Bunz, PLC and Pocket,
1. Should suspects receive Miranda rights?
2. Should suspects receive constitutional rights?
I also notice that you guys,
despite my request, prefer to talk about what we
shouldn't do and why we
shouldn't do it...
If someone asked you how to operate a computer, and all you had to tell them was what they
shouldn't do and why they
shouldn't do it that way... that person would be left to figure out what the "right" way was all by themselves. Inevitably, at some point, that person would screw up and you'd be right there to chew them out for doing it wrong.
Can you not yet see my point behind asking that you not bother with what not to do? Are you beginning to understand why I asked that you give specifics as to what we CAN do?
Now as to some nonsense that keeps coming up whenever this topic is discussed.... (more questions I don't get answers to)
The Moral High Ground and Moral Authority... Who's morality? Is my morality the same as yours? Is the American morality the same morality other countries ascribe to? Can any of you define morality? I bet you guys can't give answers to those questions that the others would agree with but I bet you could all give me a laundry list of what you consider immoral...
Our Interrogation methods put our troops at risk of being treated the same way by the enemy... This line of thinking is just wrong on so many levels but if it were true, I'm quite confident our troops would rather be treated the way we treat detainees than the way our middle eastern enemies have always treated our troops and civilians.
Additionally, this argument might hold some weight if we were fighting the European countries but I would not expect Communist or Islamic countries to hesitate using horrific forms of torture on our troops regardless of how we treated their captured fighters. Europeans have some western sense of human rights, Communist and Islamic countries do not share the same sense of human rights. We could use the 5 star hotel treatment on the people we capture and, if caught, our troops would still be tortured.
The information gained is rarely, if ever, useful in any way...
From the New York Times (of all places):
Banned Techniques Yielded ‘High Value Information,’ Memo Says
Whether it was worth it or not is another question. Since we don't know exactly what information was gained, any position you take on it would be based on your gut feeling and not an informed opinion based on the facts.