No – my answer is that your basic assumption – that torture of whoever you captured would provide actionable intelligence that would save the school – is inherently flawed.

I would argue that rather than trying to gain truthful information in the time window described from someone in such a circumstance by breaking his fingers one by one – is as fanciful as arguing that the better solution is to bring in a master mesmerist to hypnotize him, or praying to God for a sign as to where the bomb is.

You threaten to break his finger. He tells you the name of another person who he says was actually responsible for bomb placement, that he has no idea of the final placement. Do you now go round up this other person and threaten to break his fingers? Do you start breaking his fingers anyway, even if it’s possible that he doesn’t know where the bomb is.

What percentage chance do you need to know that he’s actually involved before you start breaking fingers. Or is his being foreign enough justification to dispense with such weak-minded concerns?

A government which is granted the power to torture anyone will inherently contain the seed of the power to use torture to control people. That is something that the libertarian in me cannot abide.

Well, why then did you try to claim you’re a conservative? Was it your usual intellectual dishonesty or was it to gain some credibility debating someone who appears to be a real conservative?

And why do you use fake characters here and multiple faux names to appear to have people agreeing with you or– better in your book– able to make debate points that no one here would find credible coming from you?

Glad you finally admitted you’re a HuffPo regular and a far Left democrat activist, BlankHead. Wasn’t it one of your people who said “The Truth will set you free”?

And as to you hypothesis that a man so crazy to blow up a school would not crack under torture, I ask you…have you ever broken a bone?? Trust me, even psychos understand pain and will do what it takes to make it stop!

Sometimes the ends DO justify the means. Sorry. Welcome to the adult world.

If a man is crazy enough to place a bomb in my childs elementary school, and the almost certain knowledge that he will be put to death if it goes off, are not enough to deter him from this crime, I harbor no illusion that my breaking his fingers will produce anything except lies to buy time until the bomb actually goes off.

But if it’s not the real bomber, it may well produce accusations that others (also innocent) are involved, just to get me to quit breaking his fingers, and to go break theirs for awhile.

Torture is such a perversion, such an evil, that it is far too dangerous a weapon to put in the hands of government. It is the strongest tool for a wholly corrupt government to hold power.

No. I believe that the American people have an absolute right to know what their government does to those it detains. It is critical to our freedom.

And I would hardly call defending one’s reputation and the policies in office held while a sitting VP against a barage of charges as a war criminal that complete are devoid of any context in which the policies were formulated and adapted to be “pot shots.”

I would say that accusing the Obama Administration of making the country weaker by abandoning portions of his anti-terrorism policy (although clearly large portions have been kept in place) is a pot shot. Particularly when most evidence suggests that the Bush Administration DID abandon almost all of the Clinton Administration anti-terrorism policy, in their desire to craft their own without any Clinton imprinteur.

Do you believe that the US is a force for good in the world?

In general, yes. In some specifics, no.

And almost everyone on the right would agree with me, although their specifics may be different than mine. The difference is that I won’t call them unpatriotic for being critical of some of what America does.

Of course, if you really knew anything about the Gulag, you would have never brought it up as comparison. That tells me a lot.

By the way. For the USSR, the end was continued subjugation of peoples and denial of God given rights of freedom…in the case of GITMO it was preventing another bloodbath of innocent lives at the hands of murderers. If you cannot see the moral difference, then I cannot help you. And so long as people who think like you are no where near any seat of national power, I don’t care. You’ll learn life’s lesson the hard way one day.

The key phrase you use in your post to justify your fairy tale approach to the world is “when I was a child.” As far as I am concerend, if you really believe lala land crap your peddling, you are STILL a child.

And your understanding of interrogation techniques seems to be what you know (or more likely do not know) of Soviet Russia.

And I would hardly call defending one’s reputation and the policies in office held while a sitting VP against a barage of charges as a war criminal that complete are devoid of any context in which the policies were formulated and adapted to be “pot shots.” I rather call it saying what had to be said for the good of a nation spinning into a dangerously naive mindset.

General question: Do you believe that the US is a force for good in the world? What nations do you hold in higher esteem and why?

So the question among most of the world is not whether or not the US committed torture – but will the US publicly deal with the torture, which is the first step in a process to guarantee that this kind of human rights abuse and moral depravity is behind us.

As to the information itself … there may be information that KSM revealed or confirmed during torture that he had previously disclosed, and that may have been of sensitive nature. He may have also made false allegations against others, something which is very common during torture (a favorite tactic of the gulags, for example, getting subjects to confess to false crimes and to accuse others of complicity just to stop the pain, giving the state justification to expand their ring of interrogations).

I assume that when this information is not sensitive, it could be made public. That’s what the FOIA process is all about, and Cheney might be more successful invoking it rather than taking potshots from Sunday AM shows.