I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror.
Torture gives you reliable and unreliable information. That's the reason why most people in the world don't do it. So this idea that you have to torture people in order to protect national security is a false argument, and I reject it.
Tortures are a dangerous invention, and seem to be a test of endurance rather than of truth.
If we condone torture, we yield the moral high ground to our enemies and encourage anyone who hates us to stoop to using that subhuman level against us. We reap whatever we sow.
It's convenient how everyone who supports waterboarding and torture, or "enhanced interrogation techniques" as they like to call it, have never experienced it themselves. Yet everyone who has, myself included, are firmly against it.
I truly believe that if torture had worked and there was a case to be made for it, we would see that on the front pages of the American press.
People get all upset about torture, but when you get right down to it, it's really a pretty good way of finding out something a person doesn't want you to know.
Torturing a human being is almost always wrong, but it is not absolutely wrong.
If you are going to call yourself a Christian - and I don't - then you have to ask yourself a fundamental question, and that is: Whom would Jesus torture? Whom would Jesus drag around on a dog's leash? How can Christians tolerate it? It is unconscionable. It has put our young men and women who are over there, fighting a war that they should not have been asked to fight - it has put them in greater danger.
My take on the torture thing and even drones is: If we're going to get into assassination and torture, the second question is the morality, but the first is the effectiveness of it.
