Catholic and Enjoying It!
Just as though I have not recommended How to Break a Terrorist (by an actual interrogator) a thousand times to laptop bombardiers and Torture Lovers, a combox torture zealot with no actual knowledge of interrogation or of elementary human decency, much less Catholic teaching or American civil law, writes:
Hey moralizers! How would you extract information from criminals/terrorists who, gosh golly, just don’t want to tell you anything?
It’s so easy to do as Shea does and tell us where we go wrong, but offer no viable alternative in a challenging situation. Sooooooo easy
Two replies:
One: Gentle Combox War Crimes Champion: If books are too hard for an attention span conditioned by Call of Duty and 24, then just click on this article written in short English words. It too is written by a soldier, so perhaps you will show some respect and tone down your fake courage and video game/TV fantasy “realism” in deference to his real courage and real world experience.
Two: Notice, Gentle Audience, that our Torture Lover is making the inevitable next step in the logic of the Torture Defender. He doesn’t just want to torture “terrorists” (by which he means “some foreign brown-skinned guy I’m pretty sure might be a terrorist so I will torture him to find out if I’m right”). He wants to torture “criminals” too. That means, in the not very long run, any citizen Caesar decides might be a threat to his security (i.e., you and me).
One cherishes the flickering hope that even a Torture Defender is not dumb enough to hand *that* power over to Caesar to keep the citizenry in line in his cowardly hope that Caesar will save his skin from the bogeyman. But Torture Defenders have not so far shown themselves to have an over-capacity for common sense and elementary foresight.
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