Waterboarding

[nessers]

It should be no secret to any of you, especially those of you I know through the internet, that once upon a time, I was a fairly die-hard Conservative politically. I was very young and my parents were Conservative as best as I knew and my dad works for Big Oil (but he's Little Oil). So out of stubbornness, naivete, and loyalty, I clung to the

Comments

[cheyinka]

I suppose there's a chance the information could be used.

After all, we use medical information which was obtained in unquestionably evil ways by the Nazis. So the information itself isn't tainted. BUT, we waited some number of years before even beginning to analyze the results, so that we wouldn't be profiting by their evil.

In a "tell me where the bomb is!!" type of situation, I don't think there'd be any way to maintain that separation, unless someone part of another country's government tells us the information without telling us how they got it (and without us having any reason to expect torture was used to get it), or we discover a secret (actually secret, not "don't tell me where you're going so I can pretend to find you" secret) torture facility and the exhausted prisoners gasp out the information as they're rescued, or something. But in that case, we'd have to wonder whether or not the information was trustworthy.

John McCain told his torturers a list of names that he claimed were members of his squadron, except that was the list of the Green Bay Packers' offensive line. There's no reason that $generic_citizen of $generic_islamic_country can't do something similar, and if $generic_citizen doesn't know the information, e can't give it to us even if e for some reason was inclined to do so after being tortured for x hours.

[seik]

I was actually going to refer to the Nazis if you didn't. I forget the name of the philosopher, but there's some old/dead guy who thinks that by using information we know was obtained in a wrong manner, we condone the means and are at fault.