Nope. It''s been gone well before Dubya came along.

My stance on the whole issue? If torture works, use it. If it doesn''t, don''t. And here''s the kicker - if you''re going to torture, don''t get caught.

So the only measuring stick is now effectiveness, regardless of all else. You know what works even better than torture? Torturing their families and making them watch - just killing every innocent these people care about. We should do that if we''re going to just throw in the towel on being human or having a civilization. Or, we could just round up all the people that might be terrorists and kill them. Every Arab Muslim that walks through the door, regardless of age, sex, or threat, just shoot them right in the friggin'' head. Since it''s just about effectiveness, and ""what works"".

My point - in general to rationalizations of torture - is it''s about a whole hell of a lot more than if it works. I''m increasingly of the mind that members of this administration that created a culture of permissable torture should be brought up on trial for international war crimes. I know that somehow the fact that we''re talking about an American administration makes that anathema, but if there were officials who ordered or were complacent in the act of torture then they should be held accountable. It won''t happen, of course. I''m not a fool, just an idealist.

You''re such prudes.

You are missing the point here, I think. The issue is not about the ""murderous barbarian"" that gets tortured, but rather what it does to the moral stance of the people who do the torturing, who permit and/or order that torture to be done. I might want to shove bamboo splinters up the fingernails of a man who caused the deaths of innocent children, and he might deserve it, but what really matters is what happens inside me at the moment of that act of cruelty.

It is a tangled issue, to be sure. Is information obtained under torture even reliable? Are there other ways of getting that information? What information is worth the degradation of our moral fibre?

You won''t find much sympathy in me for the terrorists who got tortured, necessarily. The ones I am really concerned for are the soldiers who did the torturing.

Yes, you see...that''s the whole point of *rights*....they aren''t privileges to be revoked at will...they are rights. We live in a society where we have based our entire cultural identity of the philosophy that ""...that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights....""

The British government surely considered the American revolutionaries to be terrorists, where as they perceived themselves as freedom fighters.

Allowing torture because we fear someone or something is a slippery ethical slope that I refuse to allow to go unremarked. We cannot allow our country to follow the lead of Stalin, Hitler, the Urgun, the Mau-Mau, Idi Amin and Pol Pot, to name but a few in recent history, when we have the power and the obligation to do the opposite.

What you are arguing is moral relativism...a dangerous, dangerous concept. For what it implies is that our morality, our strength, our clarity and our laws are but playthings to be put away the minute we are frighted.

We are strong, we are intelligent, we are resourceful. We do not need to stoop to torture.