how far will you go?

To retrieve potentially vital information for your country. There have been hundreds of online articles criticizing the military for going too far with torture to extract information from p.o.w.s. Now I don't normally advocate violence , but if it is going to be used as a tool to protect citizens from potential harm then I'm all for it. However, since giving such a volatile power to such a group will inevitably cause problems, it will be best to temporarily assign the power to certain branches of the military. The reason for the temporary advocacy is so that those tortured will not be as scarred as the current prisoners at Guantanamo and other jails claim to be.


From simple books like Lord of the Flies to the complicated experiments drawn out by Stanford, we have past experiences of how badly these powers are exploited and the degree to which the power will mutilate the torturer and the tortured. We know that within days those with power will corrupt, and so lies the basis for removal of this unnecessarily long ability to torture prisoners. If we are to debase ourselves by letting our primal emotions rule us, then how can we expect our foes to be any different.


Finally the big question is are there any viable alternatives to such a brutal method of "persuasion". Many times narcotics and hallucinogens have been brought up, and many times those ideas have been repealed on grounds that the drugs cause more psychological harm than torture does. And who is to argue, after all if there is one field that lacks tangible researchable evidence it is the effects (long term and psychological) that drugs can have on people!