torture, not just for kids anymore

Torture Article
This is a great article about the effects (or is it affects?) of torture. It ends really stong, if you dont want to read the whole thing thats fine but read the last three paragraphs , they're quite good. One part I particularly liked was talking about José Padilla, a man that apparently has finally been charged with a crime after I believe 3 years in jail. They wanted to try him for attempting to set off a "dirty bomb" (as apposed to a clean one), but they have had to try him on a lesser charge because the witnesses they had against him had been tortured and if they brought them into court their treatment would have been further exposed which the CIA cannot afford. So now we have actually caught an attempted terrorist and we can't even charge them with the real crime because of torture. So we torture "terrorists" in an attempt to stop other "terrorists" and then we cant do any thing with the information because we tortured them. Great plan. Of course this is forgetting about the fact that it is morally reprehensible but really what makes you think that politicians care about morals? Then there is another rather critical part, people will say anything if you torture them enough, in the eloquent words of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, " If you fucking beat this prick long enough, he'll tell you he started the goddamn Chicago fire. Now that don't necessarily make it fucking so! " Its a fairly easy to understand concept that people will admit to almost anything and incriminate anyone to make the pain stop. This was also illustrated in the Orwell’s 1984 as I’m sure you all remember. So we torture people making us look just that much worse in the public eye, we may have alienated our few remaining European allies as the EU is looking to remove voting rights from any country that had these illegal prisons, which most likely will not pass as it would require a unanimous vote from the remaining countries but I may we be enough to stop those countries from wanting to deal with us. And we cant use any of the information we gather thru torture in court, and its hardly reliable enough to use for intelligence, but then again its been a few years since anyone cared if our military intelligence was accurate or not. Most americans seem to agree that one way we can lead the world is with unbreachable morals which the world can look up to. The problem come about when you forget those moral and begin arrogantly bullying other nations. There is no nation today that can stand alone, we must work with the rest of the world not against it.