To adopt the Mario Cuomo response: If a scumbag terrorist threatened to touch one hair on my child's head I would rip him limb from limb personally, and take great pleasure in doing so. However, my personal desire should not be the basis for government policy.
The government is charged with preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States, not the lives of each and every US citizen. If the government did whatever it took to prevent anybody from killing any citizen of the United States, we would be living in a police state, and FReepers would be up in arms about the intrusion of tyranny.
“To adopt the Mario Cuomo response: If a scumbag terrorist threatened to touch one hair on my child’s head I would rip him limb from limb personally, and take great pleasure in doing so. However, my personal desire should not be the basis for government policy.”
Great we have the solution right here from Maaaarrrriooooo.
We will train every soldiers’ parents in waterboarding and ripping limbs from terrorists who have killed or captured or injured their kids serving in the Armed Forces, and therefore are able to interrogate the terrorists from a personal perspective, rather than a governmental policy perspective. /sarc
You do know one of the few legitimate responsibilities of the federal government is to protect its citizens? You do know that the government exists because it can do certain things that individuals, on their own and in their own individual capacities, cannot and/or are not allowed to do?
According to you quoting Mario, you are for individuals acting in a severely vigilante fashion towards a person they want information from, yet not for the government to do techniques far less graphic than what Mario would do personally, when it comes to protecting our own forces or civilians. Hmmmmmm. Right.
We are not talking about "whatever it took..", we are talking about waterboarding, and not a random citizen, but a foreign enemy intent on killing YOU, ME and all of our friends and family. In the process of protecting us and our interests, our government kills such people all the time and, I for one, am very pleased about this.
Killing them doesn't make ours a police state, but not killing them could certainly make us dead. Is waterboarding worse than killing them? Is not waterboarding them and them killing us better? My ethics say that waterboarding doesn't do any physical harm, nor long term emotional nor psychological damage, though I like Cuomo's idea of ripping them limb from limb.