You are pounding straw men not arguing with the man in front of you for much of the rest. I have never said a single word against capital punishment, it is a red herring. In fact I support it as necessary in some circumstances and therefore oppose all attempts to undermine it, especially with unsound and unoriginalist constitutional arguments. The state must be able to defend itself. It is a matter of indifference or practicality for routine murderers, compared to life imprisonment. It is not a matter of indifference when it is Hitler and Ludendorf storming city hall in Munich, or dealing with Saddam Hussein. There you have and use it or the state is destroyed. The state must be able to defend itself.
But for your statement that you are in favor of torturing in extreme circumstances, it renders you morally unfit for any position of trust and objectively damnable. It also shows you have no idea what honor is. The statement that there is no other choice is utter hogwash on its face. No great mysterious force is grabbing your hands and forcing you to apply electrodes to another man's genitals. Claiming you are forced to it is a pathetic and transparent lie.
Citing 24 is laughable - it was written by leftist hacks intent on smearing the Bush administration. The actual context is the Algerian war, not a television show. Read Paul Johnson and Alstair Horne on the subject. The party of torture is the party of Jacques Massu and Le Pen. Did they win the battle of Algiers? Yes, and they promptly lost the battle of France and with it the war. The people of France would rather let the colons die and be damned, than maintain them as racist overlords in Algeria through systematic Gestapo torture. And they were right - the same paras willing to torture in Algiers were willing to stage coups in Paris; they lost all allegiance to anything that would count as civilization.
At bottom, the error of the torture party is to think the group they are a member of and seek to protect through torture, is an objective transpolitical category, and will remain operative whatever they choose to do. But this is emphatically not the case. No one who tortures does so for me or to defend me or as my representative or in my service. He can't decide to, I decide that he doesn't. If he electrocutes privates all day, he still isn't doing it on my behalf, but against me. I'd rather have him fry my balls than stand with him on anything.
Free political allegiance given on moral principle is the underlying true division, not national identity or (as the colons thought) race, nor (as the terrorists think) religion. The torturer represents only the torture party, and he can only defend and advance the torture party. He can't defend innocents; there are no innocents in a torture party. The moral circumstances he tries to cite to justify his outrages therefore fall to the ground. He is torturing for himself, for his own interests as he sees them. He is, at bottom, torturing out of his own craven fear and his own lust for power and domination.
And no, my honor can't be used to kill me. I am not a weakling. As a fact, the torturers and all their would be empires of necessity and expediency are dust and ashes, or cesspools of poverty and despair and weakness. As a fact, only chivalry and honor have ever built anything; even the edifices of unworthy rulers were built for them only by better men.
"But maybe frying this guy's balls will prevent an attack someplace". So? Are you such a coward you can't run the risks our men run every day on the streets of Iraq, even in the safety of Los Angeles? Why are you so scared of a few pipsqueak terrorists? I sure as hell am not. They can't touch us. And we can murder them all day as long as they care to try, without breaking a sweat.
No one can make themselves immortal by torturing anyone, in any circumstances. All your ruthlessness and imaginary "practicality" will not reduce by one second the length of time you will be dead. But you can burn in hellfire. Or not. That bit is up to you.
You simply may not seek victory in war by making your captives as uncomfortable as possible. The means and details are quite immaterial, you can't seek the end. You can offer leniency or preferable treatment or release in return for cooperation if you find it useful. But captives are free moral agents and not sacks of meat for you to tenderize.
I have never read such juvenile drivel on this forum since I came on board in 1998.
This whole issue is starting to become laughable.
Prof. Paul Fussell, a cultural and literary historian, and professor emeritus of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania wrote a book some time ago about his experiences as a US Army private in WWII. No conservative Fussell, but he describes an incident in the Battle of the Bulge when a small unit of GI's captured a few Germans. Being cut off from their unit and in desperate shape they needed to know exactly where the German tanks were to avoid being killed. The Germans prisoners refused to talk. Their Sergent lined them up and said that if they didn't talk he would begin killing them one by one. They still refused to talk. He immediately shot the first one in line in the head. The rest of them talked. The Americans were able to save themselves.
We didn't win the war against the Germans and Japanese by playing fair. We played to win.
I don't even know what to say to a man who wouldn't do what is necessary to get information to save himself or his countrymen in a war. I just know I wouldn't want him next to me if the going got rough.