re: #305 Ben Hur

It depends.

Was the UAE a free representative democracy at the time, attacked by totalitarian terrorists in an unprovoked act of war the murdered 3000 of its civilians with the aim to bring down the country most able to stop their global domination, that used harsh interrogation techniques agianst the planners and executers of said attack to expose vital information to stop (and did stop) an existing and imminent plan to murder thousands more in another one of its cities?

Or was it just some tin pot oil rich brother of a illigitamate back water desert monarch of a sand prision that practices religious, gender, class, race, and cultural apartheid and supremecism doing a Sopranos style “pay back” on a poor farmer that pissed him off?

It does NOT depend. Either the acts themselves are torture, or they are not. The motivation has nothing to do with it. If it did, then by your logic it would be OK to mutilate, amputate, stick needles in eyes, set balls on fire or rip out fingernails under the “right” circumstances but not otherwise.

We’re on slippery ground here. Either what was done to this man was not torture, but something like S.E.R.E. or enhanced interrogation techniques, in which case we’re as innocent or guilty as the UAE prison guards; or it was torture, in which case - ditto. It’s the acts themselves we’re talking about here, not the justification.

Gets kinda complicated when you look at actual cases, doesn’t it?

And the US does engage (or has engaged) in real torture - only we outsource the really “harsh” stuff to Egypt etc. So “our” hands are clean. Right.