The Hypotheticals replayed last night on Channel 9 ended in a most disturbing way. Too many people around the table – including the new people’s hero Bill Shorten – were willing to consider transporting someone (who may or may not have information about Osama bin Laden) off to Egypt where there is some new torture method to do with teeth.
Amnesty International says this:
Torture and other ill-treatment that is cruel, inhuman or degrading is repugnant, immoral and illegal, and always wrong…Torture or other ill-treatment not only harms the victim, it brutalises the perpetrator and the societies that allow it to happen. It is cruel, inhuman and degrades us all.
To add your name to 11000 candles to stop torture, visit the website here.
And Bill Shorten: you’ve got some thinking to do (IMHO)
I hate torture. Apart from the moral issues of such dehumanising behaviour, IT DOESN’T WORK, so there’s not even a utilitarian defense of the practise.
Over and over again it has been shown that while torture certainly makes people talk, they’re quite capable of deliberately misleading their torturers when they do talk, and in fact that is what usually happens. So information gained under torture is not reliable, all the people who make such decisions know it’s not reliable, and yet some of them choose to do it anyway. Pure barbarism.
I’m not a big fan of war. I love hypotheticals as much as the next person.