Without torture, 17th-century Europeans would never have gotten all those witches to confess

[Recursion]

Seriously. Think about that. Thousands of people confessed to things that all of us now agree are simply physically impossible (cats don't actually speak, people don't actually fly, there is no actual physical devil with horns and a bifurcated tail, etc.), because that was the only way to get people to stop pressing heavy stones on their chests and poking them with red-hot metal spikes.

[Sunlei]

2. bush spent 81 million of OUR Federal money for a rebranded dunking chair

[PoliticAverse]

3. It's important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that

those folks had.

I'm sure a lot of them were working hard under enormous pressure and were real patriots.

[ReRe]

4. Yeah...

... they sure did get a lot of "actionable intelligence" out of those witches, didn't they? And further back in history the Catholic Church got allot of converts out of that Spanish Inquisition. which, if I'm not mistaken, the CIA torturers got many of their tactics.

[Recursion]

5. The last Pope headed up the Inquisition before he was elected Pope

Though in fairness the Protestants were no slouches in torturing either (nor any other religion or ideology, for that matter).

[cer7711]

6. THAT is the point of torture: to elicit FALSE confessions . . .

. . . from otherwise innocent people.

History teaches us this lesson, over and over again.

The "ticking time bomb" scenario oft-cited by proponents of torture?

About as rare and fabled an occurrence as a Wall Street banker with a social conscience.

[Recursion]

7. A philosophy prof I know asked this question:

"Would you torture someone to find out if there was a ticking time bomb or not?"

[ProfessorPlum]

8. that f*ing ticking time bomb question seems to be the only one that

anyone ever asks. The (correct in my view) answer is NO! Next question.