by Russell E. Saltzman

Saltzman assails the role of medical personnel monitoring detainees during interrogations. He also discusses the exception asserted by many, that water boarding, if it elicits life-saving intelligence and isn't lethal or crippling, is justified. His argument on this exception is not based on evidence, but suppositions about the scenario of life saving intelligence, which dodges the issue of whether life saving intelligence is justifying of water boarding. Read on.

I agree with Saltzman's belief about the evil of torture and why it must not be sanctioned, however, that reasoning also applies to those persons whose lives would be saved by water boarding (again, if evidence showed it produced life-saving information). That's a big IF, and if the IF had evidence to back it, we'd still need to have evidence ruling out the effectiveness of alternatives to torture or borderline torture to save mass life and perhaps torturous morbidity.

In another thread, I brought up the mass life saving justifications for the Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (fire, atomic, atomic), pointing out that in each case, planners knew that there would be burn victims, and that many of those could be civilians. I asked if this knowledge, with all the implications of burn injury treatment and 'recovery,' could be knowing torture to save many more lives calculated at-risk without the bombings. This could get into speculation about more humane alternatives available to the allies in WWII.

A point of information: