paulsol the Righteous wrote:
Quote:
not because it's wrong to do it in Gitmo, but because it's presumably in violation of the state laws where it occurred.
Morals don't know what borders are.
This is the embrace of sadism and cruelty for their own sake, and for no other end whatsoever. You missed the point entirely. Shocker, I know...
The moral issue is valid, but that's not the thrust of the international debate on the issue right now. It's about legality. And legality most definitely knows about borders and it knows about conditions and qualifications and legal nuances.
Trust me. The objective of this story (from a writing perspective) was not to address the moral issue of the interrogation technique in question, but to support the false assumption that the US government picks people off of street corners in the US and subjects them to this form of interrogation. Seriously. That's the goal here. The wrangling over the morals of interrogation as a whole is window dressing.
It's what I call an "assumptive argument". Where the argument is about one thing, but the argument itself assumes some conditions that the arguer wants people to assume are true. By presenting cases in this fashion, you can plant that assumption into peoples heads without ever actually debating it or arguing it.
It's what I talk about when I respond to arguments that Bush lied because Iraq didn't have WMDs. The argument assumes about 3 separate things about WMDs and Iraq that aren't true.
Heck. The entirety of social liberalist ideology is based on an assumptive (and rhetorical) argument. The position is summed up in the question: "How can we consider ourselves to be a free, equal, liberalist society if not everyone in the society can fully enjoy the fruits of our society's prosperity?". Upon being presented with this question, most people immediately "assume" the answer "well, gee... I guess we can't" and proceed to embark upon a lifetime of supporting causes that involve the agenda of wealth redistribution in order to correct for this problem.
Of course, the assumption is that a lack of equally distributed wealth in any way makes us a less free, equal, or liberalist society. A wonderful example of this is the use of the fact that the "gap between rich and poor is growing" as support for some additional argument. Um... Doesn't that assume that having a large gap is wrong?
I could sit here all day long listing off (mostly liberal) arguments that use this style. It's the same thing here. The argument appears to be about morals, but it's really about making sure that people assume the underlying condition at hand is real. It plays wonderfully into current far left arguments against "torture". Heck. Even calling it "torture-lite" as though there isn't already an existing definition of torture works into this agenda.