[hrktb]

I think we care about what's acceptable/unacceptable because we need a collective line in the sand for what would be self destructive.

I think if some concepts are not marked as non bargainable, they will eventually be common.

Torture and terror falls in this camp for me. If we agree there are cases it's ok to use them, eventually we'll have a neighbor tortured because of some other thing society abors.

[orionblastar]

I think Post-911 and the Bush Administration making statements that in order to save lives and prevent more terrorists attacks they had to torture terrorist suspects.

It is a kind of the ends justify the means, the type of road that leads to tyranny. Which is why the Patriot Act got passed and hasn't been repealed yet.

You know that terrorists will use torture and everything they got and won't stick to laws and rules to get their ends to justify their means.

So what prevents us from becoming just like the terrorists we are fighting? Does it really need a fight fire with fire, and it is not terrorism when we do it? Are there better ways to fight terrorism that we haven't considered yet?

[jacquesm]

> So what prevents us from becoming just like the terrorists we are fighting?

'prevented', not 'prevents'. That's a passed station now, it's official, it's documented and it's absolutely horrible.

You see, when a bunch of deranged idiots does something there are all kinds of mitigating circumstances, but when a nation state does something there are none, unless you want to claim they too are deranged idiots.

[orionblastar]

Ironic that US Special Forces trained the Taliban to fight the USSR in the 1980's and then later on their leader founder Al Qaeda using the same tactics to fight the USA.

I think US failed foreign policy helps create a lot of terrorist networks. We pulled out of Iraq and Syria too fast and then ISIS/ISIL took over in the power vacuum there. So in trying to end the war too soon, to score points for people back home, we actually made it worse in Syria and Iraq.

In leaving Afghanistan we gave control back to the Taliban.

So the US war effort in the Middle East has failed as terrorist networks just take back control.

The USA won't admit to the things it does, it covers up the Prism NSA spying system, it covers up the torture, it covers up murdering people with drone strikes, then it goes after the news media that reports on all of the bad things the USA is doing to censor it.

Maybe we cannot prevent being a tyranny, maybe it is too late? We had to become a police state with the Patriot Act and Prism in order to fight the war on terror and then what have we become over that?