I don't think it is an irrelevant question to ask, some folk in this thread support torture and are OK, if not happy, with it being carried out in their name. To understand if someone is for or against can be useful in how you frame a response to someone, granted not essential.
Are you someone who considers it is OK to torture someone? And if you are is there a point at which you would stop supporting torture?
The relevance and seriousness of a question can depend on who is asking.
We have hashed this issue many times. I don't in the slightest extent condone pulling out someone's finger nails as is alleged above, and that is torture. On the other hand I know that those who take Jihad's position on many issues have no compulsion about lying of such things; in fact it is part of standard propaganda policy to do so, and I have no doubt that incentive is even stronger when they stand to gain large sums of money.
I am probably missing something here, but I don't know why Britain would be responsible to compensate anyone when it did no such thing, nor did it happen at Guantanamo.
As to torture in principle, I'll restate what I have said before.
There can be a genuine disagreement on what constitutes torture, and even in the mildest form of the definition some people have the almost religious view that "it doesn't work" because anyone can be made to confess anything.
They miss the point that confession is not the object of real interrogation, whether torture or not. Confession is simply gratification for someone with little use since one presumably already believed whatever the confession was for, and then I would have no problem calling it torture.
Information that can be followed up and verified and acted on is something else entirely, but even gaining that requires a certain amount of evidence in advance (like if someone was really responsible for planning a terrorist act).
I believe that harsh interrogation short of bodily mutilation or direct physical pain is not torture and the only grey area that I know of in these debates is waterboarding. That I would consider torture if used just to see what could be learned; but I would make exceptions for someone like Khalid whatshisname under the circumstances at play at the time.
We can kill people with missiles when we think they are in a house, but we are supposed to be shocked when a mass murderer is treated to the same techniques used to train some of our own soldiers against "torture"?
This debate is usually about semantics and whatever makes some people think they are morally superior to others, or it is simply a target for those who invoke the slippery slope argument against those they already have disdain or hatred for.
