Well, you wouldn't torture your 9 year old, right?

The point is that situations where we believe we are intimately aware of all the facts of a situation only to find that we're not so aware exist.

I rather think you missed the point, both of SacredDigits 9 year old child analogy, and of the 14th Amendment argument in favour of gay marriage.

The fact that his son is 9 years old is not relevant. The point was, his assumption that the 9 year old was lying was based on faulty assumptions. He had incomplete information on the capabilities of his two year old son. The analogy is still relevant, because it's not only 2 year old boys with 9 year old brothers, about whom we may have faulty information, it is conceivable we may have faulty information about anything, and anyone.

And as for your argument that everyone has the equal right under the 14th amendment to marry someone of the opposite sex. I suppose that is technically true, but it is practically quite beside the point. Surely the POINT of marriage is to enter into a (hopefully) stable, lasting, loving, and mutually fulfilling relationship. I have to say, I suspect most gays and lesbians would have a hard time entering into a loving (in a sexual and romantic sense) and mutually fulfilling relationship with a member of the opposite sex. And after all when (not if) gay marriage is legal in all 50 states, everyone will still have the equally constitutionally protected right to marry someone of either gender.

@dexter : What if I have evidence that X is a terrorist, and the information i seek from him is NOT a confession (since i have evidence already), but some other vital information, like the location of some bomb they have planted. Note that the terrorist cannot lie about this information to stop the torture, because it's veracity can be checked (by actually checking the location for the bomb), would you justify torture in such a case?

@Manas, present a more reasonable scenario... I still find torture to be abhorrent and inhuman... but, in answer to your question: maybe... (I'm going to have to reflect a bit on it - because it is a tough question). The verifiability is certainly a key. Of course, in the case of the yellowcake Uranium claim that was tortured out of someone, the CIA went into Niger to verify the claim and came up completely empty handed... as in, there would have been corroborating evidence of shipments anywhere near the amount claimed - there wasn't any evidence, so we were pretty damn sure that the story was bunk at that point. But then, in their infinite wisdom, the Bush administration decided to trust the tortured information over the CIA intelligence. So - verification only works if you trust the verifiers.

The ticking bomb scenario is pretty specific... I don't believe there's been any cases of us actually doing that. Torture has been used for confessions and for larger "intel" - such as yellowcake and WMD... Once one says it's OK to torture, I imagine a pretty slippery slope. Heck, the government is already pretty far down that slope. If I were to say, yes, OK in that particular situation then how does it really change our policy? How many times, outside of TV shows, are you going to have someone in custody who knows something that specific, current and actionable?

OK... here's my answer. No. It shouldn't ever be pre-approved... it should only be like "justifiable homicide" where, after the fact, it is a defense that the torturer can put forward. To pre-approve is to normalize it as Standard Operating Procedure... and we know where that leads - as it lead us already at Gitmo and Abu Graib and other locations less well known.

oops - *"you present a more reasonable scenario..."

I like the idea of it being an affirmative defense. "I had to torture Prisoner X because if I didn't, we wouldn't have found the bomb and it would have killed thousands." That way, the torture can benefit from hindsight. If it can be reaosnably argued afterward that torture was the only effective method of obtaining the correct information at the time, then the person who used it could be found innocent of any wrong doing, but if further investigations determine that the person was premature, reckless, or just plain wrong to use torture, they can be appropriately punished.

@ Mafia

Sure. Gay marriage is not unconstitutional, but nor is it guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

@dexter, i agree with you, i was just questioning the blanket belief that all torture is wrong. Pre-approval is of course likely to be misused. Perhaps a better system would be where in order to torture, the would-be torturer has to obtain explicit written permission from some higher authority, applicable to that specific person and some fixed small duration only