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Originally Posted by Undertoad
And that's where the argument is now: Carter says "America tortures", by his definition of torture, which he has expanded as wide as he can because then we don't have an argument about whether it's ok to slap somebody. Stuff your mama did to you as a kid is now "torture". Stuff you would do to win a $100 bet is now "torture". Stuff weaker than any 15 second segment of Jackass is now "torture". And why. Because it's the only way to win the argument.
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That is the beauty and curse, depends on which way you take it, of American media. President Carter can say what we do is torture and then someone else can look into it deeper, make a rebuttal, than someone else can take a different viewpoint, make an opinion, and so on. That is the best available way to take at this issue on a subjective topic such as this. It is also the best way to learn.
For my personal view on the topic, I can see how slapping can be considered torture since torture is so situational. If I am a guard and need to take a prisoner somewhere and he resists, so I pistol whip him, that will usually not be seen as torture. But, if I take two kids, this actually happened by the way in Greece, and force them to slap each other as hard as they can while all the guards chant and mock them without any greater purpose, I would definitely consider that torture because it is pointless entertainment for the guards on the behalf of the prisoners. Pistol-whipping is without a doubt considered more brutal than slapping, but when put in different situations, one comes out much worse than the other because of intentions.
When we look farther into the topic, we get a greater understanding and can then make a better judgment on how we should react.
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But your line of thinking "we are not as bad as Al Qaeda" contains the notion that "we are bad", and now that is your starting point and you're working to prove it. You could just as easily start with "Al Qaeda does much MUCH worse things than we do, 999 times out of 1000, ordered and instructed from the top, motivated by inhumanity as a part of their very nature... and that is what makes Al Qaeda bad and us good. That said, we are overdue for discussions and instruction about where the limits are and why."
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I don't see how that makes us "good". I am not suggesting moral equivalency because the scenario can never allow it with such different environments, but Al Qaeda should not be a factor in this discussion at all. If your child is getting C's in math and he points out that he is doing better than his neighbor, who gets F's consistently, how would that make your child good at math? Whenever I brought up that excuse my father always said that what he is doing doesn't matter and looking back my father was right, and I believe that should also be applied to this situation. What Al Qaeda is doing should not determine how we treat our prisoners since we live in different environments and should strive for different goals, doing so only seems like a cop-out to me unless you can show me otherwise.