Torture

A long time ago there was a play on television by an MP, well known thwen as a writer of novels. Cannot remember his name. The play for TV concerned an MP who was against all forms of torture. The usual reasons were laid out so that one could nod sagely and agree. But the man's daughter was kidnapped and he found himself in a position where, to extract information about his daughter's whereabouts and safety from someone the police (in a foreign country where torture was a sort of way of life) had arrested, he could resort to using their trorture intruments which involved passing electric currents through the man's body. Did he? Would he still expound his views on the moral reasons of not resorting to torture? Or would he himself use the weapons he was invited to use?
He used the weapons of torture and extracted the necaessary information. His daughter was saved but his moral being was compromised.
Torture is used all over the world, even now in these enlightened days - or are they? I recall a film, The Algiers Story it may have been called, which was about the French occupation of Algiers. It was a great film but a thoroughly nasty one in many respects: there were atrocities perpetrated on both sides - suicide bombings by the Algerians, shootings at close range by them, and there was torture used by the French (one of the actors in the film who played a Colonel in the French army was the actual Colonel who had done the torturing - evidently he thought it necessary).
Janet Daley has written a superb article in The Daily Telegraph today about the use/non-use of torture. David Cameron stated, she says, that torture was wrong and that "we ought to be very clear about that"; then he added: "And I think we ought to be clear that the information we receive from torture is likely to be unrelaible."
Why the second statenment she wanted to know. "What point is there in discussing what Mr Cameron calls the 'effectiveness thing' at all?"
She goes on to discuss in depth the moral imperative questions that John Stuart Mills wrote about; but her point is already, simply, made: even if torture were to prove effective, should it be used?
It's easy to answer no to that. But you come to the MP and his daughter in the TV play where you yourself are involved emotionally. Or to a question of the man who knows where the nuclear weapon is but won't tell.: should you squeeze the information out of him or let the bomb go off? And there's President Bush and waterboarding. Should he be tried in a court of law for allowing it to go on? He maintains that heaps of important information was discovered that saved many lives. We'll never know.