What reasonable individual would employ torture if it ddn’t yield significant results? During the Korean War American POWs were effectively turned and yielded considerable data to the communists. Do I advocate torture? No unless it can yield data that can save lives.

But I do have a question to those who would abolish its use. Are you prepared to accept responsibility for the lives that will be lost if an enemy realizes he cannot be threatened by Americans regardless of his actions. Are you willing to sacrifice tens of thousands to earn the undying gratitude of the Paris bistro set?

No one who has served and is responsible for the lives of men in the field could propose such a reckless and unwise policy. McCain is a sameless media hog who is brought us campaign finance reform abridging the first amendment and now seeks to place terorists on the same level as jaywalkers. Pathetic.

I think it is pretty poor utilitarianism if you run around trying to use it to prove some pre concieved belief that you have – if you do that it implies you are not a utilitarian at all you are instead a “fill in the thing you are trying to prove”.

I think we could accept that – I doubt many people worth torturing think torturing is not OK (when done by them for some purpose). Proving it might be a little difficult though I expect when faced with the device they would lie.

Another sunny Sunday afternoon and it’s time for the Britblog Roundup once again. Your nominations for what was good and great on the blogs from theUK and Ireland this week. Get your entries in for next week to britblog AT

But for the informal stuff, if you don’t know the information’s provenance, judge it on its merits. Something from Uzbekistan, say: treat it with suspicion, but don’t discount absolutely if it seems plausible and points to something potentially serious for public safety. A nugget from Germany: treat it more seriously. And so on. I don’t see any obligation to reject intelligence information whose origins you know nothing definite about: that would mean rejecting almost all intelligence.

Eh? This is exactly where I came in – if you switch off the ethical absolutism where our own government isn’t directly involved, what you end up with isn’t “well, it may have been obtained under duress, but we can’t be sure either way, and it’s interesting information in any case”. Or rather, that’s precisely what you end up hearing from Dame Eliza and her chums, but what actually happens is that the floodgates open. Allowing information which may have been extracted under torture means that you allow information which definitely has been – almost all of which will be garbage. (It’s a great mystery to me why the British and American intelligence services want to keep the garbage coming, but it seems that they do – cf the Craig Murray saga.)