Quote Originally Posted by prodigy View Post
So just to clarify, if a known terrorist was captured and he has knowledge of future attacks, it's not ok to force him to give up this information? I mean he obviously is not going to want to say anything, so I guess we can just let him go? It is wrong to torture him, it is wrong to hold him in prison... what is the best way to handle these people? It's a bad situation, there is no right way to do it, but saying all the ways we have used are wrong without acknowledging the options are very limited doesn't really help. These guys don't play by the rules, if they did they wouldn't be here still. If you play a game against someone who doesn't play by the rules, do you think you can still win?
I marked in red the parts I disagree with. There is a right way to do it. I don't see why shouldn't we hold people in prison. We have these ways, we simply want a shortcut and think that doing the wrong thing may not be all that bad after all.

The whole criminal justice system is set up to deal with people who do not play by the rules - we continue to have a functional society with continuously decreasing violence and crime rates, so I would say we are winning by playing by the rules against bad guys who don't.

I think the core of the problem is that despite all the big words a lot of people do take the freedoms we enjoy for granted.
Playing by the rules is what ensures these freedoms.
You do not start with 'known' terrorists, you start with 'suspected' terrorists. You need a process based on rules to move from 'suspected' to either 'known' or 'falsely suspected', because without such process you end up with abusing innocent people and that's where you've betrayed all those ideals.

Is the criminal justice system perfect - certainly not - sometimes we discover we've sentenced the wrong person, sometimes we fail to punish the right person. But not having such system and simply punishing people without due process is far far worse.