Ireland, we are not talking about toturing guilty people. We are talking about torturing people that are SUSPECTED of something. The problem with suspicion is that's it often wrong -- one reason why we have trials instead of one person arbitrarily meeting out judgement.

Secondly, what if they are guilty? Shall we be as inhumane as they? Shall we commit the same acts which we so loudly decry? On one hand, you suggest the average, ordinary people who are prisoners in Guantanamo were forced into their acts by the Taliban, then you say they brought it upon themselves. Which is it? People who live lives of limited choice and less information on which to make those choices may not be able to make the same choices we do.

It is a convenient fiction that there is one accepted code of behavior for all humans regardless of culture. Children learn only what they are taught. If you are taught that it is right to kill others when your leader says so -- whether it be in a terrorist training camp or at a US military installation, that does not mean you deliberately make an evil choice -- you simply make the one that's available to you based on what you have been taught.

If we resort to the same evil acts when we DO have a choice, then we are no better than our "enemy," and the enemy has won. We also teach our children, and our enemy's children, that we only pretend to denounce these acts -- in truth they are an acceptable way to live.

Is that what you want to teach a new generation? More blood?