So, at what point does it become dicey for you? 50%? Less?
According to the people that actually know what waterboarding is, you’re wrong.
My bet is that yes, the best trained person could resist the best torture technique. People have been conditioned to peacefully ignite themselves after being doused with gasoline in protest, and quietly burn to death without making a fuss. If you’ve got something scarier than that to put someone through I’m sure the CIA would love to hear from you.
Being conditioned to willingly ignite yourself, and sitting peacefully while someone does it against your will are two different things, and no one will ever stop you in mid burn to ask you to divulge secrets. The two situations have nothing to do with each other.
I support torture in that instance, but I still think it should be illegal.
Are there people who can resist any form of pain-inducing torture?
Yes, for a kick-off there are people with a genetic condition that means they can’t feel pain at all.
Can someone be tortured indefinitely without giving up information?
Yep, the easiest way is for the person to try to confuse themselves about what the information is, which is certainly an achievable skill. Not sure if this is quite in the spirit of what the OP was asking though.
How do you reconcile the two halves of this statement? It seems simple, but I can’t see a way to resolve it under any depth of examination.
If you’re saying something is a supportable idea, and should be done in certain circumstances, then why should it be illegal under those conditions?
Or if something is illegal, how is it a supportable idea, and something we should do?
If we’re talking no permanent damage, then I’d support it at 50%. But you make a valid point with the slippery slope. At what point does one person’s temporary discomfort not balance with saving lives?
That’s a valid concern, but one not in the minds of most people on either side of the torture debate. The issues are the reliability of the information, the rights that innocent people have against being tortured, the safety of the public that theoretically could be obtained through torture, and the long-term psychological trauma and risk of serious injury or death through torture.
Hey–is it “I, too can be a screenwriter” week?
Again?
The problem as I see it is this; whatever law we make that allows torture to any extent with no potential punishment, we’re effectively handing delegating the power to make the decision as to whether it’s suitable in the particular occasion to the interrogators (whoever that may be). Saying “significant and present threat means torture is ok” (for an example) means that the interrogators are the ones that get to decide what that threat means. Higher brass may afterwards disagree, and the interrogator may be punished for being wrong, but that just means we have two problems; torture’s still be done, and interrogators are being punished for getting it wrong.
The best way as I can see it to solve this problem (and certainly it’s by no means perfect) is to make all torture illegal, or court martial material. That way, when an interrogator has to make that call, they’re weighing it against the chance that they’ll be drummed out dishonourably, or whatever. I think it’s a good deterrent against uncessary torture, while still meaning that the interrogator can say “Ok, i’m not allowed to do this, but the threat is such that i’m willing to take on that potential punishment”. To take the example of the OP, were torture entirely illegal, I would imagine that there would be at the very least one interrogator who is willing to take on the blame in order to stop those murders.
It is interesting that you’d support torturing people based upon a lesser basis of certitude than what a court would require in order to grant the police a search warrant to look through someone’s house.
Torture is wrong in all cases and is demeaning to all involved. While you may be able to construct a scenario where, just this once, it’s worthwhile to torture, that’s a long way from justification for torture in general. I think it speaks volumes that it is so difficult to construct a scenario, however implausible, where torture could even remotely be justified.
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Should the evil person be tortured and if so, how?
No, never. First, who will do the torturing. Second, you’ve already established that this is an evil person; now you are going to believe anything he says because he’s in pain? -
Will it work and if so, how quickly?
Who knows? If your torture is working right your victim will say anything you want him to say, so how can you know if his information is correct. But at least the torturer gets a thrill. While you’ve got him on the table, get him to tell you where the pot of gold is, where to find the fountain of youth and get a cure for cancer too. -
Can the info be extracted without causing permanent damage to the evil person?
You mean permanent physical damage. Sure, why not?
Also:
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This is not modern Earth, but Moon Base Ganymede, at Jupiter.
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The mastermind we’re torturing is not a human being, but a superintelligent chicken with psychic powers. We don’t need the chicken to talk, we just need the chicken to think about the information, so our own psychic superchicken can read it.
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The American citizens being murdered every minute are being killed by having radioactive billiard balls shot up their buttholes at the speed of sound. This doesn’t really affect the scenario, except to make it Extra Horrible ™.
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It’s the day before your anniversary, and you still haven’t bought your spouse’s gift, so the clock is REALLY ticking.
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Angry monkeys have surrounded Radio City Music Hall and are demanding that Constitutional protections be extended beyond just the primate population, to include superintelligent psychic chickens, even those offworld.
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The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped four percent the previous day.
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You’re kind of hungry, but the Caesar salad in the Ganymede commissary just isn’t going to do it for you, and the grill doesn’t open for another four hours.
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A massive fleet of Crotathian battle cruisers, powered by antimatter reactors and armed with particle fluctuators, cryothermic warheads, and highly trained Drakoogian bone weevils, has been detected passing the orbit of Neptune. Preliminary analysis of the fleet’s trajectory suggests that they’re not aiming at Earth, they’re just passing through, probably on their way to attack the M’Stavruci homeworld again, but we don’t know that for sure, and even so we don’t want to attract their attention.
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Your psychic chicken says that the evil mastermind chicken is thinking you’re a pantywaist.
Now what do you do? Huh? Huh? NOW WHAT?
Except in the OP, it states the information can be easily verified.
Since so many seasoned interrogators have publicly stated that torture just plain doesn’t work, and is more likely to harden the resolve of the person being tortured, I would have to say no to torture. What you would ultimately achieve is more days of random deaths.
Doubtful. The subject will say anything that might get the interrogators to stop; it will not necessarily bear any relationship to the truth.
The no-visible-marks-left psychological torture – sleep deprivation, loud noises all night, heat and cold, shackling in stressed positions, threatening with dogs, defiling Korans, etc. – that our military has been using on prisoners originally was invented by the North Koreans, and was successful in getting American POWs to appear in films falsely confessing to war crimes. U.S. psychologists studied it and determined the process is useless for any purpose but the production of false propaganda; no reliable information can be extracted, only what the subject thinks the interrogator wants to hear. But the authorities appear to have lost sight of that distinction. The methods were used in the SERE (Survive, Evade, Resist, and Escape) program, in which American special forces personnel were put through such psychological torture to teach them to resist it if captured. After 9/11, NCOs who had played the part of foreign interrogators in such simulations were put in charge of real interrogations and expected to get reliable information from prisoners, and for the most part didn’t. You can read the story in Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, by Charlie Savage, Chapter 9, “The Torture Ban.”
You definitely win the “I Want To Be a Screenwriter” Contest!
Throw in a snogging scene between the Evil Mastermind Chicken & the Torturer & it could be a Torchwood episode!
If we can write-off several thousand lives a year in return for the freedom to drive automobiles, then allowing a handful of innocents to die at the hands of a serial killer in order to preserve law, justice and the higher principles of a civilised society seems like great bang for buck to me.
…or feed the interrogators a potentially endless amount of false information.
So as long as we’re talking about dream factory hypothetical scenarios: “If you fucking beat this prick long enough, he’ll tell you he started the goddamn Chicago fire! Now that don’t necessarily make it fucking so!”