Where is that bs coming from? Even in the Lyndie England case only, more than 3 people were directly killed by waterboarding used by US personel.
Naturally if you create a scenario where people are going to go to prison for a lot of years if they torture someone in order to save a life, it’s going to give some pause as to whether or not they do it. In my opinion, Dirty Harry in your scenario, would have done it anyway…'cause he’s that kinda guy. My feeling is that is such a scenario, where the bad guy is clearly guilty and there is limited time to save an innocent life, Dirty Harry would not be faced with prison in the first place.
I’ll tell you what I’d be in favor of with regard to torture. I think that the authorities should have to go before a judge and present whatever evidence they have that would reasonably lead to a belief that torturing a particular miscreant would produce information needed to save lives. It would then be up to the judge to decide whether the information merits the application of torture.
This would eliminate the application of indiscriminate torture just to see if there’s something there, and it would require that sufficent evidence exists to warrant the application of torture. thus greatly reducing the odds that we’d be torturing someone who would give us false information because he doesn’t really know anything just to get the torture to stop.
I’ve also read reference to it here and George Bush has said as much himself while on his current book tour.
I’m not aware of anyone having died or been waterboarded during the Lynndie England episode.
Still wouldn’t work. As soon as the terrorist know their guy is missing, they are going to assume he is in our hands, they are going to assume he is being tortured or soon will be. They will instantly abandon anything that the captured terrorist could compromise, because, sooner or later, he will crack. You can find out what they were doing yesterday, but not what they are doing today.
The scenario offered is a fantasy, that the bomb is ticking, that you have, by whatever extraordinary good luck, captured the one guy who knows exactly where it is, exactly when it is set to go off, and whether or not to cut the red wire or the green one. It is fantasy masquerading as a plausible scenario, it is horseshit.
Besides, the moral dilemma is crap as well. If it were my loved ones in danger, or simply my fellow citizens, and I knew that Achmed had the information necessary to save their lives, I would do whatever it takes. I would be wrong, or course, but I would do it, and confess it, and let the chips fall where they may.
There is nothing remotely heroic about inflicting pain on someone who is helpless to defend themselves.
Americas enemies have always known that if they torture US Troops they would be held accountable for that torture as a war crime.
Now that GWB has declared that “water boarding” is not torture, every US service man who’s water boarded in any future war will have George Worst Bush to thank.
Not that I condone torture, but I find the “it doesn’t work” claim to be unconvincing.
We should condemn torture on moral grounds alone, not practical grounds, because I do believe that it does work in the right circumstances.
In your specific case, you are assume that 1) they find out he’s capture before we torture him and before we can thwart an imminent plot; and 2) that it’s simple and/or insignificant to make the terrorists abandon their current plans and start anew.
I agree with you. It would indeed give some people pause - faced with the prospect of, on one hand, the chance of the death of a young child (as in your example) and the prospect of imprisonment, some people indeed will value their job and freedom over that life.
Why on earth would we want such people in that position, though? I mean, if we have a situation where people who have the ability and opportunity to torture, that their value system is so out of whack is surely in and of itself a massive problem. We ask a lot of people in the military or in government in the first place, but I would say that it is in precisely this sort of situation that you want people who are willing to think of people in general rather than their own wishes.
I think the problem with that is that it is time-consuming. Go back to your Dirty Harry example - I haven’t seen the film, i’m afraid - would preparing such a case be something that he’d have time to do? The general example of the “torture-acceptable” situation is the immediate, considerable-if-not-massive threat; i’m not sure that such an idea would be all that useful practically speaking. Too, when we’re talking matters of national security, i’m less convinced that a) more people becoming involved would mean a smaller risk of word getting out somehow, and b) that the secrecy necessary for such a role wouldn’t simply move the potential for incorrect usage up one (we do rather seem to have seen that higher ranking officials aren’t exempt from poor behaviour in this regard), and in addition that the decision is put into the hands of someone who does not have the full understanding of what’s going to happen (the “politician who’s never seen war ordering troops” problem).
There’s also still the problem that a person who actually has information might play for time and give false information - that’s only going to compound the problem of timing.
People can get before judges pretty quickly when the situation calls for it. And i’m thinking that perhaps certain judges could either be placed on call or assigned to give priority - even middle of the night priority - to cases where the need to gain information immediately cannot wait, although I doubt that there would be that many extremely urgent cases come up. Still, I believe it’s well within the capabilities of our justice system to come up with a way to handle these cases expeditiously when needed.
Frankly, I’ve never given much credence to the idea that people under torture are going to play games like that. They’ll only be letting themselves in for more, and possibly worse and longer lasting, torture once it’s discovered that they’ve been lying or stalling for time.
I read something interesting the other day in which some Muslim guy (don’t remember whether he was a prisoner) actually suggested torture as a good way to get information from Muslims because it allows them an out with regard to their religion. In other words they have to resist all they can, but their religion gives them an out in the case of torture. I’m thinking maybe this is why it was necessary to waterboard Khalid Shaykh Muhammad a hundred times. I guess he resisted with each new piece of information about what he might know, and then gave up only that upon being waterboarded. Then it was rinse and repeat over and over again until finally he’d been waterboarded a hundred times.
Oh, yeah, with regard to the scene in Dirty Harry, there would not have been time. And just like in other occasions where the police are given the power to hit, taser or shoot someone, I think that the type of action taken by Dirty Harry should be considered justifiable under the circumstances. You know, put him on desk duty and conduct an investigation, just like is done now in the case of police shootings, and then return him to duty if his actions are found justifiable.
Btw, since you haven’t seen it, here’s the scene where Dirty Harry finds and extracts information from the killer. Bear in mind when you listen to this guy whinging that he’s playing games. He had already killed two other women and ripped a tooth out of the girl he had kidnapped. And he hired a thug to beat him up so he could claim Dirty Harry did it. And he got away with beating the shit out of Dirty Harry by telling him he wouldn’t reveal the girl’s location if Harry fought back. He was something of a masochist and would play games even when he was hurt. The final half of the video consists of liberal San Francisco officials giving Harry shit and placing more importance on the bad guy’s rights than on the life of the 14-year-old girl. (I made a mistake regarding the wound. The bad guy had been stabbed in the leg previous to this scene and was limping accordingly, but he gets shot in the leg in this scene and that’s the wound Harry goes to work on.)
But would you torture the ID4 aliens to find out their invasion plans? That’s what I want to know.
Its a movie, Starving. John Wayne did not storm the beaches of Iwo Jima. Ronald Reagan was not a naval aviator. They did, in fact, shoot Old Yeller, but that was just because Disney was such a prick.
Belive it or not, I am aware of that fact. Perhaps you missed it just above but I clearly said that such instances would be rare. But the movie does serve to make the point that torture is not the greater evil in all circumstances, and that the bad guy’s rights shouldn’t supercede the rights of the victim, which after all are supposed to be life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Quoth Hold Fast:
So you’re saying that you’d only be willing to consider torture in a situation where its use is guaranteed to cause the death of millions of innocents? Me, I’d rather try to get the information from that guy, instead, rather than just giving up on defusing the nuke for the sake of getting some sadistic jollies. Offer him money. Offer him women. Offer him amnesty. Bring in an imam to tell him that killing a bunch of people will land him in Hell. Tell him we have a mind-reading machine that can get the information anyway. All of those have a chance of getting the information, and saving those lives. As soon as you start on the torture, though, all of that is off the table.
But then you have the opposite problem; we’d want such things to be expeditious, but not too expeditious. There comes a point where you could cut out too much necessary work. I mean, at the farthest end of the timing ease, you could simply get a judge to give verbal permission over the phone, but that would obviously have problems as regards their understanding of the situation.
You mention a lack of extremely urgent cases; in such cases, though, wouldn’t it be better to try and get information in other ways? I mean, knowledge of urgenc is information in and of itself; if you know that something requires immediate knowledge (or that it doesn’t need immediate knowledge) isn’t that evidence that useful information can be got without torture?
Well, this is the problem, isn’t it? You can’t just promise torture in the future, you have to promise a *lack *of torture if they do talk. Which means you have to stop once they give you some information; if you carry on too far in “making sure”, then you remove the motivation for them to later talk. If they think that you’re going to torture them no matter what they say, then it won’t matter if they play games or not, either way they’ll get tortured. Likewise if you don’t believe them, they’ll be under the (pretty much correct) impression that they won’t believe the truth, either.
I mean no offense, because i’m pretty sure we’ve debated on personal experience before, but it doesn’t seem all that fair to make such an assumption based on the words of “some Muslim guy”. I mean, I could ask elucidator what he thinks of torture and then apply it to your situation based on the words of “some American guy”, and I think i’d have more problems than agreement.
Thanks for the link. I suppose the big problem with the idea is that we can’t really make laws designed solely for Dirty Harry types. A law that would allow him to do as he wishes, with what seems to be fair judgement, is a law that would allow countless other police officers to do as they want, too. Perhaps those are the kind of situations those “liberal San Fransisco officials” had seen too much of before. I’m not sure I would have confidence that DH was the rule rather than the exception.
And the OP mentions three instances in which it did work. Waterboarding Mullah whats-his-name apparently came up with good intelligence.
If waterboarding is sometimes justified, then you need people around who are willing to do it.
If they are eager to start pulling out fingernails, that is one thing. But waterboarding three guys, out of the thousands of prisoners taken in Afghanistan and Iraq, is another.
Regards,
Shodan
I think he’d be more likely to lie and stall when offered women or money or the words of an Imam. If we were doing stuff like that, he’d be told when training that it was all bullshit and that we wouldn’t actually give him all that stuff, and they would warn him about infidel Imams who would try to get him to stray from the path of righteousness.
And your presumption that torture would result in false information (presumably, that is, since you seem to feel that torture would ipso-facto result in the death of everyone in the plane) is patently false and has no grounding in reality. If torture was such a notorisously ineffective way of gaining information, why has it been used and refined so many times over the centuries? To claim that torture is utterly and invariably ineffective, as you appear to be doing, is nothing but a politcal statement. And one which flies in the face of logic and experience.
There’s a big, big difference between “eager to start pulling out fingernails” and “willing to waterboard when it is justified”. One is causing pain for pain’s sake. The other is causing pain for a greater percieved good.
Ideally, I would think, we need people who find the idea and task unpleasant, but who are prepared to do it anyway. The sort of person who, as said, is willing to put the needs of others above their own personal needs. Is this too much to ask of the military?
But there’s the rub, the “right circumstances”. For which read: very rare circumstances.
The principles of “need to know” basis are almost universally practiced, but no more so stringently enforced in a clandestine, insurrectionist, and/or terrorist organization. Take Lenins revolutionary cell structure for a prime example. These are rules honed against the Czarist intelligence, the Okhrana, as serious a bunch of monsters as you’re ever likely to hear about.
The most common of these is the “need to know”, that no one in the organization knows more than what is necessary to perform a function. The less you know, the less you can give up. And the guy who holds all in the info, in whose hands all the strings finally lead, is way, way in the rear. If you’ve got him, you’ve already penetrated to the very core. But its not very likely that you do, its much, much more likely that you have an ordinary “foot soldier”.
Say there are ten safe houses, an arbitrary number. Average foot soldier knows maybe one, perhaps two. His superior knows the same two, and also knows how many and which ones his subordinate knows. He is also tasked with keeping track, so that if one of his troop disappear, he knows it immediately. There are no innocent explanations for disappearance in that world. If you haven’t got him, the other guys do.
Most likely, the foot soldier doesn’t know his bosses real name, he doesn’t know where his family lives, he doesn’t know anything more than what he needs to know.
And yes, if he’s captured everything he knows is blown. Which is why this compartmentalizing is so important, you don’t have to abandon everything, you only abandon everything that he knew about, and you keep that to an absolute minimum.
So, sure, under the “right circumstances”, torture might be useful and effective. Problem is, those circumstances are rare. The masterminds who have the information you want are not wandering about to be picked up, they are buried layers and layers deep.
Isn’t that how you would run a clandestine revolutionary movement? Assuming Mensa was making a bid for world domination?
Well, we do the same sort of things when we suspect someone of crime. We bust down their doors, terrorize their families, put them in jail and put them in the position of losing perhaps tens of thousands of dollars in bail money under similar circumstances. I would think that if the warrant process was good enough to justify all that, it would also be good enough to decide whether torture was justified. Frankly, I’d rather be waterboarded than have all that other stuff happen, and yet in goes on every day in every major city in the country and lots of smaller ones and no one thinks anything about it. So what I’m saying is that we handle cases where torture may be justified in the same way that we do with regard to other judicial warrants, with the exception of having some sort of way of expediting the process if necessary. I don’t think (and not being a lawyer I may be wrong) that judges ponder warrant requests for days on end. The primary delay seems to be just getting one before them. Once that’s done, the judge can examine the request and decide upon it just like he does with any other warrant request.
As I pointed out to Chronos above, such techniques would soon be discovered and warned against…and besides, these guys are such strong believers that they’re willing to blow themselves up. To you honestly think they’re going to be dissuaded by offers of goodies of some sort?
Well, again - and maybe this depends upon how horrific the nature of the torture is - I don’t think a person would be very likely to give false information if he knew he’d be in for more and longer torture if he lied.
I understand. I just thought it was an interesting observation and food for thought. It should be easy enough for the powers that be to discover this quirk if it’s true. In fact, I’m sure they already have if it’s true. Again, that may be why it was necessary to torture Sheikh Mohammed Khalid so many times. Each time they’d get a new piece of information indicating he knew about something, he made them put him through waterboarding in order to make it okay for him to spill the beans. I’m not saying this is so, but it is a possiblilty and one I think is interesting. Maybe I’ll try to ferret out more information on it one of these days.
I’m not saying that we should allow cops or torturers or anyone else to do as they wish. They should be under the same constraints as ordinary law enforcement officers and answerable for their actions under the circumstances just like other officers are.
If they are torturing people WE should kill them if the “terrorists” don’t.
EDIT: Well, I’ll semi-take that back, but only because I don’t support the death penalty. Just throw them in prison for the rest of their live with no possibility of parole instead. And I certainly won’t consider it a tragedy if the people they are going after manage to massacre them.
I can’t find anything that I disagree with here.
Waterboarding is not the same as what happened at Abu Gharib. They differ, not only in what was done, but why it was done. One was humiliation to no purpose. Waterboarding someone and finding out what he knows about pending terror attacks - that’s not the same thing.
Whether or not that justifies waterboarding is debatable. But ISTM that those who debate it need to keep in mind what Bush is saying - there are circumstances in which it seems to work, and therefore the argument can be made that it is justifiable under those circumstances at least.
Regards,
Shodan