Well if the lawyers said it was OK that’s fine by me… Hell’s Teeth are you reading this damn right scary crap you are writing here?? They simulated drowning an another person to terrify them. Terrify them, you know the source of that word “terrorism”. You* are terrorists now, well done.
Folks are underestimating the force of a principle which is key to conservative America:
“It is OK when we do it.”
Now Rand Rover and newishyoungguychangednametosomeoneChineseIcannotrememberatthismoment have recently voiced this important principle. To wide derision understandably, to claim there are special rules, only for us, is repellent and indefensible. This does mean they do not fiercely believe it
So instead the principle is said more commonly in a coded way. Make no mistake though it is key to the conservative ethos. One of the clear differences with liberal/progressive USA which holds all people to be equal as a self-evident truth. You despise conservatives for this principle. Have you considered they despise you for the same reason?
Did anyone else notice that we have gone from “Torture is ok to save the life of an innocent” to “Torture is ok to find a dead body”?
Merely pondering hypotheticals. (And hypotheticals that included judical oversight, I might add.)
Still, I began to see that that line of discussion was leading off the main subject and is one of the reasons why I began to try to bring the discussion back to the central question, which is:
“If someone’s life is at stake, and torturing the miscreant would prevent their death, is that torture justified?”
No one so far seems to have been willing to offer an answer to that question (save perhaps Kevbo, who seems to have been willing to admit that he’s nuts with regard to the subject).
So how about you, Cyros? What’s your answer? If the life of one of your family members or loved ones were at stake, and torturing the evil-doer would prevent their death, would you opt for letting your loved one die rather than to torture the miscreant and save their life?
And I see you’re still the kind of moral savage whose views give aid and comfort to the enemy.
And everyone knows that judicial oversight means that no mistakes are ever made. No innocent person every put to the rack spilling whatever he thinks you want to hear.
If it was my loved ones damn straight! I would torture, maim, or kill. Of course, I would be acting emotionally and not rationally. I would also torture and kill someone who killed my little girl. That does not make it right. It is a visceral emotional reaction and if I was even a little removed from the situation my answer changes.
How many other policies should we base on what feels good and right on an emotional basis?
Are you ok with the possibility of every soldier captured (yours and theirs) being waterboarded? Surely they all have information that put together would save lives.
So you feel it would be irrational to torture the evil doer in order to save your loved one’s life?
Here’s a cite for you on that from today’s headlines, involving Bush too:
DNA test casts doubt on executed Texas man’s guilt
At least Bush didn’t torture this evil-doer, he just had him killed.
Unfortunately emotions can and do get things wrong. So yes it is irrational. I have seen many examples in El Salvador of guerrillas being tortured that give false information that would then kill the group of soldiers that came to do a rescue or get info on where to find the guerrilla radio station, only to get the Salvadoran general that ordered the Mozote massacre blown out of the sky as he put the booby trapped radio transmitter in his helicopter to show the press his latest “victory”.
Here’s the thing. We live in the real world. Here in the real world, no one EVER, EVER knows that torture will prevent someone’s death. It is but one rare outcome out of a plethora of outcomes, some of which include justifying the torture of other people on our side because we do it. The only sure thing we know is that if we torture someone, that person is tortured. That’s all we know.
Come join us in the real world.
Your question should be: “If someone’s life is at stake, and torturing the micreant might possibly, but likely rarely, prevent something that might possibly, but likely rarely, result in a possible death, is torture justified?”
I think the answer to that question, the REAL question, is a resounding no. And the fact torture worked once does nothing to change that.
Somehow this torture saves life reminds me of 1984s Newspeak – an instance of absurdly constructed slogans created to confuse people by removing common sense anchors of morality and ethics. Think for a second about war on terror - you see, its war=good, terror=bad. Once the anchors of civil discourse are removed, you can do anything without impunity because people will endlessly discuss the obvious. Its all part and parcel of carefully constructed context in which it is possible to start a war but still being revered, publish books and collect profits – other warmongers end up quite differently. But this is our` warmonger which in Newspeak means he is just a peacemaker using war as a tool.
Now, going back to the awfully obtuse question and up you a notch – would you kill yourself to save your loved one? Hopefully, you will realize absurdity of the question the basic issue with questions like this – how do heck you know that it will indeed save your loved one life? You don’t and you shouldn’t. That is why nobody is trying to answer it as I suspect most Dopers answer questions thinking about it rather than from the gut. It`s exactly the same moral issue I have with death penalty (have others this is one is just on top) – how do you know that the person you are about to electrocute did the crime?
I’m being deadly serious. An act of mercy to an invertebrate does not counteract an act of terror on a sentient being. It like the joke about the Scottish fence-builder. “Aye, but ye screw one goat…”
If we’re referring to the incidents that Bush is talking about with the “once”, even that is in doubt. As referenced earlier in the thread, the Brits have called bullshit on his claim that it saved lives.
Starving Artist:
As has been mentioned before we prosecuted Japanese for torturing our soldiers back in WW2. I am sure that the Japanese torturers could justify their actions by the fact that the information they got could save thousands of “Japanese” lives. Were they justified? Back then we were horrified by the thought of torture. It was always the evil other that did such things. It was used to show how evil the Nazis/commies were that they would do such things. Now some 60 years later it seems that we have switched places with our enemies. Something has changed since the good old days. Of course you could always blame 1967 liberals, but somehow that rings a bit hollow.
No one has answered it because the question is absurd…
What if we had a vehicle that required no fuel to operate, should we use it?
What if there was a vaccine that prevented every disease, should it bee provided to the public?
What if there was a treadmill that could operate in a manner that would hold an aircraft stationary?
Even hypothetical questions have to be bounded by reality…
I read this thread and there are two hypothetical situations concerning torture use put forward…
#1 (by Starving Artist) Should we use torture to save kidnapping victims or to force murderers to reveal the whereabouts of a corpse… Which is basically saying that the police should be able to use torture as a regular technique to solve common crimes… In this scenario torture would be quite effective because the people who are being tortured are already weak minded narcissistic individuals who care only for themselves… and for every case that it solved there would be justification for more torture… Sounds great doesn’t it? Innocents saved, bad guys get what’s coming to them… Problem #1 Innocents will be tortured… and the sad thing about that is that there are people who would say that is a small price to pay for all the good that torture does… Problem #2 This is a decent into total and utter barbarism, no matter how you want to justify or moralize it… The more common it would become the more barbaric we would be…
#2 (reality) Torture should be used in extreme cases were torturing an individual would save 100s or 1000s or 1 000 000s or 1 000 000 000s ect. of lives… The problem here is that you are no longer dealing with weak minded common criminals… You are dealing with zealots who would rather die than betray their cause… In this scenario there are two ways that it would unfold… The tortured would hold and not reveal a thing or worse, they would provide false info and the authorities would waste time and resources following a false lead…
It boggles my mind that in our contemporary seemingly civilized society that there are people that would even consider torture as a viable tool but hey Starving Artist summed up the way that he and others like him think…
If you are not better than the bad guy, what are you?
Yeah, SA, but if you’d been paying the LEAST bit of attention, the case is being made, and apparently is generally accepted among professional interrogators, that torture is NOT an effective method of getting that info that would save your family members or loved ones. So, the only reason you’d PREFER torture under the circumstances, is that you don’t really care about them.
Oh dear, dear, dear, there are STILL people who think “24” was a documentary?
I agree that if their family was in personal danger some on this board would wound, torture, and/or cause the death of their captive for information (Der Trihs,being the notable example, that guy would throw his newborn to the wolves and then thank the captors.) The quality of the information gathered is debatable if you do the research.
I do have a problem with torture in this respect: if you are of the respective country that has been attacked and maybe further, how, even with years of competent interrogating training would one have no personal self-interest at stake?
Also, have a Commander-In-Chief who has never seen combat be the first one to perform it on his enemy.
I do have a SERIOUS issue with a soldier having to mirandize an enemy combatant on the battlefield. If this is now a common practice for American soldiers, it puts their lives at considerable risk while doing it.
I have no issue at all with that, because I restrict myself to having issues with things that actually happen.
My bold:
I do have a SERIOUS issue with a soldier having to mirandize an enemy combatant on the battlefield. If this is now a common practice for American soldiers, it puts their lives at considerable risk while doing it.
I was wrong Chronos. I had understood it to be that the combatants are read their rights at the scene.