I’m having a hard time reconciling the above with this:
Terrifel
Thank you for the kind words. No, as I said before, I had nothing to do with it.
Holey Moley, guy. That whole pedophile thing is just too appalling for words. Lets not even go there. I’ve heard of such things but had no idea it actually ever happened.
As far as seeing the guy being brutally tortured, I didn’t wait around. It was just something I blundered into. I wrote a bit about it below in a response to TomnDebb. It’s been 15 years ago and I can still close my eyes and summon-up the exact look of that room and the victim and the smells and sounds and the grin on the torturer’s face.
Regards
Testy
But on the other hand, if something** is **inherently wrong, no *ad hoc *reason can make it right.
I don’t know, for some reason I feel like hauling out Ursula Le Guin .
Sorry, I missed that. What was the answer again?
Then I’d just have to spread my hands and say, “Um… the only other alternative was raping a bunch of children?” I have to believe that most human beings would understand the motivation behind that decision. That’s not even getting back into the whole issue of what happens when you get done wiping your dick off and then learn that there never was a bomb, or when you’ve just finished pumping the last screaming child’s ass and then the bomb goes off anyway.
I don’t know why it “always” comes down to child rape; but my guess is that the option is likely to be utterly abhorrent to the civilized mind. Up until a few years ago, I would have imagined that most people thought the same about torture, but I guess not. If you’re bored with child rape, I suppose you could substitute the immolation of the elderly. Whatever bakes your beans.
Mr Dibble
I think I answered that in the second paragraph.
Regards
Testy
There was a dire need to find justifications for the invasion to convince many undecideds that invading Iraq was part of the war against terror. (Bush already had his motives, he needed more for others)
So that is not quite correct, what I’m saying is that torture gave us false information; looking at the context, I can not find a good reason to completely dismiss that people were purposely tortured to get that false information (And “catapulting the propaganda” is a quote from Bush BTW)
No, torture found false evidence regarding the connection of Al-Qaeda and Saddam during the war against terror; unfortunately, as in the past, the powerful just grab any information they can get to justify an evil path.
I’m not willing to continue giving them that power.
Well, I appreciate the explanation. You can understand why your earlier vague description sounded so disturbing, I hope?
Yeah, I feel bad for even bringing it up now. Let’s just forget I even mentioned it. In fact, if everyone else who reads the thread would do the same, that would be fine.
Whoooosh!
Did you say anything, though? To the Captain, to the torturer, to your embassy, to the Press?
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing"
No, you tried to excuse it away. Believe me, I’ve got enough grudges from the past to keep me awake at nights, but I wouldn’t wish torture or death on anyone - not the guy who raped me when I was a kid, not the thug who whipped me when I was a teen, not the guys who turned my Grandad into a shell of a man.
What makes you think you get a pass?
Aside from the disturbing text…I’ll reply that you’re already backing away from your statement. You explicitly painted a causal link. If what you said was accurate, I’d expect the person in the predicament to weigh the two sides of the equation: millions dead (my words) versus children being raped. I wonder if you would have the same hand-spreading reaction if your mom, sister, or S.O were one of those in the nuclear blast, or in the radius of non-instant death (radiation sickness, etc.). Seems callous to me.
What if torturing someone would lead you to the secret location of a child-raping cult? You could stop it at that point.
I just don’t think you have the imagination to posit a situation where you might need to apply pressure to get information or to extricate yourself from a bad situation.
I don’t like baked beans.
-Cem
Terrifel
OK, forgotten. I’ve got more than enough ugly images of other things. That one’s worse though.
Yeah, after I read back over that I realized people probably thought I was working in Abu Ghraib or something. No, nothing at all to do with any of that or anything else concerning the Iraq war. I’m just a regular IT guy trying to make a living over here. I bumped into that whole horror show trying to help a customer. Right now, in between frantically trying to avoid being deemed “the fiend of the SDMB,” I’m troubleshooting a Java program I’m writing. It doesn’t work and by the looks of things it never will. Alas.
Anyway, that’s why I’m being so persistent in saying torture works under certain circumstances. Yeah, I know. I should probably just shut up about it or drop out altogether.
Regards
Testy
Actually, all cases of torture for information are fishing expeditions. If you already know the answer, you don’t need to use torture to confirm it.
However, even if you play semantic games and narrowly define torture as not a fishing expedition because you are looking for a very tightly defined bit of information, you still have the problem that you don’t know when you have the right information, so the torture is going to continue until the victim offers up something the torturer wants to hear.
It is simply bad practice that does no good for intelligence and turns its perpetrators into monsters.
(I also did not claim that the torture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi resulted in the Iraq invasion. I noted that it was used to help rationalize it. So we substituted getting crap through torture in place of good info through professional interrogation and the crap was used to assist a bad event carried by (Surprise!) the people who approved the torture.
Given that we have the testimony of multiple interrogators going back to WWII that say that torture is an ineffective method of gathering information, as opposed to a few yahoos who think it is macho to use it–despite its noted failures–I see no reason to ever accept torture. Those few occasions when it has appeared to work have been the results of the answers coincidentally conforming to the previously held belief of the torturers.
Any other claim is posturing.
Actually, using something for the wrong reasons does make it inherently wrong. (And while I can envision a very few inherently wrong acts for which one might possibly construct a hypothetical scenario that would make it “less” wrong, that fact that torture is not only wrong, but ineffective, places torture outside the realm that can ever be justified.)
Have you applied torture?
Mr Dibble
To who? I’ve obviously done a poor job of describing a state of armed anarchy. There were no embassies, no real troops, no government at all. As far as the Chief, Captain, whatever he was, he was the one doing it. Pissing him off wouldn’t have helped that prisoner in the slightest.
Regards
Testy
Let me get this clear - you’re saying torture works because you saw this Iraqi being tortured to find other Iraqis, while at the same time they said they’d caught the other Iraqis? Two questions:
Why was he still being tortured?
Did the thugs explicitly state that the other Iraqis had been found based on the tortured one’s testimony?
MrDibble
Well, you’re obviously a much more forgiving person than I am. Mind you, if the people doing what they’re doing stopped today I’d be more than happy to drop it as well and would no longer support their summary execution or any other dreadful penalty. I don’t see it happening for the foreseeable future though.
And what makes you think I was looking for a “pass,” from you or anyone else?
Testy
Tomndebb
I’m considering water-boarding my computer with a glass of iced tea right now.
Regards
Testy
Well, that’s the thing.
It’s always easy for the pro-torture side to concoct a scenario where torture seems justified.
The counterpart to that is that if we’re concocting scenarios, why is it that torture is always the only thing that can save the day?
It reminds me of an article about a top police interrogator. I’ve tried searching for it and can’t find it, but what he said struck me. This was a guy who was a legend for being able to get people to talk. And he said that his favorite interrogation method was good cop-bad cop, and he always played the good cop, and he never used a bad cop. And he always got results that way.
As for the whole child rape thing, that’s because some people due to some failure of empathy don’t seem to be able to imagine that infliciting torture means that you’re morally depraved, yet they’d agree that raping a child is proof that you’re morally depraved. if you’re an undercover cop, and the only way to infiltrate a child rape ring is to rape a child yourself to prove that you’re one of them, then the scenario is that you rape the child, because that allows you to prevent the rapes of many other children once the rapists are in jail.
Except this is a contrived scenario, because it presumes that the only choices are to rape the child, or let the rapists go free. And that’s baloney. Such a scenario can’t happen, because there are always other ways. ALWAYS. All the excuses for why you had to rape that child don’t matter, because the real-life non-contrived answer is that you didn’t. The pedophiles who really do rape children tell themselves that they had no choice too. So we don’t have an exception to the child-rape laws that child-rape is OK if you really really need to rape a child.
In these scenarios, torture is always somehow the only way to get the information. And any alternatives are defined out of the scenario, so that you either torture or get the bad result. And then you expect people to say they don’t want the bad result, and then pounce and say “AHA! So you DO support torture!” Except in real life alternatives to torture can’t be defined away. In real life, certainty about the nature of the information can’t be defined away. In real life, certainty about the guilt of the torture victim can’t be defined away. In real life, the secondary effects of torture can’t be dismissed. In real life, the fact that we now live in a totalitarian dictatorship instead of a liberal democracy can’t be dismissed.
And if you think innocent people don’t get randomly pulled off the street and tortured, read this story. And then imagine what the story would be if instead of dumping him in Albania they had done some cleanup work and taken care of the problem. And then try to guess how many problems have disappeared and never made it into the news because the torturers didn’t experience the tiny flash of conscience that they apparently did in Mr. Masri’s case. Look at it from their perspective…what’s worse, putting a bullet in the brain of one innocent person, or causing an international embarassement to the US that will almost certainly, you guessed it, cost lives because the existance of the kidnap/torture program is now exposed. It’s a simple calculus, right? Better that this one guy die, so that the secret torture that saves lives can continue, right? And he’s not even an American citizen!
Oh, well I’m sorry if my text disturbs you. I’d hate to distract you from explaining the proper use of torture.
Yeah, it was more of a joke-- and at this point, a failed joke on a number of levels-- but that doesn’t change the fact that there never is such a causal link in real life. That was sort of the point.
Yes, how callous of me to refuse to rape or torture people. I’ll have to remember to ask Mom whether she would want me to rape a bunch of kids if it means saving her from a nuclear bomb.
Child raping cults don’t have secret locations. They meet openly in the Dominican Republic. Everyone knows that.
No, I can easily imagine such situations-- I simply choose not to torture people. Torture is terrorism. If you have to protect yourself from terrorists by using torture, you’ve already failed. You’re just another terrorist.
If you can imagine causes worth fighting for, I don’t see why “a torture-free society” can’t be one of those causes. So, bad things may happen if people aren’t tortured. So be it-- this is one of the things that define a worthwhile society, and it is not negotiable. Bad things happen because people vote, but on balance the world is a better place for it. As a wise man once said, “You take a chance waking up in the morning, crossing the street, or sticking your face in a fan.”
Too bad, baked beans are the only way to prevent child-torturing cults.
I know the story. I just don’t see the similarity between allowing an innocent child to suffer for the greater good and torturing a known terrorist leader for the same reason. Just because the first example is wrong does not mean the second is wrong as well.