Do you support forced interrogation/torture of suspected Terrorists?

I kinda thought that’s what we were discussing, PatriotX. I wonder how often situations similar to my hypotheses happen…I’m guessing fairly often in conflict zones.

I wonder if that 99.99%+ number is reliable.

I think the posters who claim that member+torture = misinformation aren’t thinking real-life situations. If we assume that all torturees are fervent, fanatic disciples who will hide the truth to the end, then possibly. I would guess (IANAT) that a good amount of interrogation is up-front discussion of what’s at stake during the interrogation. I would think that, if the interrogator makes it clear what is wanted, and if the information is not of world-beating importance, that the interrogator will likely get information that’s useable.

To piggy-back on **Sage Rat’s ** earlier post, the point of an interrogation is not always to get an “answer”, but to get data points around which you can add context. Once you have a contextual pattern, you can use that as a reference point to true/false other statements.

Der Trihs… not to be confrontational, but are you seriously telling me that you can’t devise a thought experiement in which you woudl not find torture to be the way out?

-Cem

Since we’re still in thought mode, I would say that “known terrorist connections” would consist of known data linking the person being tortured, the informational goal, and an action defined as terrorist in nature (which is a whole 'nother thread, IMO).

I woudl tend toward your second statement, where the person was tried and found to be guilty of association, but I’m sure there are grey areas in that definition as well.

-Cem

Okay, Whack-a-Mole.

You have photos of a man posing with a nuclear bomb in a New York taxi. The ID of the taxi and its driver are obscured, no matter how much Grissom zooms in, you can’t tell which taxi. The countdown on the bomb is set to detonate at 1pm. It’s 12:50pm. You’ve been torturing the suspect (the one from the photo) for hours, but for some reason no matter what you do he won’t talk. It’s almost as if he feels no pain or discomfort, he just continues smiling at you. He knows he only has to hold out another 10 minutes.

You have the man’s family in custody. Would you torture his wife infront of him? What about his children (10yrs and 5yrs)?

Do the ends really justify the means?

It works for Jack Bauer. And I can’t believe there is a photograph or still from a security camera that Grissom’s computer can’t clean up enough to read a taxi number, even if the guy is standing in front of it.

They ALL are. Specifically, being human, they are “fervent, fanatic disciples” of the cause of not being tortured. They’ll all lie, and tell you what they think you want to hear, and they’ll keep doing so. Including after you are done torturing them; IIRC, when we tortured people is when we stopped getting useful information.

Probably. I could just as easily make one where molesting a child is the way out ( aliens will blow up Earth if you don’t, say ). That doesn’t make it either likely to happen, or right, or something that should be tolerated much less approved of.

In the real world, torture is about cruelty. Why else would people handwave away the near certainty of innocent people being tortured, or of the “information” gained being useless ? Torture isn’t done to accomplish a goal; it is the goal. It is a monstrous act, performed by monsters. Torturers deserve execution simply for being the sort of people who are willing to torture.

I honestly do not know. Were I faced (with the admittedly HIGHLY unlikely situation we are talking about) with certain death and mayhem on a scale that involves millions of lives I just do not know.

Honestly I seriously doubt I could torture anyone else, adult much less child, just to make the guy who does know talk.

I do think in the end it is for society to determine if the ends justify the means. Yes I took Philosophy classes and to this day I have never settled on a firm way of approaching these moral dilemmas (that is should I opt for virtue ethics or consequentialism or deontology?).

In general I think separating the ideal from the pragmatic is the way to go and yes, there are many shades of gray there and it does open the door to the slippery slope. In the end you make your decisions and others will judge your actions. Ultimately laws are a societal construct so it is they who make the final judgment.

I would think the easiest way to avoid misinformation would be to not ask yes/no questions. I doubt I’m the first on e to think of this. Actually, your statement would work in favor of a torturer. As long as the parameters are stated and the torturee knows what’s at stake, I would think the interrogator could get fairly accurate data points.

Meh. If you’re going to construct a doppelganger, make it look right. I gave two instances of where I thought a real-life situation might impinge on our torturing discussion. It’s become very easy to deny Machiavelli…I believe that the ends DO sometimes justify the means. And we all know aliens want our water…why blow us up?

Torture is absolutely about cruelty. That’s why it’s feared, it’s why it will never go away, and it’s why it’s still used as leverage. And, except for (hopefully) rare cases, I doubt that many people go into a war/conflict as a means to use that battery/nipple-clamp setup they bought out of the back of Soldier Of Fortune.

I agree it’s not the most pleasant thing to imagine, but I do believe that torture has a place in extreme situations.

-Cem

I missed the edit window:

Actually I try to abide by the ideal but am not totally hidebound to it. For instance you could say lying is always wrong. In general I abide by that but I do think instances arise where lying is actually the right way to go.

I’m not against the principle of torture. It just doesn’t work, and torturing someone can lead to some pretty disasterously wrong information, causing unneccessary wars and whatnot.

So, torture isn’t a useful tool. There’s no way to make it useful. The only thing it accomplishes is to “punish” someone, which our legal system is supposed to be in charge of. The only entity that should ever have the authority to punish an individual are the courts, and taking part of that power away from the law and giving it to some guy with a car battery and nobody watching isn’t a particularly good idea.

If someone pointed a gun at you, would you rather him shoot you and your family or to be able to shoot him first?

Short of ridding humanity of all scum, it’s fairly well a given that either you have to stoop to their level to make them stop, or sit back and let them keep doing it till they grow old and die.

Is it more moral to let North Korea starve its people than to go in, surround the North Korean government’s bunker, and starve them out?

Not that I’ve ever heard. And I fail to see how not using yes-no questions would make a difference. I’m sure someone could and would come up with names and locations and plans for a nonexistant terrorist plot if someone was torturing them; no yes-no questions required.

It’s feared because it hurts, not because it’s cruel. People would fear it if an uncaring machine did it. And it’s not done for leverage, it’s done out of malice and sadism.

NEVER. And as I said, anyone who does so should be killed. No exceptions.

That has nothing at all to do with torture.

If you do so, then YOU are scum yourself, and you haven’t stopped anything, just added to it. And put yourself in a position where you can’t complain about people who torture you and yours, unless you are a complete hypocrite. Which people who support positions like yours tend to be; torture is only bad when OTHER people do it.

Again, nothing to do with torture.

The big sticking point I’ve had with torture proponents is that they fail to make the distinction:

Suspected terrorist =/= Terrorist.

To thier mind, a suspected terrorist IS a terrorist, and has no right to anything.

I have seen or heard NOTHING from officialdom to indicate that if a terrorist were to dial a wrong number, and connect to my phone, that there is any possible way I could show that I am not a terrorist…and the longer I would deny such, the greater the need for torture would be.

AFAICT, there’s no limitation that we discuss made up situations.

Do you agree with Torture of suspected terrorists whilst in the custody of an allied nation?
…is it ok to torture them for information? How about mild torture like sleep deprovation? Is that ok?
What do you think of torture and the treatment of military combatants?

However, most interrogations do not involve a ticking bomb scenario.

Of course it’s reliable - it has 5 significant digits!! :wink:
From the cite below
The devaluation of rapport — that is, building an operational accord with
a source — as an effective means of gaining compliance from a resistant source
is in large measure the product of the misguided public debate over the role of
interrogation in the Global War on Terror, one that seems invariably to focus
on the “ticking bomb” scenario. The point can be safely made that for every
instance where a source might have information about an imminent, catastrophic
terrorist event, there are hundreds (possibly thousands) of interrogations where
the information requirements are far less urgent and the opportunity exists for a
thoughtful, systematic approach.
In the case of the latter, the interrogator might be well served in designing an effective approach regime by asking himself/
herself, as recommended in the KUBARK manual, “‘How can I make him want
to tell me what he knows?’38 rather than ‘How can I trap him into disclosing
what he knows?’” 39 Operational accord seeks to effectively, albeit subtly, gain
the source’s cooperation and maintain that productive relationship for as long as
possible without betraying indicators of manipulation or exploitation on the part
of the interrogator.
Educing Information
http://www.dia.mil/college/3866.pdf
KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation
Review: Observations of an Interrogator

A major stumbling block to the study of interrogation,
and especially to the conduct of interrogation in fi eld operations,
has been the all-too-common misunderstanding of the nature and scope of
the discipline. Most observers, even those within professional circles, have
unfortunately been infl uenced by the media’s colorful (and artifi cial) view
of interrogation as almost always involving hostility and the employment of
force – be it physical or psychological – by the interrogator against the hapless,
often slow-witted subject. This false assumption is belied by historic
trends that show the majority of sources (some estimates range as high as
90 percent) have provided meaningful answers to pertinent questions in response
to direct questioning (i.e., questions posed in an essentially administrative
manner rather than in concert with an orchestrated approach designed
to weaken the source’s resistance).
Operating with a dearth of research in support of offensive interrogation
methodology, the writers of the KUBARK manual appear to have found
themselves in a situation not unlike that experienced by interrogation personnel
today. In essence, KUBARK’s coercive methods refl ected concepts derived from
research into hostile methods — government research carried out specifi cally
to help identify effective countermeasures — and then “reverse engineered”
selected principles to meet operational requirements.

In large measure, the abuses — alleged or actual — perpetrated by U.S.
interrogation personnel since the advent of the war on terror can be explained
(albeit not defended) by the very same dynamic. With interrogation doctrine
refl ecting little change from the 1960s and producing few substantial successes
in the current battlespace, commanders, operators, and intelligence offi cers have
sought an alternative. In considering options, it became readily apparent that the
experts in Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) were the “only other
game in town.”
While offensive and defensive interrogation operations have much in common,
there are intractable differences. Defensive interrogation training is designed to
help U.S. personnel withstand the unique stresses of all manner of exploitation
— including the employment of coercive methods — to protect information and
avoid becoming pawns in an adversary’s attempt to generate useful propaganda.
To prepare personnel for this substantial challenge, resistance training seeks
to create a systematic threat environment to achieve “stress inoculation.” This
includes exposing trainees to intensive role-played interrogation scenarios. In
the course of many years of experience in such practical exercises, many of the
resistance instructors have become accomplished role-play interrogators.
However, there are three fundamental reasons why experience as a resistance
instructor does not necessarily prepare someone for service as an intelligence
interrogator. First, resistance instructors — portraying interrogators from potential
adversarial nations that have shown disregard for international convention on the
treatment of prisoners — routinely employ a wide range of coercive methods
that often fall well outside Geneva Convention guidelines. Second, although
questioning is an important element of the role-play exercise, this activity does
not reach the depth required in an intelligence interrogation. Third, resistance
instructors, though talented professionals, lack the training, linguistic skills,
and subject matter expertise required of interrogation personnel. In sum, the
employment of resistance instructors in interrogation — whether as consultants
or as practitioners — is an example of the proverbial attempt to place the square
peg in the round hole.

Despite the impressive success achieved by interrogators who have mastered
the skill of effectively establishing rapport with a source — **the celebrated
Luftwaffe interrogator Hanns Scharff
**37 providing but one well-known example
— methods for rapport-building continue to receive relatively little attention in
current interrogation training programs. There seems to be an unfounded yet
widespread presumption that all persons inherently possess the skills necessary
for building rapport and therefore do not require any supplemental training to
hone this ability. While the KUBARK manual has gained a degree of infamy
through its association with coercive means, it also, in an interesting stroke of
irony, consistently emphasizes the value of rapport-building as an essential tool
for the interrogator.

Would you support the Iranians torturing an American spy who had entered the country to plant a nuclear weapon at one of their power plants?

I am definitely in the “no” camp, BTW. My question is posed to those who may believe torture is justified.

It entirely has to do with torture.

So then what is your answer for North Korea? Is it more moral to watch the government torture its people or step in and starve out the government?

With “The ends never justify the means” and “Inaction in the face of suffering is a moral good” I think you’ll find that everyone agrees with the first but not the latter even though they say the same thing.

I do not agree with torture in any form. It is never OK to torture anyone, even through sleep deprivation or other “mild” forms. Captured personnel (“terrorists”, “unlawful combatants”, “insurgents” etc.) should either be treated as POWs - with all that that entails via international law - or else subject to the regular criminal justice system. Not held in gray-area extraterritorial gulags and tortured.

In a way, America is saying that its criminal justice system is so fucked up that it can’t handle all the Gitmo detainees properly.

  1. Torture is immoral. Certainly violent dictatorships are happy to use it. What sort of society do you want to live in?

  2. There is plenty of evidence that people held at Guantanamo Bay (no trial, no lawyers, tortured) are innocent.
    Those people are there because the US says the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply.
    “We torture them because they are suspected terrorists. They are suspected terrorists because we say so.”

  3. It doesn’t stop the terrorism. The British used torture on the IRA for decades, but all it did was create new recruits.

I am opposed to torture on moral grounds. It’s cruel and it’s wrong, independent of any results or possible good that it might achieve. But in terms of its efficacy, I was profoundly influened by reading about the witch hunts in early modern Europe in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Although not all witches were convicted based on torture, thousands were. The best current estimate is that 40,000 people were executed for being witches, and given that witches don’t exist, every single one of those confessions under torture (including the thousands of individuals who were named as witches by someone being tortured and were then executed) was completely false.

Torture will cause people to say whatever they need to say to get the pain to stop. In some cases, that might even be the truth. But the price for that truth, combined with the uncertainty about the quality of the information provided, makes me unequivocally opposed to its use.