Exactly. That in itself is, to me, the most compelling reason to never use torture. Those who are suspected of being terrorists are in the position of needing to prove a negative. It is unconscionable to me that they can be detained, tortured, denied contact with the outside world (let alone legal counsel), etc. because they have some – often extremely tenuous – connection to terrorist activity. They stay in that hellish limbo with no hope of resolution from their own actions. It’s sickening.
I should add - I would still oppose any and all torture (even the hypothetical NY Bomb one) even if it worked 100% everytime.
I don’t think anyone should end up like my Grandad, ever.
I don’t think these Jack Bauer scenarios tell us much about anybody’s view of torture. Most people aren’t going to oppose torture if they are positive it will stop a bomb from blowing up Peoria (or even New York City) in half an hour.
Can I offer a situation that I think is more realistic? Let’s say the United States captures a man who, they are pretty sure, is involved in Al Qaida’s finances. He’s not a donor, but he helps cash get from supporters to the people who actually plan the operations. So he would presumably have some information that can lead to other people, some of whom might be more valuable. There’s probably nothing imminent happening, but who knows?
So, with that in mind, is it okay to strip this man naked and keep him in a cell for days on end? Is it reasonable to force him to stand up for 24 hours or more? Is it acceptable to pump the sounds of crying babies into his room to keep him from sleeping? Is it alright to punch him or waterboard him? Are some techniques more allowable than others? What about using more than one at once? Much has been made about the legal definition of words like “cruel, inhuman and degrading,” but I think that’s just handwaving - we know what torture is when we see it.
I do oppose torture. I also think, based on what I’ve read, that it’s ineffective - not because of conniving fanatical liars, but because it seems to me that any person being tortured will say whatever he thinks will make it stop. I think that’s commonsense, unless you think there were actually witches in Salem, Massachusetts.
I would rather die in a terrorist attack, or run a greater risk of dying in one, than have possibly innocent people tortured in an attempt to obtain information that might protct me from one.
Don’t be silly. There’s no similarity between shooting someone who’s shooting at you, and torturing a helpless victim.
Again, that has nothing to do with us torturing people.
Some means are never justifiable. And torture can’t reduce the amount of evil in the world, because it is evil. And it’s a false dilemma, since there are an immense number of other ways of dealing with problems than torture. Your two statements don’t say the same thing; you are simply trying to excuse the evil you support with the standard “They made me do it !” defense.
I think one of the problems with all these extraordinary steps we’re talking with respect to terrorism is that what constitutes a “known terrorist connection” is a rather vague concept.
Sure, we have someone like Osama bin Laden. There’s a no brainer. Then we have all the guys down at Guantanamo. So far as I can tell, they are all being interned there because they have known terrorist connections at the time they are captured. As we’ve heard again and again, those at Guantanamo are supposed to be the “worst of the worst.”
And yet, it has become almost routine for the military to release people from Guantanamo because they are no longer a threat to the country. Excluding the cases where some of those released have turned up on the battlefield again, I can only assume that some significant proportion of those released are simply not the bad people we initially thought they were.
Part of the moral equation here must be, To what extent are we willing to risk torturing innocent people? We’re not talking about the death penalty here, in which there are multiple levels of legal process before the state takes an irrevocable step of harming another person.
Torturing someone to get time-sensitive information means that we would have to be operating primarily on suspicion that someone is a known terrorist, not proof. If torture is ok, then it is inevitable that we’re going to torture innocent people. That is completely immoral in my book.
Torture should stay illegal, and should never be used. If a person feels torture must be used, then he should accept the consequences. If the ticking bomb goes off anyway, or it turns out there was none, he should spend a long time in jail. If it happened to be successful, then no jury would convict him.
The ticking bomb scenario is nonsense, since we seem to have tortured a lot of people with nary a ticking bomb in sight. This just shows that once you buy into the ticking bomb as justification, it quickly goes to a rumor of a ticking bomb or a plan for a ticking bomb or a rumor of a ticking bomb. Yes, this is the slippery slope argument, but we’re way down the slope already.
For those who think torture is justified: how about non-terrorists? If a man is thought to have a child buried underground somewhere, is it okay to torture him for the information? How about someone involved in planning for a murder? How about for a bank robbery which might turn into a murder?
We can bring back the rubber hoses, then update all those film noir movies to the present.
Is it?
Ok I grant my hypothetical nuke in New York with me as the sole person dealing with the person who planted the bomb is only made for TV stuff.
But can you not hypothesize a reasonable “time is critical” situation in a war (for instance)? Say you nab an opposing General or other high ranking official and you need to know info on their deployments/plans. Knowing this would save hundreds or thousands of your own soldiers’ lives. I am willing to bet such things have happened with some regularity in war.
Note I am just playing Devil’s Advocate here. As I stated in my first post here I think torture is wrong and only conceiving of the most drastic of instances can I even begin to think, perhaps, it might be appropriate.
Here’s the thing. I can imagine scenarios where I would torture somebody to obtain certain results.
That doesn’t mean our legal system should allow me to do so legally. I can imagine scenarios where I’d steal a million dollars. That doesn’t mean I should be allowed to steal a million dollars just because I really really want a million dollars. I can imagine scenarios where I would feel justified shooting someone in cold blood. That doesn’t mean our laws should be changed to allow me to shoot someone in cold blood just because I really really want to.
If torturing someone is so important, then the interregator can go ahead and torture the person, and face their later punishment happily. And if the torturer really did save New York City from a nuclear bomb, he can probably find a sympathetic jury who can let him off the hook. And even if the torturer knows he’ll face 20 years in prison for torturing that terrorist, well, he should suck it up. What, he’s not willing to spend 20 years in prison to save New York City? We have soldiers who are dying to defend our country, and you’re not willing to face a few years in jail? You’re saying you’re willing to torture, but not if you’re going to face any sort of legal trouble? If you’re going to face jail time, you’ll just let New York City go to hell?
If it isn’t important enough to spend 20 years in jail over, it isn’t important enough to torture someone over.
Of course laws against torture aren’t going to prevent all torture, soldiers and cops torture prisoners probably every day. That doesn’t mean we should legalize it. I’m not going to go out on a limb and say all cases of torture are always and without question wrong. But they should always and without question be against the law, and people who torture should always and without question face charges.
Because anything less is unthinkable. Because what invariably happens when torture is winked at is that everyone who comes into the interrogator’s hands is liable to be tortured, regardless of who they are or what they are supposed to have done, or what they are supposed to know. Any prisoner can be tortured, because why are they a prisoner if they didn’t do something? Torture is then used, not to gain information, but as punishment, or simply for the amusement of the interrogator. And when torture becomes a commonplace tool, then interrogators will invariably be those who enjoy torture. People who don’t enjoy torturing other people will quit, they won’t be able to take it any more. Which means that the interrogators will all be people who enjoy torture for its own sake, and any intelligence they get from the detainees will be a distant secondary goal at best.
The heroic interrogator who doesn’t enjoy torture but who tortures out of a sense of duty is a myth. The very best we could hope for is an interrogator who tortures because he hates terrorists and wants to make them suffer but doesn’t actually enjoy torture for its own sake. But then we have torture for revenge, not torture to gain intelligence.
So rather than a contrived ticking nuclear bomb scenario, a more realistic one is a patrol looking for the location of a sniper or IED or whatever, and they grab someone and threaten him to force him to reveal the location. In one sense this is understandable…the soldiers don’t want to be killed or hurt, and torturing this person who might be a witness or might be suspect will allow them to avoid being hurt or killed, and might allow them to kill or capture enemies. But can we stand by and allow them to do this legally? As a matter of policy? Because if we do, then we’ve essentially allowed our soldiers to torture anyone at any time for any reason. We absolutely have to categorically forbid this behavior, and make it absolutely clear that any soldiers who do this will be court martialled, and we have to mean it, and we have to do it. Are soldiers in fear of their lives sometimes going to torture prisoners for reasons that seem good to them? Yes, but so what? People steal, that doesn’t mean we should do away with laws against stealing.
Torture as policy won’t get us good information, and it will invariably lose the war. We aren’t going to win the war by shooting a certain number of enemy fighters, and once we’ve shot them all, the war is over. We’ll win the war if and only if ordinary civilians over there prefer to cooperate with our soldiers to cooperating with the insurgents. And if ordinary civilians know that anyone taken into custody by American soldiers is very likely to end up tortured, or detained indefinately, with no recourse, how many civilians are going to cooperate with American soldiers? How many civilians are going to talk to American soldiers about where IEDs are planted, or where snipers are located, if they are likely to be taken into custody and tortured, rather than thanked?
You either don’t torture, because of the lack of success in getting results, or you should extend torture to other areas, such as criminals. It’s not like torture is a new idea from the Bush administration, after all. We had supposed we grew out of it.
But the point in the sentence you quoted wasn’t hypotheticals. It is that once you buy into the justification of torture in extreme situations, it creeps into less extreme ones. Our torture in Iraq has nothing to do with ticking bombs. Torturing a major terrorist in a crisis shouldn’t be used as justification for torturing some poor shmuck pulled off the street - yet this is exactly what the Bushies are doing. if they were honest about this, they’d have strict guidelines about when it is justified, and punish those who go beyond them. Instead, we get “we don’t torture and it is okay anyhow.”
I’m only human though, and I have to admit that the prospect of torturing those in the Adminstration who have dragged the reputation of the country I love through the mud makes me smile.
It’s an interesting question. It boils down to your desire to save the child (no, not ‘cheerleader’! 
). At the risk of sounding pedantic, moral choices aren’t supposed to be easy. When you’re confronted with a situation like that, you have to choose, and choosing not to torture the burier would constitute giving up on the kid.
I agree with Ravenman when he states that our ability/inability to define ‘true’ associations (and thereby torture innocent people) must be part of the equation. Having said that, only a fool would deny situational relativism to be part of that question as well.
We have people in this thread decrying “Jack Bauer” thought experiments on one hand while waving the absolutist “never ever!” flag with the other. If you’re absolutely unwilling to consider torture, then what are your other options? Some type of hypnotism? Using some magic “truth drug”? I doubt they work, or we wouldn’t be torturing people (sorry, Der Trihs…I don’t think people have torturing others as a goal), as the efficacy would win out.
And for that matter, why is the ticking time bomb written off as so much nonsense? I suspect (no cites, of course) that there are several targets in Afghanistan and Iraq who are suspected of knowing minefield maps, knowing of roadside bomb-patterns, and other passive ordnance. If you had a chance to potentially save 1,000 troops (arbitrary number, make it what you like), and probably several civilians, at what point does it become worth it to invest in the “soft” torture methods? If those don’t work, does your moral sense forbid breaking a finger?
I haven’t had to torture anyone. I have no problems imagining myself torturing someone for information I needed in extremis (I’m referring principally to my wife situation I described in post #2 above).
In my experience, people who eaasily say “never” simply haven’t been in a position that requires the choice.
-Cem
Great post overall…wish I had said it.
I do not think the US will prevail in Iraq by being nice. I do not think we will prevail by being mean either. Damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
Thing is the other guy is not playing “by the rules”. If we play all nice the other side threatens them with death of their families or burning their house or business down or what have you. The populace of course does not like this but it is not hard to guess which way they will go.
If the US is mean that of course opens the door for the insurgents to point at what assholes we are and win there.
I am NOT saying this to argue we should be play thugs. Indeed I think if anything we should take the moral high ground. We’ll still probably lose but our integrity will be intact (or would have been if we did it…instead we were thugs just enough and not good enough that we got the worst of both options).
I’m not sure when we started dealing in Nationalism and loaded words like “support”, but I would entirely agree with Iranian governmental agencies using torture on an American spy if it meant saving Iranian lives. It’s another type of relativism, in that, to a reasonable Iranian government mind, saving Iranian lives would trump already-flaunted Geneva theories and moral convention.
-Cem
Or, it could be that they find the thought morally repugnant and unlikely to garner any useful information.
As you’ve said, you’ve never tortured anyone so evidently you haven’t been in a position that requires the choice either, unless you WERE in the position and choose not to do so.
+1.
I meant that statement to be a little broader than our current torture conversation, but it will still apply.
Saying you won’t do something before you’ve had to make the choice is naiive. I admit I’ve never tortured anyone (and hope to never be in any position to), but I can certainly imagine a situation where I would do so without compunction.
It’s similar to the Hitler/Time Travel trope in fiction. It goes like this: “If you could travel back in time, would you kill Hitler so millions of Holocaust victims could live?” To people who say ‘never’, it’s an easy decision. I wonder if most people would agree? I know it’s laughably fictional, but it’s not hard to think of a situation where extreme pressures would force you into a similar choice.
And…Der Trihs…does it strike you as ironic that you’re advocating death for torturers? What’s worse…torture or death?
-Cem
Well, this is why our discussion should focus on public policy, not on whether we can imagine a scenario where we might choose to torture someone.
As I said, I can imagine myself stealing a million dollars. That doesn’t mean I think we should make theft legal. We aren’t going to establish whether torture is always immoral under all circumstances, and we don’t have to.
Of course soldiers and cops and CIA agents and judges and prison guards (as opposed to us internet bloviators) are going to face situations where torture seems like a good option to them. And so instead we should ask ourselves, is it a good idea to allow soldiers and cops and secret agents the legal power to torture under certain circumstances? And then should we try to define those circumstances, and then should we encourage soldiers and cops and CIA agents and judtes and prison guards to use torture under those circumstances?
And setting aside whether torture is always immoral or only almost always immoral, I think we can very clearly state that legalized torture is always bad public policy. We simply cannot allow legal torture in any form, we cannot tolerate torture by our soldiers, our cops, our CIA agents, our judges, or our prison guards, even if those people think they have good reason to torture. And we cannot train people to torture, we cannot say torture is wrong and then wink at it.
Because history shows that people who are legally entitled to torture detainees invariably abuse that legal power in horrific ways. How many heroic torturers who saved thousands of lives or prevented horrible catastrophies does history record? How many torturers should we hold up as heroes and teach our kids that they should be like that person when they grow up? History shows us that people who torture do so simply because they are sadists who enjoy torturing people. History shows us that regimes that use torture do so in barbarically unjust ways. History shows us that soldiers who randomly torture captives do not in the long run save the lives of their comrades, they cost lives because the people they chose their torture victims from are changed from bystanders or allies to enemies.
So if there exists a convoluted scenario where torture is justified, and a soldier, or cop, or CIA agent, or judge, or prison guard feels like they HAVE to use torture to prevent an even greater catastrophe, then they can try to justify to us after the fact while they’re defending themselves in a court of law.
It’s not a valid comparison. For one thing, are you 100% sure that killing Hitler would have prevented the Holocaust? If the answer is “no,” then what are you going to do, just keep going back in time and plugging assorted people until you get it right? If the answer is “yes,” then your proposition assumes perfect hindsight, whereas we have no similar foresight. We in the real world can’t just point to one guy and say, “If we kill/torture/detain this guy, x number of people will definitely be saved.”
Then you are being pollyannish about us, and human nature in general. And you assume that torturers would define “efficacy” as “gets the truth”, rather than “gets me something I can hand to my superiors” or “gives me the chance to torment The Enemy”. I see no reason to believe that we care if it actually works.
Torture, by far.
Another one against all forms of state sponsored torure in all conceivable situations. Similar to the reasons I personally disfavor the death penalty. has to do with the sort of values I wish my nation to embody. I would like to think we are better than that.
Many well-stated opinions upthread.