If we’re willing to bomb cities and accept the possibility of collateral damage–that is, innocent civilians being harmed–then absolutely we should use torture, as well. There is no difference between accidentally torturing the wrong person and accidentally killing an innocent person, no matter how personal the act may become.
I hold that collateral damage is worse than torture, because there is a risk of harming children.
Just to make it clear: there are undoubtedly innocent people suffering at Guantanamo.
There are known cases of mistaken identity.
Many people were just handed over by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.
If released, these people are never charged with anything.
There is no evidence against anyone that would stand up in court.
"Many of Guantanamo’s prisoners proclaim they’re innocent. What’s different about these men, Muslims from China’s Uighur minority, is that even American authorities said they were innocent, referring to them as “no longer enemy combatants” or “NLEC.” Nevertheless, they remained imprisoned more than a year after their names were cleared – after the U.S. government determined they did nothing wrong and posed no terrorist threat to America or Americans. "
“Four Britons formerly held in US custody at Guantanamo Bay have been questioned by UK anti-terrorism officers and freed without charge in Britain.
…
In November 2002 the British Court of Appeal said it found his detention in Cuba “legally objectionable”, but stopped short of forcing the government to intervene on his behalf.
…
His Catholic father Joseph Belmar told the Sunday Mirror he believed the authorities were trying to paint his son as a terrorist.
“They have said he was in Afghanistan in 1998 studying chemicals at the terrorists’ base but I know he was in London,” Mr Belmar told the paper.
…
Mr Begg said he had urged his son to move to Kabul with his wife and children to fulfil an ambition to build a school and help improve water supplies.
In a letter sent from Guantanamo Bay, he said he had been tortured, threatened with death and kept in solitary confinement since early 2003.
…
Not long after his arrival there he told his parents he had heard news reports that someone with his name had been arrested in Afghanistan and he was concerned an Islamic extremist was using his missing British passport.”
“One of the three men who committed suicide at the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay was due to be released - but did not know it, says a US lawyer.”
“Mejadedi said many of the detainees, who are now free, had served up to four years in Guantanamo. He said “most” of the prisoners were innocent and had been turned in to the U.S. military by other Afghans because of personal disputes.”
http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2006/10/12/guantanamo_detainees_go_to_afghanistan/
You seem to think there are limited numbers of terrorists and bombs. ‘If we torture this guy, it will all stop!’ :smack:
I already posted the why the British torture against the IRA didn’t work.
But just in case you don’t know it:
All that happened was that there were more recruits for the IRA, the money (partly from the US) flowed in to support the IRA and there were new bombings.
Eventually the torture stopped, the negotiations began and finally the violence stopped. Torture merely put the whole process back and caused lasting resentment and shame.
You don’t need a moral sense to be against torture. It failed to stop the IRA, it failed to stop the Salem witches, it failed in Algeria and Vietnam:
Torture was a frequent process in use since the beginning of the colonization of Algeria, which started in 1830. Claude Bourdet had denounced these acts on December 6, 1951 in L’Observateur: “Is there a Gestapo in Algeria?” Torture had also been used -on both sides- during the Indochina War (1947-54) and in all the French colonies…
What makes you think children don’t get tortured ? What make you think we don’t torture children ?
Torture is one weapon in an arsenal of weapons.
And if you nuked the Middle East today it would turn the world against us even more and raise funding to terrorists even more and yet nuking Japan ended the second World War.
What is and isn’t a good strategy in any conflict depends on the players and the situation.
The British approached the IRA as being criminals not as being an army. As such, they didn’t even think of things in terms like “resolving the conflict” since to them there was no conflict. They used beatings as a method for determining bombing locations, not as a means to gain strategical information for besting their enemy in a war.
If in 1940 I was able to capture someone who I had very good reason to believe, given as I am a professional intelligence officer and it is my job to know such things, is knowledgeable as to the whereabouts of Mao Zedong and, again since it is my job to know such things, I have very good reason to believe that his assassination will stop the Communist revolution in China but the person won’t give me that information and the more time that passes the greater the odds are that Mao will change his position. In such a case, torture might be your best and safest bet for ending a war.
The ticking time bomb is a very realistic scenario because in real life the sheer existence of some people is the explosion. And the longer they are in power to continue what they are doing or even expand what they are doing, the worse off the world will be. And yet the chances for bringing it to end might very well be very small. Any chance you get at some key information that you have very good reason to believe in the existence of might be your only chance for the entire next decade.
But the key points are that:
Minus all of those, proceeding with torture is just stupid stupid stupid. And, of course, ignoring each of those is specifically what Bush II is guilty of.
But in terms of morality, using torture is up there with the question of “If there’s a factory making bombs next to a children’s hospital…” It just depends on how important the objective is in terms of harm to the world versus gain and how much confidence you have in your ability to minimize the fall-out.
I intensely dislike the thought of torture but to answer your question; show me the suspect we’re talking about.
If it’s someone suspected of financing terrorists, there are much better and more certain ways of busting him. Arrest his ass and get started with the forensic accountants.
OTOH, someone caught wearing C4 underwear? Hand me the pliers.
And yeah, I do realize that there are an infinity of scenarios in the middle where it gets all gray and fuzzy. The problem is scope creep. If it is officially allowed at all, some politician will extend the scope until people getting miss-called by a suspected terrorist will be worked-over at the local police department. I don’t think it would ever be possible to officially condone torture.
Testy
I disagree with this. A military action per se is morally neutral. It’s an extreme measure, but it’s moral value depends on the goal you pursue and the methods you use. Although there are all kinds of gray areas, the basic premise of justified military action is that you are striking against an enemy which poses a credible threat. A torture victim poses no threat.
All contrived thought experiments aside, the purpose of torture is to destroy the victims’ integrity, dignity and identity, to uncivilize and dehumanize them. So how can you ever argue that torture is furthering the cause of human dignity? When you condone torture, you throw away both the dignity of the victim, and the dignity of the torturer, all in the name of some barely provable gain in security or order.
Maybe it’s clearer when you think of torture as a form of rape (which it often is).
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but I believe the western allies made it through the entirety of the second world war without having to officially condone torture, I would even say it was one of the defining characteristics of that alliance. This is what makes them the ‘good guys’, the rest is just dying empires struggling for a slice of the cake.
For me, one of the saddest things to come out of that war are the ways in which the nazi world-view infected the people who fought them. Case in point - Aussaresses - a French soldier (ex Légion d’Honneur) who was captured by the Germans in the early battles, later escaped, made it to the UK, dropped back in France to head a resistance cell etc. Now his claim to fame is that he (literally) wrote the book on counter-insurgency during the French-Algerian war, applying mass torture, kidnappings, death squads, ‘exemplary’ reprisals etc. He went on to serve as a counter-insurgency instructor to the US military throughout the Vietnam war, then moved on to Argentina during the dictatorship in the '70s etc. Maurice Papon who was much later convicted of crimes against humanity is another example.
Do I need to point out that the nazis lost, France was driven out of Algeria, the US was driven out of Vietnam, the Argentine dictatorship was overthrown etc? So, does torture work? Maybe as a very short-sighted instrument of social control, maybe occasionally a couple of the names a torture victim gives up actually were part of his cell, but ultimately it’s a betrayal of our values, makes us look weak and scared, and breeds future enemies.
ETA :
Why ? Do you actually think that a suicide bomber has any information that’s so useful that it justifies going over to the dark side in a desperate and clumsy attempt to extract it? What’s that act going to do to you?
Themenin
Yes, “I actually do think” he would have some useful information. For starters, I’d want to know who gave him that vest. I’d find out, too, and right fucking quick. And as an oh-by-the-way, there’d be nothing clumsy about it. Yes, I agree that torturing someone would not be good for me either, but that really wouldn’t be what’s uppermost in my mind at the time.
I’ve lost one personal friend to those assholes (Paul Johnson) and I know a 14 year old girl that was awakened by an explosion and chased through her house by a lunatic with an assault model AK. She hid her younger sister in a large chest and was shot herself, although not fatally. The thing that she remembers most vividly about the incident was the way the guy was laughing while he sprayed bullets all over the place. He thought it was funny to chase a terrified little girl around with a machine gun. That was several years ago and she’s still regularly seeing a damn therapist.
Terrorists are an enemy and I’m not interested in their rights or anything else aside from the best ways of killing them. My compassion and sympathy for them is nil.
Regards
Testy
You do know the IRA had a political party (Sinn Fein) right?
And that they won seats in elections?
And that the English-Irish conflict can be traced back centuries?
I have no sympathy or compassion for terrorists either. (I was on a London bus when an IRA bomb exploded a short distance away.)
But why do you think torture, followed by killing is going to stop them?
Have you not read the history of terrorist movements?
This thread, like the general “debate” on torture which takes place in bars and offices around the country, is wholly disconnected from the reality of how it’s applied. Torture is not primarily used to gain information, not in a war zone anyway. It’s used for intimidation and pacification. It’s used to increase troop morale. Those are the advantages of torture.
Take Iraq. We torture there all the time, just for the sake of doing it. It’s the best way to release pent up steam. In other conflicts at other times, it can have a chilling effect on the local population which can make it a valuable tool. But that doesn’t work very well in Mesopotamia. It is alien to my own moral compass how the distribution of the pictures from Abu Ghraib had such a radicalizing effect, how much of an outrage it caused in the Arab world. The culture was deeply offended by the weird sexual kinks paraded around by smiling U.S. troops. It would have literally been far less damaging to the cause if they had all been summarily executed. It’s more noble and honorable to die a martyr than to live after being sexually embarrassed by the Christian crusaders. But, then again, I don’t have fantasies about Karbala.
If you want useful information on a large scale, you need moles, spies, and informants. You need to convince the locals to help your cause. Those principles are absolutely vital in any counter insurgency. Of course, we have failed completely in this area. We’re flying blind. They know everything about us, the troop movements and every detail of our outposts and convoy routes and we know nearly nothing about the resistance outside of the fact that it is a vast, de-centralized movement and includes a staggering percent of the Iraqi population playing a support role.
Ditto the “war on terror.” We’re completely in the dark and we need an institutional revolution if we were to actually care about it. If you think snatching people off the streets of Italy, France, and Canada, sending them to a secret CIA site and then chaining them to walls and sodomizing them with glow sticks is going to help us find out about an upcoming attack, you’re insane.
glee
I don’t think torture will “stop them” at all. It just gives someone else the information they need in order to stop others. To answer your question, yes, I’ve read the histories of several terrorist movements and I realize it won’t stop all of them. OTOH, it will most certainly stop the ones that are caught.
As I said above, my support for this depends on the circumstances. I would not be willing to use this under most circumstances, that’s out of concern for me, not them, and I would not ever be willing to have it officially sanctioned by the government because of the reasons I mentioned in my first post.
Regards
Testy
Testy, I’m truly sorry for the loss of your friend, but I think you might mistakenly believe that the people who are opposed to torture are people who are not familiar with violence. You may find the opposite is true. While I do truly sympathize with your loss, I believe it’s important to draw a distinction between a personal reaction and the policies which a state adopts. That’s why we have the rule of law. While I might resort to all manner of heinous exactions as a private individual under the right circumstances, I hold the state to a much higher standard.
On a technical point, insurgent movements are generally organized in isolated cell structures in order to render information from captured members useless.
On preview - it looks like our views on this are not so different
Yes, I was aware, and nor does any of that conflict with what I wrote.
Themenin
Well, I disagree that people who are extremely familiar with violence are always the ones against torture. After all, the ones extremely familiar with violence are the ones who have used it successfully in the past. And yes, I know most terrorist orgs are set-up in a cell structure. OTOH, you’ve got to start somewhere and I would be willing to bet that my hypothetical terrorist with the C4 underwear would know quite a bit that I’m interested in. As someone pointed out above, if the pain is severe enough, people will tell you anything to get you to stop. I know that was supposed to be a counter-example but it works either way.
You are correct that we are not really all that far apart. I could not support state-approved torture although that is due to my distrust of politicians in general rather than any moral squeamishness or doubts about its efficacy.
Regards
Testy
At the current moment and under Bush II’s leadership you are correct.
I don’t support the current regime’s practices, but that’s separate from whether one would support the interrogation of terrorists in a generic sense.
Torture falls under military action.
Consider then the suspect who has information that could save lives. His information could save every bit as many lives as the death of the person who blows up cars. In either case, you have an action of attempting to save lives through the use of force, with the understood caveat of “we might be wrong.”
That said, though, I don’t support torture for many of the reasons you listed, but in terms of “we might get the wrong guy, wouldn’t that be bad”, I see it to be morally indistinguishable from collateral damage.
Trihs: torture children? Do you have an evidence of the US doing this?
WWII interrogators for the U.S. spill their guts:
Quote:
“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess.
My 5th-grader’s history textbook said George Washington had a standing order threatening dire consequences for anyone who mistreated a prisoner.
More WWII experience
Educing Information
http://www.dia.mil/college/3866.pdf
KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation
Review: Observations of an Interrogator
Despite the impressive success achieved by interrogators who have mastered
the skill of effectively establishing rapport with a source — the celebrated
Luftwaffe interrogator Hanns Scharff37 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.
I cannot recommend strongly enough that everyone read the linked piece as well as reading about Hans Scharff. It’s the real deal in practical practice w/o the foggy hypotheticals proposed by political pundits.
Anecdotally, I am extremely familiar with State-sponsored violence, both personally and its effects on people I loved. No-one I know who was a victim of it advocates torture. Lots of Amnesty Int’l supporters in my circle.
… or the ones who were just victims.