For my proposal to work, there’s no question of hanging people out to dry. You commit the crime, you do the time. I don’t care if you prevent a nuclear holocaust by torturing someone: you will still serve the prison sentence for torture. Anyone in the bureacracy who tries to cover up the crime you committed is an accessory to the crime. If you get lauded as a hero for preventing nuclear holocaust, awesome for you: when you’re out of prison, you’ll have a cushy time waiting for you.
But if people think that they won’t have to pay a price for torture, they won’t be able to perform the bloody calculus properly.
Hell, if the constitution allowed it, I’d think the perfect penalty for such torture would be to commit equivalent torture on the torturer. If the constitution doesn’t allow that, it doesn’t allow the initial torture either.
The Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment, it is entirely silent on cruel interrogtation. (Boy, you guys, always trying to read stuff into the Constitution, you and your activist judges…)
The constitution is silent on interrogation methods used on non-citizens outside the US. Although **elucidator **thinks he was joking, he is exactly right that it would be an activist judge who interpreted the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause that way. And there is no need to do so, as this is an issue covered by statute, not by the constitution. If it came down to a matter for the judicial branch to decide, that would be a matter of interpreting the statute, not the constitution.
This is an amazing thread. Scylla’s waterboard experiment, and the subsequent conversation here, go straight to the heart of what our Constitution tries to achieve.
What do we mean by “freedom”? How are we to adjudicate a posited conflict between two persons’ freedoms?
Does the freedom of an accused conspirator to refuse self-incrimination trump the freedom of a possible victim to live and pursue happiness?
Pay attention to the language. An “accused” conspirator and a “possible” victim.
Hypothetical questions such as those posed by El Jay always seem to imply that the accused is definitely guilty, and that a possible crime will surely be committed.
Why does our thousand-year-old legal system use terms like “probable cause” and “due process”?
Suppose I conclude that my neighbor intends to set fire to my house, with possible loss of life to me and my family. Forgetting about the legal system for a moment, do I have a moral right to torture the neighbor in order to prevent the outcome I fear?
If I am in fact entitled to torture my neighbor based only on my personal opinions, what kind of society do we expect to have?
Our own experience interacting with human beings suggests that approving such a practice will destabilize our social system, with the probable result that everyone’s life becomes more dangerous and less pleasant over time.
Do we really want to live in a “might makes right” social system?
This is the question at the heart of the dilemma our nation faces right now. (We’re not alone, BTW–Israel is struggling with the same issue, AIUI, although their government is a whole lot more honest about it.) Well said.
I guess I can’t say a whole lot more of what I’m thinking about this without getting into politics and making tomndebb’s job harder. What I will say, is that we can’t look in the mirror and have any respect for ourselves if we allow our humanity to slip any further than it has by condoning the use of torture.
You aren’t serious are you? The sort of torture we’re discussing here is punishment for not answering questions. So, I’d say it’s constitutionally prohibited.
Well, yes and no. In passing, I’m taking a swipe at the notion that the purpose of the Constitution is a definition and limitation of human rights, as if it says “This you may have, but nothing more unless you amend”. Personally, I doubt the Founders even considered that we might have such an argument and saw no reason to address the issue.
I would agree that it is prohibited, but by a decent standard of human conduct, which precedes the Constitution and was taken by them as a given, something that did not need to be elaborated upon as they were not intent on founding a nation of immoral savages.
–>>>RE: "And that is going to happen in the real world when ? In reality, you’ll end up with someone who may be perfectly innocent, or ignorant of that particular data.
Uhh… it was a hypothetical situaion to prove a point that if it were your family at stake you MAY feel differently about subject.
I’d hate to be the wife of a weenie like you. She must be proud.
—>>>“But who will tell you what you want to hear when you torture him”
Evidence stated it WORKS - Abu Whoever GAVE us REAL information. IT WORKED.
And again, scaring someone isn’t “torture”.
—>>>“you can drive people insane”
NOT PROVEN - guy just “felt” it. Abu Whoever did NOT go insane.
–>>And then you wonder why all the world hates you.
I could care less that people who want to KILL me because I dont follow their religion “hate me”.
And then you wonder why the REAL world thinks you are an IDIOT.
So ? If I did, I’d be in the wrong. And you pro-torture people do love the contorted hypotheticals.
No, he didn’t. Whoever “Abu” is.
Some have.
As if that’s the only reason people hate us. Millions upon millions hate us, for the simple reason that we as a culture deserve to be hated for the things we do. Because, among other reasons, we torture people.
Your hypothetical is all very well, but (aside from having been invented) it misses a clear point: In an earlier link an FBI agent described the situation where Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, having been “rendered” to the Egyptians for “interrogation,” appears to have been the most likely source for one of the claims made by the administration to rationalize our invasion of Iraq–information that has been thoroughly disproven since the invasion.
In other words, we tortured him to get him to say what we wanted to hear and he told us the lie that would stop the torture.
So even if the very odd “24”/“Dirty Harry” situation actually occurred, it is as likely to provide false information as valid information, making it pretty unreliable and bad policy to employ.
Perhaps fighting misinformation and ignorance on a board dedicated to that goal?
We don’t need a perfect definition, I’m have been stating the widely accepted and practiced definition within the medical community. Exactness of terms is important in any debate, no?
Sorry, I really meant to be a bit snaky, no insult was intended and the second comment was directed at those waterboarding-is-ok political hacks as no one is really defending it in this thread.
I fail to see where you’ve proven anything. You’re flat out wrong in post #75 and Der Trihs corrected you in post #77. You contradict yourself in post #80 when you quote the dictionary where it specifically states, “to die” and then you say that death is not even implied.
I took my first CPR/First Aid class in the Boy Scouts and have been current all of the time since; my certifications have never been allowed to expire. I am PADI certified in Medic First Aid, oxygen provider and as a Rescue Diver. I own and operate a safety training business and over the years I have certified thousands of people including firefighters, EMTs, nurses, doctors, dentists, CNA’s, hab techs and lay responders in CPR, First Aid and the use of an AED; first through the American Heart Association and currently through the American Health and Safety Institute. We even do the occasional Blood Borne Pathogens certification class. (I really hate doing those.)
I can state with authority that someone who has ceased to breath on their own is dead. If they stay that way or not doesn’t change the fact that they are dead at the time they stop breathing. If they receive intervention in time, (CPR, ACLS, etc. ) they may come back from that state of death but they sure enough have been there. No sane person would say that since their broken arm was now healed that it wasn’t broken in the first place or that since the skin graft has now taken hold, that they weren’t burned before.
There are those here in this thread and on this board that would like to argue the “definition” of death. To them I say, call it black, brown, polar, Kodiak, teddy or grizzley… it’s still a f***ing bear.
You are right, as many posters here, that waterboarding IS an abomination. It is torture and has NO place in a society that prides itself on freedom and human rights. The very thought that Americans are doing this and our “leaders” condone it makes me ashamed and sick to my stomach. And, sadly, regardless of the outcome of this coming election, I don’t see anything changing.
I think this is exactly the right legal approach, essentially the one we had (or thought we had) before recent changes took effect.
If a nuclear holocaust could be credibly shown to have been prevented, followed by conviction and sentencing for the crime of torture, then I think a pardon or commutation of the torturer’s sentence might be worthy of consideration.
Probably this will sound “extreme” to some people, but it’s the only way to avoid setting up the law to encourage arbitrary “preemptive” actions by everyone.
Caution: The following paragraph contains both irony and satire.
A couple weeks ago this guy down the street gave me a really strange kind of dangerous-type look, so last night Waldo and I tied him up and took him down to the basement. After we waterboarded him for a while, he was shaking with guilt. Finally he started screaming out that he was planning to firebomb my house. I poured a little more water down his throat, and he totally flipped and blurted out that he was also working with this other guy to poison my food. So we’re picking up that sick bastard tonight, and I’m pretty sure I can make him talk too. This is working out even better than I expected. We have already prevented two attacks.
This is the passive voice, so it’s a bit unclear who the agent is who is prohibited from inflicting cruel and unusual punishments. The strictest possible reading is that it’s the universal agent: it violates the constitution for anyone or anything to inflict cruel and unusual punishment. Given that the document covers the actions of the US federal government, however, it seems pretty clear and not overly activist to interpret the feds as the agent of that passive construction.
Nowhere is the direct object of that passive construction limited to US citizens, not that I can tell. The first time anything is limited to citizenry in the constitution, near as I can tell, is in the fourteenth amendment, which doesn’t so much limit things to citizens as it makes it clear that all citizens are covered.
As I see it, it’s not remotely activist to interpret the eighth amendment as prohibiting any employee of the federal government from inflicting cruel and unusual punishments on anyone.
An alternate case, of course, is that the constitution requires the government to uphold treaties to which the US is a signatory, and human rights treaties which we’ve signed prohibit such treatment of prisoners, according to those cases that have been able to make it to the SC.
Since suddenly we can’t agree on what constitutes torture, how about this for a definition: It’s not torture if [a journalist/SD member /Fear Factor contestant] is willing to undergo it just to see what it’s like.
With so many people trying waterboarding, it’s become the radical new extreme sport of 2007!
I don’t see anyone trying bamboo splinters under the fingernails, or having ex-Nazis give them root canals without anesthesia. And Scylla says he would sooner have his “fingers smashed one at a time by a sledgehammer” than try waterboarding again. Um, OK. I look forward to that post, which I suppose he’ll have to type with his nose.
I’m with you, Dan’l, but the obvious objection is, as you might well have expected, semantic. The word is “punishment”, presumably after a determination of guilt has been made by the standard legal procedures. The victim (and no other word will satisfy) is being interrogated (with the delightfully euphemistic “enhanced techniques”). His interrogators may be entirely assured of his guilt, but that does not, I pray, carry the force of law: it is their presumption, no jury has decided.
Those who view the Constitution as a miser, pinching off every right that is not specifically and undeniably defined, will waste not a moment to shove this fact into your face. By their lights, they have a point, by ours, they have but sophistry.