1.) During WW2, the United States:
Invaded a neutral country with which it had good relations, i.e. Vichy France.
Occupied another country, Iceland.
Fought with a segretated army, and many blacks would claim German POWs were treated better than American blacks.
Assassinated Admiral Yamamoto.
Would have assassinated Heisenberg had he been close to making the atomic bomb.
Bombed the hell out of German and Japanese citizens, especially at Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo.
Killed thousands of friendly French citizens as part of the D-Day preparations.
Used nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Furthermore, two WW2 veterans have told me that they personally watched American soldiers shoot POWs, one describing such acts during the Battle of the Bulge and the other describing such acts in the Pacific.
During WW2, the British also bombed the hell out of German cities, and collaborated with the U.S. in developing atomic weapons, as did the Canadians. Furthermore, I am not sure that Britain cannot be accused of messing with a neutral country re its actions in Norway in 1940.
Both the Americans and the British collaborated with Admiral Darland, who was accused of being a Fascist, and allied themselves with the USSR, a dictatorship possibly more brutal than the Nazis.
We did all this and we are the “good guys.” Do you think the world
would be a better place had we refused to go to war with Germany and Japan?
2.) During the American Civil War, the North:
Imprisoned hundreds, if not thousands, of people for criticizing the government or expressing the statement that the Southern states had a right to go. Habeas corpus was suspended and Fletcher Pratt in Ordeal by Fire claims that Defense Secretary Stanton threatened a congressman with imprisonment for criticizing the Lincoln administration
Exiled at least one harsh critic of the administration, Vandillingham (sp?), although I believe he was later re-admitted to the country.
Burned thousands out of their homes in Georgia, South Carolina, and the Shenodoah Valley.
Hung or shot many Confederate guerillas without trial.
Possibly committed major arson in Charlestown, S.C.
Were all these crimes worth keeping the Union together and ending slavery?
While I question the utility of torture, I do think the ends justify the means in many cases. If you are willing to pay the price.
Are you trying to tell me that every scientist is above moral taint? As William Shirer noted in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich scarcely any German doctors spoke up about the abuses of the camps.
I would also note that interventions in Guatemala, Vietnam, etc. have given the CIA and any affilitated scientists plenty of opportunity for carrying out clandestine experiments in torture, or observe others torture suspects. Again, I’ve had one veteran tell me that Vietnamese prisoners were thrown from helicopters for refusing to talk. Think of those Americans who were fed LSD without their knowledge.
I would also note that many peace activists have accused the former School of the Americas of training people in torture. I would also note the United States has been allied at various times in the past with brutal regimes that have been accused of torture. Presumably, the CIA or the Armed Forces could arrange to get data from them.
I doubt it. Does this “justify” the things we did? It depends entirely on the definition of justified and the person making the judgement call. I, personally, believe that the carbet bombing of German Cities and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wrong by the standards of “Just War”, and many people are with me. Furthermore, it can be argued that the war could have been won without the targetting of civillians in such ways. There are many tangents down which we could go here (especially wrt the age old Hiroshima debate), but I include these to reinforce the point that things being justified or not is a complex judgement call. Furthermore, my own, personal, pacifistic tendencies tend to come to the fore when I consider war in its most brutal and real form - that of two young men with no real grudge, killing each other for the sake power games in the upper echelons of politics. I don’t like war. I don’t like what it does to people. Was it justified in the case of WWII? All the evidence suggests that to stand by and do nothing would have been foolish, although never a day goes by when I wish that there were a more sensible way to prevent Hitlers arising. Was every individual action you listed justified? Again, it depends on who you ask and what you call justified.
I looked at all those, and, you know, I might be a bit of a modern day moral absolutist, but I can’t see how those actually helped the North win. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. Again, me, personally, I’m thinking that the things you listed weren’t justified, went against the US constitution, and fell outside the realms of “just.” But that’s just my opinion. YMMV.
What ends? If you question its utility (ie, whether it bloody works), how can there be any ends to justify the means? I, for one, am not willing to pay the price even if the ends were far more clear cut than they are. There is enough evidence stacked against torture without the simple and obvious fact that It Does Not Work. There is no obvious, useful end that can be gained from practicing torture, and there are many terrible things that can happen if we let our government have it. Weigh up the costs against the benefits and you tip the scales off the table, the equation is so unbalanced.
No. I am telling you that legitimate scientific research has had a code of ethics which has applied to those who engage in it. It is therefore unlikely that any legitimate psychologist or scientist in the last fifty years has researched this and published their data, for the simple reason that if they did they would go to prison, because it breaks the law to do so, meaning that they would be arrested when they submitted their research for peer-review.
I pointed out that you could probably get information about torture from the Nazis. You can get information about the genetic inferiority of Romanies as well, if you like.
Go on, son. Sell me on the moral benefits of torture. That’s the ticket.
Brutal regimes =/= legitimate scientists.
May I also point out that the use of torture which I have stated is absolutely and fundamentally known to be fully efficient is to spread fear and enforce unjust laws. I hardly believe that the Ba’athist torturers in Iraq at present are torturing people under scientific conditions and measuring their responses. Nor do I believe that Pinochet had fully qualified medical researchers and psychologists do his torture for him. I believe that the CIA has allied itself with a bunch of thugs and murderers in the past, and that their data would invariably be “torture works - we kept the population shit-scared of us.”
You aren’t reading what I’m writing, McDuff, nor I am trying to sell you on torture.
I merely pointed out that the CIA and American Armed Forces have had plenty of opportunity to observe torturers in action, had they wished to do so. As for your statement that Pinochet and Hussein’s bully boys are not torturing people under scientific conditions, how do you know? Cite, please.
Frankly, if I was an Evil Dictator, I would consider pointing a gun to some scientists and doctors’ heads or to their heads of their children and tell them to come up with more efficient means of torture. Human nature being what it is, I bet many of them would comply.
And no doctors or scientists have ever proven rogues, huh, or taken orders blindly from their governments, or been cowed into cooperation, or decided a lot of money outweighed whatever moral principles they claimed to profess? Frankly, McDuff, when you posted “It would be a breach of scientific ethics to conduct any studies into torture,” my immediate thought was “So fucking what. It’s against the law to smoke marijuana and that doesn’t stop millions of people, myself included.”
Furthermore, I never said any scientists & doctors engaged in such research would publish it in a journal accessible to their peers, nor do I think that many are dumb enough to submit it for peer review. However, the government does publish top-secret materials.
Let me tell you a little story, McDuff. A friend of mine interviewed with the CIA right out of college, but was not offered a job. He described seeing, in the office where he was interviewed, a manual about withstanding KGB torture. (The interviewer had to leave the room for a little bit, and he was curious about the books.) That little fact makes me wonder if the U.S. govenrment has not been funding a great many things it does not want the world to know about. I also noticed you did not address the School of the Americas issue. Can’t admit to yourself, can you, that you may be wrong?
And when I said the ends justified the means in many cases, I thought it was quite clear that I was not talking exclusively about torture.
However, I have no reason to defend an administration I despise. My main reason for posting was this: In this and similar threads, I have seen many sweeping statements such as: “There is enough evidence stacked against torture without the simple and obvious fact that It Does Not Work.”
Oh, yeah, prove it. Frankly, McDuff, I think you and many others are arguing from pure emotion. This is the SDMB; try offering some facts for once.
Torture in the regimes of Saddam/Pinochet/Pol Pot etc wasn’t used to “extract information to save people’s lives.” It was used to create fear and to enforce the will of the regime in power. It was used to extract confessions of guilt, or to get people to name names. And it was really, fantastically, completely successful at it. It worked like an absolute charm. There were people bending over backwards to not get tortured. When people did get tortured, they confessed immediately (thus proving their guilt) and if we asked them nicely, they’d tell us all the names of their friends who were plotting to overthrow the government as well.
Why on earth would I need it to be more efficient. It works really, really well.
Unfortunately, it’s shite at getting useful intelligence out of people. But if you don’t really care if they’re telling the truth, why does that matter?
Did I even say that? I said, quite clearly, that if you want research on it you could go and sift through Nazi files, but I wouldn’t trust anything you found there.
Then it’s not proper scientific research. Sorry, that’s the way it goes. Either it’s open to peer review, or it’s just some guy with a PhD beating up on people and writing down how often they scream.
Uh… so? Seriously. It’s a bit of a stretch to go from here to "The US has done active research into the efficiacy of torture.
No shit sherlock. The development of Anthrax, for one. They’re almost definitely using, if not torture, “inhuman and degrading treatment” (Official ECHR definition) on the people in Camp X-Ray.
Get the hell off your high horse. Number one, you asked for a cite from me. If it’s “top secret,” how the hell can anyone prove this one way or the other. We’re just taking it on faith that the CIA has done illigitimate research and, oh, looky here, found out that torture really does work, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Well, excuse me if I might want something a touch more solid, leading me onto my next objection, number two, unless it’s done according to correct scientific methods, including the peer review process to verify that the experiments have been done correctly, and unless they are testing the very specific subset of torture that is the actual acquisition of unknown, specific information in time-critical circumstances, and doing so with a control group (ie, torturing people who don’t know jack-shit), their results will be meaningless. Even with all this, it’s hard for me to work out quite how any decent psychologist would even attempt such a thing, given that the studies into perception, self-deception, false memory syndrome etc etc show that people are quite capable of making things up or getting the facts wrong inadvertently in much less stressful situations than under torture. Simple knowledge of the human psyche would lead anyone to infer that such a study would be largely meaningless. Stress messes with the brain. That’s a given. People don’t have to vastly increase the stress experimentally, they can study car-crash victims, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Anxiety, Stress-Induced Paranoia, all manner of delusions, and show you that basic models of the human mental system, coupled with everything we know about torture from the past thousand years of using it, show that it will not produce a human being of sound mind. We can’t trust eyewitnesses to a car crash to provide reliable information. Have you seen what victims of torture look like when they come out? They’re wrecks. They’re broken. They can’t tie their shoelaces, yet we’re relying on them for INTELLIGENCE? Come on!
Why, yes, you were also talking about wars, and I went down that little alleyway with you. However, I am talking about torture, and I say, specifically, that the specific ends in this particular case do not justify the specific means.
Very arrogant for one so oblivious, aren’t you?
Am I arguing pure emotion? I thought I offerered a reasoned logical argument which you went to great lengths to avoid addressing.
Here’s the argument again, the one you missed:
Torture victim X will lie for a number of reasons, possibly including but not limited to the fact that he might be the wrong guy who knows fuck-all about whatever it is we want to know.
Give me a way in which we can know the point at which he stops lying and begins telling us truthful, useful information, which does not, by its very existence, negate the need to torture X in the first place.
Without ^^^^^ that ^^^^^, torture is USELESS. Without that, torture tells us nothing that we don’t already know that can possibly be of any relevance to us. All we get is the ramblings of a man under duress which are extremely likely to be a pack of lies. Whatever they tell us, no matter how good the CIA is at getting people to crack under torture, this principle remains true.
Go back to the ticking bomb situation. “Tell us where the bomb is!” you cry “OK,” says the psycho, “it’s in LA.” Then, while you’re in LA checking it out, St Louis City Hall blows up. Well done, you just wasted investigative time following a duff lead, when you could have been investigating in infinitely more useful ways instead.
Add onto this the simple and obvious fact, as I have pointed out time and time again, that regardless of it’s theoretical efficiacy at doing anything useful, it’s efficiacy at doing certain undesirable things on behalf of the authorities who use it far outweigh any possible advantages a society could gain through allowing its government to use torture on anyone. The logical arguments against it are two pronged - that it doesn’t do what people claim it will do to a degree of accuracy notably higher than wishing really hard for the right answer to pop into your head, and that it is destructive and divisive and has no place in a democratic society - and the moral arguments against it are backed up by the fact that enough people have agreed on a certain standard of right and wrong that it’s accepted as law everywhere we would call “The Free World,” and in some places we wouldn’t.
I think you’re confused as to what torture is, what it does, what it means. Why not check out www.amnesty.org sometime and read through some of their literature. You’ll be able to count the number of “terrorist attacks” prevented on the fingers of one head.
Once again, McDuff, produce a cite that Pinochet and Saddam have used torture only to cow their populace. Produce a cite that they have never tried to use torture to gather intelligence. Frankly, such regimes need good intelligence more than peaceful states like Sweden and Denmark because they have more enemies.
Give me a break, McDuff. It has been well-documented that the CIA fed LSD to people without their knowledge back in the 1950’s and 1960’s. I am sure that this board’s more thoughtful liberals, like tomndebb, would be happy to produce a long list of abuses the CIA has committed or been accused of committing. Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam come to my mind immediately.
You claim there is this vast body of evidence, McDuff, why not offer some cites? All I am asking for is the name of a book, a research study, or a web site that offers convincing, nay reasonable, evidence that torture cannot work. Produce such a cite, McDuff, and I will be more than happy to leave this debate. Until then that time, I will contend that you and others are simply arguing from emotion and conviction, not the facts.
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But what if the victim won’t start talking? To take for example, Al-Queda’s No. 3 man, the one who was recently captured. What if he has the mental fortitude to keep reciting verses from the Koran until he dies? Might not torture be useful in getting him to talk, then standard police questioning methods can be used to verify the accuracy of his statements.
Furthermore, the mere threat of torture , I think, might be effective against some people. Show me a vise and convince me you’ll put my balls in it, and I guarantee you I’ll sing like a canary; I don’t have that much loyalty to anything.
I think you’re arrogant and presumptious. Once again, with feeling, if there is all this massive mountain of evidence you claim, then start citing it. Is that too goddamn much to ask for?\
Let me get this straight. I have to produce a cite that something never happened, from information gathered under the regimes of people who are generally considered to be evil dictators and who will probably not have left paper trails. For God’s sake man, even Milosovic, who was much closer to a modern democratic leader than Saddam, intentionally didn’t leave a paper trail for his actions. And why do I have to get this information? Because without it, you will automatically assume your argument to be correct for lack of information to the contrary. That’s fairly disturbing.
Again, my failing to produce a cite that the CIA didn’t do something is proof that they did? We know the CIA used torture, we don’t know that they did any studies on its effectiveness to reveal information of the sort we’re talking about. Extracting confessions and getting people to name names is easy, especially for innocent people. But your argument here seems to be that because the CIA tortured people, and because the CIA did immoral studies on LSD, that proves that in itself is evidence that they did studies on this? And the fact that I can’t find any evidence of studies of this proves…what? That it happened? The burden of proof isn’t on me here. You’re making the assertion that the CIA did the research, not me. See “proving negatives” and why it can’t be done.
Well, here we’re in an interesting conundrum. You see, I gave you the Malleus Maleficarum, and you said that it wasn’t modern enough. I could give you plenty of works from people under the enlightenment making the philosophical case against torture for extracting confessions and “naming names” from the 17th and 18th centuries. Johann Graife and Cesare Beccaria are two names that might interest you, but probably won’t, given that they’ve been dead for hundreds of years and never had any reason to mention torture in the context of “modern forensic methods,” because they didn’t exist then.
Since then, anywhere that has had “modern methods” of research, such as would be required to provide the information you require, have also had laws against torture. I’m not arguing that no scientist or psychiatrist is incorruptable, just that it would have been impossible for them to carry out meaningful research, had they wanted to do so. Those who did torture people, such as the Pinochet regime or the Nazis, had a certain vested interest in it. It’s hard to believe that the regimes of Pinochet or Stalin, torturing as they did hundreds of thousands of people, had serious aims of extracting detailed information from people, short of the ever present “confessions of guilt” and “naming of accomplices in confessed guilt.” The detailed psychological analyses that you seem to have no doubt Pol Pot carried out on his victims seem remarkably thin on the ground. I can’t find them, I can’t track them down, I can’t find any evidence that they were used for the reasons you claim they were… so why does this prove ME wrong? Cite or lack of cite, you’ll keep believing that “well, it must work, or people wouldn’t use it, would they?” That’s dangerous, and shows more sign of arguing from “emotion” than anything I’ve written here.
The “facts” as I am aware of them is that there have been no reliable studies done on torture, ever, and that even those who condoned and encouraged torture admitted that it often didn’t work, relying on the fact that “God would never allow an innocent person to be accused of witchcraft” to remove the moral objections to torturing said person. The “facts” as I am aware of them is that all studies done by organisations like Amnesty International on torture have worked from the baseline that torture is a bad thing, and therefore haven’t ever felt the need to question it; that the Geneva Convention, the International Convention Against Torture, the Constitution of the United States of America and other notable documents all have within them rules protecting people, to a greater or lesser degree, against torture; the facts of the matter that studies on torture done in anything approaching a scientific manner have been illegal in the West for at least a hundred years, and that the correlation between the availability of “modern forensic techniques” and laws against torture has been 100%. These are the facts as I understand them. I can’t give you any cites that torture doesn’t work other than those from the 14th to 17th centuries because, to the best of my knowledge, they don’t exist and can’t exist.
As I said, the best I can suggest you do is go and rifle through old Nazi documents, but I can’t vouch that any information you find there will necessarily be constrained by a need to match the truth of the situation.
There is a reason my argument against torture consists of three parts. It is because each of them may well be open to nitpicking, but as a triumvirate I feel they are pretty much impenetrable. Supposing, even for a second, that there is a way to make torture work for the things we want it to do (ordinarily I am loathe to even entertain the idea, but given your apparent imperviousness to the arguments as to why it doesn’t, I’ll give you a fraction of an inch and hope that you don’t try and run a mile with it), there are still the other issues - why would you let your government have it? Given its history, why would you do that? Given that, even if Saddam, Pol Pot, Pinochet et al used it in some cases for the extraction of information, accurate or otherwise, what they used it for in the main, all that we have reliable evidence they used it for, was to extract “confessions”, to get people to “name names,” and to rule the people with an iron fist of opression, and given that the renunciation of torture as an investigative meassure went hand in glove with the emergence of democracy in the Enlightenment, for what reason should we allow our governments, now, to have it back? Are our governments staffed by people who are inherently more moral now? Has the possibility of abuse of power been eradicated completely from the upper echelons? Well? Because if it hasn’t, letting your government torture people is a Bad Thing, even if your motives are pure as the driven snow.
And then, we come to the third part of the argument. It is against the law. The US signed and ratified treaties to say “we will not torture people.” Many other countries have signed up to this. Part of Bush’s beef with Saddam, when he remembers this bit, is that Saddam tortures his people. When we talk about people like Pol Pot, Stalin, Pinochet, we’re talking about people for whom the term “brutal and vicious dictator” was coined, people who were our enemies for a long time. How can we claim it is wrong for others to do it when we do it ourselves?
We have the moral highground over these regimes because of what we do not let ourselves do. We do not let ourselves torture people. We do not let ourselves do what we did for centuries. We do not wage civil wars on our own lands. We let our people have a say in our governments. It is these things that give us the Moral Highground, that make the USA and Europe better places to live than Iran. Not the religion, not the geography, not the language, not the cuisine. The fact that you can live here and say what you like and you are innocent until proven guilty of a crime, and then you are only guilty of that crime, not any others. The fact that we do not torture our people. The fact that you can theoretically live without fear of torture and, even if convicted of a crime, are still protected from torture.
Our enemies are our enemies because of what they do, not because of who they are. So if we do what they do, that means we become our enemies, so that even if we win, our enemies beat us. If the only way we can win is by signing our own surrender, then that’s not a victory, that’s a defeat.
So, even given the faintest, slightest, one in a hundred thousand chance that there might be a glimmer of information to be gained from torturing people (and it is only a glimmer - I have no doubt that useful information has been gained from people by torturing them in the past, simply from a knowledge of the laws of averages, but I also have no doubt that people have gained case-cracking information by wishing really, really hard, with precisely the same justifications), why on earth would we do it? Why would we let people known to be corruptable have a weapon proved effective at opressing people, on the basis that they’re not using it to opress us right now, just “other people”? (They came for the Jews, etc etc) Why would we bring all the things that we’ve fought so hard to eradicate from our society back in through the back door?
If you want to stick your fingers in your ears again and say “lalala there are no facts you’re arguing from emotion,” then go ahead, do so. My “facts” are lying in mass graves centuries old. My facts are in folk tales rooted in a horror so strong that they remain in oral histories five hundred years after their origins vanished. My facts are in the admissions of torturers themselves, be they five hundred or twenty years past, who damn themselves by their own hand when they say that torture reveals false information more often than not.
And, most importantly, my facts are in the stories of those who have been tortured, and those who constantly fight their corner. The people at Amnesty who spend their lives trying to get this horror out of our world. And I’ll be damned (along with the rest of us), if I let people’s petty fears about hypothetical terrorists spit in their faces and tell them that their objections to torture aren’t worth anything. We have the luxury to be able to talk about this in the hypothetical and the abstract because very few of us on this board will have ever seen torture scars on a human body. Trust me when I say that, should we have the misfortune to live in a place where torture was legal, where you could see the mutilations and the disfigurements and, most importantly, where you could see the fear, you would not be so blasé about it’s use, nor so free with the “it could work” arguments. You’re in the minority for a damned good reason on this one.
I submit that the “ticking time bomb” scenario is not entirely irrelevant to this debate.
Go back a mere fifty years and all of the precedents that (then) correctly identified torture as ineffectual and immoral hold up just fine. There is a specific reason for this. Until just a few decades ago, technology was not sufficiently advanced to provide what is now known as an “asymmetric threat.”
Fifty years ago it was utterly impossible for any but the largest of nations to construct a radiological (dirty) bomb. Today, a single individual with a discarded hospital x-ray machine and readily available household chemicals can assemble one. Fifty years ago a thermonuclear device was the size of a van. Today they fit in a briefcase. Fifty years ago individuals were nowhere near as mobile or difficult to monitor. Today a person can cross continents in hours.
The 9-11 atrocity has ushered in an era of previously unknown savagery. The preparations and execution of such a plot presented none of the readily observable outward signs exhibited by the “Final Solution” and other holocausts. Modern terrorism, by definition, relies upon unexpected and devastating loss of civilian life. This is counter to a lot of recent history.
While the Geneva Convention was being evolved, war and concomitant civilian losses (however undesirable) were something more easily foreseen and accounted for. People fled (as best they could) from the centers of conflict. This is no longer an option. Instant or near-instantaneous destruction is available at the push of a button. No bothersome marshaling of vast equipment stores and materiel, no cumbersome accumulation of troops and ordnance. Simply smuggle in a shipping container or large canister and kill untold thousands or millions of people.
We have entered an age where merely a few individuals can destroy not just human life but large components of civilization. If you have any doubt of this, please consider the monstrous economic damage that has occurred in the wake of 9-11. Momentarily disregarding the horrific loss of human life, the world economy has also lost trillions of dollars worth of tourism and speculative commercial investment. This is compounded by the billions of dollars required to counter ongoing terrorism as well.
Consider all of the infants and children who will starve and die prematurely because foreign aid is no longer available. Dollars diverted into increased property security and structural reinforcement will no longer create jobs or futures for untold thousands. A handful of terrorists made this happen. It was their precise intention to cause this and we have nothing to deter their fanatical mindset from causing it again.
The “ticking time bomb” scenario is quite relevant here because it is now possible for one individual terrorist to inflict horrendous loss of life upon huge rafts of humanity. One individual’s knowledge may hold the key to saving millions of lives. We have never before been confronted with such monstrosity in all previous history. We are now faced with developing methods to prevent, avert and deter some of the most difficult to detect activities there are. The incumbent loss of personal freedoms alone represent an intolerable toll.
Torture is an inefficient, unreliable and reprehensible way to obtain information or intelligence. It is unconscionable as a method of “crowd control.” Fortunately, we are evolving advanced, noninvasive technology that has great chance of reliably indicating when an individual is telling the truth (i.e., PET scans). Sadly, we may not have the time to deploy it before some other even more catastrophic terrorist attack throws the world into a nearly irreversible tailspin.
We have never before faced such a direct threat to civilization. Modern terrorists operate on a scale of malignance well outside of all accepted definitions of humanity. Combating them may well require fighting fire with fire in ways we have never before seen or considered. I dearly hope that we might avoid any institutionalized form of torture. I abhor the notion that it might ever prove useful or viable.
What I detest even more is the ability for a few modest individuals to contemplate the slaughter of millions without any moral compunction. This was never before possible in the history of all mankind. Humanity may face another 400 years of even darker ages unless terrorism can be eradicated. The slow tortuous death of needlessly starving children who lack basic assistance solely because there exist remorseless fanatical killers is not an option. The terrorists are torturing our children, our liberties and our economies. What they seek goes so far beyond the pale as to place them in a unique category.
How we treat terrorists does not entirely reflect upon our society as a whole. Terrorism is such anathema to civilization that, like Nazism, it may require previously unheard of proscriptions. The duress being experienced by al Qaeda terrorists has largely been brought upon themselves. Their willingness to abandon all human principles equally forfeits their right to humane treatment. This in no way assures that we have correctly identified or determined who the terrorists are and this remains a crux of the problem.
It may have been Bertrand Russell who said something like:
“The problem with the world is that stupid people are so sure of themselves and smart people are so uncertain.”
We may well go to our graves with our doubts. The loss of modern civilization is too high a price to pay in order to protect the rights of known terrorists. Sadly, as mentioned before, knowing for sure is rather difficult. The loss of civility in beating down suspects may be outweighed by risk of losing civilization altogether. The loss of humanity in torturing people is such an unavoidable precursor to a descent into darkness that I cannot fully judge the situation.
I remind you, that each terrorist represents a “ticking time bomb” and that we no longer have so many luxuries in averting their calamitous intentions.
So you start out with the “ticking bomb,” then that turns into a general attack on terrorists as really bad guys, leaving the implication that your defense of torture really has nothing to do with the ticking bomb scenario at all. That about summarize it, Z?
How 'bout you lay your cards on the table: Do you believe it is morally justified to torture terrorism suspects simply because they may know something about a planned act of terrorism? In other words, do you disregard the express requirement on the ticking bomb scenario that we must know there is a bomb set to explode and that the suspect knows where it is?
Please, what’s the difference between “modern terrorism” and the old style of terrorism? Remember the Lockerbie bombing? Remember Rome in the 1960s? 9/11 may have been the most devastating Single Attack in history, but it doesn’t have the highest death toll of a terrorist campaign yet. The IRA killed about 3700 people between 1969 and 1999. People have had Semtex since the 1960s, and gunpowder for years before that.
It’s that bad is it? Odd, because it doesn’t seem too terrible to me, right now. Britain lost more tourism money because of a crisis in our agricultural industry than we did because of 9/11. American markets are losing confidence because its engaging in deficit spending like a mad loon. 9/11 is one factor, but only one in a myriad of them. Oh, and the “billions of dollars required to counter terrorism” have to be spent somewhere, don’t they? People end up getting paid money. Creation of jobs, etc etc…
I’m not arguing that 9/11 didn’t have a detrimental effect on the economy. Terrorism does have a detrimental effect on the economy. But its been having that detrimental effect in Europe for years and years now - we seem to be surviving.
9/11 didn’t. As I said, it had a negative impact, but it wasn’t even close to causing the “collapse of civilisation.” Maybe they’ll get bigger attacks than that. Maybe someone will nuke Chicago or Naples with an ex-soviet warhead in a suitcase. Maybe they won’t.
If they do, I want to be able to trust my government to do the right thing. In order to trust my government, I have to be assured that it is following the rules it has laid down for itself. That’s difficult enough to believe at the best of times; if I thought it was torturing people, I’d be on nobody’s side in the conflict. To be honest, I’d probably have emigrated to Iceland or be in prison as a political dissident anyway.
People who don’t believe that the 15th Century Vatican documents on torture are relevant need to pay attention to this. This argument is NOT new. Replace “terrorist” with “heretic” and you’ve got an argument that’s so old we don’t even know when it was first used.
That’s a lovely way to absolve onself of accountability for your actions. Did Nazism require “previously unheard of proscriptions”? I was under the impression that what took place at Neuremburg were Trials, not torture sessions or kangaroo courts.
(Incidentally - comparing 9/11 to the Final Solution is a hefty invocation of Godwin’s Law if ever there was one)
What might help is a reminder that the act of torture by a “civilization” will, itself, serve to assist in its downfall. We keep ourselves civilized by being accountable, not by smacking other people. Nobody can take “civilization” away from the USA, but it could be voluntarily renounced.
You’re absolutely right. We no longer, for example, have the luxury of torture, like we did for hundreds and hundreds of years. We’re holding ourselves accountable to much higher standards now.
Shodan
Nope. But then, I already said that I didn’t.
On the other hand, it may not show that the CIA used torture in as many words, but it showed that they did produce manuals explaining how to torture people. It could have been a purely theoretical document, of course.
(Interesting study - compare that extract above with the Malleus Malefacrum. Isn’t it funny how things fail to move on just because the technology gets better?)
Yes, 9-11 has ushered in an era where a terrorist nuclear attack, not a military one, is now a distinct possibility. This is so different from even Dresden or the Troubles that all equations must be rethought. Willfully detonating a nuclear device within the confines of a large city when no state of war exists differs immensely from Hiroshima, where defeat was sought against a merciless and aggressive foe.
I am not so much attempting to dispute your own eloquent stand as to point out that the stakes are now much higher than ever before in history. Previously, malefactors like al Qaeda could not possibly promote the level of destruction currently available to them. Now they can and actively seek to do so.
I am also not attempting to justify torture, far from it. I am merely trying to point out the tremendous paradigm shift represented by asymmetric threats. The Bali bombing has been said to cost Indonesia ~$1,000,000,000 in lost tourist revenue already.
I find it intensely ironic that you juxtapose “terrorist” with “heretic.” Remember, the rest of civilization is viewed as heretics by these fundamentalist Muslim fanatics. The pervasive global detriment to progress that modern terrorism represents is a wholly new phenomenon. That so few can affect so many was one of my major points.
Nazism has brought about new proscriptions. The prohibition of selling Nazi accouterments on eBay in Europe, the restraint of free speech in Germany pertaining to Nazi viewpoints all fly in the face of many modern ideals. Yet Nazism is so detestable a concept that such restraints may be needed.
Terrorism and Nazism share much in common and both need to be wiped from the face of this earth. I willingly pair terrorist acts with the Holocaust because fundamentalist Muslims are already conducting a female holocaust of their own. We need only look to a girl’s school burning down while the students inside perish because they were not permitted to escape the blaze due to being improperly clad. This is not Godwin’s law, it is ruthless murder, just like 9-11.
As an aside, have you read “The Arms of Krupp?” The Nuremburg trials, however important, were heavily tainted by post war / cold war interests. I can only wish that the “higher standards” you mention held sway everywhere. Yes, we are all obliged to lead by example but those who seek to deceive whilst marching under false colors and swaddling themselves in religious sanctimony represent a dire threat to us all. How do you propose to fight them?
Shodan, McDuff’s cite was intended to show The Peyote Coyote, in response to his assertions regarding supposed scientific evidence for the efficacy of torture, an example of the CIA’s experience with the problematic aspects of torture as a means of extracting information. (And BTW, the cite most certainly does “explain how to torture people”, just not in any great detail.) The cite was not intended to support any claim of McDuff’s other than the claim that torture is not a reliable means of intelligence gathering.
Hopefully McD will now ignore your further hijack to continue his skillful rebuttal of Zenster’s on topic and fascinating (but frightening) rationalizations.
Please immediately withdraw your assertion that I am attempting to rationalize torture. You are not reading my posts in their entirety and you have obviously missed my laudatory comments concerning McDuff’s deft assay of this nettlesome issue. Nowhere do I support torture as a viable tool for normal interrogation.
My sole attempt is to point out that the nature of this new breed of technologically advanced terrorist renders obselete many established notions of how to conduct intelligence gathering or establish any sort of credible deterence.
Like that’s supposed to clear up what the hell you’re talking about? Out with it, man! Do you or do you not support jumper cables on terrorist testicles?
in the link that you correctly provided in the OP, I posited one of the only situations where I would conceivably advocate the use of torture. It is, indeed, the classic “ticking (nuclear) time bomb” scenario and I would cheerfully perform the deed myself if I knew it was a way to save the lives of millions. I said so at the time.
No one seems to notice that I have mentioned PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans. They have an immense potential to provide extremely reliable indications if someone is telling the truth. Coupling the use of PET scans with simple reward based behavior modification (better food, more visitation, outside activity) could potentially provide useful intelligence without the use of physical torture. The huge cost of these machines makes such a thing impractical at present. Recent advances in resolving submicron NMR data signals may go a long way towards realizing this application of CAT technology in the near future.
Let us all hope we can soon make use of these methods instead of gonad galvenometrics.
So, are you saying you oppose torture in situations except for the ticking bomb scenario (i.e., we know there’s a bomb set to explode, we know the suspect knows where it is, and the only way to prevent its explosition is to extract the information from the suspect)?
“It is, indeed, the classic “ticking (nuclear) time bomb” scenario and I would cheerfully perform the deed myself if I knew it was a way to save the lives of millions.”
did you not understand?
And cheerfully is probably an exageration. I absolutely detest the unwarranted initiation of violence, but the above situation is not such a case.
Now, since you’ve been so pointed about this, allow me to go off topic and ask how McDuff, yourself or anyone else proposes to fight terrorism? I think Saddam has adequately proven once again that appeasement does not work for anyone young enough to be unfamiliar with Hitler.
Again, technology will likely provide much more humane and effective tools. I’m just concerned that we may not have the time to evolve them.
The part where you DID NOT AND STILL DO NOT say that torture in any other circumstances is unjustified.
Put an end to it. Do you or do you not support torture in any other circumstances? Are you or are you not okay with smacking suspects to death in Afghanistan because they might know something about a currrent terrorist plot? The world awaits your unambiguous, dance-free response.
Bullets, bombs, computers, payola, you name it. But no torture. The line is not so difficult to draw on that point.
Yeah, whatever. Start your own thread on neural implants and ozonos. I’m asking you about torture, and you still refuse to give a straight answer.