(I am really looking for a factual answer, but the question is sort of hot.)
Some People say that it is OK to put a prisoner’s lips in a food processor if he has information about a ticking bomb that will go off in the next few minutes.
Question: has such a scenario ever actually occurred?
As the situation is quite a common hypothetical to support use of torture, I’m sure that if it had actually happened, the real-life event would also be cited in support of torture.
Surely if you want him to talk, you need to keep his lips intact?
Not those lips. Not “him.”
Well, now I’m even more confused.
Anyway, if it had happened, I’m not sure we’d ever know about it -
–Governments that attempt it aren’t likely to publicise it, even if it was successful (better just to say they averted the crisis through skill and cunning)
–Victims of it aren’t likely to want to admit they caved under pressure (assuming they survive and are free to talk about it afterwards)
I suppose a regime change might bring such things to light.
In the 2002 Jakob von Metzler case in Frankfurt, Germany there was a suspected ticking bomb scenario (kidnapper arrested, admitted kidnapping but refused to state whereabouts of 11 year old kidnap victim which might have been in danger of suffocation etc.). After the kidnapper was verbally threatened with physical harm he led police to the body (it turned out that he had killed the boy early on so there was not in fact ticking bomb scenario).
In the trial of the responsible police vice chief (who had ordered the threat) and the investigating policeman (who uttered the threat) the court ruled that the threat was illegal and that there could be no justification whatsoever for threatening torture, but it also went out of its way to apply all manners of mitigating considerations (moral conflict; the police vice chief turned himself in with a memo to the prosecutor), arriving at suspendeds fines equivalent to 90 and 60 days of incarceration.
I’m sure it’s happened numerous times in combat situations. A military unit in the middle of a battle will capture an enemy soldier and interrogate him about what his unit is doing.
Well, not to be difficult, but I was a career soldier. I never encountered such a situation IRL or in the literature.
Perhaps you can elaborate, since you are sure it happened numerous times. :dubious:
All I can say is: :eek:
I’ve asked that question myself before and received no answer. It’s an article of faith that it could happen, but I’ve not seen any proof that torture has ever worked for obtaining information. Former FBI Interrogator Jack Cloonan explains in this YouTube video that the “ticking bomb scenario” just doesn’t happen in real life, that information is gotten by talking to people.
I think we need to keep torture illegal even in these situations. If an interrogator is so sure that an attack is imminent that he feels the need to torture, then he should be willing to take the risk of facing prosecution to prevent it. If it turns out he’s right and a nuclear attack or something like that is prevented, then I suspect that he won’t face prosecution anyway. If we legalize torture in these situations, then suddenly way more situations will seem like torture is the only answer.
The only good answer I have ever heard for the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario is “that is what jury nullification is for”. If you were an questioning a suspect and used illegal means, and really did save people from the bomb, or failed to save them if the guy managed to thwart you despite you torturing him, which seems likely with a fanatic who only has to hold out a short time anyway, do you think a jury would convict you? And if it turns out that you had the wrong guy, you should go to jail. The threat of going to prison should restrain you, in the same way we expect it to restrain other people.
Personally, I think that for a cop or agent to do that and have it work would be a fairly disastrous outcome, because I have no doubt, none, that they would do it again, and again, and every time it would get easier for them to start in on those methods, for less and less legitimate reasons.
You’re an infantryman in Bastogne and it’s December 1944. In the last six months, you’ve killed dozens of German soldiers in battle and been almost killed by German soldiers as many times. The German Army has just launched a major surprise attack and your position has been surrounded. You’ve captured a German soldier and you know he has information about the attack. He knows how many German soldiers are out there, how many tanks and airplanes and artillery pieces there are, and how close they are and if they’re heading in your direction. If you have this information it might save your life and the lives of everyone else in your platoon.
Now if you’re shocked because I used an American example, make my hypothetical soldier Russian or German or Japanese. Make it a different war if you want. And you think nobody in history ever picked up a knife and tortured that prisoner?
I suspect the “ticking bomb” scenario is one of those hypotheticals that undergraduates love to tie themselves in knots about but which never arise IRL. Much like debates about whether you could/would/should kill Hitler if you could go back to 1932, etc.
Real life doesn’t allow of the sorts of certainties that the scenario demands. How good is your info that there really is a bomb? How good is your info that the schmuck you have in custody knows about it? Even if the source of the info is the schmuck himself, how do you eliminate self-aggrandisement, attention-seeking, etc? It’s all a bit like those questions that ask “If you could be absolutely guaranteed that you would not be caught, would you cheat on your wife?” The premise is flawed. No such guarantee can possibly exist.
But Justice Scalia seems to think torture justified in the ticking bomb scenario.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-02-13-scalia_N.htm
Because you have no way of knowing if the German soldier is lying or not. All he has to do is keep changing his story. You’ll never know if any of his information is correct until you send people to check it out. He can keep doing this until he either loses consciousness or dies. Why wouldn’t he? If you were being tortured by Nazis, wouldn’t you send them on as many wild goose chases as possible, and wouldn’t you avoid telling the truth?
Pain does not equal truth. Do you have some study that shows that there is some place you can stick a knife into a person that suddenly turns on the “truth” switch?
Please, watch the interview I posted. Or here’s another one - his five minute response in a debate on interrogation. This is the man the FBI assigned to question al Queda suspects. Five minutes, please.
The problem with information extracted via torture, aside from the disturbing moral disconnect, is that it is notoriously unreliable. Not only could a subject lie just to jerk around his interrogators (especially in a time-sensitive situation), he might very well lie in order to satisfy them and stop the act of torture. By the same measure, the interrogators will never be certain whether they’ve extracted all of the pertinent information or if they’ve gone past that point and are simply pulling out whatever fantasy the subject thinks will best pacify the interrogator.
A secondary and more long term problem is the effect on the interrogators themselves. The best interrogators–that is, those best able to filter facts from the inevitable stream of distortion and outright bullshit–are people with a strong sense of empathy, who can see past what horrible things the subject may have done and make the kind of bond that lets them sincerely evaluate the information for subjective truthfullness. This same sort of empathy, however, will result in psychological problems for the interrogator. The only people for whom this won’t be a problem are sociopaths; those people who don’t feel or empathize with the pain of others. These people might be good at very logical thinking, but aren’t going to display the kind of indentification with the subject that allows them to evaluate the information on an independent basis.
In the scenerio positied by the o.p.–in which violence is imminent–what is the likelihood of extracting accurate information from a resisting subject in time to prevent the incident? Outside of fictional television shows and thriller novels, I’ve never heard of such a thing. And in the end, the information you get from sadistic torture–which does, regardless of legalistic arguments, include waterboarding–is going to be unreliable without independent confirmation that will be unavailable in the hypothetical “ticking bomb scenerio.”
Stranger
I still don’t get how you can stick anybody’s lips in a food processor without cutting them off first.
Those things take practice to do right, don´t you know?
Some time ago, on the comments of some news regarding new pictures found about Abu Ghraib, some clueless putz came in casting aspersions agains “liberals” for being removed from the cold realities of life, how you have to get a grip on the true way the world works to understand why torture is necessary because -insert cliched movie plot here-.
It was very amusing seeing someone that portrays itself as grounded on the gritty realities of the world inner workings trying to prop up his argument with a piece of fiction. Cognitive dissonance at its best.
You’re talking about a different issue. I’m saying torture occurs. You’re saying it doesn’t work.
And quite frankly, you’re wrong. By your logic, there’s no point in asking anyone any question because you have no way of telling whether their answer is true or false. But the obvious reality is that we can usually figure out ways to tell whether or not somebody is lying to us when they answer our questions. so torture does work. It doesn’t produce truth. But it does produce answers. And then the questioner can figure out ways to seperate true answers from false answers.
None of which implies that torture is right or that anyone should use it. But saying it doesn’t work is just a cop-out. You don’t resolve a moral issue but making up comfortable lies that make it irrelevant.