I re-read your posts before your most recent, and it appeared that you were defending torture as a “regrettable necessity”. If that is not a fair characterization of your position, my apologies.
if nothing else, thanks for that little youtube video—its a fun little debate channel to watch
As Professor Rejali pointed out in the YouTube video I posted, there were real ticking bombs in the aftermath of the London bus bombing. Through excellent police work and the cooperation on the British Muslim community, the other bombs were found. The knowledge that he was NOT going to be tortured was a vital factor in one set of parents turning in their own son. Do you have a cite to the contrary (that does not involve any Hollywood screenwriters)?
I would be very surprised if any interrogation professional in the West ever admitted to a belief in the efficacy of torture to extract information what ever their real beliefs.
I suspect that they would soon be out of a job if they did.
Also it begs the question that if torture has been so much of a failure in extracting information in the past why did Soviets,the Nazis and the communist Chinese continue to use it so persistently?
You’d think that after the first twenty or fifty or a hundred times where they’d either got no information or false information they’d pack in using it as a waste of time.
Apart from anything else the interrogators themselves would suffer probably very extreme consequences for repeatedly passing on false information.
I am talking about torture used specifically to obtain information here NOT torture being used as a punishment for having the wrong religious beliefs or for treachery.
As to making martyrs of people no person who has ever betrayed his cause no matter how badly he has been tortured or threatened is ever held in high esteem by the people of the cause he has betrayed.
Even the POWs held by the N.Koreans and Chinese who collaborated,let alone gave away sensitive military information,after extremley bad treatment were not
exactly received back in their home countries with widespread love and pity, and that is in the liberal West.
I cant see any nut job terrorist being considered a martyr by his own people for helping the enemy for whatever reason.
Certainly. Compare the crime rate in Japan to the US, UK, or anywhere. You let the police extract confessions from people and crime becomes minimal.
Total Crimes per Capita
Doesn’t torture criminal suspects:
USA - 80.0645 per 1,000 people
UK - 85.5517 per 1,000 people
Does torture criminal suspects:
Japan - 19.177 per 1,000 people
[
](FT: UN Committee against Torture castigates Japan’s judiciary | debito.org)
Missed time on the edit window. I wanted to add:
You don’t think that cutting crime saves lives? You could say that, “But, you’re going to end up puting innocent people in jail!” But of course, Japan has way fewer people in jail as well. Certainly some percent are innocent, but almost certainly some percent of those in the US are as well. Given the massive difference in prisoner count (715 per 100,000 people in the US and 54 per in Japan), it’s likely that there are more innocents imprisoned in the US.
What the hell does any of the above have to do with the “ticking time bomb” scenario?
Entirely off topic. Can you come up with a documented “ticking time bomb” situation where torture has revealed time-sensitive information that couldn’t be gotten otherwise?
Yes or no?
Because they were sadistic, or fanatics, or both ? Because they didn’t CARE if the information was accurate ?
Why ? These are not people who cared about truth; these are people who wanted to hear what they already believed. The same sort of people who hold show trials with predetermined verdicts.
Oh ? Ever heard the term “martyr” ?
The West that has delusional ideas about torture, free will, and willpower. People who are more realistic about it are going to be more willing to recognize the fact that you WILL break under torture. No matter how determined you are.
Not for that, for being tortured. For proving our evil to the world.
Well I expect that SOME of us are evil in the West,those people who gloat about the potential deaths of western soldiers en masse without even knowing anything about them as individuals…or caring .
That sounds to me just about as evil as you can get.
Do YOU know anyone like that Der Trihs ?
And would you consider them to be the ultimate hypocrite ?Weeping crocodile tears about people they know nothing about in reality but wishing death on their own countrymen and their allies because they were bullied at school and cant move on and get over it 24 years later?
I am of course speaking purely hypothetically.
In other words, I’m right, you’re wrong, and all you can think of is a personal attack.
You even managed to work in the implied claim that we have the right to march into other countries and slaughter people and lay waste to them any time we feel like it, and the locals are evil, evil people if they shoot back.
I’ve been there Matey,lecture me on Iraq and Afghan when you get up the courage to go there yourself,and I dont mean you have to join the army to do so,in view of your extreme pacifist beliefs.
You really haven’t got a clue about the mind set of the people over there,do you even have a clue what the difference is between a Sunni and a Shia?
Try googling it or reading a book.
Its just so very easy to get indignant about things foreign when your own life isn’t at risk.
It’s as H.L. Mencken said: “For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong.”
Because reward is easier and more likely to yield constant and useful information. Consider the US government’s battle against organized crime. This was a group that used violent means to achieve their ends, used violence against it’s own members to enforce order, used violence against the public to ensure they didn’t cooperate with the police and murdered judges and witnesses.
And the only thing that actually worked, in every single case, was “turning” a member by offering them something they wanted - freedom from prosecution, safety for their family, a new life.
Whatever made you think I’m a pacifist ? Or that I opposed attacking Afghanistan ( even if it was done poorly ) ?
And I’m hardly going to some hellhole just to gain brownie points with you. I expect that you are hoping I’d be dumb enough to do it and get killed; you wouldn’t be the first on this board to obliquely wish death on me.
What does any of that have to do with anything ? Why should I care about the religious distinctions of the people we choose to assault and kill ? Are the Shia or the Sunni more dead after we shoot them ? We engaged in a war of conquest against Iraq, we wrecked the country, slaughtered thousands, inflicted misery on millions, and so on. I really don’t care about the religion of our victims.
Ah, the “You can’t criticise evil unless you are evil !” argument. Stupid as always.
Here’s what the FBI interrogator of Abu Zubaydah and other al Quada members said in the video I posted:
Like I said in my first post in the thread, the “real world” ticking time bomb scenario is the time-sensitivity of information. I.e. the faster you can get information, the better the odds are that you can prevent “bad things” happening. If you want to limit “bad things” to only meaning a bomb that’s going to go off within 2 hours then yes the odds are very low, but like I said there’s troop movements, troop locations, long-term strategy, etc. that knowing allow you to prevent or win engagements. There’s no practical difference between tracking down a group of terrorists, a day before they are ready to move to a different hideout, to where they have explosives for five bombings, and between preventing one bomb exploding that was going to go off in 2 hours. If you’re going to put up the strawman of the latter example as the only thing which counts as a ticking time bomb then sure, but I doubt you’re going to find any strategy textbook which doesn’t consider finding out your enemy’s secrets in a timely manner to be a way to win. And I can’t think why anyone would ever think that finding out your enemy’s secrets a year after you catch him is as likely to be useful as if you could get it from him in the same day–the great odds are that most of it will have outlived it’s shelf-life.
As to why you would use Japan versus the US/UK, well where else are you going to find examples of the efficacy of torture versus non? The CIA hasn’t issued any scientific surveys on the topic, last I’m aware. So really the only place to look is the policing world. And since really we’re talking about Iraq here, using torture for the sake of policing is what we’re talking about, no? Prove to me that policing which doesn’t use torture is more effective.
All I’m asking for is a single documented example where accurate and useful time sensitive information was gotten via torture.
Got one?
As I recall, one effect of our torturing in Iraq was that most of our local intelligence dried up. No one wanted to talk to us anymore. How is that good for police work ?
Well, the Britannica seems to believe that the “Babington Plot”'s conspirators were all found by torturing a Mister Ballard.
http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-635080/Francis-Walsingham
But I’m not sure exactly what you’re hoping to accomplish. This is like someone saying that “Smoking will take 5 years off your life” and pointing to statistical information to support it, and then the person he is talking with going “Oh yeah, you just find me one person who died five years under the national average and smokes!”
Finding one case where a person was tortured and some strategic good was brought about is meaningless. If there was some way to bring up a list of people who were tortured in the past and the outcome of everything, and those who weren’t and the outcome, I’m sure you could find cases where things turned out well and cases where things didn’t on either side. Ultimately you’re just collecting anecdotes.
But the key thing is that there isn’t a database on torture. Most groups who have used or are still using the technique don’t work in the public eye. What they do and don’t do is pretty much secret. You might as well ask me to find out the name of every agent of the CIA working in Africa and then using my inability to do so as proof that the CIA doesn’t have anyone in Africa. That’s just stupid.
There’s statistical information in support of the efficacy of torture in policing. At the moment, I’ll readily admit that it’s a corelative link and not necessarily a causational, but that’s worlds above any other data point in the whole thread.
Again, you compare Japan and the US in regards to reporting crimes to the police and Japan is lower, and yet they have less crime. Belief in police efficiency, the US is number 1, with Japan coming in decently behind, and yet they have less crime.
All your “data point” does is seem to indicate a correspondence to the statistical data and lend it credence. However, I would doubt that your factoid is something that has any particular data to back it beyond one interview with one guy reporting on what had happened over a span of one week–which could be enirely unrelated.