Gosh thats wonderful,'i defy anyone here to say thats not totally humane.
The provisional I.R.A. who were no more extreme then Al Quiada a couple of times told people who had betrayed them to the Brits(I’m declaring my interest here,a Brit and a member of the security forces at that time) that if they came home,admitted what they had done then they would be forgiven ,but amazingly they were all murdered ,not by the I.R.A. but by dissident Republican elements ,I’m sure Al Quieda wouldn’t do that.
Are we to take that as an admission that the “pro torture” side both has no documented cases of torture working in the “ticking bomb scenario” and can’t seem to admit that this is the case?
If the best example is more than 500 years in the past, I’d say your case is as faulty as your link (try Wikipedia next time). Mary was executed based on physical evidence, not coerced confessions.
There are plenty of databases of torture. Many failed torturous regimes kept excellent records - the Stasi, the Gestapo - and Professor Rejali includes their data in his book Torture and Democracy. I guess I’ll wait fruitlessly for you to admit you were wrong.
What the hell does that have to do with anything ? We aren’t talking about efficiency, or the belief in efficiency; we are talking about torture. Is the typical Japanese citizen afraid that the police are going to drag them off and torture a confession out of them, or rape their wife or child in front of them to put pressure on them ? And if they were, do you think they’d talk to the cops if they had a choice, about anything ?
As I recall, it was from Fiasco. And it’s to be expected; you have yet to explain why anyone sane would willingly talk to torturers and murderers.
Which makes no sense. When we’re talking about institutional torture like that of the KGB or Gestapo, we’re talking about organizations of thousands of people, the majority of whom weren’t actually involved in acts of torture. Governments don’t set up a secret police agency with 10,000 people so a hundred psychopaths can get their jollies inflicting pain down in the basement. There are mentally ill people who enjoy starting fires but dictatorships don’t hire them to be professional arsonists. The actual torturers may be sadists but the people who employ them had what they thought were rational reasons for hiring torturers.
And governments do care if the information they have is accurate. They may not care about how many innocent people they hurt but they definitely care about not missing any guilty people. Dictatorships do not want rebels and dissidents running around trying to overthrow them. They might be willing to kill thousands of innocent people along the way but their goal is to eliminate opponents of their regime - and for that they need some accurate information.
They do when their fellow psychopaths are the ones in charge. And what makes you think the majority aren’t involved in torture ?
Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Even in America, right now, we have an Administration full of people who think that they create their own reality. That the truth is what they declare it to be. Do you really think that, say, Adolf Hitler’s Nazis were more moderate and reasonable than Bush and friends ? Were Stalin’s Communists ?
So they simply spread fear. Create a general atmosphere of terror so that no one dares try anything against them. For that, it doesn’t matter if the people they torture and kill are innocent or guilty, as long as they are torturing and killing someone.
Except that torture is useless for that, because it’s one of the best ways to create enemies there is.
Can the difference in crime rates between the UK/US and Japan be attributed solely to the difference in interrogation techniques? I always heard that Japan’s culture was tremendously different from the “western” culture of the UK and the US, and that comparisons of this kind were usually not valid because of the vast cultural differences (like the Japanese emphasis on conformity).
So which one is it? Does widespread torture make a dictatorship more secure or less secure in power? Does it terrify people into submission or drive them into rebellion? You’re claiming it does both at the same time.
I can see how it could do both at the same time – terrorizing the majority of the population while driving a minority into rebellion. As long as the minority remains small enough, the government stays in power.
As the quote goes, “Let them hate, so long as they fear.” It makes more enemies, but makes those enemies afraid to do anything. Of course, it also means that the dictatorship will become more “brittle”; with so many fervent enemies, weakness will invite destruction.
In my estimate, Japanese schooling would be closest to German, and the best link that anyone has ever found to crime is poverty.
So my guess would be that if you wanted to do an accurate comparison, your best bet would be to figure out how many people of any particular income range in Germany commit crimes per capita of that income range, and then do the same with Japan, and compare.
Japanese “conformity” was really more something in the 60s, 70s, and early 80s when the idea was to turn out workers like soldiers. These days it’s best to just think of the country as being America in the 50s.
We’ve already fairly well covered that “ticking time bomb” is a phrase that can be shrunk down to having an infeasible interpretation. Just going by the review, I would venture to guess that he uses a narrower definition. Nor do I have any way to know that he honestly sampled all known anecdotes. And more importantly, I have no particular reason to trust debunked anecdotes over systematic analysis.
No, we were talking about torture making the populace less likely to report crimes and information to the police. But, that’s irrelevant if torturing suspects works better in policework than a helpful populace, which data appears to support if that is what the explanation for the data actually is.
How many people do you torture before you find a ticking bomb.? Did you have to torture all his friends and family to find him?. Our police torture confessions out of prisoners. Are you OK with that?. Turn on the torture spigot and it gets everybody wet.
A country that allows torture says a lot about itself. You have to torture a lot of people to arrive at a ticking bomb. Pretending we will only torture the worst of the worst is ridiculous. If you only torture in extreme circumstances who is going to do it. How do they get any good at it. ? It makes no sense.
Let me raise an issue. Those of you who are saying that torture never accomplishes anything and only creates opposition and is used as a means of government oppression have repeatedly asked for cites of those of us who disagree. But you’ve been giving yourself a free rdie.
Could we actually see some cites for your claims? Can you cite a torture victim who states he had some secrets but gave nothing but false information despite being repeatedly tortured? And cite a terrorist who says he took up arms because of torture and wouldn’t have done so for any other reason? And a cite for any government spokesman who states that the reason they torture people is to keep them in line with no intent to gather real information? I’d hate to think that all your claims that these things are absolutely true are just based on movies and TV shows you’ve seen.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18709-2005Mar8.html
Heres an article for you.
But in another vein .I think values matter. A country that tortures is a 3rd world values country. The act is a sin against humanity. If you can allow that, where do you stop. America went from a shining light to a sewer. World respect is gone. The things which we claimed differentiated us from other nations is gone. We start wars without being attacked. We torture ,we lie. We throw our weight around like a bully. If this is OK by you say so. But maybe because I am from another generation, I am not pleased. This is not the America we claimed to be even 8 years ago.
All of which I agree with. I have no argument with the people who say that torture is immoral and no government should practice torture. I also believe that as a non-ethical issue, torture is a bad idea because its costs are much higher than its benefits.
But some people can’t stop there. They have to go on and insist that torture never accomplishs anything - that nobody ever in the history of the world has ever gained any use out of torture. And that I feel is ridiculous.
I likened torture to murder at one point and I think it’s a useful comparison.
You shouldn’t commit murder because it’s immoral - fine, I agree. You shouldn’t commit murder because it’s a serious crime and you’ll probably go to prison - again, I’m in agreement. You shouldn’t commit murder because it doesn’t work and the people you try to kill never really die anyway - huh? I’d like to see some statistics on that.
Maybe in another thread, but not this one-it’s off-topic. Why don’t you go back, re-read the OP, and try to actually answer the question that is asked? You know-the one about “torture”, a “ticking time bomb”, and a concrete example of the former successfully being used to solve the problem of the latter. Got one? If not, just say “no”, instead of trying to re-word it until you can answer “yes”.
He’s a professor publishing a scholarly work via a University press. Isn’t that pretty much a gold standard for citations? I’m not going to buy and summarize a 900 page book to determine what percentage of his data is based on various torture survivor’s testimony (“anecdotes”) and what percentage is actual records of torture. The latter would appear to be the most difficult type of information to gather, as even the regimes that torture have enough residual ethics left to feel ashamed.
For the first part, and of the top of my head the first thing I recall is an F-105 pilot shot down over Vietnam saying how when the beatings started it was time to turn on the BS machine and say all kinds of outrageous lies to the interrogators. I have the documentary but it´ll be a little complicated to extract that video segment and post it somewhere.
However I´m quite certain it could be easy to produce more cites, but I´m short of time right now to go searching.
For the second, are you honestly expecting to have a statement of a goverment officially saying, that? again of the top of my head I give you the Red Terror, you can add Pol Pot, Mugabe, Duvalier, etc, etc, for regimes that used torture as an element of their state terrorism.