This was brought up in the thread about Mancow getting waterboarded. But has there ever, in the history of crimefighting, been a ticking time bomb scenario like you might see in “24” - where an evildoer plants a bomb or otherwise vows to somehow wreak havoc in the next few hours, and the only way to prevent the slaughter of innocent civilians is to get him and or one of his henchmen to talk and reveal the details of said plan.
And this all assuming, of course, that the authorities manage to capture the mastermind or someone else with knowledge of the plot before it goes into effect. Has this ever happened?
As pointed out in the last ticking time bomb thread, this was more or less the situation with the London bombings a couple of years back. In the end, the Good Guys were able to get the information because the villains’ families were certain that they would not be tortured.
The Israelis say that something like 98% of all terrorist acts were halted by practicing coercive interrogation on suspects. The actual details of those cases are, however, secret. The results of the US’s interrogations of suspects is all secret. Probably anywhere you look, the information attained and whether it was verified is secret, so there’s really no knowing whether any of these cases was real or fit a ticking time bomb scenario.
Real investigations of things, however, take weeks and months, not a few hours. But the thing to keep in mind is that enemy combatants are people whose 24/7 job is to plan out and commit acts of terrorism. It’s like if you have a rabid dog running around, there isn’t a specific time by which you need to catch the dog before it causes harm, rather the longer the dog has to go free, the more damage it is going to cause. The ticking time bomb scenario as presented by most members of the SDMB is a straw man and that’s the principal reason that you’ll never find an example of it in the real world.
They are simply lying or deluding themselves. Notably, whenever the details get out, it turns out that all torture got them was a bunch of lies. And quite often it turns out they tortured the wrong victim anyway, who naturally confessed, anyway.
Those who torture, and those who support torture are monsters. Utterly morally bankrupt. Why should anyone take their word on the effectiveness of their atrocities, or anything else for that matter ? Especially given how they seem to be always lying when the truth gets out ?
Oh, please. “Enemy combatants” are neither automatically obsessively focused on attacking us, nor are they all ( or probably even most ) terrorists. Not that we restrict ourselves to torturing people who take up arms against us anyway.
No, it’s a deliberately manipulative scenario created by torture proponents, and hardly restricted to the SDMB.
Because it’s the only information there is.
You might try looking up the definitions of the two words, ‘enemy’ and ‘combatant’, because by definition it means someone opposed to and in the process of attacking us. Bush II might have just handily labeled several people who didn’t fit this criteria as this, but that has nothing to do with the definition of the term.
And it’s probably lies, given the track record involved of torturers and the general opinion of interrogation experts. So until they come out with actual proof, it’s a safe assumption that it’s just more lies and should be dismissed as such.
Cite please? Former FBI Interrogator Jack Cloonan has stated very plainly that the Israelis don’t torture. He was with the FBI’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 2002 and personally “broke” many al-Qaeda members without torture. I’m more inclined to believe someone with that kind of personal experience than some random person on a message board.
The definition of the term is “someone we don’t like”. We chose it specifically because it has no official definition like POW.
And I was also objecting to your characterization of them as someone whose “24/7 job is to plan out and commit acts of terrorism.” Someone who kills an America soldier occupying his homeland isn’t a terrorist. And someone who spends most of his time trying to get food for his family isn’t working “24/7” to kill Americans either. You are trying to demonize our opponents into terrorist Terminators.
They (publicly) stopped in 1999.
Copied from a previous thread –
[
If we look at this page of the number of attacks per year, 16 (successful) attacks in one year is a large number. Foiling 45 per year is a significant success rate. It might also be noted that in 1999, the ability for the GSS to practice coercive interrogation (torture) was limited in Israel, and so the high point over a thirty year period in 1996 is entirely blown away subsequently. An average of 1-2 successful attacks per year has become ~5 attacks per year.
If the point of torture is that the victim thinks the only way to end the pain is to give the torture what they want, why would you use it in a “ticking time bomb” situation? If I have a bomb set to go off some where in 8 hrs. I know all I have to do is hold out for 8 hours and my suffering ends. I could do that. What good would it do to torture? Everyone one involved knows that there is a set end time to the torture as you will have found the bombs location one way or another.