Why not torture terrorists?

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nice Op-Ed, titled: Why not torture terrorists?

'nuff said, I think. And well said.

 

Ah yes, they are the evil monsters and we are the just and the true, makes waging a war so much more easier doesn't it?

 

I've allways found it amazing how anyone can under any circumstances accept and allow torture. It is barbaric and outdated not to mention completely unnessesary and inhumane. I find is stupid and unlogical how people who support any sort of torture can find anything immoral in suicide bombings, nuclear attacks, genocide or other funny facts of life we all hold so dear.

 

I can think of circumstances where I wouldn't dare condemn someone for torture if I were a military judge. The general softening of prisoners for further interrogation is obviously wrong. So is any sort of sexual torture. Or torturing another person and making someone watch that. Or forcing confession to a crime. But beating the crap out of someone who knows where a timebomb is located, or prisoners to be executed in a short time? Or hostages tied up and left alone somewhere and being unable to reach for water or food or run away from fire. Don't know if I would use torture in such circumstances, but I could hardly blame someone else for doing that. However, situations like this rarely occur. Usually, it's general softening and general questions or specific ones but aimed at obtaining tactical advantage, let alone the fact that it's done with a slim chance of the prisoner actually knowing anything.

 

Ragusa, I agree with that as a general point. Once you have someone in custody and are not interrogating them about matters of paramount importance on a deadline, there is no excuse for engaging in torture. Moreover, stronger accountability and investigative mechanisms are needed to make sure that those who authorise, practice and engage in torture are brought to task, not just a couple of sacrificial lambs at the bottom of the ladder.

But Chev makes a good point - the "ticking bomb" scenario changes the matter somewhat, in my opinion. As a matter of general principle, no, I don't believe in torture. In some situations, however, where information has to be extracted within a certain period of time, then I can excuse it. I would never say that it was "justified", but sometimes there is not a strong enough argument against using unconventional methods to get what is needed from a prisoner. Although someone being tortured will often tell you whatever they think you want to stop the pain, so-called "tactical interrogation" has been remarkably successful in the past.

Where it becomes difficult is where you reasonably suspect (but do not 100% know) that a person in custody has access to such information. In such a situation, one has to balance the basic rights of the prisoner against the potential threat to civilians. Given that setting, and knowing that there is no middle ground to be had, I could excuse it and be willing to bear the responsibility for the order if it turned out that the torture victim was unaware of the threat.

@ Morgoroth/BTA:

Agreed. It'd be funny if it weren't so tragic.

 

Yes lets rape arab women and children (and anyone else that stands in our way!), sure we won't enjoy it but its the most effective method.

Where does this madness stop?

 

I'm pretty much with Chev on this one. What is the greater evil can be asked. If you 'know' someone is witholding information reguarding lives of your comrades or innocents and the 'ticking-bomb' situation is in effect by not reducing yourself to barbaric measures could result in the deaths of those people.

I'm certain that in a situation where torture was used to save lives the US public or even the international community would turn a blind eye to the torture crime. Who is the villian? The torturer or the torturee who was witholding life-saving information? I know not all cases are black and white like that, but some are. If your enemy can stoop to such lows (public executions etc.) then you'll find a hard time combatting them if you cannot either.

Torture is wrong but sometimes, to do the right thing, people have to do the wrong thing.

 

War is sometimes necessary for self defence. Torture can't be self defence. There are no practical cases of situations where torture has saved lives or rescued anyone. The story of the ticking timebomb is just stupid since such things do not happen, and often forcing the confession out of them would require more than just beating them up, like say cutting one of their fingers each time they refuse to say anythinh. This would hardly be good for the torturers mind either.

I allready said my stake on the beating issue. Executing prisoners is not torture. It of course depends how you do it since executions can to be done very painfully. That last example would be horribly wrong if the man would actually starve to death. If he was left there and a fire broke out then it would simply be a mistake.

Evil plus evil can't produce anything good. As I allready said the ticking timebomb is a myth, no practical cases exist to my knowledge.

 

No, it doesn't produce anything good. But it can stop greater evil from taking place.

 

So its okay to rape a suspects daugher in front of him as he might have information on possible terrorist attacks?

Yes it might get people talking, but would it get out the truth? People will confess to anything if they are tortured or if they have to witness someone close to them being tortured.

When the British army tortured Catholics accused of being IRA members, did that come to any good?

 

Heh. There was an episode of the Fox show 24 several weeks ago that featured the successful use of torture to extract info in a "ticking bomb" type situation. Once again, all thanks to Rupert Murdoch for clarifying the situation.

 

Even genocide can be defended if you start twisting the concept of self defence. Does it make genocide right? No it does not. If someone declares war on your nation then you have no choise but to fight back. No nation is ever forced to install torture.

It has worked to save money and resources, and is used just as capital punishment, to scare people. Both are equally ineffective in their purposes. Torture in the sole purpose of extracting information is ineffective. The archives of Russia about the tortures in Soviet Union are very good examples of this. When people suffer enough they will say the things their torturers wants to hear and no the truth.

People who talk about "greater evil" have allways scared me, and of course this argument could be used to defend genocide as well. After all would it not be so much easier to bomb Iran and North Korea to the ground with Nuclear weapons. So what if a few hundred million might die? After all we just prevented the possibility of many more to die in the future.

 

Then you are only strengthening the enemy..

If you scare them, make them believe that they can't mess with you, then sure, they will tell all they know.

In a clash between two so different cultures, it is like shooting yourself in the foot by keeping yourself to your idea of fighting civilised.
The enemy has more ways to hurt you, and you have less ways to strike back.
It is like the story of that Allied officer who refused to surprise the enemy with an early airborne attack, it was the dishonourable way, so he warned the enemy, guess which side lost the battle.

 

I too, think that's true. No one is really expecting to gather information through torture. And I mean expecting, tortures know best that what they do is not information gathering.

Torture is rational but it does not serve information gathering. If it would be a method that could provide results, everyone would do it. I think it's naive to think that torture isn't a tool in everyday police work because of some amorph and vague "humanitarian" concern or "virtuous chivalry" or something absurd as "human dignity". It just has no practical use. It's useless if the purpose of police work is to solve cases through investigating the "truth". In this cases, torture can't provide practical noteworthy results.

But it's still rational for the very reason you gave trying to instill fear into your enemies . It's great crowd-control (in a psychological manner) and has always been used to spread fear among the population. That's why cases of torture are always linked to some political issues, never as tools of actual information gathering. Or as part of punishment, as a deterrence factor for a watching crowd in need of a reminder why one should obey the law, be it right or wrong.

 

"I would submit that torturing a captive is solely a defensive measure."
Well, this is stretching the criteria for defense quite a bit. If you torture someone for information it is as likely to have offensive uses as it is to have defensive such. In fact, in self-defense you have an informational advantage: it's your turf, you are more likely to know where the enemy will likely come from and how strong they are, etc. When you attack, however, it becomes vital to know the enemy's positions and strength - hiding them is his main plus as a defender. If you torture them to terrorize the enemy this also hardly qualifies as purely defensive - it is as likely to demoralize a defender as an attacker, if not more. In case you mean self-defense to be anything that keeps you from harm - well, so after you land the first blow all you do is self-defense - after all, the other one will try to harm you in their self-defense. After all, you're most safe when the other person is unable to attack, right?
Another problem with torture: yes, eventually you will get some information. How do you know if it is true? Do you continue torturing them to see if they break? This is both cruel and potentially harmful - they may tell you what they think you'd expect even if they had told you the truth, just so you'd stop hurting them. Oh, I suppose eventually you might get to be pretty good at sorting out the truth... But only pretty good, and only after you've put quite a few corpses behind you. Yes, torture might have saved life at times, but were those lives so much more important than the many more that have been lost - both among ally, enemy, and civilian? I won't say torture is not completely without its uses, but it should still not be done. Heck, I don't think there is anything at all in the world that does not serve some purpose to someone. The fact that you might see it as good doesn't mean that it is - plus, when do you stop disliking it and start to enjoy it?
Let's not forget something else: torture is a fairly good signal to the other side that your prisoners need not receive a better treatment. The link need not work both ways (if you don't torture your prisoners they might still torture theirs, but if you do, they will likely follow suit). Abuse of prisoners during wars is common, but organized torture is less so - and, I think, for a reason.

And one last thing. If you use torture on anyone, forget about claiming any higher moral grounds, no matter who the "other" is. In this case, using torture is using terror to achieve your goals, for example - and that is terrorism. If two sides believe their goals to be just, and use the same methods in achieving them, there is little moral difference.

 

If someone really desires to get information out of a prisoner I don't think torture is a reliable method. As most of you have stated, they'll say anything to make the pain stop.

I think using truth serum would be a more reliable method. I don't know how effective truth serum is, but if it gets someone the answers they need, then I'd say that's preferable.

Torture, while I don't agree with the reasons it's used (unless of course you're dealing with a lawless anarchy), is a tool for instilling fear. I don't think it will work on terrorists because despite what many people think terrorists will hold to their beliefs to the bitter end. For example if you tell them that if they betray their kin and allies that you'll stop the torture do you think they'll do it?

I believe the only instance(s) in which you'll ever break someone with torture is if that person doesn't believe in what he/she is fighting for or if that person doesn't want to die for what they believe in.

 

You're right, Morgoroth. But it can prevent greater evil. The problem is that sometimes being effective and being moral are mutually exclusive. Within the context of a war (guerrilla or otherwise), nothing is essentially "good", hell, virtually nothing is subjectively "good" except those things which provide an advantage to your side. We shouldn't glorify war or conflict, that's true - it's a rotten, miserable business. I know I'm standing on a slippery slope, but if violating the rights and freedoms of one probably-guilty person saves the lives of hundreds or thousands more, and I don't have the option of fence-sitting, then that one person is in for a rough time.

True. All you can claim is that it was defensible, not that you were right to do so.

Truth serum ain't all it's cracked up to be. It makes people babble out all sorts of stuff; you need a very good interrogator to get anything that's useful out of it.

I don't disagree. However, there are other ways of torturing someone - forcing them to choose between their beliefs and the lives of friends or family can be effective. I don't think that's ethical, and I wouldn't sanction it unless the cost of not doing it was immense. I can't imagine the sort of person that could calmly order an innocent person or people slaughtered in the name of "intelligence".

I have taught classes about exactly this sort of scenario. Most of the students looked at me like some kind of sick monster when I suggested this, but couldn't refute the logic behind it except on moral grounds. Of course, what makes a "civilised" human being seldom has anything to do with cold logic. In the end, I think we're kidding ourselves if we think it won't happen. As I said earlier, I believe that better accountability mechanisms are more important for preventing torture than any blanket statement, simply because there are cases where such actions can be defended.