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Is torture ever warranted?

Kevin_Lowe said:
In my view torture is a social institution akin to the death penalty in that while it's conceivable that it would be a good thing to torture some people or execute some people, I sure as hell do not trust any government not to abuse the power to do it. Therefore I feel very strongly that every single US citizen who aided and abetted torture should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
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Very well said.

Again, I see no reason--political or otherwise--for at the very least not going after everyone who made it possible for these handful of tortured-to-death incidents to occur.
 
Kevin_Lowe said:
Discussion from this thread moved to here:

Firstly, Paximperium, would you care to elaborate on this remark?





In my view torture is a social institution akin to the death penalty in that while it's conceivable that it would be a good thing to torture some people or execute some people, I sure as hell do not trust any government not to abuse the power to do it. Therefore I feel very strongly that every single US citizen who aided and abetted torture should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

.
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If we are going to take that route then let's indict Obama for assessing the death penalty against the terrorist "suspects" and innocent civilians killed in a dozen drone attacks to date since his election. There is no "ticking time bomb" situation there either. In lieu of that let him release the legal advice that he got to do so.
 
Texas said:
If we are going to take that route then let's indict Obama for assessing the death penalty against the terrorist "suspects" and innocent civilians killed in a dozen drone attacks to date since his election. There is no "ticking time bomb" situation there either. In lieu of that let him release the legal advice that he got to do so.
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Start your own thread on that topic please, rather than threadjacking this one.
 
Texas said:
If we are going to take that route then let's indict Obama for assessing the death penalty against the terrorist "suspects" and innocent civilians killed in a dozen drone attacks to date since his election. There is no "ticking time bomb" situation there either. In lieu of that let him release the legal advice that he got to do so.
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Did you get those tea prices in China for us yet?
 
Kevin_Lowe said:
Start your own thread on that topic please, rather than threadjacking this one.
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Why? We are talking about the handling of terrorist "suspects". Is it ok to kill them without a trial not to mention innocent bystanders while roughing them up is cause for imprisonment? If we are going to use the Obama standard then he should be tried for murder.
 
Texas, I started a new thread for you here.

Let's keep this thread on the stated topic, which is about whether torture is ever warranted.
 
One of the reasons I would say to be against the use of torture is that it gives a state a right which a society of free individuals should never give the state i.e. the right to harm the individuals that make up that society.

Now to have a functioning society we all have to grant the state some power and rights to do things to us that as individuals we may not personally want to happen, for example incarceration for committing something society as a whole considers to be a crime. So it is always a grey area as to exactly what we allow to be done to us or not, but to me torture is one of the few clear lines.

I do not want to live in a society where I can be quite appropriately picked up in the street based on good, procedurally sound and lawful investigative work by the security agencies of the UK and then face torture. And this type of scenario is not one of these far-fetched ticking time-bomb ones, it is one that happens regularly. For example the police or security forces may have intercepted communications between terrorists planning a heinous attack. One of the people is identified as "Darat" (a not uncommon name in the Arabic world) living somewhere in the High Wycombe area (recent convicted terrorists have come from this area, one even shared the same first name as me and was also brought up a Methodist - so I fit a profile...) and who is an apparent recent convert to Islam but still using his original birth name. Perhaps I could be pulled in for questioning based on their intelligence (and I would not object, in principle, to such action) but what happens when after I've been denying all involvement during 48 hours of "soft" interviewing and interrogation they decide the planned attack is so serious that they will just have to move onto the next stage and torture me to get the information they believe or just hope will stop the attack?

Whilst I do want protection from terrorists I do not want the protection so much that I will allow my government to torture me.
 
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Toke said:
Torture did seem to work for the gestapo.
At one point they were quite close to rolling up most of the danish resistance movement.
The surviving resistance called in a RAF airstrike against the gestapo headquarter in copenhagen to kill the captured resistance leaders before they could talk, and get the file cabinets I guess.

I guess gestapo were better at it than the abu grai crew, or danish resistance fighters were softer.
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This is actually a good point.

A major difference is that the Nazi's didn't have to worry about losing their moral authority.
They had made fear, genocide and domination their central values and were actively communicating that. I mean, who designed those SS uniforms?

Secondly, I think that they were doing a rather well directed campaign (in practical terms). Getting people to report people under torture, who would then do the same.

Same thing in Argentina in the seventies. First you get a broad cross section on the left, including a few that would be prepared to get involved in armed resistance.
Then you start torturing communists, then socialists, then people who know socialists, then people who look like they know socialists.
 
Eddie Dane said:
This is actually a good point.

A major difference is that the Nazi's didn't have to worry about losing their moral authority.
They had made fear, genocide and domination their central values and were actively communicating that. I mean, who designed those SS uniforms?

Secondly, I think that they were doing a rather well directed campaign (in practical terms). Getting people to report people under torture, who would then do the same.

Same thing in Argentina in the seventies. First you get a broad cross section on the left, including a few that would be prepared to get involved in armed resistance.
Then you start torturing communists, then socialists, then people who know socialists, then people who look like they know socialists.
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There's also the issue that when you look at the effectiveness of torture in groups like the gestapo or the kgb, you need to acknowledge that their interrogation went beyond what we'd call torture to killing one prisoner in front of another or kidnapping threatening and torturing the families of people they wanted information out of. These are lines that I think we wouldn't want to cross even if we would allow torture.
 
I don't think torture is ever warranted.
But one thing I'd like to address is the reason given by some. To prevent another 911. Our failure to prevent 911 was not due to our lack of torturing terrorists. We ignored numerous warnings. Official warnings from inside the FBI, a training pilot, and probably others. Our failure was simple internal operations. Not the lack of hooking up a person's testicles to a light switch.
And torturing probable ex soldiers in Iraq (we briefly tie-wrapped their wrists) who aren't even the culprits. Weren't the terrorists mostly Saudi, some of whom trained in Afghanistan?
 
After doing some additional reading(and "soul" searching), I've reversed my position on torture. It doesn't work and its use is too often misused to allow its use under any situations even the hypothetical "ticking time bomb" scenario.

The ethical thing to do would be ban all use of torture, no matter the cause.
 
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Kevin_Lowe said:
In my view torture is a social institution akin to the death penalty in that while it's conceivable that it would be a good thing to torture some people or execute some people, I sure as hell do not trust any government not to abuse the power to do it.
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I agree.

Therefore I feel very strongly that every single US citizen who aided and abetted torture should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
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That is a separate discussion. Would you prefer to continue the discussion here or back at the "EJ thread of rants"?

Lastly, I think it's fascinating that Pax wanted to shift the topic from the highly specific topic of the previous thread, which was "US torturers to go free", to the much more vague "Is torture ever warranted?".
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Nothing interesting about it. I needed more information before I could decide if torture would have any utility at all in safeguarding lives. The answer is no.
 
Megalodon said:
I would still like to know if the proponents of the ticking bomb scenario would trust the code given to them by a tortured man...
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You try it - if you were going to die anyway, you do and if the code works you don't - and at least the terrorist is in severe pain until his death.
 
Texas said:
Why? We are talking about the handling of terrorist "suspects". Is it ok to kill them without a trial not to mention innocent bystanders while roughing them up is cause for imprisonment? If we are going to use the Obama standard then he should be tried for murder.
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No, we're talking about torture.
 
paximperium said:
After doing some additional reading(and "soul" searching), I've reversed my position on torture. It doesn't work and its use is too often misused to allow its use under any situations even the hypothetical "ticking time bomb" scenario.

The ethical thing to do would be ban all use of torture, no matter the cause.
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When you first said that you would stew over this, I strongly suspected you'd come to this conclusion.

I wish more people would indeed stop and think this over as you have done.
 
According to CNSNews, the CIA has said that waterboarding led to info that allowed them to prevent a 9/11-like attack on LA. However, the link doesn't appear to be working anymore and CNSNews is a conservative organization, so I will have to wait to see if a mainstream news org confirms its validity.
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This link works now, http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=46949 and seems to confirm that waterboarding did produce intelligence that prevented another 9/11 type of attack.
 
Neally said:
This link works now, http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=46949 and seems to confirm that waterboarding did produce intelligence that prevented another 9/11 type of attack.
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http://www.slate.com/id/2216601/

an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush's characterization of it as a "disrupted plot" was "ludicrous"—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn't captured until March 2003.
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