Merged Senate Report on CIA Torture Program

3point14 said:
<snip>

You would have a point, in your Trek related excursion, if those tortured volunteered for it. They didn't.
Click to expand...

In a way they did. They voluntarily joined a terrorist group working hard to kill Americans. Also, they are voluntarily withholding information.
 
Upchurch said:
It's amazing that people are cool with using torture as many times as possible until it works, but anything else is framed as "if it doesn't work the first time, try something else entirely".

Why would you need to resort to torture?
Click to expand...

I can speculate. This whole interrogation thing is like psychiatry in that there's an art along with the science. By "art" here I mean some dude's guess about what to do next.

I don't actually think it's linear but a bit from here, some from over there, and so on. For example, torture might seem to make person X compliant but not person Y. They get a bit of info from somewhere (say a captured cell phone call), call up the prison and say, "Hey, we want to know if the technique of dressing up like women to beat the checkpoints was something they used in Pakistan."

So that gets added to the list of things you want to know. Maybe one guy says it was and the other not. You believe whatever compliance technique you are using is valid, but you can never tell if what you are getting is the straight info, some localized bit, something the prisoner didn't know but heard or made up, or just noise. But in this soup of interviews, by whatever means, one hopes a coherent picture emerges.

In any case, I think this straight-line, from here-to-there bit is merely hypothetical, no matter what technique we are talking about. It makes it very hard to say anything with much clarity or prove something works either in the way you think it ought to or reliably.

I give you the polygraph as an example - bad science, but might work sometimes, needs independent verification.
 
3point14 said:
I haven't read one that doesn't.


'The ends justify the means'

'It's war!'

'It might work and we're desperate'

'YOU DON'T KNOW MAN, YOU WEREN'T THERE!!!'


All of these are justifications for flying planes into buildings full of people.

The telling thing is that, when it's 'their' side doing it, the rules become all mutable. When it's the other side doing it then all of a sudden there's a 'line in the sand' and, oddly, no equivocation at all.

It's rank hypocrisy.
Click to expand...

Were you around when I was pointing out the immorality of strategic bombing by the allies during WWII, while most of the moral absolutists around here were actually defending the practice?

And, yes, to attack the methods of terrorists is somewhat hypocritical. We terrorize civilians as well, although we claim it's ok because that's not actually our aim (although it was during WWII). I am not really big on drawing distinctions between us and the terrorists based on methods. The Islamist terrorists quite simply are enemies of a culture and a civilization I like, and the methods they use, and the goals they support, have a negative impact on me, my security, and my happiness. As such, I support fighting them, either to keep them at bay or to wipe them out. I don't dwell on their goodness or badness anymore than I dwell on the goodness or badness of a sinus infection.

I suspect excellent odds of some poor dutiful grunt somewhere getting his nuts electrocuted and his toenails ripped off because the government of the USA has now given tacit acceptance of torture by anyone to anyone because, if one looks hard enough, one can always find a justification.
Click to expand...

I think anybody who uses what the US did as an excuse didn't really need an excuse in the first place.
 
sunmaster14 said:
In a way they did. They voluntarily joined a terrorist group working hard to kill Americans. Also, they are voluntarily withholding information.
Click to expand...


This sort of thing can be impressive when watching a young woman do it with her body for sport, but to watch a human mind bend and contort in such ways is truly disturbing.
 
sunmaster14 said:
Were you around when I was pointing out the immorality of strategic bombing by the allies during WWII, while most of the moral absolutists around here were actually defending the practice?
Click to expand...

I read the exchange, yes.


And, yes, to attack the methods of terrorists is somewhat hypocritical. We terrorize civilians as well, although we claim it's ok because that's not actually our aim (although it was during WWII). I am not really big on drawing distinctions between us and the terrorists based on methods. The Islamist terrorists quite simply are enemies of a culture and a civilization I like, and the methods they use, and the goals they support, have a negative impact on me, my security, and my happiness. As such, I support fighting them, either to keep them at bay or to wipe them out. I don't dwell on their goodness or badness anymore than I dwell on the goodness or badness of a sinus infection.
Click to expand...


You don't worry about things like torturing the innocent? This is all just the equivalent of taking an antibiotic and if a few other cells get destroyed in the process so be it? Leaving aside the guilty, you consider the torture of innocents to be no more a moral quandary than cutting out healthy cells along with a cancer? You don't consider the innocent victims of torture by the USA to be any more worthy than a skin cell that would grow back?


I think anybody who uses what the US did as an excuse didn't really need an excuse in the first place.
Click to expand...


So the USA needed an excuse (you yourself have come up with many on behalf of your government) but anybody else doing it, of course doesn't need an excuse because they are evil? Evil doesn't need an excuse.

This is a brilliant piece of rationalisation that allows you to continue to look down on those that torture while at exactly the same time considering it justified when done on your behalf. Cognitive dissonance?
 
Last edited:
sunmaster14 said:
In a way they did. They voluntarily joined a terrorist group working hard to kill Americans. Also, they are voluntarily withholding information.
Click to expand...

You have just now justified any country torturing the military of any other country. You have justified the Japanese torturing our soldiers in WW2. Good job.

You've even justified the torture and eventual beheading of Americans by ISIS.
 
Last edited:
3point14 said:
<snip>

You don't worry about things like torturing the innocent? This is all just the equivalent of taking an antibiotic and if a few other cells get destroyed in the process so be it? Leaving aside the guilty, you consider the torture of innocents to be no more a moral quandary than cutting out healthy cells along with a cancer? You don't consider the innocent victims of torture by the USA to be any more worthy than a skin cell that would grow back?
Click to expand...

That wasn't actually my point, which was that I don't consider terrorists to be uniquely evil because of their goals, or even their methods. I suspect many of them are perfectly normal human beings, i.e. not sociopathic, who just happen to have been inculcated with beliefs that have negative utility for me, for the world, and even for them. They probably feel the same way about me too. I just don't care.

But you seem focused on the innocent here. Is that your primary argument against torture? That we might make mistakes? And there is no doubt we would make mistakes, just as we do in our criminal justice system, and we accept that as the cost of having a criminal justice system. If there was a case in which there was absolute certainty that a guilty person had valuable, life-saving information, would that change things for you? If not, let's not complicate the discussion. The probability of innocents being harmed is a parameter that can be tuned as low as you want, in theory, although obviously it will be balanced against reducing the probability of success. In the criminal justice system, we demand proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but that falls well short of 100% certainty (Blackstone's ratio is > 10/11).

So the USA needed an excuse (you yourself have come up with many on behalf of your government) but anybody else doing it, of course doesn't need an excuse because they are evil? Evil doesn't need an excuse.
Click to expand...

No, that's not my point. My point is that "tu quoque" is not a good excuse, and if somebody were to use it, it would show that his moral opposition to torture was skin-deep at best, and probably just disingenuous.
 
sunmaster14 said:
Well, my response was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I think your fallacy is completely off-point. There aren't two wrongs here. There is a "right" which is more than offsetting a "wrong."
Click to expand...

No, in that case, we would just call it a "wrong." No matter how you try to justify it, torturing and possibly murdering someone for the sake of extortion, as per your example, is wrong.

In the instances where you've tried to defend the CIA's use of torture, you've said that the outrage was disproportionate because we were "only torturing a bunch of terrorists." In that case, yes, you were using the Two Wrongs Make A Right fallacy.
 
ehcks said:
You have just now justified any country torturing the military of any other country. You have justified the Japanese torturing our soldiers in WW2. Good job.

You've even justified the torture and eventual beheading of Americans by ISIS.
Click to expand...

I don't want to belabor the point, since it is rather a subtle one and not central to my argument at all, but the fact is there is at all times agency on the part of the terrorist, even the captive one. He should know that by becoming an unlawful combatant, he will be denied certain rights to due process and to prisoner of war status. He will be treated as the lowest criminal imaginable. Perhaps he has reasonable expectation not to be tortured, but in principle he won't be unless he has valuable information which can be used to save innocent lives, and only then if he refuses to divulge it. By withholding the life-saving information, he is making a voluntary choice. This does not, by itself, justify his torture. Only the need to extract valuable information which saves innocent lives can do that. But he does retain the power to end his torment, something that historically our prisoners of war were not granted by their tormentors (e.g. in Vietnam, Korea, or Japan).
 
logger said:
How about waterboarding? It really is the perfect tool, its quite harmless too. No limbs being lost, no fingernails pulled.
Click to expand...

Waterboarding can cause permanent physical damage, and possibly death. Just because it doesn't leave any external marks doesn't mean it's harmless.
 
Frozenwolf150 said:
No, in that case, we would just call it a "wrong." No matter how you try to justify it, torturing and possibly murdering someone for the sake of extortion, as per your example, is wrong.

In the instances where you've tried to defend the CIA's use of torture, you've said that the outrage was disproportionate because we were "only torturing a bunch of terrorists." In that case, yes, you were using the Two Wrongs Make A Right fallacy.
Click to expand...

My point there was that a person who has committed a horrible crime has lower moral standing than an innocent person. We accept that as a society. It is one of the reasons we're willing to strip criminals of their freedom and many other civil rights. It is the reason that we have the death penalty, which is the ultimate expression of the lower moral standing of the criminal. When a bad thing happens, we feel different levels of moral outrage, and we should, depending upon the moral standing of the victim. We feel the most outrage when an innocent child is harmed, and the least when a criminal is harmed.
 
sunmaster14 said:
My point there was that a person who has committed a horrible crime has lower moral standing than an innocent person. We accept that as a society. It is one of the reasons we're willing to strip criminals of their freedom and many other civil rights. It is the reason that we have the death penalty, which is the ultimate expression of the lower moral standing of the criminal. When a bad thing happens, we feel different levels of moral outrage, and we should, depending upon the moral standing of the victim. We feel the most outrage when an innocent child is harmed, and the least when a criminal is harmed.
Click to expand...

So it's okay to do horrible things to people whom you feel are of lower moral standing?

sunmaster14 said:
Yes, I have. I recognize the importance of protecting the rights of the minority. I am not really a utilitarian in the Jeremy Bentham sense. My theory has always been that even deontologists are just utilitarians with long horizons.

In any case, my point was to draw a distinction between the examples that Cleon's quote gave. Torture properly involves hurting one person to save many (and a presumably guilty person at that, who always has the option of being cooperative and minimizing the hurt, or avoiding it altogether).

Slavery and genocide involve hurting the many for the benefit of the few, and with no "outs" whatsoever for those being hurt. As I said, it is a category error. In addition, it is simply an appeal to emotion as slavery and genocide have extremely negative connotations in today's society, and they hardly involve moral questions with which serious thinkers wrestle today.
Click to expand...

So you'd be okay with slavery and genocide if they hurt fewer people and the victims had the option of being cooperative and minimizing the hurt?
 
sunmaster14 said:
I don't want to belabor the point, since it is rather a subtle one and not central to my argument at all, but the fact is there is at all times agency on the part of the terrorist, even the captive one. He should know that by becoming an unlawful combatant, he will be denied certain rights to due process and to prisoner of war status. He will be treated as the lowest criminal imaginable. Perhaps he has reasonable expectation not to be tortured, but in principle he won't be unless he has valuable information which can be used to save innocent lives, and only then if he refuses to divulge it. By withholding the life-saving information, he is making a voluntary choice. This does not, by itself, justify his torture. Only the need to extract valuable information which saves innocent lives can do that. But he does retain the power to end his torment, something that historically our prisoners of war were not granted by their tormentors (e.g. in Vietnam, Korea, or Japan).
Click to expand...


This is false. The Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War requires that accused unlawful combatants be tried by a military court of the capturing power, or a civil court of the country in which they are captured and that they be treated in accordance with either the laws of the country in which they are captured, or IAW the laws of the Capturing Power. If convicted, they are either treated as PWs (if found to be lawful combatants), or as civilian prisoners in the Detaining Power.

Being an unlawful combatant is NOT a license to be tortured or mistreated.
 
Cleon said:
Torturers, and those who support them, bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.
Click to expand...



BS

They are hero's and have kept my country safe. I'm standing while I salute them.

What brings shame is cowardly liberals, they are the same ones who hold our incredible military in contempt.
 
Border Reiver said:
If your position is that torture is fine when used on your own enemies, but not on you or your allies, then you are what we call in the military a hypocrite. The rule of law applies to all, or it ends up applying to no one.
Click to expand...

Our soldiers constantly get tortured, It would be nice if everyone obeyed the laws of war. lol
I've already given three reasons based on the rather rational view that doing so is contrary to both international and US domestic law, and makes carrying out operations more dangerous for the US and her allies.
Click to expand...

This is why these things are supposed to be kept secret, its not supposed to be out in the open so libs can turn up their pious noses. But having libs in positions of seeing classified secrets is becoming quite the problem.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom