Originally Posted by Nova Land
Suppose there is not an incredibly-short time limit (necessitating the use of unconventional methods because it is felt conventional methods can't produce results quickly enough) as in the artificial hypothetical which has been constructed, but rather a more normal situation in which there is sufficient time for conventional methods to work. Are you willing to forbid the use of dubious techniques such as water-boarding and to let professional interrogators use the methods which over time have been found to be most effective and most reliable?
Sure.
Good! I am glad that is settled. While we still disagree on whether torture should be permitted under the (extremely unlikely) hypothetical you posed, we appear to be in agreement that torture should be banned whenever there is not a ticking time bomb.
I'm not sure why you say it wasn't settled. I've never made any comment on this thread that would suggest otherwise. I have ALWAYS only talked about situations when there is a very short amount of time to learn some very important information. Now, are you therefore agreeing that what you call torture might be acceptable if there is a ticking time bomb? That is still unclear.
This was a hypothetical. In your hypothetical you specified that we knew the ticking-time-bomb would go off in hours; in mine I specified the ticking-time-bomb would not go off for at least a month.
Fine. But suppose 29 days have gone by and the conventional techniques still haven't yielded the information needed to prevent a mass casualty attack. What now? Out of stubbornness or lack of moral clarity do you continue to try an approach that hasn't worked for a month?
You're right that in real life we generally don't know how exactly long we have. That's one reason your ticking-time-bomb scenario is unrealistic.
But not impossible and I'm only trying to show that there can be circumstances where non-lethal temporary pain (now defined as torture) might be justified. Others are claiming that isn't the case.
So let's set aside the world of artificial hypotheticals in which we know how long we have.
No, because they are quite instructive.
It could be hours, could be days
So you admit that a very short time frame is possible. In which case, what proof can you offer that any of the conventional techniques will break the silence of a hard core terrorist? You haven't provided any yet, but we know that waterboarding can do this. We have statements by the government which haven't been proven wrong yet that waterboarding caused individuals who had resisted conventional techniques to reveal information that was actionable and that saved lives. Whether these claims are true or not is certainly in question but the only way to settle that is to get access to the raw interrogation transcripts and the reports. And that is solely up to Obama at this point.
Although there are many fictional examples in which a ticking-time-bomb is discovered an hour or less before it goes off, I do not know of any real-life examples.
To which I note that you don't know everything because many things of this nature are still classified. Indeed, if it is true that these more extreme (but still neither fatal or causing long term harm) techniques have successfully saved masses of casualties in situations when conventional interrogation techniques have failed, then the release of information on those techniques so far by Obama and the NY Times has potentially done a great disservice to this country. Again, the only way to know is for Obama to go the rest of the way and reveal what actually happened during the interrogations and what actionable intelligence was garnered. And the best way to do that is release the secret reports on the interrogations and the effectiveness of these techniques. If Obama doesn't do that, then one wonders if he won't because it will show that his release of secret material so far has shown poor judgement. It wouldn't be the first time that Obama has shown poor judgement when it comes to national defense and foreign policy.
We can therefore assign an extremely low probability to that occurrence. Ditto for two hours, three hours, twenty-four hours.
You are just blowing smoke. You don't know this. You can't know this. And if we look back in time to the point where KSM and the other al-Qaeda were being interrogated,
- it was shortly after an attack that killed thousands of Americans,
- it was at a time when we feared al-Qaeda was planning or had already planned additional attacks (and note that al-Qaeda was making grand announcements to this effect in the press and the subjects were saying things like "soon, you will know"),
- the subjects were known to have been involved in the last attack or were known to be high level operatives who would have access to al-Qaeda's top plans,
- we knew that al-Qaeda had been and was still seeking chemical, biological and nuclear WMD,
- and we could reasonably fear that such materials might already have been acquired by them.
How long is "soon", NL? Could that mean a day from now?
And don't the consequences of an attack matter? Isn't there a difference between an attack that kills a dozen and one that kills ten thousand? Or do you see them as equivalent too?
