When is torture acceptable?

[Safe-Keeper]

The poll results give me hope for humanity.

I was always brought up to think I was on the same side as the good guys

ETA:

You might remember them. They collectivly fought WW2 againsts enemies who thought nothing of toture as a way to extract information. Away to exterminate people they simply didn't like

They fought the Cold War - Against a people we were warned about through cautionary tales such as 1984. People who would use torture to manipulate, change, extract lies as a way to the truth

Suddenly I wonder what happened to the good guys. I like being on their team. I like not lowering myself to bad guys level. I like being able to hold my head up and say "We are better than that"

It's tragic, really. They know torture is wrong, but it's us doing it, BUSH, to boot, against the enemy! C'mon, are you Anti-American?

I debated the torture question a lot earlier on, until I quite due to sheer fatigue. Many of the debates took on the same pattern: I'd attack Bush for using torture, and they'd violently deny he could ever authorize such a thing. I'd then provide evidence Bush was in fact in favour of torture... and they turned around 180 degrees and defended the decision from then on. They did it openly - one post they were against torture, the next they were in full support, and incredulous I could be in opposition.

It boggles the mind - we, the free world, know torture is wrong. We know it's not an effective means of extracting information. We know from experience that you can't give people "a little" power they shouldn't have, to use only in extraordinary circumstances, because then inevitably it slides out of control (Google the infamous and horrific Stanford Prison Experiment for a research project on this, or just look up how well it worked for Israel to use torture only in limited form). We know torture is wrong.

Why, then, do we all of a sudden openly defend it? For the same reason people defend Manzanar and Dresden, I suppose. For the same reason it was OK for Israel to launch a preemptive air strike against her enemies, while Pearl Harbour was condemned. For the same reason we Norwegians consider insurgents who place bombs in front of our Jeeps in Iraq cowards, while praising our own insurgents who used similar underhand tactics in WWII. But what is this reason? That we're conditioned to accept what our own armies do?

 

[Altered Statesman]

Yeah, it is good to see torture isn't the in thing here. The only time I think torture is acceptable is, and it's hard to explain, but in a revenge type of situation when the agressor has the %100 correct, MDC quality and personal moral highground. Kind of like torturing Hitler, Pol Pot or the dude/chick who killed someone you loved etc. I'd be down with that, but I'm a little differen haha. I don't think it's honorable or the right thing to do, but I can understand how sometimes it makes people feel better. Torturing people for information is stupid as it is unreliable so I guess I'm all for torture for fun, but not for intelligence purposes. Governments should have better morals than what I have just described (which is why I'm not in politics).

 

[Upchurch]

The poll results give me hope for humanity.

More so than many of the threads around here on the topic.

 

[Ziggurat]

You misunderstand. Policy should never be made by those for whom the question is emotionally charged

Not possible. 9/11, for example, was emotionally charged even for people who didn't have relatives or friends in the towers. Or how about the pentagon attack? Should everyone in the building have been precluded from taking part in planning our military response? And given Washington is a perpetual target for terrorist attacks, it's basically a guarantee that policy makers will be emotionally invested in its security. Yes, the examples given were artificially heightened, but the idea that only those detached from the issue should be making the decisions is not something we can actually enforce.

"We could have done worse" is a poor excuse for "we did a bad thing".

It wasn't an excuse. It was a statement of reality which bears directly upon the accuracy of a claim you made.

 

[Ziggurat]

Does Holland or Denmark or any other northern european country have overwhelming power compared to their enemies ? I don't think they do.

Against foreign enemies, no, they do not. But then, they don't actually engage in warfare against foreign enemies, except as a (small) part of a coalition which does have such overwhelming power, because of the US military.

 

[Ziggurat]

I do not think confessions have a good track record in any circumstances. The Guildford Four come to mind as examples of this. I think we need to come back to the presumption of innocence, and we need to hold tight to that principle.

Presumption of innocence has little to do with these issues. The issue before interrogators is not to gain confessions or establish guilt, but to gain actionable intelligence. Those are very different goals.

In fact, even opponents of harsh interrogation techniques or torture should be careful to note the distinction, because if you incorrectly center the issue around presumption of innocence, then on what basis would you oppose such interrogations for someone who has been found guilty by an appropriate legal process? Once guilt is established, would you not still oppose torture? I presume you would, though feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. Therefore, your reasons for opposing torture are independent of guilt or innocence. So there's no point in claiming that presumption of innocence is what this is about, because it's not.

It is the job of the criminal justice system to prove their case beyond reasonable doubt before a conviction can be safe.

There is no reason we need to handle those who wage war against us through the criminal justice system. In fact, such an approach is specifically forbidden in many cases by the Geneva conventions.

 

[Upchurch]

Not possible. 9/11, for example, was emotionally charged even for people who didn't have relatives or friends in the towers.

Yes, perfect example. Look how decisions made in the heat of the moment turned out. We got great little numbers like the USA PATRIOT Act with little or no review by the legislators who signed it into law.

It wasn't an excuse. It was a statement of reality which bears directly upon the accuracy of a claim you made.

The claim I made? Oh, gawd, don't let it turn into another one of these things again.

For those who care:

Here is what you claimed I claimed:

So I don't think it's at all accurate to claim that desperation did dominate all concerns.

Here is what I said:

And yet, somehow despite maintaining a very large margin and not having yet come to the point where desperation should have dominated all concerns, we reached that point anyway.

"not having yet" as in "desperation did NOT YET dominate all concerns"

 

[Ziggurat]

Yes, perfect example. Look how decisions made in the heat of the moment turned out.

In a real crisis, decisions must always be made in the heat of the moment. You are unsatisfied with how those decisions turned out. Fine. But what systematic changes can we make that ensure that decisions made under such conditions will never be unsatisfactory? None. We cannot avoid that possibility. So you should have a particularly keen interest in making sure we do not face such a crisis again.

 

[Fiona]

@ Ziggurat: I was following a train of thought raised by trisketthekid about police interrogations. It is a separate issue and probably off topic. Sorry about that

 

[Upchurch]

In a real crisis, decisions must always be made in the heat of the moment. You are unsatisfied with how those decisions turned out. Fine. But what systematic changes can we make that ensure that decisions made under such conditions will never be unsatisfactory? None. We cannot avoid that possibility.

None? Obama's 5 day waiting period on signing bills into law would have been a pretty good first step. (I wish he had followed through on that one.)


I would like to point out a post from earlier in this thread that you might have missed:

And in fact, having a clearly spelled out prohibition in all cases takes that emotional judgement call off the table. We want to make this decision in a calm and deliberative manner separated as far as possible from the heat of the moment.

While we cannot plan for every single contingency, we can plan for a great many.

So you should have a particularly keen interest in making sure we do not face such a crisis again.

Facing the next crisis is inevitable. What I have is a particularly keen interest that we behave like civilized people when it happens.

 

[zaphod2016]

In the poll, choice number 4 is answering a different question.

This is true.

I was just really curious to see how that option with correlate with the "sometime acceptable" option.

 

[zaphod2016]

Amendment VIII of the bill of rights.

No "cruel or unusual punishment".

QFT! Long live the US Constitution.

However, in the interest of fairness, the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights applies to American citizens, not foreign terrorist suspects.

 

[Ziggurat]

None? Obama's 5 day waiting period on signing bills into law would have been a pretty good first step. (I wish he had followed through on that one.)

Obama didn't follow through on it in non-crisis situations. Why would you think a promise that he can't keep now would have made any difference during a crisis? It is an easily discarded promise even under the best of conditions.

Facing the next crisis is inevitable.

No, it is not. 9/11 was not inevitable. Terrorist attacks since then were not inevitable either, and many have been prevented. We cannot guarantee that we can avoid crises, and we should indeed be prepared to deal with them if and when they arrive, but there very much is a point to trying to avoid them.

 

[Upchurch]

Obama didn't follow through on it in non-crisis situations. Why would you think a promise that he can't keep now would have made any difference during a crisis? It is an easily discarded promise even under the best of conditions.

Make it mandatory. Make it law.

Facing the next crisis is inevitable.

No, it is not. 9/11 was not inevitable. Terrorist attacks since then were not inevitable either, and many have been prevented. We cannot guarantee that we can avoid crises, and we should indeed be prepared to deal with them if and when they arrive, but there very much is a point to trying to avoid them.

I said nothing about not trying to avoid them but the first one we fail to avoid is, by definition, "the next crisis". How is not being able to guarantee that we can avoid them different from the next one being inevitable?

There will be a next crisis and I would like us to behave like civilized people who don't have to stoop to the tactics of our enemies when it happens. Do you disagree that this is how it ought to be?

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

However, in the interest of fairness, the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights applies to American citizens, not foreign terrorist suspects.

The way I learned it in Civics class (and the way it's worded in at least several of those Amendments) is that the Bill of Rights is mostly a limit on the authority of the government. (You know--all that Lockian stuff about natural rights?) It's not limited to a certain class of people. For that matter, when the U.S. Constitution meant to talk about U.S. citizens, it used the term "citizens". To me that means that when it used the term "people" it meant all people. Amendment XIV, for example, talks about the privileges and immunities of citizens, but that the rights forbidding the government from depriving anyone of life, liberty or property without due process are extended to all "persons" in a given jurisdiction.

The VIII Amendment pertains to the government.

And finally, there is the SCOTUS decision in Boumediene v. Bush.

ETA: To use an absurd example of how the Bill of Rights doesn't just apply to U.S. Citizens: the first Amendment forbids the government from establishing a state church. Do you think any level of government could establish a mandatory religion for permanent residents? Ditto free speech, etc. It applies to anyone in our jurisdiction, not just to U.S. Citizens.

 

[Ziggurat]

Make it mandatory. Make it law.

Congress can unmake anything they make. And why do you think it would make any significant difference in a crisis anyways? Five days of waiting wouldn't have stopped the passage of the PATRIOT act.

 

[Lonewulf]

Meh. Non-Americans aren't even human anyways, so they don't deserve human rights.

 

[Upchurch]

Congress can unmake anything they make. And why do you think it would make any significant difference in a crisis anyways? Five days of waiting wouldn't have stopped the passage of the PATRIOT act.

...

Three non-sequitors back to back, huh? Now, you're just trolling for a "Gotcha!"

What point are you trying to make Zig? When is torture acceptable?

 

[Ziggurat]

What point are you trying to make Zig? When is torture acceptable?

I'm not surprised you don't understand the point I'm trying to make. You've never been very good about understanding other people's positions. Rather than regurgitate everything I've already written, I'll just point out that I haven't argued that torture is ever acceptable.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

We don't ****** torture!!111