One of the most facile dismissals of torture is that it doesn't work, so why bother? That's tempting, but it's too easy. Torture seems to me very likely to work provided that you can verify the information, which I assume interrogators can in at least some circumstances. Nor is it obvious to me that the quality of information is likely to be lower than that obtained by other means: yes, people will say anything to avoid torture, but they'll also say anything to avoid imprisonment. Maybe the lies will be vivider or more voluble under torture, but it doesn't seem necessarily so that the ratio of lies to truth will increase.
I'd rather see people take the hard stance and say "Yeah, torture may still work, but we still shouldn't use it because it's wrong." Otherwise, you're kind of stuck if someone comes up with a way to make it effective. I've been thinking about this in relation to the much vaunted lie detecting brain scans. Most people have talked about the implications for the criminal justice system--does the fifth amendment still apply? But what I wonder is, what does this mean for torturers? If you can actually tell accurately when someone is lying, torture suddenly becomes very, very effective, doesn't it? And yet, it would still be wrong. So make the case on those grounds. Efficiency is a dangerous red herring.
Isn't the whole point that you can compel someone to say anything at all, if you torture them enough? You can compel someone to admit to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby, if you hurt them badly enough.
As far as this "Torture seems to me very likely to work provided that you can verify the information, which I assume interrogators can in at least some circumstances"-- isn't the whole argument that we only use torture when we need to obtain some vital piece of information that we are sure will save lives? If you can verify it, why do you need the torture? I don't think you've thought that part through.
I think you're right that the major objection to torture is an ethical one-- and yes, I think it is absolutely compelling-- but I think you're being a little to dismissive of the problems with torture as a means to gather intelligence.
The moral argument is fundamental, but I think you're putting the burden on the wrong place with the practical argument. We (opponents of torture) don't have to demonstrate that torture is never effective. If we accept that torture is wrong at all (which I think most people are willing to start with) then someone who wants to torture needs to show that they have good reason to believe that it will be more reliable and effective than non-torture methods of interrogation. In the absence of such a demonstration, which I've never seen made, you never get to the moral argument about whether you'd torture, even though torture is basically wrong, if you really really really had to.
No, Malvolio, in the case of very specific information, if it can be verified, torture works quite well. A Japanese Admiral is captured in the last week of November 1941, by covert means, and is asked where the Imperial Japanese Fleet has gone. He refuses to tell, and is subjected to torture, and then gives some inaccurate information on December 1st. He is told that the information will be verified within 48 hours, and if it is incorrect, the torture will be more severe. He then provides the accurate information.
Yes, it is hyperbolic hypothetical, but it illustrates that when information coerced by torture can be verified, and the torture victim fears the outcome of providing inaccurate information, torture can be effective. If the brain scanning technology proves to be extremely effective in detecting liars, this will be even more true. A utilitarian opposition to torture ultimately founders.
Agreed that the "torture doesn't work" argument is becoming overused, and there's been some loss of clarity on the point that subjecting people to excruciating pain and terror is evil because...if it's not, it's really not clear what "evil" means.
Still, as Malvolio says, if you can verify the info, why do you need the torture? This would only be an argument for the use of torture in a very routinized fashion to gather large volumes of information that can be cross-checked against other (torture-generated) info. I find it hard to believe, even in our debased political environment, that people would accept making torture a ROUTINE part of interrogations. (This is, in fact, how the North Vietnamese used torture: as a routine part of interrogation of recent captures, just to help verify battlefield info which they mostly already knew.) Instead, torture advocates always use the "exceptional circumstances" argument -- ticking time bombs etc. Those are precisely the circumstances that render torture useless, as the info can't be checked.
As for lie detecting brain scans...really, let's cross that bridge when we come to it. I find it hard to believe that "lying" is actually a category of activity that matches up to a discrete brain pattern; it's too similar to "telling a story". My 3-year-old's lies and fantasies are mixed up with his accurate reporting in a totally indistinguishable fashion, and I'm not sure he even knows which is which.
A utilitarian opposition to torture ultimately founders.
An explicitly, solely, practical opposition to torture might. An opposition to torture starting from the moral principle that at least we shouldn't torture or abuse prisoners unless we have strong reason to think that it is necessary and will be effective, and leaving the question of what to do when we do have such strong reason until the practical case comes up, is still a relevant way to address all the actual political questions relating to torture that have come up in recent years.
"I'd rather see people take the hard stance and say 'Yeah, torture may still work, but we still shouldn't use it because it's wrong.'"
That would be a more honest position to take, but a thoughtful person ought not to stop there. It makes little sense to say "I oppose torture" without offering a definition of torture. No doubt Dennis Kucinich has a different definition of torture than say Dick Cheney. There are some things--like waterboarding--that I think are quite acceptable, but I'm willing to consider a rational and coherent argument on the other side.
After difining the word clearly, the opponent of torture ought to explain why it is wrong to torture people. Empassioned denunciations alone will not do. Those who oppose coercive treatment of terrorists had better offer good reasons for their position.
After all, the argument for coersion is quite compelling. The United States government has a sacred duty to protect its citizens. As Megan admits, torture can be effective in getting valuable information about ongoing threat to American security. So, unless there is a very good reason not to do it, it makes sense for the American government to apply sufficient pressure to terrorists to get the information they need to protect the Amercian people.
I agree that the ethical argument is the most compelling one to make against torture, but the "it doesn't work" angle tends to be more effective if you're arguing with someone whose moral fiber is so rotten that he just doesn't care if it's abhorrent.
LB is right about the burden. You're also making a pretty ludicrous claim about the danger of false confessions, based on approximately zero engagement with actual factual evidence of how torture actually tends to work in practice (either in the U.S.'s recent experiment, or in general). I could right pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages about this, but you might find it too depressing too bother with, so I think I'll pass. "It seems to me." Oh, interesting. But what is it based on? Nothing, as far as I can tell.
But the biggest problem, which is not one restricted to you, is that you buy into an artificial separation between the moral argument and the practical argument. You buy into this premise of sterilized, carefully calibrated torture by trained intelligence professionals who are torturing exactly the right people in exactly the right ways to prevent terrorists from murdering innocent American civilians. To your credit, you still think it should be illegal. But the whole premise is false, and having the argument based on this false premise is what has enabled the administration to get away with such atrocities. Whereas if we look, in excruciating detail at the effects, it becomes almost impossible to defend the administration's policies. That's what's radicalized me about this issue: researching the factual circumstances of US torture policy. Read up on the Maher Arar case and tell me again about how there's no particular danger of torture leading to false confessions. Read up on Dilawar, and tell me again about how our decision to abandon Geneva actually protects innocent civilians. And believe me, there are other examples.
It's not a coincidence that the U.S.'s experiment with torture (& indefinite detention) has gone so badly--that there's far better evidence of us torturing innocent civilians, in some cases to death, and helping pound some more nails into our chances in Iraq, than of saving American lives. The same thing tends to happen whenever any country tries this, and there have been plenty of experiments at this point. Their failure isn't a coincidence. It's a power that corrupts. It may start with a desire to find out accurate intelligence from high level suspects on imminent threats to save lives, but give one human being complete power to brutalize another and it takes about 5 minutes for all that nice-sounding stuff to be thrown out the window. It's ineffective *because* it's immoral, and it's ineffectiveness destroys the utilitarian moral argument that people usually make in favor of it.
After all, the argument for coersion is quite compelling.
What's so compelling about coercing someone when, by definition, you don't know what they know? Or more importantly, whether they know something worth coercing out of them in the first place?
Instead, torture advocates always use the "exceptional circumstances" argument -- ticking time bombs etc. Those are precisely the circumstances that render torture useless, as the info can't be checked.
Right. Also, as Michael Kinsley demonstrated brilliantly, these kind of hypothetical extremes don't happen in real life. (You KNOW there's going to be an imminent terrorist attack, you KNOW it's large scale, you have someone in custody who you KNOW is a part of the plot, you KNOW that he will reveal key information under torture, you KNOW that information will be accurate, you KNOW that having it will make it possible for the authorities to stop the attack... it's an unreal situation. It's too TV.
Of course, the important thing is, we're the country that doesn't (or says it doesn't) torture. We hold ourselves up to the world as this beacon of democracy and freedom, and as much BS as there may be in that, it's something to take seriously. We're the country that doesn't resort to this sort of thing. Or, at least, that's the country we should be.
um test
My test for torture:
Imagine (against all logic and rationality) that the US government is convinced that you have vital information and getting it from you could save lots of lives, if not this very second then in the weeks and months to come (in other words, no 'ticking bomb' but their motivation for getting the info from your uncooperative self is pretty high).
You've made all the disclaimers you can, you know nothing! nothing! But they don't believe you and their patience is getting thinner and thinner.
What, precisely do you want them to be able to do to you?
um, double test
oooooooooh if you include a link they have to verify it. Makes sense. Sorry for that.
"What's so compelling about coercing someone when, by definition, you don't know what they know? Or more importantly, whether they know something worth coercing out of them in the first place?"
I'm not sure what your argument is. You seem to be trying to construct an argument a priori that we couldn't possibly get information out of anyone (an argument that owes something to Meno and St. Anselm). But this isn't a matter for a priori arguments. This question can only be answered empirically.
I've heard George Tenet say that he received extremely valuable information from the detainees due to coercive interrogation methods--infomation that actually saved lives. And he said this recently, so he is not merely giving the administration's line. Tenet might not have been a superb CIA chief, but he certainly was in a position to observe the efficacy of various coercive interrogation techniques and has conluded that they are an invaluable tool. And he is hardly alone.
I know some here who have no expertise or experience in these matters will say "Tenet doesn't know what he's talking about," but I hope they will forgive me for not finding their rather uninformed protestations very persuasive.
brooksfoe, a torturer may want to torture when the information can only be verified after he is told where to look. The torturer knows the terrorist leader exists, but not know where the safe house is located. The torturer knows the enemy has a weapons cache hidden, but not where. There are many scenarios where torture could be usefully employed to gain specific details of generalized knowledge, when the torture victim knows that providing inaccurate information will result in yet more torture. Of course, this will also result in truly ignorant people being subjected to agony, but one of the ugly realities of torture is that it eventually attracts or transforms people who start torturing victims purely for the entertainment.
I've heard George Tenet say that he received extremely valuable information from the detainees due to coercive interrogation methods--infomation that actually saved lives.
Well, he would, wouldn't he? It's not like he's going to say "We tortured people and it didn't do jack." He's in intelligence. Of course he wants the power to do any hideous thing under the sun. And who exactly was saved? Which plots specifically were these? How was the terrorist in question captured? How did his interrogators come to know that he had valuable information? Without the context or information, I don't see how this is valuable.
The real question is, why does our country have such a worthless human-intelligence aspect to our intelligence service that we have to rely on torture?
Every time they make that argument & it's actually possible to examine the details at all it turns out not to be quite true--there turn out to be press reports about the key information that led to some arrest or the prevention of some attack coming from some computer they captured, or a tip from an informant, etc. etc.
Tenet signed off on torture--there's a decent argument that was a felony. Of course he's going to claim he has secret evidence that it was necessary to save American lives. Yeah, I bet it's a slam dunk.
The real problem with attempting to separate out the moral issues from any practical issues is laid out in Belle Waring's classic post "By the power of stipulation". You can get people to agree that they'd do any bad thing at all, say, torturing a three year old child to death, if you can stipulate that something much much worse will happen if they don't do it. To talk about the question morally, you really do have to talk about the practical issues first.
Torture should be opposed because it's immoral, period. It's a hideous relic of the brutal past that only makes the present more brutal. It makes us sadists and butchers. But let's set one thing straight right now--the utilitarian argument (oppose torture because it's not very effective in the first place) is doomed to fail not because it could be wrong sometime down the road, but because it's wrong NOW--torture is often VERY effective, once you realize the intent of the torturer.
Torture designed to wring confessions out of people is part of a sham trial process. The victim will, eventually, say anything to stop the pain. The truthfulness of the confession is irrelevant, and everyone knows that. All that matters is that the confession is made. And that's the administration's policy, in a nutshell. It doesn't matter to Cheney and Co. one damn bit if the information from Gitmo or secret prison or renditioned detainees is bogus, because that's not what they're after. All that matters is the confession part. The administration (most of the time) isn't after vital information on the War on Terror--that's a lie. It wants bogus confessions. That's the real insidiousness of the White House policy. It's turned American jurisprudence into the Inquisition.
Torture to get actual information that the torturer really cares about is a different story--but the danger of its being effective is very real. The victim knows that the pain won't stop until he / she gives their torturer the information they are seeking. They can make up a plausible lie, but must be aware that their interregator won't stop the pain for good--either by ending the torture or killing them--until the information is verified. Some victims may have the constitution to play that game, but many won't. It's wasn't for nothing that the Allies were petrified that the Germans might capture someone who had knowledge of the D-Day plans. The very fact we recognize such a danger is an acknowledgement of the possibility that such torture could work.
So we should oppose torture on moral grounds first and always.
Yet another facile blog from Megan McArdle. She writes two paragraphs defending torture as an effective instrument even suggesting ways its efficacy could be improved. Then, at the end, in a desperate attempt to pretend she opposes torture she concedes "[a]nd yet, it would still be wrong" and asks us, her readers, to make the case for her.
If Megan McArdle really believes that torture is wrong she should make the case herself rather than play the naive devils advocate.
Still, as Malvolio says, if you can verify the info, why do you need the torture?
Verifying information is very different to developing it. In the Japanese admiral example, it would be impossible to quickly scour the whole Pacific to find their fleet, but relatively easy to send someone to point X to verify the claim that they are there.
The unreliability of the information does not strike me as being such a big point as all that. All information, from all sources, is unreliable.
I think this whole debate is slightly beside the point. What we need is a reasonably clear policy on the treatment, interrogation, imprisonment and release of prisoners of varying descriptions. Something that people can actually follow.
Example: under what circumstances do we send someone to Guantanamo, what can we do with him (or her) while there, under what circumstances should they be released into whose custody?
If you have no policy, then people will have to do whatever seems right to them at the time. What else can they do?
Isocrates, we can only lament that Generals Marshall and Eisennhower weren't smart enough to order routine torture of all POWs in WWII. Think of the lives that might have been saved at Kasserine Pass, the Bulge, or Arnhem! Not to mention their passing up the use of poison gas. What fools they were!
Claudius makes a good point, too. How do you, as a citizen of the country that did the torturing, propose to determine that the torture was necessary and effective? You will have the word of the CIA agent that it was. No f-ing duh. Gestapo agents certainly also testified that the torture they engaged in was necessary in their country's national security interests.
I mean, let's say you're a Gestapo agent at a Nazi stalag. You've recently captured a downed American colonel who probably knows which two German cities have been selected for bombing raids in the next two days. If you torture him for the information, it could save tens of thousands of German lives. Don't you, the Gestapo agent, have a moral responsibility to torture that American colonel?
"it makes sense for the American government to apply sufficient pressure to terrorists to get the information they need"
I say get the suspects child and start cutting fingers off. There's no end to the 'pragmatism' of the torturer. We do it because we like doing it.
The great humanitarians here have told me that Dick Cheney is evil and George Tenet is a sadist, but not one of them has offered a clear defintion of torture, nor a rational argument showing that it is immoral. "Torture should be opposed because it's immoral, period," one says. Sorry that doesn't cut it.
I don't consider waterboarding torture and I don't accept that it is immoral. Indeed, one could make a persuasive case that failing to use such coersion, when doing so would kill no one but save thousands or even millions (as in the famous "ticking bomb" scenario) is profoundly immoral.
The government has a responsibility to protect its people. If that entails giving a few degenerate terrorists a hard time, that's alright with me. Should there be a line the government does not to cross? Yes, probably. But there is profound disagreement about where that line is to be drawn. There are some here who seem to think anything less pleasant than Club Med is "torture" and ought to be forbidden.
This is pathetic. There's no need for debate. Torture is wrong, it's unamerican, it's criminal, and the fact its supporters, who lack souls, have to conjure up highly imaginary scenarios to justify it only reinforces its uselessness in reality. An idea like kidnapping and torturing a Japanese general sounds... still insane even with the benefit of historical hindsight, but consider it in the context of the time. It would have been nothing less than an act of war, at a time when the US was still publicly not behind entering WWII.
Torture is about power, not about gathering intelligence. It's a means of feeling tough for someone such as Cheney as every decision they make fails spectacularly. It's a display of impotence and lack of imagination. It used to be part of what separated America from the truly brutal regimes of the world, and now stands as the only proof needed that we have lost our way.
re: iscocrates above.
Megan has found her audience.
for fucks's sake.
even the romans knew that information extracted via torture was at best unreliable, and at worst complete falsehood. seriously, look it up.
you can apply all manner of MATHEMATICAL analyses, involving putative error rates and coercive coefficients (ask bruce schneier, or a behavioral scientist even, to lay it all out for you), and you still come up with a HIGHER ERROR RATE THAN NON-COERCIVE INTERROGATION.
now, if coercive interrogation ("torture") gives you a greater error rate than non-coercive (small room, good cop/bad cop, hot lights, etc.) then investing any energy into coercive interrogation is counterproductive - think of the inevitable PTSD or reinforcement of the crueler side of the interrogators' nature as a really huge fucking externality.
and it's still _morally_ wrong.
I'm not sure what your argument is. You seem to be trying to construct an argument a priori that we couldn't possibly get information out of anyone (an argument that owes something to Meno and St. Anselm).
I'm not saying that we couldn't possibly get information out of anyone. My point is that you seem awful quick to just dismiss the fact that sooner or later innocent people are going to wind up getting sodomized, or having the German Shepherds sicced on them, or getting shackled to the floor for 18 hours at a time. You may think that's a small price to pay because George Tenet says so but I think that's a grotesque moral calculus you're using.
The funny part, to me, was when you stated upthread that you thought it was torture opponents who needed to explain themselves. Good one!
Also, isocrates: how many ticking time bombs do you think torture has saved us from so far? I'm wagering the answer is a big fat zero, given the Bush Admin's penchant for loudly proclaiming every plot they've thwarted.
Y'all have completely misunderstood me. I mean, yes, I think you're wrong, and that torture theoretically must work sometimes, but that's mostly beside the point. The point is, we shouldn't argue about whether torture works, because it's the wrong grounds on which to fight the battle. I'm not asking opponents of torture, of which I am one, to assume the burden of proof that it doesn't work; I'm asking them to back away from a dangerous argument over the efficacy of torture.
The problem with that, is that if you stipulate that torture does work, and raise the stakes enough, sure, anyone will torture an innocent toddler to death (see Belle's post linked above). Abstracting out all the arguments over efficacy renders the moral argument contentless.
Note to McCardle's sponsor at the Atlantic:
Are you a mole for the competition? Is there a more repellant, smugger child of privilege than Ms McCardle?
LB has already made this point, but it warrants a much less polite reiteration. It is completely fucked up to demand that others justify why one *shouldn't* commit crimes against humanity. At the very least, all of the moral heavy-lifting has already been done; ya know, it wasn't for nuthin' that things like systemic torture and genocide are classified as crimes against humanity (or, when practiced on a smaller scale, as war crimes).
no. wrong.
it demonstrably does NOT work, AND it is morally wrong. you should always use BOTH ARGUMENTS IN CONJUNCTION WITH EACH OTHER.
yes, occasionally a coercive interrogation will produce a nugget of valuable information. however, the RATE AT WHICH IT DOES SO IS LOWER THAN NON-COERCIVE INTERROGATION PROCEDURES. there are many treatises on interrogation in the criminal justice section of your local public library (socialism!!! horrors!!!) that will confirm this fact, with evidence and references aplenty.
it does not work. not even theoretically. it introduces new misinformation and sources of error into the data.
that you want to hew to the moral argument alone simply means that a) you only want to argue with people who share your view, or b) you have not done your homework.
or both.
What LB said. The important thing is to debate BOTH the morality of efficacy of torture based on the actual evidence about our actual torture policy as it was actually practiced in the world, instead of TV shows, artificial hypotheticals, and "it seems to me" statements based on nothing.
"Y'all have completely misunderstood me. I mean, yes, I think you're wrong, and that torture theoretically must work sometimes, but that's mostly beside the point."
Nice try, McCardle. Won't wash. And what does that say about you as a "writer"?
I'm not asking opponents of torture, of which I am one, to assume the burden of proof that it doesn't work; I'm asking them to back away from a dangerous argument over the efficacy of torture.
The problem, Megan, is that relying on the moral argument is not sufficient, because the argument on morality is not very helpful. Let's say you think technique X is immoral; I do not. Convince me that you are right and I am wrong. What's your argument?
But if you say that technique X has been tried and all the available evidence points to in ineffectiveness, that's a strong argument that we shouldn't use technique X, in a way that "I feel that technique X is immoral" isn't.
All of this is irrelevant anyway. The "torture opponents" DO use the moral argument primarily anyway. The argument basically is: "Anyone who supports Bush is an immoral, evil, torture supporter; we're more moral than you are becuase we loadly proclaim that Bush is an evil torturer and you don't." To the extent that the efficacy of certain techniques comes up, it is in the form of "Look at how evil those Bush supporters are, they know that torture doesn't work and they still want to engage in it; they must be really, truly evil people."
Oh, good grief, brad, I oppose torture every bit as much as you, but opposition to torture doesn't have to entail a bunch of childish ahistorical bullshit. Yes, the scenario I put forth was hyperbolic, which is why I stated as much. It was a scenario merely intnded to illustrate a point, that torture does work when the torturer is seeking specific details of generalized knowledge, and can verify his victim's statements. A weapons cache or a safehouse are less hyperbolic examples.
As to the deliberate violent misttreatment of the captured as a matter of American policy being unprecedented until now, and what seperated America from truly brutal regimes, that's just ignorant. Whenever the United States has had conflict with non-European entities, it has tended to, as a matter of doctrine, to apply brutal violence to some of those made prisoner in the conflict. Human beings are often nasty little creatures, especially towards those perceived as being of a different kind with whom they are engaged in conflict, and American policymakers, while certainly far from the worst offenders, haven't been immune to this. Examine, among various examples, how the American military personnel were encouraged to deal with the Japanese in WWII, as opposed to what was encouraged and tolerated with regards to the Germans. Yes, mistreatment well to the rear was sometimes punished, but there was a deliberate propaganda campaign designed by American policymakers to encourage military personnel in theater to be unbelievably brutal to captured Japanese, brutality which makes the current conflict seem quite mild.
Illegitimate violence directed at prisoners, by deliberate design, was far from new to America before the current Administration took office. To head off the predictable strawman, that doesn't mitigate anything this Administration has done, but lying or being ignorant about the past does not strengthen one's arguments in the present.
Let's see.. I respond to megan's previous post here pointing out that the ticking time bomb scenario doesn't really make an argument for torture, and now she comes back with a post about how people shouldn't go on about the efficacy/inefficacy of torture.. but rather should just use the moral arguments..
But wait...wasn't she just asserting a position for torture by trying to overcome the moral arguments against it by assuming torture's efficacy, a claim that most likely has no basis in reality?
Obviously--at least to me--the first argument against torture is that it is fundamentally immoral and degrades not only the torturee, but also the torturer. It is evil.. plain and simple.
However, even though this clear line has been established--we still see people making arguments along the lines of "yes, of course it's evil, but in these exceptional circumstances we must overcome these moral qualms and do it because we believe it is effective at getting something we need for the greater good.
But this second statement is not necessarily true. .. and that's what I was getting at before... There are numerous examples of actual interrogaters who argue against the use of torture because of its ineffectiveness.. (see example here, and here, and here ...) and that's what I'm getting at...
Megan is the one who originally made the assertion that most people would agree to torture in the ticking time bomb scenario... and now she doesn't want anyone to point out how wrong those people are.. not just on a moral level.. but also on a pracitical level...
I wonder why...
"it does not work. not even theoretically. it introduces new misinformation and sources of error into the data."
Not to belabor this, but what about torture doesn't work, even theoretically? Torture to extract bogus confessions for sham trials and other such activities? Sorry, but there's a long history of them being pretty damn effective, since the confession is all the torturer wants.
Torture to produce vital information? I'll grant you that this a much trickier proposition. But if what you're saying is true, then there's no rational reason for spy agencies or militaries to fear the capture of personnel who have vital knowledge. Truth serums and other chemical interrogations, wake-sleep, and thumbscews are all forms of torture. None of them are effective, even in theory?
Megan McArdle's claim she believes torture to be wrong would be more believable were she actually to make the case directly.
After the first few days of this blog I wonder if it would not be more truthfully titled: "Intellectual Incoherence."
Torture does work, if applied by properly trained people. So does coercive interrogation, with the same stipulation. I am disturbed that so many posts conflate the two, whereas there is a significant difference between them.
I'm against torture because of what it does to the torturer. Because coercive interrogation is at a much lesser "evil" level than torture, I don't fear what effect coercively interrogating someone has on the interrogator. Perhaps that's a product of my military training--I've seen coercive interrogation in practice, during training exercises, and I have first hand knowledge that it both works and doesn't produce a bad effect on the interrogator.
Back to my original stipulation--torture and coercive interrogation work only when used by properly trained people. Sure, you can get anyone to say anything if you beat on them long enough, but that's not effective if your goal is getting the truth. And in a military situation, getting the truth is what's important, not like police work, where getting a conviction, any conviction, sometimes overshadows convicting the right person.
The reason why the Supereme Court finally banned torture by the police was because the improperly trained police were not getting the truth out of their victims. That's to be expected with so many different jurisdictions in the U.S. each with their own standards of training. The same cannot be said for the military. I can't speak for the other services, but the Marines had a dedicated MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) for an Interrogator/Translator Team member. These guys were well trained and effective. They were taught coercive interrogation techniques, both psychological and physical, and they were darned good at their jobs.
So if you are going to argue against torture, don't try to do so from the position that it doesn't work. A lot of us know better.
Will Allen writes: "A Japanese Admiral is captured in the last week of November 1941, by covert means, and is asked where the Imperial Japanese Fleet has gone. He refuses to tell, and is subjected to torture, and then gives some inaccurate information on December 1st. He is told that the information will be verified within 48 hours, and if it is incorrect, the torture will be more severe. He then provides the accurate information."
This is where America has had it wrong throughout its history. We should have been torturing random foreigners on a regular basis going back to at least the War of 1812.
We should also now be torturing Satanists, atheists, agnostics, Communists, and wiccans as much as possible, so that we can glean information about the coming Antichrist. If they're telling the truth we can verify it by consulting with the Book of Revelation as ably interpreted by Pastor John Hagee.
Plus we'll get to use cool techniques like bastinado and waterboarding. Yee-haw!
If the point of the argument is to elicit the stand alone moral arguments against the use of torture, then you premise is fallacious. The premise that supposes torture can be made 100% percent effective just ignores a critical part of the whole argument.
The reason that the fourth and fifth amendments were adopted is not to protect those persons who would voluntarily confess if only the government would be allowed to ask them. Part of the reason is to avoid false confessions, but the largest part of the reason, I would assert, is to prevent the efficacy of the government being more important than individual rights. The likelihood of dying or being seriously injured as a result of crime is so much greater than being a victim of terrorism. So why is there no similar debate about repealing the fourth and fifth amendments? Again, I would assert it is because those safeguards protect us. The torture debate exists on the fallacy that the torture could never happen to us, US citizens, friendly nationals, etc. Self-interest says that our government is not more important than us, individually.
How about this premise, what if torture were acceptable for purposes of national safety, why would it not also be acceptable for personal safety, i.e. available to domestic law enforcement. How can you justify the so-called government protection of its citizens by the use of one and arbitrarily deny it use to the other? If you make a distinction, that distinction is based on the fact that one group has the right to torture individuals from another group based on nationality.
claudius: re-read my second post.
none of them increase the good-information/bad-information ratio more than the techniques that do not rely on coercion or torture.
when you're talking about committing limited resources to checking out the data that comes from interrogation, false positives are more likely than false negatives to be a significant drain on those resources. this weakens your resilience and ability to respond to threats, because you're more likely to allocate those resources in response to nonexistent threats.
Re whether torture is an effective means to gather information: I don't claim to be an expert, so I bow to those who are. The consensus is that it's a very ineffective and unreliable method.
Re the moral argument: It would be nice to address this as a moral issue. Sadly, the pro-torture crowd tends to start screeching about an episode of 24 that they saw last week, so we have to discuss this in terms of return-on-investment--the only factor that the right wing seems to care about.
Torture isn't about getting information; it's about domination.
Hey, M,L&J?, if you are going to deliberately misrepresent the meaning of someone's post, at least do so in a manner which doesn't reveal your profound historical ignorance, o.k.?
Joe, the consensus in this thread is the product of ignorance. Anybody familiar with the current techniques frequently employed in a U.K. home invasion realizes that torture can work in the right circumstances, circumstances which aren't terribly far-fetched. Tie a person to chair, and go at them with a tool set, and they'll reliably tell you where the valuables are hidden, as long as the information can be verified and the victim knows that the tools are still ready to be employed. Now, if there are no valuables, there's a lot of pointless agony, but the torturer usually enjoys the process anyways, so it truly isn't pointless.
I'm a little disappointed in the level of discourse here. I had expected the Atlantic to attract more rational comments than, say, the Daily Kos.
One exception (though not the only one) was the comment by Rex above. He wants to ditinguish between "torture" and "coercive interrogation." I think that's crucial. Let us all stipulate that torture ought not to be practiced by the United States. That leaves some room for coercive techniques that fall short of torture. Surely a few hours of unpleasant music or 15 seconds dunked underwater doesn't constitute torture.
So we ought to try to draw a line, based upon experience and rational reflection, between accptable coercion and torture.
isocrates--
Our own war crimes tribunals after WWII disagreed with your take on waterboarding quite strongly. They called it the "water cure," and a war crime.
The problem with your apporach, rageahol, is that you have then in large measure based your opposition to torture on the difficulty in verifying false positives. That is, as soon as a situation arises in which verification becomes simple enough, one of your main arguments against torture collapses. Thus, the torturer has an avenue to advance his cause, namely to argue that cost of verification has dropped low enough to make torture a reasonable behavior. It seems better to me to simply say that torture is never to be allowed, and thus there is no reason to calculate or discuss it's efficacy in any situation.
A Ouija board is right some of the time too. Provided of course, that you can verify the information...
Torture should never be the default method of interrogation. If it is truly needed, then the torturer should be ready and willing to defend himself in court over it. It should never be legal.
steve kelso,
No.
Actually, torture (by a properly trained person) is about getting information. The domination involved in torture is merely part of the psychological aspect of obtaining information. The same thing applies to coercive interrogation.
In past threads, we sort of came to a consensus that torture involved breaking skin or breaking bones; the sort of physical injury that most people agree is truly torture. We were somewhat conflicted on defining coercive interrogation, with some moonbats claiming that anything that was perceived to be hurtful was torture, which the rest of us disagreed with. I mean, wouldn't one agree that a valid definition of torture would involve something happening to a greater degree than happened to most of us on the playground?
So maybe the discussion should be twofold: (1) is there ever a justification for torture to obtain information, and (2) under what circumstances is coercive interrogation permissible?
The "24" crowd believes that torture is justified when the stakes are high enough. That tends to be my feeling, but my concern is, who decides when the stakes are high enough? If we put our faith in Jack Bauer, we impliedly have to put our faith in those people who hired and trained him. Thirty years ago I had faith in the recruiters and trainers; nowadays, I'm not so sure.
I also believe that coercive interrogation is permissible when national security is at stake. Again, the problem I have is, who decides? We sent troops into harms way in Bosnia and Kosovo, and there has yet to be a U.S. national security interest articulated for those decisions. (McCain articulated a national security interest in seeing the job through once we deployed (i.e., to save the NATO alliance), but to date no one has been successful in articulating a national security interest in our involvement there. Whereas a national security interest has been clearly stated with respect to both Afganistan and Iraq, even if people disagree about it. My point is that if politicians deploy troops in harms way even when there is no national security interest at stake, why should we trust them to decide when coercive interrogation is permissible?
I, for one, think the effectiveness of torture is pretty relevant to any discussion of its morality. The fact that torture is not particularly effective makes makes it a pretty easy call… the potential harm of allowing the state to sanction torture far outweigh the potential benefits, and torture should therefore be considered immoral.
If, however, torture were 100% effective, it would be a much tougher call.
Any moral system that doesn’t consider real world consequences is, in the end, a pretty strange and pointless form of morality...
rageahol:
"none of them increase the good-information/bad-information ratio more than the techniques that do not rely on coercion or torture."
This CAN be right if you're talking about torture to extract vital information, especially if the policy of torture / verify is a widespread one. But with all due respect, if the object of the torture is to extract sham confessions or intimidate oppressed populations, the good info / bad info cost-effectiveness ratio is totally irrelevant. It all depends on the goal of the torturer. In that light, making the utilitarian argument against torture (it doesn't work anyway) is risky--because it DOES work in many cases.
Will Allen asks: "Hey, M,L&J?, if you are going to deliberately misrepresent the meaning of someone's post, at least do so in a manner which doesn't reveal your profound historical ignorance, o.k.?"
I'd be glad to do that if there had been anything profound in your initial post, Willie me boy, but there wasn't. It was the single most inane thing I've read on the Intertubes this week, and that's saying something, since I've seen posts by Jonah Goldberg and the Gang of Wienies at the Corner.
will allen: see my first post, in re: externalities. even if the immediate cost of verifying the information drops low enough to permit torture (and one would think that if this were the case, it would also be easy enough to check each possibility without the need for torture, as in the home invasion robbery example cited), the externalities of having someone more inured to that sort of abuse of power are far greater than the immediate risk of harm. look into behavioral research on punishment - its reinforcing effects on the punisher, when they are reinforced by getting valuable information from the punished, tend to push the punisher into thinking that punishment, or torture in this case, is the appropriate way to deal with interpersonal issues far more often than is actually the case.
and in any case, i would dispute that any policy of allowing torture in an interrogation is liable to be broadened over time, further exacerbating the externality issue as well as the bad-intel issue. the issue is one of policy, not isolated incidents. there will always be isolated incidents of torture both here and abroad, but the codification of these practices as legitimate is what harms intel as well as the psyches of the torturers.
(and if the ticking-time-bomb scenario comes up, and someone illegally tortures a perp AND ACTUALLY IS ABLE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT WITH THAT INTEL, then they are still breaking the law and should be tried as such - no jury would convict them anyway.)
That said, some of Will Allen's subsequent posts actually made sense... but not that first one.
isocrates writes: "So we ought to try to draw a line, based upon experience and rational reflection, between acceptable coercion and torture."
I think experience and rational reflection has shown us to be incapable of drawing the line. The use of the phrase "acceptable coercion," as opposed to say "interrogation," immediately shows the user to be incapable of drawing the line between torture and torture lite.
An Iraqi General was allowed to die while subjected to "acceptable interrogation" by being stuffed upside down in a sleeping bag. (Where'e the harm in that, after all, since children do this all the time.) As they smothered the General to death I doubt his murderers cared where the bright line between acceptable coercion and torture was drawn.
Isocrates,
Waterboarding is torture; our own government condemns the practice as torture when reporting about human rights abuses committed in countries other than the US. Our government doesn't recognize waterboarding as torture only when it uses this technique.
Waterboarding is more than simply dunking a person underwater. It is an act designed to make the subject feel like he is drowning; i.e. to make person feel like he is dying underwater. I don't know about you, but an act that makes feel like I'm dying from a lack of air is torture in my book.
I'm sorry M,L,&J, that my first post wasn't more plainly labeled as hyperbole, thus allowing you to recognize it as such, instead of as advocacy for randomly kidnapping and toruring foreigners. I will endeavor to be more obvious for you in the future.
We pretty much agree, rageahol, although I think you still miscalculate the predictability of verification's cost. In the home invasion example, for example, finding hidden valuables in a home can be quite time consumimg, which is one reason why it is becoming increasingly common for such thugs to torture their victims; you'd have to be truly crazy to not give up their location immediately with your fingers between the blades of a bolt cutter. Similarly, someone has to be a really, really, really, dedicated cadre to not reveal the locations of easily verified weapons caches, if the cadre is in the hands of a skilled torturer. Some are, but a lot aren't.
I wholly agree, however, that torture cannot be effectively regulated and thus, individual exceptions aside, it becomes a net negative, in terms of defeating the enemy. I just would rather not go so far as to make the claim that it "never works", for in may experience, making falsifiable claims does not advance one's advocacy.
Yes, silly naif, if you take a person who knows nothing about what you're asking, and you torture them, they'll start out lying to stop the torture, but eventually they'll start producing cosmic truths that answer your queries, even though they didn't originally know the answers.
Why, I bet we could torture Ms. McArdle and find out the cure for cancer, the DJIA at the end of 2009, and the answer for why you have a paid blogging gig while the far more rational and talented Gary Farber can't pay his rent.
Ya think, Meg? Do you have these mysterious truths tucked away in your subconscious, just waiting to be liberated via strenuous waterboarding?
Also, the effectiveness of torture really has to be questioned when we know it's very effective at identifying people who are satan-screwing, spell-casting, baby-eating witches, when such people don't actually exist.
How fascists are made:
After all, the argument for coersion is quite compelling. The United States government has a sacred duty to protect its citizens.
First, no, the US government has no real "sacred" duty. It takes a civic-minded pledge. Moreover, the sole pledge anyone in government takes -- from a Social Security desk jockey to the President is NOT to protect its citizens, it's to protect the Constitution.
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
When did Americans become such whiny, ahistorical, pissants? We have a fascinating and proud history -- one that STARTS with the notion that we are a nation of laws, not men.
Yet with one attack, the fear-soaked cowards of the "Give Torture a Chance" crowd hide behind an all-mighty state where its torturers are good and noble, not the failure of the very foundations of the state.
Hideous post. Our republic won't survive you fascist fucks.
will allen: our dispute seems to hinge on the definition of "works"
it "works" in isolated instances, in the very short term, and less frequently than rational, level-headed, well-characterized interrogation techniques. unfortunately as humans we tend to respond more to isolated instances of success or windfalls than we do to overall frequency - see also: lottery. it does not "work" as a policy, since for it to provide more good information than bad, would require the interrogators to always have the "right" person, and always be in a position to verify the information immediately, while the subject is still under questioning. it also does not "work" as a policy since it makes monsters of interrogators over the long term. so, no, it _never_ works _as policy_.
At least we managed to use torture to get rid of the witches. Their teats were cold!
Y'all are pretty funny. I've yet to see a single comment even note that torture is illegal. Not even just a little illegal, but barred by the US constitution, federal statute, Article III of the Geneva Convention, etc. etc. etc.
So here's a quick argument against torture.
It's illegal.
Breaking the law, willfully and knowingly no less, is immoral.
Torture is therefore immoral.
Now if I can just get someone to say that it's not always immoral to break the law...
Efficacy of torture -
Megan, from the K-Lo slot at the Atlantic says don't argue to efficacy of torture today because someday it might work.
God, please save us from our discourse.
Anyway, this posting is an unbroken stream of bloodthirsty vapidity and revolting 'you hippies are hypocrites when you argue to practicality' posturing, but this stands out:
"Nor is it obvious to me that the quality of information is likely to be lower than that obtained by other means: yes, people will say anything to avoid torture, but they'll also say anything to avoid imprisonment"
This is empirical fact. This is not something that needs to be made 'obvious to Megan' to be true.
matt writes: "Megan, from the K-Lo slot at the Atlantic says don't argue to efficacy of torture today because someday it might work."
This makes me wonder if the Bushpigs think it works NOW - because they have Maury Povich's lie detector squad down in the dungeons spot-verifying the information extracted from the prisoners.
Who would put that sort of genius beyond the sparkling abilities shown daily by the clowns since January 21st, 2001?
The fantasists who can imagine different degrees of coercion and think that anything said under certain types of duress can be in anyway reliable have obviously never been tuned up or never had the opportunity to do the same, though i'll bet some of the real serious churchgoers in the group are just itching for the day when they can live out their Jack Bauer dreams
I was something of a criminal in my college days and on into my early 20's ('89-'95) after my father died and my day job wasn't enough to take care of my mom and keep the bills paid....Anyway, as a result, i found myself in a few of the types of situations that still make certain films difficult to watch because of the memories and associations they dredge up
Physical torture is useless except as a purely punitive measure, people will say any goddamned thing in the world to make the pain stop unless they are crazier than the person who is working them over. I say this from having been on both sides of some serious beatings, so unlike the folks here who want so badly for someone to validate their Jack Bauer fantasies, i actually have some practical base of knowledge from whence i speak. and the notion of "I'll hurt you even worse if you are lying to me" is a farce, the idea is to hurt them as badly as possible just short of killing them anyway, the subject is either going to welcome death or just lapse into near catatonia from the pain (i did on a couple of different occasions)
So you'll have to excuse me while i laugh at some of the rationalizations i've seen in this thread.
[on a closing note, the fear of certain people i suspected i might meet in prison was the most effective coercion anyone ever applied to me]
Oh. My. God.
I don't know what's worse, that someone got paid to write this abomination, or that a bunch of people here seem to be arguing dispassionately about the efficacy of torture.
Sick people rule our discourse.
I'm a little disappointed in the level of discourse here. I had expected the Atlantic to attract more rational comments than, say, the Daily Kos.
Funny, I'd expected the Atlantic to employ more rational bloggers than Megatron & the rest.
Megan, you'd be better off to drop your first paragraph completely. If you start off by calmly discussing the efficacy of torture, people aren't going to get around to reading your second paragraph. QED.
It's like Richard Nixon discussing the various ways the Watergate burglars' hush money could be raised, and then only at the end saying "it'd be wrong, that's for sure." By that time, it's too late. You should never have entertained the topic as one where reasonable people could disagree in the first place.
SpaceMonkey, you're either a liar, or you've never had anything worthwhile to give up that could be verified, or never tortured anybody who had something to give up that could be verified. Say, when a home invader ties a victim to a chair, and gets out the pliers, and asks where the cash is hidden, d'ya' think the homeowner is going to say just "any goddamn thing" to avoid the fingernails to be ripped out, or is the homeowner going to say where the money actually is?
Dear Ms. McArdle,
Decent people take up any argument available against torture. You say it's morally wrong and you know it's being practiced by our own government, yet you want to undercut an effective argument against the practice. In effect, you would weaken the case against torture on the basis of what? Some hypothetical nonsense?
Please to not be undermining useful arguments against abhorrent practices in the future.
Cordially,
jack
I."Hideous post. Our republic won't survive you fascist fucks."
This is exactly what I meant when I lamented above the often low quality of the discourse here. Anyone who has picked up a logic text would know that ad hominem arguments are fallacious. Those with a great deal of passion but very little sense use explitives, call their interlocutors "fascists" and generally insult everyone who disagrees with them. But i will move on to the more thoughtful response to my posts.
II. "I don't know about you, but an act that makes feel like I'm dying from a lack of air is torture in my book."-eltoro
Okay, we disagree about the proper definition. I would be inclined to draw the line, tentatively, at anything that is likely to cause permanent physical damage to the detainee. But I would be willing to accept techniques that cause significant psychological and physical stress.
The reason is that I put much more weight on the security of American citizens than on the comfort of the terrorists. I don't want them tortured (as I define it) but if putting them in unpleasant conditions can yield valuable information, then I'm for it.
III. "The use of the phrase 'acceptable coercion,' as opposed to say 'interrogation,' immediately shows the user to be incapable of drawing the line between torture and torture lite."-ndm
Well, you seem to be saying that no coercion at all is acceptable. But one of the definitions of coerce (according to me Webster's) is "to restrain by force." by that definition, any form of incarceration is coercive. But surely you don't believe we should just let all terrorists go free.
The sad fact is that there are dangerous people out there who want to kill us--and they have no qualms about torture. We oought not to allow a debilitating sentimentality prevent us from taking necessary measures to protect ourselves. When Winston Churchill authorized the bombing of german cities, he didn't so it with glee. He wasn't pleased that many civilians would be killed by the bombing. But he recognized it as a necessary evil--necessary to prevent a far greater evil.
So we ought to try to draw a line, based upon experience and rational reflection, between accptable coercion and torture.
Posted by isocrates | August 22, 2007 3:42 PM
A capital idea. I will draw that line right between the words "accptable" [sic] and "coercion." If you can't get your info without coercion, you're a lousy interrogator or you're going to get misleading/useless info anyway. Plus, if your reputation as a world leader is based in large part on your championing of human rights and defense of the Geneva conventions, engaging in egregious violations of same will, through experience and rational reflection, most likely lead to losing that reputation and thus the moral authority that proved so useful in so many other areas.
isocrates, you have no human emotion. None. You're a monster and don't even know it. And that's not only sad, it's scary that such a position could be held and actually attempted to be defended by a rational, thinking human being. To destroy your "enemy" you would BECOME your enemy. You have learned NOTHING from 2000 years of human history.
To Will Allen:
Here's an alternative to your Japanese Admiral scenario.
A reliable informant tells the "Authorities" Will Allen knows where Osama is. I take Will in and ask where Osama is. He says he doesn't know. I take a ballpeen hammer to his fingertips. He says he doesn't know. Then I break his nose. He tells me Osama is in a hotel in Islamabad. I tell him we'll check it out and if he's lying, I'll go to work on him with a blowtorch and a pair of pliers. He says he really, really doesn't know where Osama is. Blowtorch comes out. At what point do I stop torturing this innocent man?
My terrible, twisted case possesses the same verifiability yours does, and includes the same presumption that the subject of the torture has the information I want. The only difference is that my victim is entirely ignorant of the information I want to sweat out of him. That, to me, is the horrible danger of torture. It seems reasonable to me that in order to tolerate the act of torture, we have to be certain that every single person tortured is exactly the right person that needs to be tortured to acquire a specific piece of information. Of course, lots of people don't seem to be too terribly wrapped up in the need for the degree of certainty that seems to me necessary to even contemplate the possibility of sanctioning torture even once. But then, I'm often wrong about a great many things. This may be another one.
Now to McArdle's bizarre claim that anyone would lie to avoid imprisonment, which is just..well...wrong. Judy Miller is about the most lily-livered individual I can think of in American public life, and that craven creature did 85 days in the joint without gripe or complaint. Now, if you'd stuck her head in the toilet for, oh, 5 minutes say, I suspect she would've told you everything you ever wanted to know about Scooter and aspen leaves.
Will Allen:
"d'ya' think the homeowner is going to say just "any goddamn thing" to avoid the fingernails to be ripped out, or is the homeowner going to say where the money actually is?"
What if there isn't any money?
The sad fact is that there are dangerous people out there who want to kill us--and they have no qualms about torture.
Posted by isocrates | August 22, 2007 6:17 PM
No, the sad fact is that there are people in this country who think the interrogation methods perfected by the Gestapo and the KGB are perfectly acceptable for use by the United States, even though we fought a World War and a Cold War for 50 years to defeat the philosophies behind those methods.
I say again, you have no human emotion. No compassion. Just hate, anger and bloodlust.
No, Jack, making ridiculously false claims, like spacemonkey's above, wherein it is posited that the infliction of pain is never an effective means to extract useful information, is an exceedingly stupid way to advance one's advocacy, because being seen as making ridiculously false claims tends to reduce the credibility that is attributed to one's other claims.
"I had expected the Atlantic to attract more rational comments than, say, the Daily Kos."
You don't come here much do you?
Then the homeowner is going to suffer pointless agony, sam, unless one considers the fact that most people who torture do so in part because it entertains them. However, that says exactly nothing about the fact that if money is present, ripping out a fingernail will be extraordinarily likely to produce the information that has been demanded.
Now to McArdle's bizarre claim that anyone would lie to avoid imprisonment, which is just..well...wrong. Judy Miller is about the most lily-livered individual I can think of in American public life, and that craven creature did 85 days in the joint without gripe or complaint. Now, if you'd stuck her head in the toilet for, oh, 5 minutes say, I suspect she would've told you everything you ever wanted to know about Scooter and aspen leaves.
Posted by Sam | August 22, 2007 6:22 PM
Oh but why stop there, Sam? Let's throw Judy into the American equivalent of Lubyanka prison and see if she talks. That's what isocrates thinks would be a great idea. Why stop with "terrorists"? Let's just throw everyone into the torture prison so we can extract their useful information on their subversive associates. Then we can round up all those traitors and seditionists and torture them too. Why should they expect any human rights, anyway?
What's the point Will? That the fear of physical pain, or actual physical pain, will get someone to tell you something. That's not terribly insightful--animals, including humans, have an aversion to pain. The question is whether it's right/moral/just to use torture.
Sam, if you will actually read the thread, you'll see that I stated well above that torturing wholly ignorant people is an inevitable outcome that produces nothing but agony for the ignorant, and entertainment for the torturer. Again, however, that says exactly nothing about the efficacy of torture when it is used on someone who does have useful information, and their answers can be verified with some speed.
Why on earth do you think that making plainly false claims is a useful way to be an advocate for a position?
I thought we could leave the torturers-for-fun out of the equation because, really, they don't actually care where your money is now do they?
No, we're in agreement that if you tie me to a chair and beat the shit out of me, or better yet, my child, you're going to find out EXACTLY where my money is. My point was that both the scenarios you pose are rigged to demonstrate that torture works. You already knew that both of your victims had information to impart and that the torturer was looking for that specific information. As a matter of practical torture, the "subject" may or may not have the information you're looking for. Do you think it's unreasonable that investigators may often not know whether their subjects do, in fact, have the information they want? If so, you've got more faith in the state apparatuses that would do the deed than I do.
Brady, the point is to just forcefully make the point that torture is to be prohibited, period, without going so far as to make the ridiculous claim that it never produces the desired information, because when one makes ridiculous claims, one's advocacy is weakened.
I didn't intend to make claims of any kind. I read all of the thread and didn't see where you addressed in any conclusive way how, as a matter of practical public policy, you can conclusively distinguish between someone who does and does not have information you want.
Three days of blog posts from Megan, and this much is clear: she likes to write seemingly inflammatory, provocative, and "edgy" posts that get her a lot of attention but are written in such a way as to leave her "deniability" as to what her own views really are. Ultimately, though, it's all about getting noticed.
Ann Althouse, meet your long-lost daughter. As for me, I'm outta here.
WA,
I can see that we're at cross-purposes here. Your argument addresses an issue that I've taken off on a tangent.
isocrates writes:
There are morally-depraved people in the World should and we must not reduce ourselves to their level by institionalizing their immorality.
isocrates continues:
This is a morally-depraved worldview that I thought we had put behind us at Nuremberg. In the last four years perhaps half a million Iraqi civilians have been killed because this Nation did not allow morality - or debilitating sentimentality, as isocrates calls it - to stand in our way.
Sam, the home invasion scenario is not "rigged". People do get get their homes invaded, and they are tortured to provide all sorts of information; locations of valuables in the home, PIN numbers, etc. It plainly works. When there is no information to be had, just like when there is no useful information to be had with a suspected captured enemy combatant, the torturer gets to entertain himself, and there isn't a torturer alive who didn't practice more than a few times who either didn't stop out of revulsion, or begin to find it entertaining. Either way, the torturer benefits, and it only is a question of how much.
It does not advance the position of opposing torture to make easily falsifiable claims. Torture sometimes can produce useful information, but that is no reason to allow it.
Vivider? I'm sorry, I couldn't get past that. Even as you were writing this piece of crap didn't a little flag go off telling you that there is no such word? What absolutely just slays me is the discussion of torture here in the comment section. Like a previous commentor noted, it's immoral and it's illegal. End of story.
Dear Will,
I agree with you wholeheartedly regarding your last post. But I what I want to know is if torture works, albeit rarely, then why would it be immoral? I think torture is immoral, pure and simple, and something that is a priori immoral cannot "work" in any meaningful way.
Oh you want "substance"? Then how about providing something that has some.
Your position earlier is as light as air:
After all, the argument for coersion is quite compelling. The United States government has a sacred duty to protect its citizens.
The substance of that should earn you endless mockery. The government has NO sacred duty. Everyone who works for the government pledges to do one simple thing, protect and uphold the Constitution. Show me exactly where YOUR substantive point is found. I simply cite the oath that has been administered to Presidents and civil servants alike for more than 220 years. Where is yours found?
This is exactly what I meant when I lamented above the often low quality of the discourse here. Anyone who has picked up a logic text would know that ad hominem arguments are fallacious. Those with a great deal of passion but very little sense use explitives, call their interlocutors "fascists" and generally insult everyone who disagrees with them.
Of course, the irony is lost on you that while you can't even stand a little name calling because it's so UNCIVIL, you stake the position that waterboarding is "fine".
And by the way "ad hominem arguments are fallacious" is only true if ALL I did was call you names as 'proof' of your ignorance. Since I actually pointed out that your "point" about this country's "sacred duty" is wholly at odds with the actual laws and customs of this country.
I guess your idea of civility and mine are grossly at odds.
Will,
I hadn't heard of the trend toward torture/burglary you say is going on in Britain. Do you have a source on that? It strikes me as being a fairly stupid tactic to use, absent unusual circumstances.
Well, Brady, if I define "works" purely as a functional outcome, then your defining "works" as a moral outcome does not apply. If you think torture is immoral, period, and thus not allowed, why are you using euphemisms for intolerable immorality such as saying that bevhaior x "doesn't work"? I've never heard someone say, for instance, that rape "doesn't work", and if I did, I'd think the speaker was very, very, strange.
But I what I want to know is if torture works, albeit rarely, then why would it be immoral? I think torture is immoral, pure and simple, and something that is a priori immoral cannot "work" in any meaningful way.
Huh? The utilitarian value of something, and the morality of performing it, are not necessarily at cross purposes. Something can "work" in that it is capable of producing useful ends, and yet we object to the means.
Here's another: you're poor and need money immediately to pay a bill collector, so you sell your daughter into sexual slavery. Did it work? You betcha; you've got the cash in hand to prove it. Is it moral? Not even slightly, it is a revolting thought.
Well, blackadder, home invasions are much more common in the U.K. than in the U.S.; go look up any national crime statistics, and I've heard anecdotally that beating or otherwise torturing the inhabitants is becoming an increasingly common way for the thugs to find out where the valuable are at. In any case, it isn't limited to the U.K.. I've read several news accounts of home invasions in the U.S. where the victims are beaten to provide PIN numbers and the like. Criminals know that the infliction of terror via the application of pain, or threatened application of pain, will often produce the desired behavior by the victim. Really, do you think criminals have the time for slow persuasion, or that they do not have to frequently demonstrate the credibility of their threats?
Vivider? I'm sorry, I couldn't get past that.
Come on. It envividates the whole post.
Well, I've been called a "fascist fuck" a "monster" and a man driven by "bloodlust" today and it's still fairly early. I haven't courted this level of enmity intentionally, but I do find it rather amusing.
More importantly, though, I want to address a comment by ndm (who seems intelligent, despite calling me, or rather my worldview, "morally depraved").
ndm wrote: "In the last four years perhaps half a million Iraqi civilians have been killed because this Nation did not allow morality - or debilitating sentimentality, as isocrates calls it - to stand in our way."
Now that's very interesting. It is wrong, but still interesting. It is fairly well known that many prominent conservatives, like George Will, William Buckley and Brent Scowcroft had misgivings about invading Iraq from the start. The real enthusiasts for the war were the neoconservatives. Ndm wants to associate the Iraq war (and me) with a kind of amoral Realpolitik.
But the interesting thing is that the neocons who pushed for war have a real disdain for Realpolitik. Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, and the rest have long rejected the Richelieu, Bismarck, Kissinger style of diplomacy in which moral considerations are subordinated to questions of interest and power.
So, ironically, Wolfowitz and the like have a great deal in common with many who are posting here--a grandiose moral vision, a dogmatic sense of right that supercedes all "petty calculation," an unyielding sanctimony that can tolerate no intellectual opposition.
I know that burglary is more common in the U.K. than in the U.S. (perhaps because in the U.S. people can own guns). This is the first I've heard about the torture thing, though. I tend to be distrustful of anecdotes told to me second or third hand. It's just too hard to tell truth from fiction. It does strike me as being a rather foolish thing to do, though not necessarily for reasons that are relevant to the currnet debate.
Will: the problem with your analogy is that in the case of a home invader, their ultimate goal is something which is not only held to be less valuable than the life of the kidnapped (any rational person would gladly give up a couple hundred in cash or a TV in order to save their own lives), but something that, once obtained, would likely ensure that the person undergoing the physical abuse would stop undergoing any further punishment. Even then, the threat of violence is often stronger than the act of violence itself psychologically.
In the context of national security and/or terrorism, the impetus turns on its ear. The person being tortured likely holds their life to be far less valuable than the overall mission or cause at hand, and will be more than willing to undergo pain or even death in order to preserve the sanctity of their overall goal.
Also, the admission of knowledge (if it, in fact, exists) in the case of national security likely only means that the torture itself ceases - faced with a likely lifetime of imprisonment or even death with the added cost of compromising the cause which they hold dear makes them more, not less, likely to be hardened against the threat of torture.
Even if you take your flawed example as true, you've managed to prove that torture works inasmuch as it allows one person to more efficiently rob another person - you've made it a great tool in the service of evil, but not of good.
A couple more things: the ticking time bomb scenario is the worst one to use torture in. You know why? There's a fucking ticking time bomb. If I know that a time bomb is going off in twenty minutes and you don't, why am I going to break down and ruin everything if all I have to do is hold out twenty minutes? Why wouldn't I immediately lie to you in order to waste your time on a wild goose chase? The second that bomb goes off, I win and you lose, and all I had to do was have someone I already believe is an agent of Satan do the horrific things I already think you will.
The last is Meg's asinine "verification" theorem. If you can verify the information you get out of someone from another source, why do you need to torture the person in the first place? A far more effective use of this is seen in every cop show you can ever think of - just tell them there's someone in the other room squealing, and that you'll give them better treatment if they squeal first. There's a reason it's a cliche - it generally works pretty well in actual law enforcement.
Reading this "debate" on torture is like watching eight year olds argue the obvious literary superiority of Pokemon over Shakespeare.
Dear Will and Anony-mouse,
Thanks for making my point about the inherent fallacies in utilitarian morality. Utilitarianism works if people are objects, but it's hard to justify selling your daughter into slavery or torturing another human. Why? Because it's immoral to do so. So I guess the ends don't justify the means.
And not to get off on a huge tangent, but the idea that it was only "neoconservatives" who supported the Iraq war is just silly. The bulk of the political establishment supported the war back in 2003.
"It does not advance the position of opposing torture to make easily falsifiable claims."
Sorry, Will, my bad. I'm clearly not as smart as you so I'll drool on back to Special Ed where I belong.
All that isocrates and you still have no idea about the principles this country was founded on. I find that amusing.
Also that you think it's the government's 'sacred duty' to protect its citizens, but not the Constitution. How droll.
And I think it's downright hilarious that a sober minded sort like yourself can think waterboarding is 'fine' but blanche at bad names.
Chuckles all around, I guess.
Since your entire argument is based on the cold calculation of coersion and war-crime level 'non'-torture, I think it's incumbent on you to somehow PROVE that torture works before thinking its unyeilding sanctimony (due an absolute belief in things like the Geneva Conventions, the US Constitution and human right) to oppose it outright. Where are your calculations?
Will Allen,
the times i ended up on the spot, the value of the information and assorted details i had on me often was worthless, but my "employers" such as they were,counted on that...i was young and blunted (not to mention a bit masochistic) and got used as something of a decoy with some regularity...only reason i'm not dead is because in the particular environment i occupied, corpses were bad for business....nonetheless, being played for a dummy and getting my ass handed to me on a semi-regular basis, even if i was well-compensated for it in the end is why i have gone to such pains to wise up and go straight, besides, Will, other than theory and hypothetical situations, what is YOUR basis of comparison?
when i was the one doling out the pain, i learned that a convincing threat to a subject's loved ones was a far better motivator than any of my implements...and before anybody gets any crazy idea to red-flag, i've alredy been processed by the criminal justice system for my transgressions (thank god for plea deals....yeah, i'm a rat, sue me)
Sam quotes someone and writes: ""I had expected the Atlantic to attract more rational comments than, say, the Daily Kos."
You don't come here much do you?"
I suspect the person you were quoting doesn't go to Daily Kos much, either. The level of rationality at Kos is far higher than it has been at the White House these past 6 1/2 years.
"I suspect the person you were quoting doesn't go to Daily Kos much, either. The level of rationality at Kos is far higher than it has been at the White House these past 6 1/2 years."
You got that right, Brother!
also, will, your home invasion analogy is flawed, as others have stated on the basis that the information or items that one might extract are more easily parted with than, say operational knowledge of anything from a military operation to a major dope deal. The soldier will resist as long as they can or give a false statement to protect the operation and the thug will hold out under duress because he may well be killed off by his own people if he talks.... a homeowner, on the other hand, has no expectation of torture and complies more willingly
Well, sam, if you weren't among those making the easily falsifiable claim that torture never works, then the comment wasn't directed at you.
Tell me, Brady, when you condemn rape or robbery, do you do so by asserting that rape and robbery "don't work"?
Starscream, if you actually think, to pick just one example, that everyone with useful knowledge of the location weapons caches or bombmaking factories is likely to "greatly value" the overall mission than their lives, you have no business remarking on the alleged eight year old mentality of others. It is rare that anyone "greatly values" a mission over their life, which is why it takes a huge amount of training to get people to fight effectively in combat. When terror reigns, many people who previously thought they were committed find out that they have overestimated their commitment. Some will have such commitment, and some won't, and that commitment will fluctuate. That doesn't mean that torture doesn't work.
Next, you display ignorance or lack of imagination in examining what you call the "verification theorem". The theorem often can involve the torture victim providing the source of verification, such as the location of the cash or weapons cache.
Also, if you really think that giving the violent robber what he wants is "likely" going to result in the end of the violence, you are extraordinarily ignorant of the mindset of violent criminals. One of the best ways to increase your chance of being murdered by a violent criminal is to passively agree to their demands.
Finally, I'll note that I made no claims regarding the ability of torture to provide a positive moral outcome, but only that there are situations, and not terribly unlikely situations, in which inflicting pain on prisoners can result in a prisoner behaving in the manner the torturer demands.
If you are going to make obnoxiously sarcastic remarks regarding Pokeman and Shakespeare, start by making them to the mirror.
spacemonkey, you sound like a bad paperback, and given it hasn't occurred to you that for threats towards loved ones to be credible, they at least occasionally have to be carried out, or that threatening loved ones is itself defined as illegal torture by international law, I don't think further interaction with you is going to be useful, and I'm certainly not going to swap histories with you. Continue with the grizzled tough guy, though. It seems to have value to you.
Will, let me show you my Pokemans.
One assumes when we're talking about torture, we're specifically talking about the committed terrorist or soldier - that's why they might potentially have the information you want in the first place. It's not my fault that the character in the torture wet dream is the hardened jihadist who's committed himself to holy war. It's also not my fault that those are the people we are, by and large, fighting.
They're the kind of people who, if you can imagine it, would hijack planes and fly them into buildings, not only killing everyone onboard...but themselves, too! Shockingly, they'll even strap bombs (yes, real bombs) to their chests and, inveighing against an oppressor that exists only in their radicalized psyches, blow up dozens of innocent civilians. There's a little known type of program called "the news" that has more information on these people.
What you define as the verification theorem is essentially meaningless - it's nothing more than saying that torturers will seek out the validity of the information they extract from their victims. No shit, Sherlock. That has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not the information given is valid, only that torturers will try to do something with whatever information they get.
What you've labeled as the optimal terror victim is someone who is a.) not particularly committed to the value of keeping their information secret relative to their own lives, b.) fairly easily swayed into compromising their mission or belief system for (potentially temporary) relief from the torture they're facing and c.) in possession of whatever knowledge the torturer is trying to extract. C is made highly unlikely by A and B, which makes the entire thing fall apart.
One last thing - you just completely destroyed the rationale you set up for torture working, but I figured I'd leave it for last. I contended that the only reason that torture would work in the case of the criminal is that the desired object of the torture was worth far less than the value of the person's well being. You just turned that around and said that it was highly unlikely that torture would work, because the victim of a torturer would be unlikely to believe the torture would stop if they gave up what they want. A position, obviously, that has nothing whatsoever to do with any other application of torture ever imaginable.
In other words, torture would work unless it would have a reason to work that would completely undermine the point of torture in the first place, in which case it wouldn't work at all, but we should still torture. Smooth move, slick.
My Pokemans, let me show you them.
No Will, that's my point. You can have absolutist morals or utilitarian morals. Rape, murder, torture, etc. are illegal because they are immoral. Driving on the left side of the road in the US is also illegal, but on more utilitarian grounds. If you concede that torture does produce useful information, and presumably useful information is a good thing, then doing some torture must be a good thing... at least on occasion. You are the one arguing that torture can lead to useful results, even if the end user, i.e. torturer might not be someone that we like. Unfortunately, you go to war with the torturers you have, not the torturer you would like to have.
Those with a great deal of passion but very little sense use explitives, call their interlocutors "fascists" and generally insult everyone who disagrees with them.
What a thin-skinned pearlclutcher you are. Be careful what you wish for, isocrates. When the fascists finally take over the U.S.A., take care not to do or say anything against the dictator. Before they send you off to the death camp, your torturers just might call you a few bad names as they crush your balls in a vise.
Starscream, you begin with the ridiculous assumption that all enemy combatants with useful information will have the level of commitment demonstrated by the 9/11 attackers. This reveals a monumental ignorance on your part, making your sarcasm regarding others' alleged shortcomings once again ironic. You have no idea of what your are jabbering about. There are thousands of enemy combatants with useful information and like any large group of people, the level of commitment will vary among them, and even with a single individual, that level of commitment is not a constant.
Next, if the victim of torture knows that the information provided can be verified fairly quickly, and if proven false, the torture will resume, there is a large incentive to provide accurate information. That is part of the value of verification. In contrast, all sorts of information gathered from sources, tortured or not, is of a nature that it cannot be verified quickly, or at all, thus giving the torture victim much better opportunity to seek respite from his agony via providing false information. It is unfortunate that this needs to be explained to you.
Finally, in your rush to be sarcastic, you neglected to actually read what I wrote, which was that passively agreeing to a home invader's demands increased the chances of getting killed. You inaccurately claimed I said "it was highly unlikely that torture would work, because the victim of a torturer would be unlikely to believe the torture would stop if they gave up what they want." What the victim of a home invasion believes in their moment of terror while being beaten has exactly nothing to do with what actually provides them the best chance of surviving. If you are going to sarcastically remark about an assertion that someone has made, try to have sufficient wit to accurately represent the assertion, won't you?
Some victims no doubt wrongly think being passively compliant from the start will end the violence, and thus give up the demanded information. Of course, in your overweening effort to be sarcastic above all else, you fail to grasp that threatening someone with violence in order to obtain information is as illegal as carrying out the threat. Threatening people with violence is considered a form of torture, and yes, torture works.
Of course, others will resist being compliant, in part because they fear that giving up the information will not save them. In the real world, however, even in a war, as opposed to your fantasy where every combatant with useful information is a committed as a kamikaze piloting a Zero into the deck of an aircraft carrier, some people will resist, and then some of them, when the agony becomes too great, will provide useful information, especially if they know that the information can be checked out quickly, and if shown to be false, the torture will continue. In other words, torture sometimes works, all your ignorant sarcasm aside.
What a cop-out McArdle! You can't win the "torture is not efficient" argument, so you declare it off limits?
Brady, I only presume obtaining useful information was a good thing once I know how the information was obtained. Why would you suppose one would say that obtaining useful information is always a good thing? The public once obtained the useful information that flying hydrogen-filled zeppelins was dangerous to those onboard. The manner in which it was discovered was not a good thing.
All this UK Home Invasion Scenario talk is quite hilarious. All that speculation based on
"I've heard anecdotally that beating or otherwise torturing the inhabitants is becoming an increasingly common way for the thugs to find out where the valuable are at...
Posted by Will Allen | August 22, 2007 7:22 PM"
What a joke.
For our intrepid defenders of the efficacy of torture, apparently based entirely on their hard nosed common sense and vivid imaginations, a question:
Do you approve of the waterboarding, extreme temp exposure, sleep and sense deprivation, and noise and light bombardment of captured American soldiers by enemy forces?
No, I didn't ask what they do, I asked if you APPROVE of the use of those "techniques" on US Marines. You know, for the effectiveness.
david, you apparently are unable to read, and thus cannot grasp that I explicitly stated that torture was disapproved, at least by me. Your illiteracy would also explain your failure to read all manner of crimes where the victims were forced to provide information by beatings and threats thereof. I assure you, it was not a joke to them.
Here's a charming story illuminating how torture is usefully employed by criminals to obtain information from victims. I don't think it was much of a joke.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wichita_Massacre
david,
I haven't seen anyone here advocating or defending the use of torture. Perhaps you should re-read Megan's original post and then all the comments? Here's the topic of discussion: "torture" does work, so if you are going to argue against torture, then you need to come up with a better argument than "it doesn't work." For example, we shouldn't use torture because it's immoral. And then we should discuss why it's immoral. (No, morality is not self-evident. If it were, there wouldn't be so many different views of morality.)
Do I "approve" of those named techniques being used on Marines? What kind of question is that? Are you naive enough to think that if we forego those techniques that our enemies will forego them too? If so, I would appreciate an historical example. You know, being a dumb Marine and all, I'd like to be reassured that the Japanese, North Koreans, Chinese, Moros, Vietnamese, Cambodians, etc. would never ever do those things to us because we nicely refrained from doing them.
So when you go into work at "The Atlantic," how does the rest of the staff react to your swastika armband?
Let me get this straight lady,
Governments cannot be trusted to do most things, that is the essential philosophy of a libertarian. Correct?
But there's no problem with giving the government the freedom to torture whoever it wants?
It's amazing how quickly self-styled libertarians will sacrifice their supposed principles when they feel their interests are threatened. It's almost as if self-styled libertarians don't actually have any principles.
Will Allen writes: "Brady, the point is to just forcefully make the point that torture is to be prohibited, period, without going so far as to make the ridiculous claim that it never produces the desired information, because when one makes ridiculous claims, one's advocacy is weakened."
The problem with this is that there are people who decide that torture is bad but permissible for certain classes of Bad Guy because it doesn't matter what happens to them.
You really do need a two-pronged argument which also addresses that torture is usually a poor means of obtaining truth.
Torture sometimes does obtain good information, when you *know* you have a person who knows, and you know what to ask.
But that is rare enough that it is not an argument for torture. It's an argument for strict laws against torture and government officials who won't stoop to using torture unless they're damned sure that it will provide the information they need to stop something really bad so they can count on a pardon.
isocrates wrote: "The United States government has a sacred duty to protect its citizens."
As others have noted US government officials and the military swear an oath to protect and serve the Constitution, not the citizens.
Do you know why this is?
It's because we have 300 million citizens, but only one Constitution. The Constitution is priceless and irreplaceable.
People? People are disposable and replaceable. Thousands of people die every day. Nations regularly absorb and cope with natural disasters that kill tens of thousands of people.
Kill all you want, we'll make more.
But don't fuck with the Constitution that makes us free.
"The reason is that I put much more weight on the security of American citizens than on the comfort of the terrorists. I don't want them tortured (as I define it) but if putting them in unpleasant conditions can yield valuable information, then I'm for it."
Isocrates,
Of course, you are assuming that the person subject to torture or simply unpleasant conditions is actually a terrorist, or even simply a nefarious agent of a hostile foreign power. The problem is that our intelligence agencies & military forces have detained innocent people caught up in sweeps in Afghanistan & Iraq and who were misidentified as terrorists. Many of these folks were sent to Abu Ghraib or Gitmo to be tortured while in US custody, and were renditioned to the custody of Egyptian or Pakistani torturers. We gained no useful intelligence from torturing these innocents, but we sure gained new enemies in the process.
This is something that occurs when you lift prohibitions on torture and make it a routine tool in the national security toolbox, instead of making it a necessary but rare exception to the normal course of coercive interrogation.
Torture seems to me very likely to work provided that you can verify the information, which I assume interrogators can in at least some circumstances.
It's already been pointed out, but that was a pretty weak sentence (in once sentence you have both "seems" and "assumes"?). You should have stopped at that point and come up with a new idea for a post.
Later, a commenter said: "Breaking the law, willfully and knowingly no less, is immoral."
That is untrue. There was nothing immoral about the civil disobedience of MLK, nor is there anything immoral about a cancer patient smoking a joint, just to name a couple. Your conclusion is good, but you get there in a faulty way.
Could someone please explain to me how Megan McArdle has a job as a journalist?
I will address two more criticisms directed at me:
I.The problem is that our intelligence agencies & military forces have detained innocent people caught up in sweeps in Afghanistan & Iraq and who were misidentified as terrorists. Many of these folks were sent to Abu Ghraib or Gitmo to be tortured while in US custody, and were renditioned to the custody of Egyptian or Pakistani torturers. We gained no useful intelligence from torturing these innocents, but we sure gained new enemies in the process. This is something that occurs when you lift prohibitions on torture and make it a routine tool in the national security toolbox, instead of making it a necessary but rare exception to the normal course of coercive interrogation.-eltoro
Okay, it's true that any time we do anything to anyone there is a chance that we have the wrong person. But if we are immobilized by the fear of incarcertating or interrogating the wrong people, then we will never capture or hold anyone because there is always some chance of error... It makes sense then to do our best to get the right people and to minimize any chance of detaining innocents. It's worth noting, though, that many of the people released from Guantanimo have turned up again fighting American forces.
Moreover, you yourself seem to be endorsing "coercive interrogation" but not torture. But that means you and I agree, as does Rex I believe.
II. The substance of that should earn you endless mockery. The government has NO sacred duty.-jb
If you are an atheist, that is no doubt what you believe, but please don't pretend that you are speaking for this country's founders. Look at the Declaration of Independence, for instance:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men..."
You might find it an "inconvenient truth" that Jefferson rooted his argument in God-given rights, but he did. And he goes on to that the central function of government is to secure these God-given rights.
And if you delve a little more deeply into American history you will discover that Jefferson had originally written: "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable." So it seems to me far from a stretch to call defending the lives of the American people a "sacred duty."
Jane?
The most enervating thing about your writing is that you seem to be stuck in high-school debate mode. You advance positions that you clearly don't believe in, just for the sake of, I dunno, outrage. Whether it's extrapolating your days as a cash-strapped, ramen-slurping grad student into some broader understanding of legitimate poverty, or claiming to be "humane" in quantitatively assessing the causes and legitimacy of others' infirmity , you seem to write as if unencumbered by messy real-life experience.
One day you'll be older, Jane. If you have half a brain or half a heart, you'll cringe at some of the stuff you're writing today.
Oh I agree, we should torture.
We should start with the CXOs of publicly traded companies who defraud their investors, or who go to foreign nations to pay for the violent suppression of, say, union activity. Oh hell yeah, let's go there.
The only thing the rich fear is torture, that's what I've always thought, so let's have at it.
Then we won't have to worry about losing trillions to the next corporate scandal, like the S and L and Enron and Global Crossing and all the rest. Just torture them and torture whoever them name while being tortured and on and on. We';; clean corporate America in no time.
You know, I've always thought you were a shallow thinker with an appetite for self-promotion beyond any merit the quality your thoughts would naturally bring you.
But now I think you're a genius.
Let's test your ideas on you first, Megan McMoron. We'll assume that you must have broken some law at some point, your transgression of which can be revealed through torture and a brain scan. By the way, your new blog is torture, and that's the truth.
"Seems to me very likely to work"? I don't think it gets more facile than that.
Throughout this debate, those who defend torture constantly toss out these broad, baseless statements, or rely on the notorious Ticking Clock argument, rather than actually going to experts who know something about the subject.
You know why? Because they know they're wrong. In 5,000 years of human history, it's been proven, time and again, that torture is very effective ONLY at breaking prisoners and getting them to confess, not to the truth, but to anything they think their torturers want to hear.
Do you think the risks we face today - "My god, thousands could be killed!" - are greater than the risks we faced during WWII when actual fascistic military regimes had already conquered dozens of countries and were at war with us? Greater than the risk we faced during the cold war, when nuclear destruction was on the table as a very real threat?
The quintessential country faced with an existential challenge is Israel. Terror plots have already resulted in hundreds of deaths; and while they are in a reasonably strong position today, there have been plenty of points over the past 60 years when Arab armies were prepared to live up to their boasts to "Drive the Jews into the Sea". And yet, the State of Israel refuses to apply institutional torture, the Supreme Court has ruled against torture, and those misguided enough to use torture have been punished.
Why? 1) Because it is not moral, and as such is a threat to the fabric of the state, and 2) It has been proven to NOT BE EFFECTIVE.
What is effective is a psychological regimen in which the prisoner comes to identify with the captors, a variation on the Stockholm Syndrome. You don't get that by knocking people's teeth down their throats or making them think they're going to drown. You get that be turning their expectations on their heads and actually being kind to them.
I know it's terribly un-PC to indulge in coddling terrorists. But if torture doesn't work, and the psychological approach does, and this is known, then one has to conclude that the only reason people are pushing the one while deriding the other is because they want to torture. They like the idea of torture. Torture makes them feel tough and manly.
And that's just not a good enough reason to flush our national honor down the toilet.
Oh, one final point:
The false logic of the Ticking Bomb scenario:
If there ever was a case when this was really an issue (think "24"), the Jack Bowers of the world would go right ahead and rough the guy up to get the information, knowing that nobody in their right mind would ever prosecute them.
That's the god's honest truth.
However, the ticking bomb scenario is not what we're faced with.
The reality is that we're faced with a whole bunch of people in US custody who may be terrorists and know bad things, or may just be innocent guys pulled up in the dragnet - like the dozens we have already let go from Guantanamo because it turned out they weren't terrorists and didn't know anything, or the thousands swept up in Iraq who aren't insurgents, but just happened to be young an male and in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Even the actual terrorists we have captured who actually do know bad things don't have ticking-bomb style knowledge.
So the ticking bomb scenario asks us to take a single, extreme case, and use it to justify normative, ongoing behavior - behavior that is morally reprehensible and abhorrent for a civilized country to engage in, and which the actual experts also say doesn't work.
Now, please explain to me again who's being facile?
Torture does not give truth - it gets people to say what the torturers want them to. It is inhuman and it kills the souls of those asked to torture. It is reprehensible and against eveything America stands for. Since it provides no RELIABLE information, it is only done to get revenge on some "other" that is "bad". It's really the next step past torturing cats (which Bush did as a kid).
The bottom line - If you support torture, you are a loathsome Nazi, and should either get psychiatric help, or consider suicide for the sake of humanity.
Just a reminder that we should not accuse Megan of supporting torture. She thought that by making an argument that you can't oppose torture on rational grounds (because it DOES in some cases result in useful information) she would make opposing torture on MORAL grounds a stronger position.
I hope now she sees that even attempting to discuss torture AT ALL is a course fraught with peril. There are people in this country who don't believe there is such a thing as a moral argument against torture; indeed, their "morality" says that we SHOULD torture in order to advance our own agendas. These are monsters that Megan apparently did not believe existed, let alone that they would show up in her blog comments.
Welcome to the world, Megan. These are some of your fellow Americans.
"One day you'll be older, Jane. If you have half a brain or half a heart, you'll cringe at some of the stuff you're writing today."
Hopefully the same will be true of some of the commenters here.
I may be in the minority, but in certain extreme circumstances I have absolutely zero problem with the idea of torture. Say, for instance, that we know that there is a powerful bomb that's been planted somewhere in the city of NY and it's scheduled to detonate in 24 hours. We have captured one of the members of the terrorist cell involved in the plot, but he is refusing to talk. If you're the President of the United States, what do you do? If the choice comes down to either hooking up some jihadi scumbag's testicles to a car battery or standing by and watching thousands of innocent Americans die, as far as I'm concerned the car battery is gonna win out every time. Frankly, I wouldn't want anyone in the Oval Office who, under those circumstances, would resist using torture.
You might find it an "inconvenient truth" that Jefferson rooted his argument in God-given rights, but he did. And he goes on to that the central function of government is to secure these God-given rights.
Oh for God's sake. Do we really have to go into the Deist views of Jefferson versus the secular nation he helped build? Really? The hint comes in "their Creator" which gives people the choice of what deity they figure they were created by. "Our Creator" would have been a lot more direct, no?
Second point: As you may or may not know, the Declaration of Independence presaged the Articles of Confederation, not the current system of representative democracy. Not only that, it has only a symbolic resonance, not any kind of legal guidance as does the more explicit Constitution -- which remains the foundation of our system of government and our legal system. So again, your fear-soaked rhetoric notwithstanding, the government (again, this is the OATH every SINGLE government employee takes) pledges fealty to Constitution. If you really want to conflate civil responsibility with sacred duty, fine, but the government's SOLE "sacred duty" the thing they pledge is to protect the Constitution, not your sorry ass. If Jefferson thought it was a sacred duty to protect its citizens, it would have been in the Constitution. And yet its not. Why do you think that is? An oversight?
And if you delve a little more deeply into American history you will discover that Jefferson had originally written: "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable." So it seems to me far from a stretch to call defending the lives of the American people a "sacred duty."
So now things that aren't in the document are proof of your point? Funny. Other people might say, 'why DID Jefferson edit this point out' and draw an entirely different conclusion -- that in the final analysis, the word 'sacred' was the wrong choice of words.
This is called editing. Usually it's done to clarify and define what the idea the words should best express.
Finally, you dance on the head of a pin blithely discussing the difference between coercive and torture like there's some kind of actual difference. There isn't. The result of each is to break the person's will, make them fear for their life and inflict pain. The government used this very DEFENSE trying to avoid bringing Padilla to trial. They argued that the treatment he was subjected to made him physically and mentally unfit to stand trial.
If the choice comes down to either hooking up some jihadi scumbag's testicles to a car battery or standing by and watching thousands of innocent Americans die, as far as I'm concerned the car battery is gonna win out every time.
But that's NOT the choice. It's a false dichotomy. Torturing someone willing to die for their cause can only lead them to lie to you. In the meantime, you will have destroyed the humanity of whomever did the torturing. Dick Cheney can't be everywhere.
Torture is horribly wrong AND ineffective. It doesn't get the truth.
[cross-posted in part at Crooked Timber]
Megan McArdle writes:
The U.S. Army Field Manual:
Amnesty International press release:
Human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith:
Georgetown University News:
Rethinking the Psychology of Torture
Former Interrogators, Psychologists Join to Study the Effectiveness of Torture
The Torture Myth
By Anne Applebaum