It's rather as though someone responded seriously to Swift's "Modest Proposal" by pointing out that eating boiled baby isn't really very good for you anyway. Not only is it obvious that this isn't your motivating objection, but you always run the risk of someone putting out a new study declaring boiled baby "Nature's Most Perfect Food."I should say that I don't think you can never mix consequentialist and deontological arguments. But if you do so, you need to be clear that that is what you're doing: say, "I would be against torture no matter what, but . . . ", and you need a better argument than "I've heard dozens of people who agree with me say that torture never works!"
In G. K. Chesterton's satirical novel The Flying Inn, there's a chapter mostly about a journalist who thinks in this fashion:In his early days he had had a great talent for one of the worst tricks of modern journalism, the trick of dismissing the important part of a question as if it could wait, and appearing to get to business on the unimportant part of it. Thus, he would say, "Whatever we may think of the rights and wrongs of the vivisection of pauper children, we shall all agree that it should only be done, in any event, by fully qualified practitioners."
It may be that there is an ironclad argument against ever using extreme interrogation techniques because they're never as effective as some other method, but I haven't seen it. I've seen better effectiveness arguments against recent US policy . . . i.e., we used it ineffectively, too much. But that is not an argument for never waterboarding. It's an argument for making our waterboarding more effective (and don't think I don't see the dim little minds of trolls preparing to quote that out of context.)
The argument for not doing it at all has to rest on proving either that it's morally repugnant, or that there is no way to have an effective waterboarding policy, or that the costs exceed the benefits. Unfortunately, I seem to see too many opponents of current policy simply arguing that it never produces usable intelligence, so everyone else is a big fat moral cretin.
It feels slightly cheap, like supply-siders claiming there are absolutely no tradeoffs whatsoever to cutting taxes. The people who support waterboarding, and the Bush administration, perceive themselves to be wrestling with a genuine moral dilemma: how do you weigh the suffering of suspected terrorists against the suffering of innocent victims of terror? That's not an easy question, and if it were you who were trying to save, say, your child from a terrorist, your attitude about the utter impermissibility of torture might undergo a sea change.
That doesn't mean I agree we should waterboard--people will do lots of things for their children that should not be state policy. Only that some of the people I've heard saying they have to resort to these shaky arguments because their opponents are moral no-shows without a shred of decency seem to me to be awarding themselves vast moral credit for parroting, like a third-grader, the trivial truism that torture is bad. They find it easy to call their opponents immoral because they're ignoring a hard moral question. One that is, of course, easy to set aside if you seize on every piece of evidence suggesting that physical pressure is ineffective, and block out the people saying it's worked.
I'm against waterboarding. It's wrong. The state should not do this, for the same reason the state should not pull the wings off of flies. I've nearly suffocated from an asthma attack, and anyone who thinks it's not so bad is invited to come over to my house for some fun with a 3/4 full bathtub.
But I'm against it with the knowledge that this might, at least in some circumstance, result in some innocent person dying from lack of information. My defense is, first, that it is not okay to do purely morally repugnant things to save people--I wouldn't murder an innocent baby to save 1,000 people, either. And second, that a state which allows itself to do those things will do more harm to more people than any terrorist conceivably could.
As you can see, I do think there are ways to mix consequentialist arguments about the use of torture with the deontological argument about its morality. But I think it's easier to prove empirically that torture gets out of hand--as waterboarding clearly did, even though there's no evidence that the people administering it were specially bad, rogue agents--than that it never produces useful intelligence.
I haven't seen any particularly conclusive evidence either for or against the proposition that torture never generates useful intelligence (though as a practical matter, I can't see how it wouldn't work in some narrow situations where the information you're seeking is easily confirmable.) But also, as I've pointed out, we may well be very close to being able to make torture effective in many situations. If you can tell whether someone is lying by seeing which parts of their brain light up on a scan, then torture is an extraordinarily effective way to get information. Tell me what I want to know, or I will smash your fingers with this hammer. If you lie to me, I will know it, and smash your fingers harder. Some people will hold out, because they can resist pain, just as some people in the medieval era died rather than give their interrogators the satisfaction. But most people will break. If giving their interrogators good, useful information is the only way to make the pain stop, they will make. it. stop.
I don't want to live in a state that does that, for both moral and practical reasons. I think the greatest good for the greatest number lies in having a state that is forbidden to waterboard suspected (or known) terrorists. But I would feel just the same if those waterboardings were producing usable intelligence. And I don't know whether or not they are. So I'd like to keep my arguments to areas where I can make a really strong case.
Megan,
You need to, like, let us know sometimes what you're writing about before we sort of figure it out on our own in the 5th paragraph. You start this story about a reader responding to something and I don't have the slightest clue what she's talking about. I can figure it, but it makes for awkward reading when you don't give us any heads up. I suppose it makes sense if you were following a previous discussion. But for those of us who were not doing so, it's clear out of left field .
I think you kind of undermined your moral argument by suggesting that murdering an innocent baby is in the same moral category as water boarding Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Killing an innocent baby is a morally repugnant act. Making a terrorist afraid for his life or even inflicting pain or discomfort on him in order to get him to give up information so that we can capture his comrades before they launch another attack and kill more innocent people, that’s at worst debatable.
1. She didn't suggest they were in the same moral category; she was demonstrating that some acts are so terrible that we would never do them regardless of the potential good. That
2. What if we changed your second sentence from "afraid for his life" to "afraid for his infant daughter's life?"
1. Sure, and...?
2. If you have to defend the analogy by revising a substantial aspect of it, the analogy was probably flawed.
I thought she undermined her argument by equating waterboarding with pulling the wings off of a fly. Sure, pulling the wings off of a fly is wrong without a reasonable justification, but if it could prevent another 9/11 then I don't see why it is morally objectionable.
Thorley:
Is there a reason you're shying away from the word "torture" here? If you want to argue that it's okay to torture people under some circumstances, maybe it would be better to just come out and use the word.
And we aren't dealing with people who have been convicted of anything in court, or even with people who we can in any sense be sure are terrorists. We're talking about people we've captured, who we think were trying to carry out an attack. Or maybe people who we think know how to find the guys responsible for some attack. Or people who might know how to find *those* people. Torture as a way of getting information is slmost certain to be applied to innocent people, especially if you're imagining using it in a ticking time bomb kind of situation. (If you're convinced there's a ticking time bomb, are you really going to wait a couple hours to verify this guys identity before you start trying to beat answers out of him?)
This issue arose out of a particular context, the deaths of 3,000 American civilians from an Al-Qaida terrorist attack. The Laws of War which include but are not wholly the rules about prisoners need to be considered. According to these Laws, if one combatant side breaks a law, then the other side can break the law in a compensatory fashion as a demonstration that the breaking of the Laws would not be tolerated. This is the argument that 'allowed,' I think unfortunately, the firebombing of Tokyo or the bombing of Dresden. With Al-Qaida's attack Sept 11, you had a major breach of the Laws of War. The rough treatment, torture within the bounds of training exercises of our own troops, added the American utilitarian objective to the treatment according to the Laws of War of those who had by their participation with or continuing presence in Al-Qaida agreed to the earlier violation of the Law of War and thus were subject to the breaking of a law of war as a demonstration of the intolerability of their behavior.
if one combatant side breaks a law, then the other side can break the law in a compensatory fashion as a demonstration that the breaking of the Laws would not be tolerated.
This argument didn't work on my Mom when my sister hit me, and I don't think it should work now.
Actually:
.So you say Mom was involved, i.e., there was a superceding authority that could call both of you into line with substantial consequences.
International law doesn't really have an authority in that position. That being the case, the only way to meaningfully enforce it once blows are already being exchanged is to permit defined tiers of retaliatory escalation, such that ideally neither party will be willing to initiate the first violation, else will suffer for doing so.
Here you go again with 'didn't work'.
If the other side is shooting your soldiers taken prisoner, what recourse do you have? Maybe an International Court decision in The Hague?
No. As has been done before, you start shooting the prisoners you take. I believe this happened in the Korean war.
War is the unfortunate circumstance where both sides are attempting to kill as many of the other side as possible to gain territory, defend territory or gain some political advantage. To suggest that 'rules' other than the most broad and potentially universally acceptable could apply in such circumstances is crazy. The only rule is 'Don't lose'. Otherwise you, your family, and many of your friends will die.
The OSS tortured during the second world war, and many of their members suffered torture and death when captured. The US has become the predominant military power because they are capable and willing to do what is necessary to win over opponents. The Navy Seals last week didn't torture those pirates, they just quickly scrambled their brains will well aimed gun fire. That is laudable, whereas making someone suffer fear with some water is not ok?
Most of the fuss here is moral preening. A principled stand is to either say yes we will do it under these circumstances and face the political storms that inevitably will come as a result, which the Bush administration has done, or to say no under no circumstances whatever the cost.
Most of the discussion is unprincipled self image polishing. In the heat of the moment the politicians agreed to do whatever, but when politically expedient, take potshots or try to shuffle the blame to someone else. Or say hopefully that it doesn't work, so we really don't have to take a stand. Or worse, and the people who say this are disgusting, make it illegal, but if someone has to do it, go ahead. We will prosecute at our convenience.
Derek
"I've pointed out, we may well be very close to being able to make torture effective in many situations."
Regardless, it is still up to you to prove that torture produces better information than any other method.
If, as you assert, it may be possible to tell when a person is lying, what then is the basis for resorting to torture?
The circumstance you propose, an immediate need to recover a specific, life saving bit of information from the only possible source, is not, in itself, an excuse or defense for torture.
Meanwhile, you have not even bothered to investigate whether or not other means of gaining information might not be more practical.
All you have is one hypothetical out of infinite possibilities.
And the truth about all of this is that the only real use for torture is to gain False confessions.
pbh
You've clearly missed the entire purpose of this post.
But at the same time, I think pbh goes a long way toward proving Megan's point with his/her last sentence.
Megan thinks it more useful to argue against torture on moral grounds rather than on its potential for extracting information.
I think she gives away the argument too quickly. One person's morality is another person's situational ethics.
Of course there are moral reasons against torture. But there are also practical reasons as well.
My point is that the burden of proof is on the person advocating torture over any other method of interrogation.
pbh
What if you are wrong and torture can get information that saves lives. Does that mean it's ok?
In fact, that is the argument of those who carried out or approved the actions at issue here. What if they are right, and you are wrong?
Derek
"What if you are wrong"
That kind of question is simply lazy. You make no offer of proof, you merely speculate.
If you want to use torture, you must first prove that it is better than any other method of interrogation.
pbh
I still think you're missing the point. Megan was trying to offer a more effective way to argue against torture. She apparently thinks that the moral argument is stronger, and also (I think) that people do a poor job of making the practical arguments, which makes the moral argument less persuasive. You do this in several points:
(1) You say "the only real use for torture is to gain False confessions."
Torture certainly isn't magic interrogation method that does everything, but you're statement is clearly false. It doesn't take a lot of field experience to realize that if somebody has a piece of information, they'll be likely to divulge it under torture. It has to be a piece of information that can be verified to be useful, but that's clearly a real use other than gaining false confessions. The statement you make is likely to cause anybody you're trying to persuade (that is the point isn't it?) that you are misleading them or have not thought very much about the issue, neither of which thoughts will make them more likely to be persuaded by you.
(2) Another example is your question from your first post: "If, as you assert, it may be possible to tell when a person is lying, what then is the basis for resorting to torture?"
The basis would be to get information. Yes, one issue in interrogation is telling when somebody is lying, but another issue is getting them to talk in the first place. If we had perfectly accurate lie detectors, we could combine it with torture to solve both of these issues. That doesn't justify torture, but you implying that having accurate lie detectors leaves torture with no purpose is likely to elicit the same response as (1) above: either you're deliberately misleading or have not thought the issue through.
(3)A third example is you call Derek lazy b/c you think the burden of proof is on him.
You don't really explain why he has to prove torture is better than any other method of interrogation. If you're making a practical argument as to why we shouldn't use torture, you have to give a practical reason that the other side has the burden of proof.
Maybe these arguments would be ok in a debate format, but if your goal is to actually persuade people, and not "win" an argument, they're counterproductive. That's why commenters say you're missing the point; it's that you're giving perfect examples of why Megan's point is valid.
The argument for not doing it at all has to rest on proving either that it's morally repugnant, or that there is no way to have an effective waterboarding policy, or that the costs exceed the benefits. Unfortunately, I seem to see too many opponents of current policy simply arguing that it never produces usable intelligence, so everyone else is a big fat moral cretin.
I'm still not seeing a logically compelling reason why you think this is the case.
The fallacy here is that there's a need to make an argument against doing it at all. Not torturing at all is one of the fundamental concepts of America. So I need to hear a really strong argument why we should do it, not the reverse. This has become muddled in some people's minds because we already did it, but the baseline for America is not torturing.
Not torturing at all is one of the fundamental concepts of America.
Oh? Why do you say that? "Fundemental concepts of America" is a pretty squishy descriptor, don't you think?
It's moral laziness. There is no compelling reason to torture, so only evil people will torture.
What if there is in fact moral reasons to torture? What if in fact, in the instances at issue here, actionable intelligence was gained that prevented some nasty terrorist attack that could have cost thousands of lives? And if the torture hadn't been used, that information would not have come forward in a timely manner, and those attacks would have been successful? Would it then have been a moral failure, a deriliction of duty for the officers, having a good idea that the person had some information they needed, to not use every method at their disposal to get it to save lives?
Or are you hoping that there is no occasion for making a decision that will cost no matter what side you choose? That facts, truth and reality make that decision moot?
As I said, moral laziness.
Derek
And if the torture hadn't been used, that information would not have come forward in a timely manner, and those attacks would have been successful?
Nobody can know that, since we aren't issued special telescopes to view alternate and counterfactual universes. "Oft evil will shall evil mar."
Would it then have been a moral failure, a dereliction of duty for the officers, having a good idea that the person had some information they needed, to not use every method at their disposal to get it to save lives?
Every method? So it's perfectly all right to murder one person (not just allow him to go to his death) to save five? In that case, what's wrong with murdering five, or five million, to save one?
The whole point of morality is that it supplies absolute side constraints on choice. It is not just another factor to plug into a constraint optimization system.
The question I have is this: would a forced interrogation technique not involving pain or fear be acceptable? Examples are SciFi-ish, but not all the way impossible: brain reading device, or a [working!] truth serum.
I’m not sure why it would follow that the creation of a brain scanning device is going to result in less rather than more pain and/or discomfort on the part of the person being interrogated. Pretty much every sci-fi example of a brain scanning device has had the problem of what happens when the person whose brain is being scanned tries to resist by putting up some sort of mental barrier or “beat the machine” (similarly to the way people beat lie detectors today). The answer invariably has been: break through the barriers which is usually as traumatic (if not more) than most of the “coercive interrogation” techniques we’re debating today.
My hunch is that decent brain scanning technology used competently would completely obviate the need for torture because it would confirm that all the people who claim to know nothing useful do, in fact, know nothing useful.
For me, simple Bayesian statistics rules out the usefulness of torture. Suppose we have a _24_ scenario: there actualy is one guy in the world who knows where a bomb is and how to defuse it. Further suppose you've collected a jail full of a few hundred detainees who claiming they aren't that guy and don't know him. Now: you haven't selected these people purely at random so they do have a much higher chance of being terrorists or friends-of-terrorist than would an average person picked off the street. Perhaps they're a thousand times more likely to be terrorists than the average person. Heck, make it ten thousand times more likely. The base rate of "is a useful-to-us terrorist" in the general population is still so ridiculously low that the chances are very very very small that any of these people have the info we're looking for. In fact, even if one of these people *claims* to be a terrorist or to know one - without having first been tortured, even! - the odds don't favor the conclusion that they are telling the truth. We should be very skeptical of people claiming to know the information we are looking for.
So in all likelihood you've got - and we had - a prison full of people who don't know anything useful. If torture is an option, you can torture these people until one of them "breaks" and invents some information you find plausible, then waste more resources tracking down the "leads" thereby generated - that's exactly what the Bush Administration did. Whereas if torture *isn't* an option, you just have to keep looking for actual true information, following up on whatever leads you've got and trying to find people who actually do know something useful.
Torture is what you do when you don't have any valid leads. But when you don't have any valid leads the right thing to do is keep looking for valid leads or wait for them to turn up. If you have a wild hunch as to what might be a lead you can follow that, but beating prisoners until one of them "confirms" your wild hunch is unlikely to be a useful occupation.
I realize my model actually fails the "North Korea" test another poster here has proposed. Were we facing uniformed soldiers of an enemy that had declared war on us, that might indeed be a different matter. Then we could at least be relatively confident the plot *existed* and the person in front of us was part of it. But in this case what the government asked for and got was essentially the right to torture in order to gather evidence towards a *conspiracy theory* - the theory that Iraq was "behind" 9/11. And that, I think, we can dismiss out of hand as a bad idea.
Suppose you're worried that bad guys might be planning to blow up Congress, so you arrest a hundred suspects but after using all your best non-torture interrogation methods you still don't have a decent lead on a plot to blow up Congress. What conclusion do you reach from this?
(a) we were wrong; there actually *is* no current plot to blow up Congress.
(b) maybe there is such a plot, but *this* batch of prisoners doesn't know anything about it they haven't already told us
(c) there is such a plot and one of these guys knows all about it but he's just too gosh-darned committed to his evil cause to let it slip under "normal" interrogation so we've gotta torture to get it out.
Assume that torture "works" in the sense that it gets a confession from almost everyone and that we torture all one hundred prisoners. If we're in state (a) or (b), torture will produce one hundred confessions, all of them false. If we're in state (c), torture will produce 100 confessions, all but one or two of them false. Your best case scenario is that the good info is hiding in a thicket of bad info and your worst case scenario is that there is no good info at all but you've got 100 new false leads to check out. The more people you capture and torture, the worse the quality of your overall pool of intel. And it can easily balloon from there - detainees give you all the names they can think of, enlarging the pool of people feeding you false stories until that one true one - that might not even exist! - is completely hidden in the morass.
I'm having a hard time putting myself in the mindset of somebody who would think torture *could* be useful to the US, but the best I can figure is that you have to believe one of a few premises I lack:
(1) torture has *no* false-positives; nobody ever confesses falsely under it
(2) If people confess falsely, we'll somehow be able to recognize this really quickly
(3) We are really good at telling who our enemies are; everyone we billed as "the worst of the worst" really was that bad.
I can't shake the feeling that people like Megan are mostly thinking about the false-negative rate, not the false-positive rate, when they claim it's theoretically possible torture might "work" in this sort of context. My contrary intuition is that even if the false-negative rate were *zero* there's a good chance torture would be counterproductive.
patagonia,
Don't blame Megan; I must apologize myself. I had tried more than once to get a Moveable Type ID, and for some reason I never received the confirming e-mails that would allow me actually to post.
What Megan posted is part of the e-mail I sent her along with my expression of frustration that I couldn't seem to get into the comments here. It was kind of her to post a bit of it for me, but I do understand that it looks a bit bewildering.
Look: for "torture is wrong," read "eating babies is wrong." For "torture doesn't work," read "eating babies will make you ill." If someone went around getting out the news that the most up-to-date and hygienic diets uniformly exclude baby, and all the best authorities agree that eating babies is bad for your health, would you welcome that as additional evidence that eating babies is wrong, or would you think it was irrelevant as to whether it was wrong or right?
I tried to avoid direct SciFi parallels... the idea of extreme pain/irrecoverable damage from using a brain scanner has certainly been introduced by the writers in order to make its use morally ambiguous or outright repugnant. My point is different: is the pain/fear component of torture morally unacceptable or the sheer fact of forcible extraction of information? Because if it is the former, then we are talking about "better, gentler torture" after all.
Oops... replied to a wrong comment, sorry.
Right on. The analogy is exact, and the level of moral repugnance, while not identical, ain't that far apart neither.
OK, but if the government pulling the wings off flies led to a cure for cancer, would it be morally permissible?
Or, perhaps more realistically, is it morally permissible for the government to harvest embryos (or babies, if you prefer) for stem cell research that could cure many diseases?
Actually, pulling the wings off flies might be a good diversionary use for many government agencies. It would be a petty, vaguely cruel, and functionally meaningless task perfectly suited toward bureuacratic instincts, and it would prevent them from doing more destructive things with their time.
Tell this to the people who fix your roads, inspect your food, police your streets, respond to fires, guard the border, etc.
I did say "many", not "all".
We would absolutely be better off if the people who "guard the border" did something else with their time.
Glen, it was one of those people who foiled the millennium bomb plot.
tsotha, that's interesting but I don't find it compelling compared to the costs border guards impose. How many people have needlessly died because our border guards turned away refugees? What is the net cost of delaying *every single person* who crosses a border? Or the net cost of preventing Americans from hiring cheap migrant labor? Or the costs of the War on Drugs in both directions, compared to the benefits of free trade in substances and free movement of people? How many people have suffered during border crossings due to behavior somebody deemed "suspicious" or due to having their name on some list?
Foiling a "plot" once in a blue moon doesn't do much to offset all that.
Wasn't there a movie with Gene Hackman that dealt with that very issues. Line I remember was, "If you could cure cancer by killing one person, wouldn't you have to at least try?"
That was 'Swordfish' with John Travolta.
I don't know if I could kill an innocent to save 1,000 or even 100,000 lives. But I do know that if I did, I'd not expect to be protected by the law.
Torture should only be applied in those circumstances when the interrogators are so certain of the direness of the situation that they are willing to pay the legal consequences of their action.
Moral laziness encapsulated in one comment.
Let someone else take the risk, and let us all benefit.
Derek
Here's my moral calculus, a simple cost-benefit analysis:
Cost:
Benefit:
one millionth vs 90. My moral cost benefit analysis says 'no torture' hands down.
Derek, feel free to choose your own ratios. I'd be curious to know how you weigh things yourself. For example, under your morality, does torturing someone unnecessarily have any moral cost at all?
Tom West,
Torture should only be applied in those circumstances when the interrogators are so certain of the direness of the situation that they are willing to pay the legal consequences of their action.
Yes, indeed. It seems to me that you should not use these means unless you are willing to die for it. And the corollary is that we really do have to impose whatever legal penalty we've agreed on. No waivers or leniency or pardons.
I think, myself, that torture ought to be allowable only when the person deciding to use it accepts an automatic death penalty.
Not going to happen unless there is a well-understood and defined line between "torture" and "harsh interrogation". Inasmuch as one is not available now, what are the odds of ever developing one that will be consistently understood and applied?
What is the morality of punishing those who would cause discomfort to get information, yet praising those who kill?
Derek
A decent compromise may be possible. While obviously we don't want to allow the state to routinly torture suspects, but its hard to argue against them using to torture to get a question like "where is the atomic bomb" answered.
What we need to do is isolate those very specific instances where torture is necessary, legalize that, and then actually prosecute people who break that rule. It's stupid to have systemic processes illegal, and to keep them that way because they are wrong.
No, I don't think that's a good idea. That's Dershowitz's argument, and he makes about as good a case as anyone could, but ... no.
The only possible justification for torture is that the alternative is unthinkable. If it's really unthinkable, it should be something you'd die to prevent. And I do think you ought to be held to that, though God knows that's going to be practically impossible. If someone actually did manage to defuse a ticking nuke by, say, methodically snipping off the bomb-maker's fingers joint by joint with a wire cutter, and the result was that the bomb was found and defused, I imagine it'd be difficult to execute the guy who did the snipping. But you really should, because no one should torture unless s/he values the information more than his/her own life, and that's the only way to make sure.
It's unhealthy to put in place systems that require people to work against their own self interest in order to accomplish tasks that benefit society as a whole.
It's unhealthy to put in place systems that require people to work against their own self interest in order to accomplish tasks that benefit society as a whole.
The problem is any loop hole *will* be exploited. It's the nature of law.
Unlike Ms. Thomas, I think a trial by jury is acceptable and an automatic death penalty is too harsh. But anyone who tortures another should be prepared at the very least to risk a lot of time in prison unless he feels that the case is so overwhelming that no jury will convict him.
Unfair to the individual? Yes. But every law is a trade-off, and the trade-off of the injustice in the case of the miniscule chance of a "ticking time bomb" scenario is easily outweighed by the justice brought by prohibiting torture for all the other cases where it would otherwise be used.
The only possible justification for torture is that the alternative is unthinkable.
But what if I think you might know of someone with a ticking nuclear bomb?
I think the previous administration thought what they were doing was necessary and right, because another 9/11 was unthinkable. It is the classic "Do the ends justify the means?" argument. My answer is still no.
No such 'ticking time bomb' scenario exists. This is real life, not an episode of '24'. Look at the torture which was actually done: We waterboarded KSM 183 times over the course of a month. In what sense could such an interrogation be used to get information on a timeline? Interrogation, even bolstered by the abhorrence of torture, is a chess match. It takes time to sort out the lies from the truth, and the results are never clear cut. If a terrorist actually had information about an imminent plot and was captured, he would have a ticking clock in his head of how long he had to hold out for the plot to succeed. In such circumstances, he could dissemble for long enough to run out the clock, and simply torturing him harder wouldn't work, because the problem is checking on the false leads and determining the truth in time. It's very convenient for the Right to paint these Jack Bauer scenarios where we break someone down just in time to prevent disaster, but that's why they call it 'fiction'.
No such 'ticking time bomb' scenario exists.
I suppose you mean "no such scenario exists or will ever exist", otherwise your assertion is meaningless. If that's what you mean you're probably wrong.
That's exactly what I mean, is that not only has no such scenario exists, but no could ever exist. The idea of such a scenario is the realm of fiction, and there's a reason why '24' isn't believable, ya dig?
I see. Then you agree should you be mistaken it's okay to torture the owner of the ticking bomb?
The Bush administration's stance on torture is similar to the old stance of the Holy Inquisition. Torure is regretable, but the damage to mens' souls and Holy Church/threat to American citizens and American intersts is worse: therefore touture is justified. Further, anyone we suspect is guilty - and therefore subject to torture - until proven innocent.
Both attitudes are based on absolute (deontological) views of what is bad and what is worse. To oppose them with an equally absolute view does not end the argument.
I am a moral relativist. Consequences matter to me. No consequence is ever certain, but I judge that the odds ae very high that a society which slides into either the view that the suspected are guilty until proven innocent, or the view that official torture is justified, will suffer from and be debased by the consequences. One which slides into both is at extraordinarily acute risk.
Or to put it another way, the Fathers of the US Constitution were right to outlaw cruel and unusual punishments. If "peine fort et dure" (pressing suspects with greter and greater weights to make them plead to an accusation) had not already disappeared from English legal practice, I judge that the Founding Fathers would have also outlawed cruel and unusual interrogations.
Yet many of them had no problem with torture--for the masses they considered non-persons and were held in slavery. And good luck if you were a slave and tried to escape and made a habeas plea. That really is moral relativism. Bravo!
So what's your point, Jennis? That because the founding fathers owned slaves it's fine for us to torture?
I think the temptation to resort to these arguments is that those who are opposed to a particular means are often cast by their adversaries as being opposed to the ends. And the arguments for these policies often understandably focus on the ends.
So, someone opposing embryonic research, is often cast as being opposed to science and to curing terrible diseases. One way to beat this rap is to point the promise of adult stem cell research, and say that should be exhausted first.
Or, the one opposed to waterboarding is cast as being pro-terrorist, not patriotic, etc. So, it's tempting to latch on to any argument that waterboarding and torture are actually less effective.
This doesn't make this a prudent way to argue, but it's understandable.
I second Megan here. On a side note, I hope that once we have those amazing technologies that can read minds - we at least do not have to physically hurt the suspect anymore?
PS: I still find those who defend torture based on it "it works" far more scary than those who dilute the overall arguments with "it does not work".
A few points/questions:
1. What evidence is there that waterboarding got out of hand? We only waterboarded three people.
2. Interrogation for information is not the same thing as a punishment for a crime.
3. Cruelty is not describing the harshness of the punishment, but that it is done to achieve some gratification or satisfaction rather than to prevent future crimes.
4. Finally, many people state categorically "we should never torture" as a means to avoid actually addressing the question "did the methods the CIA used actually constitute torture?" I don't personally consider waterboarding to be torture, since we have regularly waterboarded members of our own military. Something labelled morally repugnant must be so in *all* circumstances. But I also don't try to claim that people who disagree with me means their opinion makes them morally deficient.
Jonbig - 1) That's a blatant lie. We did not waterboard 3 people, we had a pervasive program of waterboarding people that went on for years. Read the memos. The facts are out now, you don't just get to make stuff up.
2) You're right, it's not the same. We're allowed to do things as punishment that we're not allowed to do for interrogation. What's your point?
3) Besides the terrible grammar (should read "Cruelty does not describe..."), you're just wrong. What you describe is called 'sadism'. I assume that you're talking about cruelty in the sense of 'cruel and unusual punishment'. If that's so, there's a hundred years of supreme court case law to govern this, you don't get to sum it up in one sentence even if you knew what you were talking about.
4) We waterboard members of our own military as part of the SERE program, which is a program designed specifically TO TEACH OUR HARDEST SOLDIERS TO RESIST TORTURE TECHNIQUES which may be used on them if they become prisoners of war. The fact that we waterboard as part of SERE indicates clearly that waterboarding IS torture.
Also on this point, it's classic reductionism to talk only about waterboarding, on its own. This is, of course, bull. We weren't waterboarding in a vacuum, it was done in combination with sleep deprivation, starvation, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, and religious abuse. The idea that these things together could not constitute torture is laughable. In fact, the US has in the past (post WWII) prosecuted enemy soldiers for employing these exact same techniques. Watch something other than FoxNews.
1) Where's your evidence?
2) My point is that any discussion of "cruel and unusual punishment" is not applicable to interrogation.
3) Don't nitpick my grammar and I won't nitpick yours. And funny thing, but my dictionary defines sadism as being cruel. And defines cruel as "enjoying the pain and distress of others". So you haven't contradicted me, you've provided a synonym.
4) Sex vs rape is not an comparable analogy. I said the action must be *always* morally repugnant. Sex does not fit the bill.
"The idea that these things together could not constitute torture is laughable."
Clearly you haven't read the memos, since your only real response is "it is too!"
John McCain stated unequivocally that waterboarding is torture.
I'm inclined to weight his views a lot more heavily that I do the Jack Bauer wannabes who say that waterboarding isn't torture.
Or perhaps it's because his statement also confirms what is patently obvious based on the historical views of waterboarding. (See commentaries on waterboarding's use in the Spanish Inquisition, conviction and execution of Japanese military perpetrators after WWII, etc.)
The view that exposing US airmen to waterboarding within SERE proves that waterboarding is not torture is laughable on the face of it. OGWiseman above and Wiredog below have ably rebutted this specious view.
Rofe II:
You appear to be of the same school as the rest here. Just responding with "laughable on the fact of it" is not a reasoned argument. Neither OWiseman nor Wiredog actually rebutted it at all, just like you aren't eiher.
You also make the fundamental mistake that the term "waterboarding" refers to *exactly* the same action by all of those different sources you refer to.
jonbig - In fact, they did rebut your argument. Or are you going to hang your argument on the elements of SERE that protected the airmen from endless sessions of torture or the possibility that they would be tortured to death? If so, that doesn't at all counter the fact that the methodologies that were used came from actual torture conducted on our guys by our enemies. So the safeguards applied to protect our guys in a training course don't by any conceivable logic redefine the torture methodologies as non torture.
I also find it interesting that you simply ignored John McCain's position on the matter.
Since you're obviously still completely confused about what my point is, you don't know if they rebutted it or not.
Point 4 is utter bullshit.
The people who get waterboarded as part of SERE training are volunteers. The people waterboarded after being taken prisoner were not. It is, as Saletan pointed out, the difference between S&M and rape.
You also fail to understand my point. An act that is torture is *always* torture, whether inflicted on someone who willing or not. Beating someone to death, maiming, etc.
Acts that don't reach that threshold aren't torture.
MM - I sure am glad that you worked yourself around by the end of that to saying that we shouldn't torture people. This quote:
"...seem to me to be awarding themselves vast moral credit for parroting, like a third-grader, the trivial truism that torture is bad."
Is still repugnant. "Torture is bad" is not a truism, and not trivial. Not even close. As, in fact, you point out later in your own post, when you declare that you would not torture no matter what (I will use the word torture here. Any serious person will do the same). And frankly, you're right to say that a deontological argument is all we need: The idea that we're even having a discussion about whether torture works is insane. In fact, it's anathema to the entire philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization.
But if you want to discuss effectiveness, then you must acknowledge that not only is the issue more complex than Air America makes it seem, it's actually more complex than YOU are making it seem. It's not possible to frame the effectiveness question as a binary choice between torture yielding information or not.
Torture techniques are used primarily not as intelligence gathering tools, but as tools to produce FALSE confessions. Torture literally creates a false reality, as the tortured make up wild stories in an attempt to stop the torture. This, in the end, is why torture is anathema in the West: In order to preserve the truth.
When we examine the spectacular intelligence failures of the Bush administration, we can speculate on the effects torture may have had. (We can't know for sure without total access to the records. That's why a Truth Commission is so important.) What we do know is that Cheney went to the CIA and demanded that they find a link between Al Qaeda and Sadaam. They didn't find one with normal interrogations. Cheney demanded that they push harder, and they started using torture. A year or so after that we invaded Iraq. I would speculate that torture played a major role in that intelligence failure, and it's only an example. Bush was briefed at one point that a nuclear attack on NYC was imminent, when no such plot existed. Where did that rumor come from? Was it torture?
That's the point, and that's why torture is ineffective. Not because it doesn't make people tell you things, but because it makes people tell you all kinds of crazy things, and it destroys your ability to get at the truth. Of course, it's becoming increasingly clear that the goal of the Bush administration with regard to intelligence was never to get at the truth, but rather to justify the decisions they had made based on ideology. But insofar as America is a nation interested in the truth, torture and the 'intelligence' it provides will continue to be ineffective. Plus, of course, it's abhorrent and must be stamped out in order to preserve even the tatters of our moral authority.
"Bush was briefed at one point that a nuclear attack on NYC was imminent"
Link please.
I read it yesterday, and I'm looking now...hold on.
Here we are, from The Atlantic's own Andrew Sullivan:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/10/imaginationland.html
Sorry, I don't really know how to make links smaller.
Sullivan's gotten so shrill on the subject that his posts have lost all credibility. This is another example.
"On October 11, 2001 ... at the Presidential Daily Intelligence Briefing, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, informed the president that a CIA agent code-named Dragonfire had reported that Al Qaeda terrorists possessed a ten-kiloton nuclear bomb, evidently stolen from the Russian arsenal. According to Dragonfire, this nuclear weapon was now on American soil, in New York City."
Since we had no terrorists in custody as of 10/11/01, it couldn't very well have been a torture-induced confession! It didn't take torture to get Tenet's CIA to come to stupid conclusions.
Torture techniques are used primarily not as intelligence gathering tools, but as tools to produce FALSE confessions
Oh please. This is just propaganda.
What we do know is that Cheney went to the CIA and demanded that they find a link between Al Qaeda and Sadaam.
No, we do not know that. What we know is some unknown and possibly wholly imaginary person is making accusations along those lines.
Quite a lengthy discussion on this topic, and I still am not following it. The two types of arguments are entirely different. It is possible to discuss whether torture works and whether it is a good idea. It is impossible to have a real discussion about whether waterboarding is moral. That is, you can discuss it, but it's based on feelings, not arguments. That's why no one has presented arguments on that here, aside from, You're a moral cretin if you don't think... You could bring Scriptural proofs if you have any. Aside from that, what kind of real argument is possible? You feel It's Always Wrong. I don't; I think it is immoral to let innocent people die to save an evil murderer from pain. You don't.
In that sense, this is like the abortion question. When Does Human Life Begin? Consult your local clergyman. People tend to argue on peripheral issues, because the moral questions are not really arguable.
Mike - Check out my above post, where I argue that the prohibition on torture is one of the fundamental philosophical underpinnings of Western Civilization. Let me restate my moral argument in a few premises:
1) Truth is one of the fundamental values of our civilization.
2) Torture is not used to access the truth. It is used to create a new truth which matches the shape of the torturer's desire. Besides any arguments about human dignity, as a pragmatic matter, torture obscures the truth rather than exposing it. (As evidence, vide the spectacular intelligence failures of the previous administration and, even more so, the pro-active attempts to obscure reality in the service of ideology.)
3) In order to maintain our culture's attachment to the truth, and our rejection of concentrated, sustained power, we must stop anyone from employing tactics which obscure the truth.
4) We must never torture.
Now, there are two problematic parts of this argument, which I'll attempt to defend: 1) My use of the word 'torture' will raise hackles for some. Consider a scenario under which an American soldier was capture, starved, kept awake for weeks on end, beated, had his head slammed repeatedly into a wall, forced to spit on a cross, and then waterboarded. Would you, would anyone, fail to call that torture? No? Then it's torture when we do it. 2) My claim that 'torture obscures the truth rather than exposes it'. This is the sticky part, since anyone who cannot already see the Bush administration's blatant manipulation of the truth is being, in my opinion, willfully obtuse. I don't have time in this response to lay out for you the myriad lies and deceptions of the administration, nor to tease out all the connections between those lies and torture, but if you'll simply read the recently released memos on torture, I think the deception and disingenuous language really speaks for itself. The point is that I'm not making an emotional argument here. I am in favor of killing terrorists. But I am not in favor of torturing them, because of the effect that torture has on US.
I think the entire discussion here, above and below this comment, shows that my impression is correct. People are presenting how they feel about it. Aside from religious sources, there is no other way to really make a moral "proof", though many would like to try.
No offense intended, but I presume that you are not accepting anyone else's argument here, nor are they likely to accept yours.
So what do people think they are doing in these kinds of discussion? Admit that (religious sources excepted) what's happening here is entirely subjective, and just vote on who has more people who feel the same way.
Very well put, I couldn't agree more.
So, why oh why did you have to include this passage?
Let's change the context a bit.
I hope we live in the kind of society in which people, when asked their opinion on the relative merits and faults of human experimentation, parrot "like third-graders, the trivial truism that human experimentation is bad". And that they accuse people arguing otherwise of being "moral no-shows without a shred of decency". They "find it easy to call their opponents immoral" because they are treating it has a moral question.
But you can always discuss human experimentation on its merits. You can argue that sacrificing some lives today would save countless more in the future. If somebody replies that human experimentation is presently not very cost-effective, you can further argue that that's not an argument against human experimentation; that's an argument for the improvement of it. And so on.
Which leads us to another truism: most people, when discussing what they consider a morally outraging issue, refuse to adopt a casual tone or engage in cost-benefit analysis. Torture is no exception. Unfortunately, this makes certain themes very difficult to discuss. Not because people choose to ignore the moral question, but precisely because they understand it very well, and react to them emotionally.
I thought that was the whole point of the post. But then Megan derides people who do take a moral stance, her stance, as righteous lazy parrots. That's what makes this passage so puzzling.
I found that passage to be unfortunate as well, but it does make one interesting point, albeit in a backhanded way. It's so obviously true that torture is bad that a third grader knows it. So how come the Right and the Media don't seem to get it?
Yes, torture is bad - I doubt anyone disagrees. Why don't people on the left get the idea that there are people who do not consider waterboarding torture?
Interesting. Are you for or against embryonic stem cell research? Specifically, are you in favor of creating human embryos for the purpose of harvesting their stem cells?
If so, then--as far as I am concerned--you are in favor of "performing medical experiments on humans."
And it won't help to argue that embryos aren't human beings: *I* think they are (and I'm in pretty good company), so--as far as I am concerned--there is no moral distance between harvesting embryonic stem cells and "performing medical experiments on [fully-formed, adult] humans."
David - This is a side point from the thread, but it's an interesting one. From your response, I gather that you really believe (or at least believe that you believe) that there isn't any difference between a just-fertilized, less-than-a-week-old embryo, and a five-year-old child. That's interesting to me, and I find that hard to believe, for the following reason:
If there was a clinic in the USA where they were killing five-year-old children, I would get a rifle, go down and stand outside the clinic, and forcibly and violently stop anyone who tried to bring their child there to be killed. I would die to stop that from happening. Now, happily, since I don't believe that a collection of a few cells that isn't even visible to the naked eye, or even a 3-month-old fetus, is the same as a kindergartner, I don't have to do that with abortion clinics. But why aren't you? I'm not saying this as a challenge. I don't want you to actually do this. But I don't understand the moral psychology that allows a person to condemn people for having abortions as murderers, but allow said murders to go on. I just don't get it.
On the issue of what constitutes a human life, I believe as a matter of faith and doctrine that human life begins at conception. And short of abandoning my religious beliefs--which is to say, abandoning my faith in God--that's pretty much it for me.
Now, clearly, we live in a fallen world: that, too, is a matter of faith and doctrine. And we are called to witness to the world to turn away from the world, the flesh, and the Devil, and to turn toward God.
But what we are not called on to do is to cure all the worlds' ills: especially when it would require us to commit a greater sin in the process.
Why do you think that the misguided souls who bomb abortion clinics and kill abortionists are pretty much universally condemned by the Christian community? Killing to prevent killing is exactly the kind of instrumentalist thinking that we are trying to avoid. Human life is sacred: it is also incommensurate. As much as I would like abortionists to stop plying their murderous trade (and I pray for that daily), it is not my place to kill them to stop it. If I do, I am exactly on their moral level.
The only way to stop this sort of thing--short of the Eschaton--is to persuade people not to do it. Only by making people realize that what they are doing is a grave moral ill can we hope to stop abortions from happening. And--in the process--we must develop alternatives. That's why I support CareNet and other similar organizations that provide alternatives to abortion.
But--in your scenario--I could certainly see grabbing the weapon being used to kill the five-year-olds, even if that meant my own life.
David - It's hard to believe that your response to my response, and this post, were written by the same person. You say that it's not your place to kill to stop killing, when it comes to abortion, because it brings you to their level. And I give you credit, your response seemed really heartfelt, and I'm sure it's a common one among committed Christians. But then in what world is it okay to torture? Why is it that so many Christians on the Right are justifying our torture by reference to what the terrorists do? Isn't that also bringing us down to their level?
It's this staggering level of cognitive dissonance that makes me so frustrated with extremely religious people. We've really come far afield from 'turn the other cheek'.
By the way, if you want to 'categorically prohibit' torture, but admit that there will be circumstances in which it will be used, then you don't understand the meaning of the word 'categorically'.
I can't seem to respond to your response, so hopefully you'll see this.
How do you know what my position is? What makes you so sure that we're on opposite sides? I realize it would be convenient to just lump me in with a bunch of other people, but...maybe you should, um, *ask* me where I stand on this before you simply make an assumption?
And on the issue of what "categorical" means...please give me a little credit. Reread what you yourself wrote: surely you see the distinction between establishing a prohibition (categorical or otherwise), and anticipating that it will be violated?
Let's change the context a bit.
Oh, good idea. Let's change the context so it's a totally different situation that's in no way analogous to the original.
tsotha
Don't be lazy. Like torture, human experimentation has potential benefits outweighing the costs (actually, it carries a lot more promise than torture). And you can make make exactly the same if-your-family-was-on-the-line argument.
But, when it comes to human experimentation, a lot more people find the whole thing outrageous and are unwilling to make the same cool cost-benefit analysis that's been discussed in this and yesterday's thread. So those people get why some are screaming out of the top of their lungs that discussing the possibility of torture is something demeaning in itself.
People are happy to talk about very unlikely ticking time bomb scenarios (would you torture to get information that saves 50,000 people?) but not in the human experiment lethal disease hypothesis. Why? What's the big difference between the scenarios, apart from the fact that one is being carried out in the U.S.?
Nimed,
I think Megan's point was rather that if you do take the "moral stance," you need to be prepared to accept the cost of it. In the case of abjuring torture, the cost is whatever information we might have wrung from prisoners but didn't. In the case of human experimentation, it's whatever therapies we've forgone by not experimenting on humans.
She was — unless I've badly misunderstood — talking about those who say "torture is wrong" and console themselves with the thought that torture is also useless. She thinks that torture is wrong, but likely useful. So do I.
And that's why I think it's a terrible idea to lay stress on the thought that it is, after all, useless. All you need is one big flaming counterexample and you will have to fall back on, "But it's wrong anyway," which will sound like the limpest possible afterthought if the burden of your argument has been that it just doesn't work.
I do understand the temptations of arguing like this. You bring up human experimentation, which is a perfect example — so perfect that Chesterton's line about the "vivisection of pauper children" (in the bit I quoted, which MM was kind enough to excerpt) barely needs editing, though it's almost a century old.
If you think it's wrong to create embryos in order to break them up into stem cells, it's tempting to add that nearly everything that's been done with embryonic stem cells has resulted in uncontrolled, quasi-cancerous growth, whereas the recent work with adult stem cells, which has shown them to be pluripotent and tailorable to this or that function, without any tendency towards massive tumors, suggests that that's the way research should go anyway ...
You see the point. If ESCR is wrong, it's wrong even if it does happen to be the only way to get a particularly desirable set of medical results. That there seems to be a more promising and vastly cheaper way to the same sort of results, where in order to get a compatible stem cell you don't need to find an ovum donor, inject the patient's DNA into the ovum, culture it, &c., but can just take some of the patient's ordinary skin cells and tweak them, is fantastic news. But if ESCR is wrong, it would be wrong even if there were nothing comparable to it.
The thing is, it's damn hard to keep to that line when your state has hitched its star to specifically embryonic stem cell research, and some billions are now going to furiously backing what looks like the wrong horse. But this is CA; we're used to this sort of debacle. Look upon our budget, ye mighty, and despair!
The fundamental problem with discussing this sort of issue in the abstract (and, I might point out, from the safety and comfort of our undamaged, unthreatened homes) is that it ignores the reality of exigent circumstances: what used to be called "the unwritten law".
Doctor-assisted suicide was, until fairly recently, illegal everywhere and under all conditions: additionally, it was a clear and unambiguous violation of a code of medical ethics stretching back to Paracelsus. Yet, I can state unambiguously that it happened, and that when it did, it was rarely if ever prosecuted. Why? Because of the unwritten law: everyone knew that a doctor and a terminally-ill patient might work something out between them, and that was considered acceptable.
Jefferson did not believe he had the constitutional authority to make the Louisiana Purchase. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, and put out a warrant for the arrest and confinement of the Chief Justice of the United States. FDR ordered Nazi saboteurs--both Germans and Americans--executed. Robert Jackson, the U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg and a Supreme Court justice, famously observed that "The Constitution is not a suicide pact."
All of these are examples of the unwritten law in public application: /raison d'etat/, or--to borrow Cicero's formulation--"Salus Populi Suprema Lex:" "The safety of the people is the ultimate law."
If we retained an ounce of sanity, we would recognize that the so-called torture issue falls into the exact same category. Yes, it should be categorically prohibited: yes, there will be circumstances where it will be used: no, the people who use it in such exigent circumstances should not be punished. Period: over and out.
David,
If we retained an ounce of sanity, we would recognize that the so-called torture issue falls into the exact same category. Yes, it should be categorically prohibited: yes, there will be circumstances where it will be used: no, the people who use it in such exigent circumstances should not be punished. Period: over and out.
I disagree with your last clause. The people who resort to such means in such exigent circumstances should and indeed must be punished; that's the only means we have to be sure that they are really exigent circumstances. The only circumstances in which any American can be justified in torturing anyone are those in which he needs some information so badly that he would accept his own death (or, at least, a life in prison) to obtain it. And the only way to make sure that no one tortures except in such need is to make the punishment infallible and universally known.
Make the punishment merely nominal and not actual, and you're indeed well on the road to making torture as common as bribery in a banana republic. Or infant euthanasia in the Netherlands.
Can't agree with you, there, Michelle. Or perhaps, only in part: I'll agree that each case should be subject to examination as to whether exigent circumstances really existed.
I'll go back to the historical examples. Do you think Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR should have been impeached for their actions? Or--more prosaically--the doctor-assisted euthanasias in the olden days: do you really think those doctors should have been prosecuted, or perhaps barred from the medical profession?
Yes, I do, David. I think if these wrongs -- I do think they are all wrongs -- seemed justified to those who committed them, it must have been because the benefits outweighed the possible costs. There is no other way of separating desperate actions from frivolous or venal or otherwise trivial ones. And I am, furthermore, sure that Jefferson and Lincoln and FDR would have agreed.
Re euthanasia, I'm not so sure. Not sure, that is, that the doctors who provided poisons in these cases would really have wanted their names to appear.
I confess that I don't like the euthanasia movement much. There's an uncomfortably thin line between talking about "release" and the like and actively advocating it; and we have already seen euthanasia in the Netherlands move not-too-slowly from something available to adults with consent certified by two doctors, to something "available" to disabled infants with, of course, no consent at all as regards the one actually being killed.
I think I will stick to what I said before. Anyone who takes what is clearly an illegal action, given the law in force, should pay the penalty the law provides. If Lincoln didn't think suspending habeus corpus was worth the penalty that he must have thought he'd pay for it, he wouldn't have done it, nor should he have. And if a man who killed his wife when she was in intolerable pain from terminal cancer didn't think that ending her pain was worth his life, he wouldn't have done what he did.
Michelle, there isn't a reply button below your response, but hopefully you'll see this.
I think we are more in agreement than you realize. I don't have a problem with these actions being judged after the fact: it's your insistence on condemnation I can't go along with. If I kill someone, I'm entitled to a trial, even if there's no meaningful doubt that I did it. There could be extenuating circumstances (such as self-defense), or I could have been not in my right mind: anyhow, the point is if you want to review these actions after the fact, I'm OK with that. I just think that "exigent circumstances" should be an allowable defense, and that it should be both a high hurdle and one that, once establishes, pretty much immunizes you.
Another possibility is that the President himself should sign a finding each time it comes up. That would certainly be a high hurdle, and one that people would think about pretty carefully before trying to jump over. But the President, as chief of state, has sovereign immunity from prosecution: in that capacity, he can only be impeached and then tried by the Senate.
If you would be OK with that system, so would I.
There's a straightforward counterfactual here:
What is the difference in "quality of information" provided between tortured detainees and non-tortured detainees, given some time constraint (WLOG, given a certain amount of time to torture or !torture).
The data is (obviously) classified, but the estimator is obvious. When will the gov't conduct the analysis?
I think torture probably works in some cases. Sure but I am one of the people who thinks it's just wrong full stop and way worse than pulling the wings off flies. The arguments about the effectiveness of torture seem like a bizarre side show. Like a man arguing that on one hand stealing is wrong but on the other hand it's a good way to get what doesn't belong to you.
As soon as I started reading this post, I knew who the email was from. :) You need to get your own blog . . . . too many good ideas floating out there just on email or on comments pages.
Stuart,
LOL!! Glad to see I wasn't the only one who guessed the commenter before reading the thread!
Here is the other passage of Chesterton that I tried to paraphrase in my e-mail to MM. I thought it was after the Great War, but actually it's from 1912.
They evidently think it is necessary to use all their arguments, weak and strong.
I think they make a very great mistake. It is a mistake founded (like many other modern mistakes) on using the words "war" or "fighting" in a alse analogous sense, and forgetting the very human and terrible fact to which these terms really refer. In a battle, it may be better to use all your men, strong and weak, for the soldiers will not fight each other. But it is not better to use all your argumemts, strong and weak, for the arguments can (and do) contradict each other.
No chain of logic is stronger than its weakest link. But a line of soldiers has often been found not only stronger than its weakest link, but stronger than its strongest. Nay, the strength of the line has been found stronger than all its separate soldiers put together.
What Chesterton is actually talking about there is Irish nationalism; but it doesn't really matter what it is for logical purposes. The key insight is that one about arguments, as opposed to soldiers, really undermining one another even if you think you're deploying them all on the same side.
My apologies; that would be
using the words "war" or "fighting" in a false analogous sense
FDR ordered Nazi saboteurs--both Germans and Americans--executed.
This is much different, it's legal to execute saboteurs. The Geneva Conventions allow it and US Law allows it.
If I may: the argument against torture in interrogations, as I see it, breaks down into two parts.
First, torture is not a good thing per se. Morally, it requires justification.
Second, the justification that "torture gives good intelligence" is not proved, despite ample opportunities for proof.
You see? If the first part holds, the burden of proof is on the prosecution. That's where the shifting argumentation you're seeing is coming from; when you say, "prove it doesn't work," they (mean to?) say, "torture is wrong, you have to prove it does work."
That is pure mental laziness. Torture does work. For good reason underground organizations contain information tightly so that individuals cannot divulge under torture what they do not know.
Asserting that it doesn't or may not, or that there needs to be proof that it does is trying to avoid making the hard decision:
Not torturing can cost lives. Am I willing to accept the cost that not torturing entails?
Megan says yes. I say yes. Categorically.
It seems most are hoping that some constructed reality will take that hard decision away from them.
Derek
I'm glad you agree that torture is wrong. I can understand that you believe that this is all the argument required to show that it should not be done - I'm inclined to assent, just as I believe that murder would be wrong under similar circumstances. But you're wrong about torture's effectiveness.
What torture does, and does excellently, is damage the victim's personality to a point where they will say anything that you want them to say. But "the truth" is not a thing you want them to say - you don't know the truth. If you knew the truth, the torture would be a waste of time. Instead, what you want them to say is something which fits your biases - things you want to be the case, things which sound like the things you expect to be the case. If you hear something you believe when you're torturing someone, you let up on them - so they learn very quickly to tell you things you are likely to believe ... not what they know to be true.
Take Abu Zubaida. Normal intelligence methods gave a substantial amount of actionable intelligence in a short amount of time - that is, everything he knew that we cared about. (This is common - ask an interrogator.) The higher-ups weren't satisfied - "there must be more", they said. Torture was employed. And Zubaida spouted off hundreds of fairy tales, all of which evaporated on investigation, because just sounding plausible to an interrogator doesn't make it true.
So far as Google tells me, the gold standard case torture supporters (sorry, "enhanced interrogation" supporters) are turning to for torture giving actionable intelligence is ... Zubaida.
Torture doesn't work. The people who tell you it does are bullshitting, lying, or themselves bullshitted and lied to.
The justification needs to go further... "Torture gives good intelligence and there are no better/more ethical ways to get that intelligence."
So you wouldn't torture to prevent a nuke going off in Los Angeles like in "24"? You liberals and your ironclad morals!
Eating babies may be wrong, but at least it's less wasteful than elective abortion. LOL
Eating babies may be wrong, but the Donner party survived because of overcoming their moral qualms.
So, Megan, how many innocent Americans must die for you to cling to your moral purity?
That's from Matthew Alexander, who "spent fourteen years in the U.S. Air Force. An 'investigator turned interrogator,' he deployed to Iraq in 2006, where he led the interrogations team that located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who was killed by coalition forces."
How does your torture purity hold up now, kentuckyliz? Any recalibrations, or do you not care about our soldiers lives?
"I heard numerous foreign fighters state that the reason they came to Iraq to fight was because of the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib *and Guantánamo Bay*." [emphasis added]
It's now well-documented that there never was any abuse (let alone torture) at Gitmo: the worst that can be said of Gitmo is that those being held there were deprived of certain *procedural* rights, to which their claim is, at best, controversial.
Meanwhile, are you truly arguing that, on the one hand, the prisoners never tell us the truth under pressure (that would be the "torture never works" claim), but, on the other hand, we're supposed to credulously believe what they tell us of their own free will? Please.
Either these guys are consummate liars--in which case nothing they say can be believed--or they are more likely to give up the truth under pressure--in which case what they say of their own free will is less likely to be true. Either way, Mr. Alexander's claim does not stand up to even casual weighing with the baloney factor.
ArrowSmith
When Ronald Reagan helped for the United Nations Convention Against Torture to be drafted and signed - we were facing real enemies with real nuclear weapons and not imagined ones. I am sure that Reagan was aware that torture becomes only then an issue when we face a dilemma. Stressing the point of being able to save many if torturing one is almost like implying that there also can be a legitimate discussion any other way. Could we also discuss torturing innocents without the risk of threat and without a dilemma. No - Ronald Reagan was aware that facing a dilemma is a prerequisite for then rejecting torture on foremost moral but also ideological, political, social and practical grounds.
His personal logic was still simple. If you waited for the other side to stop killing and torturing first, to act morally first - it made you the villain in the conflict. When Koreans applied water-boarding etc on American soldiers - we tried to prosecute them. The idea of the "liberal" Reagan was never to become your worst enemy. Back then we understood the ideological differences between us and our "enemies" - the stuff that made us the good guys and them the bad ones. We seem to have lost all that?
Via Andrew:
Again. Back then we had real enemies with really dangerous weapons. Back then - torture also worked. Back then - nobody needed to be reminded a million times that one could maybe save New York if only... We had something to lose, back then. Our Raison d'être as Americans or as the West in general.
Excellent post.
I think torture, understood as pain or worse, is or will soon be obsolete as a means of acquiring information, because our understanding of the brain is improving so rapidly. We can already detect lies, and can use the brain to control other objects.
I do think it somewhat likely that between now and that potentially happy day, we may face a nuclear moment, given Iran, North Korea, and now, and especially frighteningly, what appears to be the fall of Pakistan into the hands of the Taliban.
Torture doesn't work; Exhibit #104
Reading this blog is becoming embarrassing. Megan has done this before, she sets up a position and characterizes those not open to the position with a certain pejorative. In this post she just employed this tactic in a very convoluted manner.
There are still multiple arguments being made interchangeably here...
1. Whether torture is ever acceptable
and
2. Whether or not waterboarding is torture (or, in general, what constitutes torture).
I am opposed to the US ever torturing anyone. I don't know that I'd consider waterboarding as torture.
And... when did it get "out of control" in the US? We used it on three people, all three fairly bad people. It's not like thousands of innocent US citizens were accidentally waterboarded through a bureaucratic oversight or some over-ambitious "waterboarder" went nuts and waterboarded an entire group of prisoners for no good reason...
or some over-ambitious "waterboarder" went nuts
I find it hard to imagine any other explanation for waterboarding someone 183 times in a month.
The argument that torture doesn't work in the contemporary American debate over torture began as a response to the ticking-bomb argument. The ticking-bomb argument is that it would be moral to torture someone in a very limited narrow case for the greater good of saving a million lives. The response is that such situations never occur; that in such a situation, torture would not work; and that the only fashion in which torture is moderately useful is when it is employed systematically (rather than on a one-time narrow basis) to verify checkable information, as Megan says.
I detest the use of hypotheticals in such situations because they tend to warp people's understanding of what torture actually is. I keep using examples from the Vietnam War because we're pretty clear on how torture was actually used there, and what it did and didn't do. Here's how it was used effectively: the Vietnamese Communists (Viet Cong and NVA) would routinely torture or threaten to torture American servicemen immediately after capturing them as an aid to interrogating them about checkable battlefield information -- order of battle, deployment of units, etc. The VC already had excellent intelligence on these questions, and because they could show captured GIs that they knew when they were lying, they could usually get the GIs to confirm general battlefield info, which was moderately useful to see whether their own info was still accurate. But this kind of information-gathering is only useful if you do it routinely, to everyone you capture. It implies torturing hundreds or thousands of people, not just a couple of "masterminds", and often torturing innocent people who don't know anything. Lo and behold, this is in fact what we did in Guantanamo and especially in Baghram and Abu Ghraib.
Torture was also used as punishment and deterrent, and for simple coercion, by South Vietnam against captured Viet Cong, by North Vietnam against US POWs, and then by Vietnamese Communists in the reeducation camps after the war. But we claim not to be using torture to make KSM repent of his evil ways and swear allegiance to the United States, or just to punish him for taking part in 9/11. Though, disturbingly, I think if Cheney were to come out and declare that we were waterboarding KSM dozens of times a week just because he deserved it and to teach those Al-Qaeda guys a lesson about what happens to you when you attack America, a substantial number of conservatives would approve of this.
Anyway, the point is that you can't use limited torture against that one special badguy just to get that one crucial piece of information to save a million lives, because that's not how torture produces information. In that situation, it won't work: if the bomb is ticking, the badguy will outlast you; the terrorists can easily effect countermeasures by ensuring that no one person who gets captured has enough information to foil a plot; the information will not be quickly checkable. And as a matter of record, this kind of thing has simply never, ever happened. The claims about breaking up an active plot against the LA Library Tower by waterboarding KSM are ridiculous. In the real world, you never know quite who you've got or what they know. If you torture people without knowing exactly what you're trying to find out and how you can check it, you'll get garbage.
It's not that torture never, ever produces a useful piece of information. But as a general practice, the good interrogators who get solid information don't use torture. The people who torture are the impatient ones, the immature ones, who imagine that the guy they've captured has somewhere in his head a big chunk of data, or one key little fact, that will instantaneously unmask the enemy's plans and that if we just crack his head open, we can get at that data and win everything. Good interrogators know that the world is much more complicated than that, and that getting an understanding of the enemy happens through long, patient inquiry. The VC had excellent intelligence throughout the war, but they didn't get it primarily by capturing enemy detainees. That would never have worked. They got it primarily through the painstaking, tedious process of spying, infiltration, and data collation. Then they tortured everyone they captured for a little verification on the side, because, hey, why not? Their values permitted that. Ours don't.
Your examples of torture use in Vietnam are wholly irrelevant. The fact that you (and I, frankly) don't consider the reasons they had to be valid doesn't have any bearing on the ticking bomb scenario.
I do not believe your assertion that "good interrogators who get solid information don't use torture" is backed up by any sort of reliable evidence. The fact that the FBI can get information from bank robbers is not surprising. Do you have a single example of an international terrorist giving up good information as a result of non-coercive methods?
The ticking bomb scenario has never occurred. It is irrelevant because it never, ever happens. One can always concoct a hypothetical but ludicrously unlikely scenario which might justify any course of action, no matter how despicable. I insist on relying on the actual circumstances in which torture occurs to assess the morality and effectiveness of the practice.
An example of non-coercive methods being more effective than coercion:
"The heavyset and imposing man was moderately cooperative in his first days of detention. He told interrogators that he was the commander of the al Quds Golden Division, an organization of trusted loyalists fueling the insurgency with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, sniper rifles, machine guns and other small arms.
"In the months before Mowhoush's detention, military intelligence officials across Iraq had been discussing interrogation tactics, expressing a desire to ramp things up and expand their allowed techniques to include more severe methods, such as beatings that did not leave permanent damage, and exploiting detainees' fear of dogs and snakes, according to documents released by the Army.
"Officials in Baghdad wrote an e-mail to interrogators in the field on Aug. 14, 2003, stating that the "gloves are coming off" and asking them to develop "wish lists" of tactics they would like to use.
"An interrogator with the 66th Military Intelligence Company, who was assigned to work on Mowhoush, wrote back with suggestions in August, including the use of "close confinement quarters," sleep deprivation and using the fear of dogs, adding: "I firmly agree that the gloves need to come off."
"Another e-mail exchange from interrogators with the 4th Infantry Division based in Tikrit also suggested "close quarter confinement" in extremely claustrophobic situations, because "discomfort induces compliance and cooperation."
Taking the Gloves Off
A week into Mowhoush's detainment, according to classified investigative documents, interrogators were getting fed up with the prisoner. In a "current situation summary" PowerPoint presentation dated Nov. 18, Army officials wrote about his intransigence, using his first name (spelled "Abid" in Army documents):
"Previous interrogations were non-threatening; Abid was being treated very well. Not anymore," the document reads. "The interrogation session lasted several hours and I took the gloves off because Abid refused to play ball."
"But the harsher tactics backfired.
"In an interrogation that could be witnessed by the entire detainee population, Mowhoush was put into an undescribed "stress position" that caused the other detainees to stand "with heads bowed and solemn looks on their faces," said the document.
""I asked Abid if he was strong enough a leader to put an end to the attacks that I believed he was behind," the document said, quoting an unidentified interrogator. "He did not deny he was behind the attacks as he had denied previously, he simply said because I had humiliated him, he would not be able to stop the attacks. I take this as an admission of guilt.""
-- "Documents Tell of Brutal Improvisation by GIs", Josh White, WashPost, August 3, 2005. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/02/AR2005080201941_pf.html
US interrogators ultimately beat Mowhoush to death, then claimed he had died of natural causes.
The ticking bomb scenario has never occurred. It is irrelevant because it never, ever happens.
I didn't realize you were privy to all the classified documents you'd need to assert that so confidently. But even assuming it's never happened in the past, I'll ask the same question I asked OGWiseman: Then you agree should you be mistaken it's okay to torture the owner of the ticking bomb? I mean, if you're right about it never, ever happening, there's no problem making torture legal in this one case, is there? Because otherwise it starts to look like even you don't believe what you're saying.
And your example doesn't really support the proposition non-coercive techniques work. They interviewed the guy and after a few days he ran out of things he wanted to tell them. And after that they got nowhere with Mr. Nice Guy. I was actually looking for something that was, you know, a success.
If there had ever been a ticking bomb situation, we would know about it, because it would have been used to argue for the effectiveness of torture. Instead the best torture advocates can come up with is the nonexistent LA Library Tower plot, which was never more than a vague concept and disintegrated a month before we even captured KSM, let alone tortured him. We don't even have any "ticking bomb" situations from Israel, where terrorist incidents and capture of terrorists happen on a vastly more frequent basis than in the US. The rule to follow here is the one that let intelligent people recognize that Saddam Hussein didn't have WMD: if this vague, specious junk is the best evidence that US government advocates can come up with, then it doesn't exist.
I think a detailed argument about which interrogation techniques are most successful in the War on Terror is going to be impossible, without access to a whole bunch of classified information. What does seem to be clear from what information has been released officially, and the much larger amount that has come out in the media, is:
a. There's documentation for a lot of torture we've used (far more than we're admitting to now). None of that seems to fit the ticking time bomb scenario. It's always possible that some other successful torture (or non-coercive interrogation) has been carried out in a ticking time-bomb scenario, but none of that has come out in public.
b. A lot of the torture we've seen documented seems to have been driven as much by impatience and frustration with the detainees as with some cold-hearted, clear-eyed decision to use torture to minimize US casualties.
c. Most or all of the torture we've seen documented seems to have taken place outside the realm where we had a lot of known and unknown answers we could compare the detainee's answers with. This probably led to the false alarms we got from various detainees, including KSM.
d. Despite all this, various people involved in using torture seem to believe that they've sometimes gotten useful information from it. This is consistent with the massive use of torture across history and across the world in situations where people using it want information and don't care about morals in getting it.
In other words, it looks like, from the information available, our use of torture doesn't track at all with the story we've been told to justify its use or explain why it might work. But there's also some evidence that it has sometimes been effective, along with a large number of false alarms. (As I said above, though, working out whether it's been a net win or lose in intelligence terms, let alone larger diplomatic/policy terms, would require access to a huge amount of information that's still classified, much of which really needs to remain classified.)
However, there's one more fundamental point to raise. The previous administration tiptoed around this issue ("We don't torture." "Enhanced interrogation techniques.") for a very good reason--the use of torture will drive away allies, and will lead (has led) to huge amounts of friction within the US government. A lot of the available story about torture comes from leaks made, pretty obviously, by people horrified by what was happening. This issue caused a bunch of strife between the FBI, the military (especially military lawyers), and the administration. An open policy of using torture in the war on terror will undermine support of that war among most American citizens, despite all the "we'll keep you safe" or "but what if it prevents the next 9/11?" rhetoric. It will do endless damage to our position in the world, by convincing lots and lots of normal people that we are monsters. It will convince lots and lots of Americans we're governmed by monsters, too. That does us nothing but harm.
183 times in one month sounds like a lot but putting that number in perspective. Each session was not to last longer than 40 seconds.
dio777:
Yeah, so probably it wasn't all that bad. I mean, the claim is that hardened terrorists almost certainly facing execution would start begging to be allowed to confess after one session, but I'm sure that whole 40 second limit made it not torture.
BTW, what was the time limit on the sleep deprivation, stress positions, and hypothermia which was being used on these guys at the same time? From what I've read, I guess the routine was to waterboard the guy, then take him back to the cell and smack him around a bit, then chain him to the floor naked in a 45 degree room for a few hours, then....
Ah, but of course this wasn't torture. We're Americans, and Americans don't torture.
Earnest Iconoclast:
The CIA has admitted to using waterboarding on three people. I believe they have admitted using other torture techniques ("Enhanced interrogation techniques") on other detainees; I'm not sure what numbers have been admitted, if any. From the huge amount of media coverage this has gotten, there have been many others tortured by others, as well--some at Guantanamo, some at Abu Girab, some at Bagram, some at the CIA's secret prisons, some in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan, and quite possibly some inside the US, as with the evidence suggesting that Jose Padilla may have been tortured. The same media reports suggest that some of this has been done by military interrogators, some by CIA agents, and some by private contractors. All the information about this is pretty freely available, probably because it's really hard to keep a policy a secret which horrifies 50%+ of the people who hear of it, and which requires hundreds or thousands of participants.
This isn't remotely about three people. I suspect we're talking about hundreds of people tortuted, at least, with some reasonably high probability that several (Padilla, Hamdi, Lindh) were US citizens. I'll admit that I don't (can't) know that. But that's what the media reports so far suggest.
The first thing that strikes me in looking at these posts is the number of interrogation experts who comment on a blog at the Atlantic. The number of people who assert the ineffectiveness of the techniques in question, and even professionally criticize those who employ them, is impressive. But actually, I have little confidence that these people have any knowledge whereof they speak. They want to get out of a moral dilemma through wishful thinking - by deciding that, hey, it isn't a dilemma at all!
As for me, my personal rule is that anything we routinely subject our military personnel to in training, and especially anything that columnists voluntarily undergo so they can write witty articles for glossy magazines, is not serious torture. The day Christopher Hitchens gets wires attached to his testicles and has electric current pumped into them, so he can write about it for Vanity Fair, I may change my mind.
Any time you have enemy operatives deliberately targeting civilians, you see into envelope-pushing measures for protecting public safety. Usually, however, such methods are kept in the shadows - the way the Obama administration is, in many ways, continuing the Bush War on Terror policies without publicly acknowledging it. But partisan political warfare has pushed this into the open. I doubt that the consequences for our safety and security will be favorable.
I do want to add one thing about the proposition that these "abuses" have damaged America's reputation and helped recruit terrorists. If America ever had an unblemished reputation for human rights protection, I'd like to know when that was. Not in the 60's and 70's, during the Vietnam War. Not in the 80's, under Ronald Reagan of contra-supporting, "Evil Empire" fame. And certainly not in the 90's, under Bill Clinton - whose bombings were always high on the atrocity list for Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter. And if you've seen Islamists saw a prisoner's head off and still believe they're in the game because one of their friends was waterboarded, I have a bridge to sell you.
The first thing that strikes me in looking at these posts is the number of interrogation experts who comment on a blog at the Atlantic. The number of people who assert the ineffectiveness of the techniques in question, and even professionally criticize those who employ them, is impressive. But actually, I have little confidence that these people have any knowledge whereof they speak. They want to get out of a moral dilemma through wishful thinking - by deciding that, hey, it isn't a dilemma at all!
What moral dilemma would that be?
What are your bona fides in interrogation?
Are you suggesting that the actual interrogators who came out against torture don't know whereof they speak?
Anybody claiming that the use of torture hasn't damaged this country's reputation is talking nonsense. Whether it was done under Clinton (as though the Clinton era is somehow a baptism that gets the Republican speaker off free) is immaterial.
The problem is that the ticking time bomb can be a biological weapon or a number of nuclear weapons. Then you have a problem. If there has ever been such a scenario thusfar, they haven't told us about it, but that could be to keep us from becoming upset. Such a scenario might kill not 3,100, or 50,000 Americans, but tens to hundreds of millions. In that case, retaliation would not be unthinkable and might involve the use of thermonuclear, not nuclear weapons. The President would have to decide whether he thought the use of torture in such a case was warranted. I wouldn't want to tie his hands. Given his constitutional war powers, I'm not sure you could tie his hands without a constitutional amendment anyway.
Apparently, we torture waitresses, medical students, athletes (some even children!), and many others in this country. Personally, I don't consider sleep deprivation, uncomfortable temperatures, and stress positions to be torture. Yes, they are unpleasant and could be overdone (but then anything can be), but unpleasant treatment doesn't automatically mean it's torture.
scareduck:
I have no interrogational bona fides, of course, and I don't pretend to have any. As a thinking adult, I can voice a moral opinion on whether something qualifies as "torture" in my view, but as to the effectiveness of this or that method, and what it says about the professionalism of the interrogator - that I don't know and, unlike (to all appearances) many of the posters, not to mention the various windbags who have voiced judgments throughout the media, I won't render an ignorant opinion. As to what professional interrogators say - as with the Iraq war, there has been no want of authoritative voices from both sides of that issue; if you choose to go unquestioningly with one side or the other, I suspect that reflects your previous opinion anyway.
As to the moral dilemma - as we both know, it's balancing the use of tough, even brutal interrogation methods versus our need to protect civilians against terrorist attack. You may think another 9/11 is acceptable as long as we don't sully ourselves with the evils of waterboarding - I suspect most Americans will not agree - but to pretend it isn't an issue just begs the question.
This is a comment on BigM magnificent comment.
BigM tells you know from the start that he is going to be a arrogant dick, and that he is going to try to close the thread with a holier than thou rant.
At least some the people who discussed the effectiveness of torture techniques were citing experts or other information abundantly transmitted by the Media. So we learn that BigM hasn't read the comments before starting to write about them.
BigM repeats one of the points of Megan's post. So we learn that BigM hasn't even read Megan's post very well before starting to write about it.
BigM's whining is now over, so I'll start simplifying and rewriting his impressive ideas from now on, just to make them a little more clear.
Let me tell how I know that some interrogation techniques can't possibly be torture: As long as military personnel trains to resist them, then it's not torture. As long as there is at least one reporter stupid enough to try it and then write about it in a magazine - just one person is enough - then it's not torture. Simple, right?
It's ok to torture enemy detainees if the enemy targets civilians. I call it pushing the envelope (because I love me some euphemisms). Just never tell me our government does it. I'm a supporter of the Oblivous Happy Sheep doctrine.
If an administration reveals to the public what he has the right to know - that advisers, court officials and previous administration members have engaged in practices that violated the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Conventions - then said government members are engaging in "partisan political warfare" and should be ashamed of themselves.
Furthermore, remember I started my comment by chastising people who were assessing the efficacy of torture without the necessary expertise? Screw that! I'm now going to state that terminating and revealing our torture practices might make us less safe. Just because.
We've done bad stuff in the past. To our knowledge, it never was torture authorized by high government officials, but that's not relevant. Anyhoo, that bad stuff was eventually discovered, and damaged our reputation. Therefore, our image couldn't possibly get any worse by torturing. Amazingly, we have had nothing to lose in the last six years! That's in spite of polls around the world showing that the largely favorable image the U.S. held in the world rapidly deteriorated since 2003.
I'd like to end my arrogant-dick-thread-closing-post with 2 inanities in this last sentence.
First, I would like to start by stating that Islamists torture, linking torture to Muslim religion, instead of extremism and fanaticism. This is just reflex bigotry, I don't even think about it. If I was a Muslim talking about Pinochet's regime, I would correspondingly say "If you've seen Christians torture by electric shock, rape and kill and still believe they're in the game because one of their friends was waterboarded, I have a bridge to sell you". See how much sense that makes?
Second, I would like to claim that what's good enough for the terrorists and extremists is good enough for us. They commit horrible acts all the time, what are we waiting for? Everybody's doing it, guys!
I'm also supposing that having my head sawed off is worse than being waterboarded 183 times. It never occurred to me that after 6 nights without sleep, getting my head rammed against a "flexible" wall and being waterboarded 50 times, I might just be begging the "interrogators" to please act like human beings and cut off my fucking head already before I lose my mind.