Problem, the reliability of information given from torture is shaky. The files of the Holy Office are full of confessions of witches who rode flying goats and had sex with the Devil.

Why isn't there a "D" behind Rockefeller's name ? The way it is written, poorly informed outsiders will assume he is yet another Republican nutter, eager to exterminate every non-American he finds on his way.

Fortunately, Communist science established that painless methods of interrogation were more effective than torture, and our guys have been fully trained in the KGB's advanced techniques. Sensory deprivation (e.g. hoods), claustrophobia in a room too small to stand or lie down, maybe a little giggle juice to relax the nerves . . . all quite harmless.

Harry:



Those are confessions of guilt, which are unreliable. Torture to acquire mere information is very reliable.

pj:



Not if you're the torturee.

Orrin,

Clarify something for me here: Are you saying that the end justifies the means?



Yes or no will suffice.

Roy --



If the ends don't justify the means, what does?

David/Roy -- Catholics believe some acts are "intrinsically evil" and can never be done regardless of circumstances or consequences. Other acts are not intrinsically evil, but rather are often evil because of their consequences. In the second group, the ends (consequences) justify the means; in the first group, ends cannot justify the means, because the means are intrinsically evil.



My rule of thumb is, if you can justly kill the guy, you can also deprive him of sleep or comfort or whatever other interrogation techniques they use.



oj - I don't follow - are you saying that KSM was harmed by giving up information on Osama's sons? But if he chose to do so, in exchange for sleep, it seems to me he benefited . . .

For someone who thinks that merely cloning cells leads us to a slippery slope, Orrin takes an awfully cavalier attitude towards torturing terrorists and criminals. He's also wrong when says that information acquired under torture is reliable - yes, the victim will provide a little real information, but he'll certainly provide a bunch of BS to satisfy his torturers (who will always think the victim is holding back some more information). Wasting time and resources to track down false leads is not useful.



I also want the next Al Quaeda terrorist who gets his house raided to surrender voluntarily, so that he might eventually reveal useful information. The terrorist won't surrender if he thinks he'll be tortured, he'll just fight to the death or kill himself.



Here are a couple other hypotheticals:



(1) Supose the serial killer suspect was not the real killer, but just some schmuck erroneously hauled in by the Authorities, desperate to catch the killer? And suppose the torture destroyed the suspect's physical and mental health permanently?



(2) In a conventional war, would it be ok to torture a captured general or intelligence officer, knowing that it might save many of our soldiers' lives, even if the other side routinely used torture? I think most soldiers would say no (though some would say yes, too).



As the old joke goes, no-one gets out of this world alive. Better to die with honor than live a little longer dishonorably.

The sad fact is that officially allowing torture would probably allow it to be mostly used in cases where there would be little need for such brutal techniques since few investigators would deem their cases to be less than critical to national security.



And if you start with terrorists, torture would probably extended to dealing with cases involving drug dealers, gang members and become a lot more widespread than people would care to think.

OJ--



No one here is Mike Dukakis. Of course I would torture the man holding my family. I would also want to kill him afterwards, but that's not the test.



I am deeply ambivalent about the use of torture, although I come down against it. In part, I do so with the knowledge that, when a terrorist who has set a nuclear bomb to explode in NYC is caught, no formal rule is going to prevent the people on the scene from doing what has to be done.



I also have a much narrower definition of what constitutes torture than, for example, Amnesty International. Sleep deprivation, physical discomfort, being threatened with pork, interrogation by women; all are fine with me. I've heard a story, which may be apocryphal, that the Phillipinos once got a terrorist to talk by dressing one of their men in an Israeli uniform and letting the terrorist see him. Sounds good to me.



But those are pretty much my limits for extracting information (and even those I think out-of-bounds when it comes to interrogation directed towards prosecution). Otherwise, I think the slippery slope argument is too powerful.



Finally, this discussion is never accompanied by discussion of the actual methods used. The Iraqi's have apparently had good luck with raping a man's wife in front of him, or strangling a woman's baby in front of her; acid vats, I hear, have been particularly effective. The hypotheticals that can be strung out here are endless and, indeed, KSM may well have knowledge of AQ agents currently in the US carrying out attacks as horrible as 9/11. I think -- and none of us can know, which is part of the problem -- that I would refrain from torture even in the face of another 9/11.

US prisoners of Iraq in the first gulf war were tortured and raped. No surprise. Does anyone really believe that if the US uses torture in Afghanistan, captured americans in Iraq are any more or any less likely to be tortured?



Sorry, it's tortured if you do, tortured if you don't. With Iraq, it's always torture.

I have no particular problem with retribution, even harsh retribution. In fact, I advocate harming a large but unspecified number of Moslems (my guess, percentage wise, around 3 to 4% based on experience with the Japanese) in order to correct the behavior of the residue.



I just doubt the usefulness of torture as a source of information.



Clever tricks -- like putting a sheet of paper with LIE on it in a copy machine and pretending it's a lie detector -- are more practical. The Israeli uniform idea sounds good.



And I have long advocated the non-violent corrective measure with Moslems of spraying their principal mosques with pig blood unless they behave. No doubt many would consider that equivalent to torture or terrorism or some sort of bad label. Sobeit.

I think that the issue of torture can be best analyzed as a two-dimmesional matrix: one one axis, purpose: (1) preventative or (2) judicial/evidenciary. On the other axis claim to reliability: (A) high or (B) low.



On that basis, I propose that torture is as legitimate as self-defense when (1A) preventative and thought to be reliable (same as shoot to disarm - NOBODY will blame you); a bit less legitimate (1B), if preventative but with unclear reliability (this is like shoot to kill); questionable even if deemed reliable but used in a judicial context (2A), since the objective is to achieve justice may be denied by the injustice of the confession under duress; (2B) falls in the realm of the Arab world.

Harry - you don't think torture is a reliable way to get information, but you believe in the copier as lie detector trick? Can't our guys afford real lie detectors?

Roy:



No. I'm sayimng there's nothing morally objectionable about torture per se any more than there is with capital punishment or killing someone in wartime..

Peter:



I think soldiers are entitled to rules of war, which terrorists, by their very nature, are not.

David:



Isn't there a problem though with taking a posture that we're against terrorism but hoping officials have sense enough to use it when they need to?

OJ-



Sure there's a problem with it, if by problem you mean that it's not intellectually neat, but the older I get, the more convinced I become that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of young minds. I do think that we're allowed to make laws, or construct our mores, to deal with what is likely to happen and to realize that all systems fall apart when confronted with the one in a million shot.



I almost never take this position in practice, but at the end of the day, when faced with disaster, I do agree that survival of a moral society is our primary concern. I understand that that could be made into an argument for torture, but my judgement is that maintaining a moral society is more important than avoiding another 9/11.



This is, to tie it to another thread, an example of a morally difficult situation that belief in an immutable fount of morality helps me navigate. As PJ notes, there are things I would not do because I could not justify them to G-d. If I didn't believe that, then I don't know how I would resist the argument that the needs of the many outweigh our reluctance to attach electrodes to the genitals of the one.

David:



Yet we are also democrats and the question arises whether it is right for us to ask soldiers, commanders, government officials, to bear the moral weight alone? Don't we have some obligation to be honest with ourselves, even if we choose not to codify exceptions to torture conventions?

>> No. I'm sayimng there's nothing morally objectionable about torture per se any more than there is with capital punishment or killing someone in wartime..


Let me get this straight then, Orrin. You're saying that "there's nothing morally objectionable, per se" about, for instance, damping down lengths of canvas and wrapping the torturee in the canvas and letting it dry (a method occasionally used by the KGB), or shoving a wire up somebody's urethra and then shooting an electrical charge up it, or raping the interrogee's spouse or child in his/her view, or that old standby, the rack?



Sorry, Orrin, and you may call me a weakling if you like, but I think torture is _objectively_ wrong and a transgression of moral and ethical limitations, and, in my heart, I simply cannot believe that God will look approvingly upon this.

>>N.B.: There's actually a really simple thought experiment that may help to illuminate the issue here: you catch the serial killer who's taken your wife and children. He's got them locked up somewhere but refuses to divulge their whereabouts. Which would you do, prove your humanity by accepting their eventual deaths or torture him to try and find out where they are?




And to address this part of your original post, furthermore:



The problem with the scenario you postulate is that (a) the serial killer, being in my custody, would no longer be capable of directly threatening my wife and children and (b) you don't allow for the possibility that I might already have my friends, neighbors and the police out looking for my missing family, and finally (c) you limit the options too narrowly by assuming that it's a choice between torture and your family's deaths. A truly on-the-ball interrogator will be able to garner all sorts of clues from even silence, if he knows the right questions to ask. (No fair rewriting the scenario retroactively!)

Joe:



No, you shouldn't harm the innocent wife and children, but it's not readily apparent that we can draw a sensible distiction between the torture of an evildoer for a good purpose and killing them as punishment. The most important reason not to torture people is really that we--the torturers--may come to enjoy it.

Joe:



Fine. And when the wife and kids are dead, will your conscience be clear?

David Cohen:



Could you send me an e-mail if you have an opportunity (you're not listing your address). Thanks

A few months ago, the German police actually had a kidnapper in custody who refused to divulge the location of the kidnapped boy and was giving them false information on purpose. They threatened him with rape in prison and announced they made arrangements for a martial arts instructor to torture the information out of him. The threat was sufficient to have the kidnapper reveal the boy was already dead and indicate where the body could be found.

CJ:



And I just see nothing wrong with that morally.

OJ--



What, you've never heard of a shabbas goy
?

David:



We moved from the 'hood in East Orange to an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in West Orange: I've been a shabbas goy. And our Greek Orthodox friend, Nick Furis, used to bail out of our street hockey games wheneverr they didn't have a minyan (sp?) at the temple.