Comments on: How Does Bush Define Torture?

By: Justin Gardner

Justin Gardner — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 20:00:49 +0000

Imagine you got a terrorist who just planted a bomb near a school somewhere, about to go off in 24 hours. Everytime you ask a question, he responds ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã…â€œAllah aKbarÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã‚?. If torture is the only possibility left to extract the information, Then torture is the only morally acceptable thing to do in that situation.

Trust me, this person would be tortured and the court of public opinion would be exonerate the people who tortured him.

However, that case is the exception, and yet that’s the one everybody always uses as if it were something that happens ALL the time. But that’s not what happens and our interrogation needs to be created for the overwhelming majority of cases because the extremely tiny minority will take care of itself.

By: Noodles

Noodles — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 19:57:00 +0000

Those are good points as well. I guess the best solution is to “do what you gotta do” but don’t tell anyone about it. Secret bases in eastern europe seem like a good idea but they are not secret anymore. Even if McCain’s bill passes, someone should find a loophole somewhere, if theis type of interrogation is still necessary.

By: Joshua

Joshua — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 17:43:33 +0000

There’s also this to consider: Even if torture, or certain forms of it, were expressly permitted by this or any future administration, how effective an interrogation tool would it really be, especially if the terrorists come to expect that it will be used against them if captured? When facing the prospect of live capture, won’t the additional prospect of being forced to provide information under torture make them more likely to fight to the death, commit suicide or force our soldiers to kill them, thereby rendering them useless as a source of information? Or, perhaps worse still, to tell their interrogators plausible lies to save themselves from being tortured, thus leading our forces on a series of wild-goose chases (thereby making them unavailable for more productive assignments, which, it goes without saying, helps our enemies)?

By: Noodles

Noodles — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 16:47:16 +0000

The torture issue is a tough ethical dilemma. It suprises me that McCain wants to treat captured terrorists the same as american citizens arrested for armed robbery.

Imagine you got a terrorist who just planted a bomb near a school somewhere, about to go off in 24 hours. Everytime you ask a question, he responds “Allah aKbar”. If torture is the only possibility left to extract the information, Then torture is the only morally acceptable thing to do in that situation.

The problem comes when the dillemma is watered down, like if you got 10 guys in a room, one guy might be a terrorist, do you torture them all? its tough to decide what to do.

We need these guidelines to set a standard for coercive interrogations but we cant limit our options if the scenario I mentioned first were to occur.

By: Steve K

Steve K — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 15:56:46 +0000

In one of his books (I forget which) Primo Levi quotes a fellow-victim of Auschwitz, a Frenchman by the name of (I think) Jean Amery, who said ‘one who has been tortured stays tortured’. Both Amery and Levi seem to have committed suicide.
Perhaps we could use this insight to derive a hypothesis: torture is what you don’t recover from. Going further, perhaps we could add that torture is something that permanently degrades the torturer also. By that linked pair of standards, sleep deprivation doesn’t count, but humiliation and/or degradation (even if not involving violence) do.
That said, it is entirely a bad idea for people in the administration to even speculate on these matters, as it tends to send bad signals to people lower down the chain of command.