Should the United States of America torture people?
 

A simple question.

Here's an article discussing torture:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/fea...1.torture.html

BTW, if it isn't clear, the 'Jack Bauer' option means that we have someone in custody, we know to a reasonable degree of certainty that he or she has information about a bomb that will kill people, and won't talk. If you think this sort of situation never happens outside of Hollywood, feel free to vote 'No'.

No one should ever torture anyone for any reason. It doesn't produce reliable information, and it's the ultimate in inhumane behavior.

Jack Bauer is a fictional character.

Don't underestimate the power of fictional characters.

As will said, torture is unacceptable, always.

I read something in the NYTimes today that caught my eye. They were talking to the Dalai Lama about the violence in Tibet, and he commented on China. Specifically, he outlined what his idea of a superpower is.

If we're supposed to be a superpower, we severely compromise our moral authority (if we had it to begin with) when we torture. It's an enormous violation of human rights (not that the United States has ever respected human rights).

I don't think anyone should torture people.

Moreover, I think that the use of torture is indicative of fear and impotence. It is one of the most forthright failures of humanity.

Isn't anyone going to argue against this? Who voted "I don't see anything wrong with torture"?

What is the OP's opinion?

Beautifully said.

Look: let's say you have an actual Jack Bauer situation. The one way to make SURE you don't get reliable information would be to torture the guy. All moral arguments aside--not that there aren't great moral arguments against it--torture doesn't produce good information.

Maybe torture itself isn't the main problem. The erosion of morality scares me more.

If it's okay to torture somebody BUT ONLY IF... then the BUT ONLY IF becomes less and less severe over time as torture becomes more commonplace and more "accepted" by the people in the public eye. "Oh, I don't care. It's not me. I'm a good citizen of East Asia." This isn't to suggest that covert torture will change and we'd be foolish to assume that Uncle Sam hasn't shoved a few bamboo slivers up some fingernails to get a few names in the last 20 years.

Once you let known torture become acceptable for one specific reason... say terrorism... human nature takes over and suddenly you've got 120V nipple clamps and are gettin' sweated out downtown about those parking violations from last year... and all in the name of stopping "traffic terrorism."

I knew I did the right thing by taking that driver's ed class to get out of those speeding tickets.

... and so is the large-scale torture that is war.

I wouldn't call torture a failure of humanity. I like to think of it as something we all carry with us as an option in the back of our heads... an evil red button we tease as a response to crazy stuff like mass murder and cheating spouses, et al. I'd call it getting in touch with the Mr. Hyde side.

Such cruelty is a very human trait.

I know you are not saying that as if, "We practice one evil, this other one is justified."

My response to torture was listed above. We can't condone it because even a little bit will eventually become more.

I'm saying we practice one evil because it involves pretty uniforms.

Physical torture? Riding around in a humvee for hours a day and waiting for a roadside bomb to take your legs off. You are a captive of the situation and the situation has the potential to kill you, but if it does anything other than the scare the shit outta you... it'll just cripple you with dismemberment thanks to the high tech body armor that turns your body into a six-segment sausage. We call that war because it's less personal than a sweaty guy putting cigarettes out on your neck in a damp basement.

/threadjack

Yeah, I'm a dumbass. I shouldn't be posting on this.

If we do it then it's OK for "Them" to do it.

Torture is a great tool... in movie and TV plot lines. In the real world I don't think it works very well. People tell us what we want to hear. Or at least what they think we want to hear.

Plus it's kind of hard to hold the morale high ground when torturing people.

This was a very valid concept in WWII when it came to US/UK prisoners and German POW's. I read that the US did have a secret facility that did in fact use psychological type of torture on key German POW's and the greatest fear was Germany would find out and do the same. I don't know if this is true, but over all this gentileman's agreement held true. US prisoners were as a whole very well kept by the Germans, and we kept the German prisoners well too. Now when it came to the German/Russian prisoners or the Japanese/US ones, thats a different story.

Sadly this has absolutely no baring on the current conflict.

On the one side we have beheading, maimings (I think fingers were mailed recently), that sort of thing, on the other side we have water boarding which incidentally was/is part of airforce SERE training.

This whole torture is wrong is easy when you are sitting at your computer desk, drinking your caffeinated beverage of choice, but then its not really your life on the line.

So you're saying torture is valid as a form of revenge?

Regardless of your beverage of choice it seems the issue is a little more complex then they behead people, we water board people. First there's a very real question as to whether or not it works?:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2005Jan11.html

It works great for Jack on "24." But that's TV and not real life. Many US veterans, including John McCain, who have suffered torture at the hands of the enemy have said not only that we shouldn't be doing it, but that it's not effective.

Then there's the question of is it legal?:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...201170_pf.html

Kind of hard to claim what we're doing is legal when we executed several Japanese soldiers for this very behavior.

Ok, here goes:

Willravel, torture whether it is morally justifiable or not, can be very effective in certain situations such as field interrogations. I.E. where you have a particular piece of information you need to get and quickly (I.E. where did you bury the cache? or which building is the hostage in?).

For long term stuff, confessions, etc. torture is less effective since, obviously, the person is likely to say whatever they think will make it stop.

When you are warring against a country that is willing to extend to their POW's the same treatment we provide to ours, an absolute ban on torture makes perfect sense.

But when your enemy is going to torture and murder any prisioner they get regardless of how the US treats it's prisioners, there really isn't any reason (other than a moral argument) to abstain from use of torture when it would be effective. I.E. if you catch one of the guys who kidnapped a CBS news crew and want him to tell you where they are...I guarantee he isn't likely to tell you unless he is coerced, at least not quickly enough to help them.

Morally, I don't see how torture is any different than killing someone. If killing is justified in pursuit of a goal, then torture is too, in my mind. I think it is distastefull and should be avoided unless absolutely necessary, but if it will save American lives then I have less than no sympathy for the poor bastard.

Don't take this to mean that I have any desire to torture someone, and I am not about to risk my career and freedom by taking it upon myself to do so, but I think we should, to a degree, adjust our methods to compliment those employed by our enemy.

I have been to SERE (the army version) and it was miserable, degrading, and a real eye opener. We were treated far worse than any of the prisioners at Abu Ghraib. At least those guys got to eat and weren't borderline hypothermic. I couldn't care less whether they had their feelings hurt, or were embarrassed. I will however concede that the behavior of the guards was monumentally stupid, done without any clear purpose, and very damaging to our national reputation.

No I never said that, or even implied it in the slightest.

Sorry, in this case psychological training trumps military training and even experience. All of the most renowned and well respected minds in psychology and psychiatry agree 100% that the information gained from torture is, at best, completely unreliable. Even if it was legal (which it absolutely is not), it is generally useless because the information cannot be trusted to any reasonable degree, especially if you and your men are going to risk your lives for it. Yes, it will occasionally produce some reliable information, but because the rate of reliable information is so inconsistent it would be foolhardy to act on the information.
This is absolutely true, but it's also very true for even very short term torture. They're not quite the same, but the results are surprisingly similar.
This shouldn't be about vengeance. Vengeance has no place in war.
Killing is usually pretty quick. As we've seen, torture can go on for years. That's a rather serious difference, wouldn't you agree?
You really want to stoop to the level of our enemy? And where does "our enemy" have large military installations where hundreds of our POWs and innocent civilians are tortured long term?
Have you been to Abu or Gitmo? I've been waterboarded myself (makeshift waterboarding, intentionally, even knowing that I was in no danger). Anything more than maybe 35-40 seconds and it's fucking scary. And I am a swimmer.

Are we going to limit this particular discussion to military torture? How about in the context of capital punishment and our criminal justice system?

Ok, I will try to respond.

Edit: no they shouldn't

well, if you look at campaigns which relied heavily on the use of torture to extract information, they're a pretty ambiguous lot--france in algeria comes to mind. in the end, the damage done politically and ethically outweighed any advantage gained through its use. it is pretty obvious that once information about the systematic use of torture got out, it galvanized the opposition to the algerian war and that opposition in significant measure explained the outcome. algeria became indepedent in 1964. the agreement happened in 1962.

personally, i think it is useless as an information gathering tactic, appalling ethically and politically can be a disaster of proportions that outweigh any possible advantage gained through it.

i dont buy the quid pro quo arguments above.

no time to develop this any further at the moment.

That's why I tried to hit on the fact that torture doesn't really work right off the bat. It would be pragmatic if torture worked, but it doesn't so it ceases to be an information gathering tactic and becomes an intimidation tactic. We really don't need intimidation tactics when we have, for example, millions upon millions of displaced Iraqis that are scared shitless of both their own people and the coalition forces. I'd say we've already got them intimidated.
My mistake. So, to clarify, you're referring to a 15 minute cession being short term and a 12 hour cession being long term.
I would have to say that fear of torture and torture are two very different animals. One uses the threat of harm, the other uses the carrot of the harm ending. These each have incredibly different effects on an individual. While I find the threat of harm very distasteful, it is necessary in war. Torture, on the other hand is the harm, but it's not the "I'm going to kill you before you kill me" type of harm, it's the "I'm going to assert my dominance over you" type of harm, even if one professes noble intentions.
Having been dead myself, I can attest to it not necessarily being painful at all. The end result really is a matter of perspective. From my perspective, death is like turning off a light. One is there one moment and simply not the next. For a religious person, it's a bit different, but I have to imagine that the end results are vastly varied. Eternal paradise vs. torture? Nothingness vs. torture? Aren't these no-brainers?
And Gitmo? Confirmed reports of 2 years of detention with regular torture from British citizens? Canadaians? Not even our enemies, but in fact people released as innocent.
If there was evidence, there would be trials. There are no trials, therefore I can only conclude the evidence is inadmissible, circumstantial, or fictional.
Scary wasn't an adequate description. After the third time I was gagging and even vomited. When I say scary, I'm comparing it to the time I was shot or the time I was hit by a car (or the time one of my girlfriends in hs said she was pregnant). Torture is an adequate description for waterboarding. As for the crocodile tears? You have to be aware that many people in Gitmo have and even are totally innocent. Don't they at least deserve your pity?
I'm not an expert either, of course.

I have no clue how I stand on this issue.

On one hand, I think torture is absolutely terrible, and after reading McCain's first-hand account of his torture for 6 years in Vietnam, I can't imagine allowing that to be inflicted on anyone, no matter how much of a political enemy they are.

On the other hand, I think that we understand as a democratic republic that sometimes, just sometimes... the individual has to give up certain things for the benefit of the group. This same logic justifies an ethical consideration about whether you'd kill 1 person if it meant saving 20, or 200, or 2000. At some point, most people well deign that the death of the 1, no matter how tragic, was necessary and effective to save the lives of many others.

It is because of this "shifting" point - Will you kill 1 person to save 10? Will you kill 1 person to save 5? -- question that I can't conveniently say that we should never torture an individual.

So I think I've tenatively arrived at how I feel about the situation; if the torture of another person, innocent or otherwise, can be viewed by a reasonable third party to directly lead to SAVING a substantial group of other humans (hostage situations, bomb situations, etc), then I can abide torture. If it's being used for mere identification (give up your leader, etc..) then I do not think it is ever acceptable, and should be the torturer as well as his authorizing officers should be held accountable for the war crime that it is.

So in a court of law, a would-be torturer would have to demonstrate to a "reasonable third-party" that their torture technique was necessitated by the belief that it could DIRECTLY save the lives of many others.

EDIT: After looking at this poll I seem to be in the DRAMATIC minority on this issue, so I've got a question for the overwhelming majority who seem to think torture is never acceptable.

If you have a credible reason to believe that killing one person would save the lives of 200 people, would you not act (in all of your power) to kill that person? Why is torture any different? Or does it have to be more than 200, for you? I think the torture or death of one person is absolutely tragic, but the death of 200 is unthinkably tragic, especially if you could've prevented it.

EDIT x2: This 'ethical logic' seems eerily reminiscent of a discussion I had in an Ethics/Philosophy study - aren't there notable philosophers who have pondered this question directly?

Every interrogation expert who's gone on record in the last five years disagrees with you. What are your credentials with which you back up the claim that torture or the fear of torture (which is a form of torture) produces reliable information?

"The use of force... yields unreliable results [and] may damage subsequent collection efforts". --2006 US Army Field Manual

Further, The United States is a signatory to five treaties or international declarations that ban torture:

- The U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
- Third Geneva Convention, Common Article 3 (1949)
- International Convenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966)
- Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions (1977)
- Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984)

In each of these instances, we've given our word not to torture. To say that torture is EVER permissible is to say that the United States' word is meaningless. No amount of wordsmithing and lawyership can undo the damage it does to dishonor our word.

The Constitution does a great job of limiting government so that it hopefully does not get out of control. Dividing powers among different branches while making each have oversight over the others has helped - despite the constant loopholes that our elected officials are constantly trying to exploit.

Lets face it, if you REALLY did know that something on the scale of the WTC was going to be destroyed, AND you were sure you had a person who knew the details, you do everything in your power to prevent it - that includes all forms of torture and pretty much murder of your subject to get the info.

The problem is that there really is no effective way to DEFINE and LIMIT the use of torture. If you try to specifically spell out the situations to use it, you would likely end up being either vague or too restrictive. Be to vague and they (over use it) torture me to find out if I know what my neighbor had for dinner the night before he committed a crime. Be too restrictive and you don't use it in a situation where it could have been a savior.

This is where the Constitution comes in. The Constitution contains a catch-all that can be used for this sort of thing. There is one power that has no oversight other than that it is a public record: The power of a Presidential Pardon.

So here it is: torture is illegal in the US in any form. But if you are DARN sure that you have the right guy who has the right information to prevent a real life catastrophe, you torture him and stop at nothing to get the information. You have just committed a crime and will lose your job as well as your freedom for at least a number of years in prison. The person / people committing the torture bet their OWN lives on the fact that THIS was the time to do it and HOPE that the president gives you an unconditional pardon. The check and balance applied is that the president has to stand behind his decision in the public.

I voted 'No. Never for any reason.' Sorry, I probably should've included this information in my post.

Personally, the *only* justifiable scenario I can think of is the 'ticking bomb' one, and, like others have said, that doesn't happen outside of Hollywood. That said, if it *did* happen, do you really think Jack...er...sorry...the federal agent in charge...would get prosecuted (assuming he did, in fact, save millions of lives by breaking some guys fingers)?

Not only that, but killing someone *once they are no longer a threat* is universally forbidden under the laws of war. Shooting someone when they're pointing a gun at you is what happens in war. You may wound them, or kill them, but it is not torture or murder. Shooting them once they are no longer a threat is torture, or murder, even if 10 seconds ago they were 'the enemy', bent on killing you.

Edit: No they shouldn't.

No, I understood that. I'm saying: even that is further than most interrogation experts would be willing to go.

Is there a difference between "torture doesn't work" and "torture provides unreliable information"? I mean we're talking about policy or even troop movements based on the unreliable information.

Let me put it this way: you're a proud member of our armed forces. Let's say that you have to go on a mission that's based on intelligence attained via torture. Knowing that the information provided by torture is unreliable, would you really want to put yourself and your brothers in arms in serious danger based on information that's not dependable? Doesn't that strike you as intelligence that doesn't work?

I voted No, never. I think willravel is right that torture rarely, if ever, produces effective and useful information.

But more importantly, we shouldn't be torturing people because we're the United States of America. This country is losing moral capital like we have a leak in the bottom of the ethics barrel. I don't want anyone hurt, and that goes double for my fellow citizens and neighbors in the US. But there have to be limits on what we are willing to do. I truly think that the United States is supposed to be the beau ideal of civil/human rights. I'm not saying the United States ever actually has been that...just that I think it was created to strive for that. I think that torturing people goes against the spirit of the "certain inalienable rights" that Jefferson speaks of, and the ideals you can see in the correspondences between Jefferson and Adams, Jefferson and Madison, and John and Abigail Adams. I think a nation that presents itself as a bastion of freedom and democracy is not a nation that tortures. It's a nation that holds itself to a higher moral standard, despite the risks that doing so entails.

No. Surprise.

Turns out nuclear weapons are effective at ending wars.

Good thing the most effective option isn't always exercised.

They're good at preventing them too.

Placebo. C'mon. "Don't misbehave or we'll nuke you!" is total bullshit.

Only whackos would initiate and by then? It's too late. Mutual destruction is like a global reach-around. Fap-fap.

...

Torture is as old as tribes and will continue to be a part of the human experience.

We, as a society, cannot accept it as a viable practice by those we elect as leaders. It'll still happen, but we have to make sure the consequences are adequate.

An effective one at that.

* * * * *

Is America tribal?

I think we're onto something here.

For the record, I voted no on this one. I believe we have established that information derived from torture of any nature with any duration or circumstance is questionable, at best. There are instances that have proven both sides of the debate on this one and that only further proves my point .. it is not 100% reliable.

That said, even if it WERE 100% reliable, it's still wrong. You stop and think about that a moment. Torture is wrong .. plain and simple .. and nothing you can say will ever change that simple fact. It's inhumane and morally unethical, and should not be even remotely considered as a possible solution to terrorism in any form, foreign or domestic. Just because your enemy is willing to practice inhumane tactics, doesn't make it right for you to do the same.

Since over 75% of you who actually voted happen to agree that torture is unacceptable under any circumstances, that is solely directed to those of you who think there MIGHT be some reason to excuse and dismiss the act of torturing another human being FOR ANY REASON.

This is the 21st century, and our technology has advanced in leaps and bounds over the last 80 years alone. We have other means to the same ends that nullify any necessity for stooping to so low a level as that of a terrorist, that have been PROVEN far more reliable and far less detrimental to the integrity of our great nation.




Somebody can have my soapbox now, I'm done with it

*Puts hand up*

A lot of people are OK with the idea that capital punishment be used as an instrument of vengeance, to satisfy people's need to see heinous crimes punished strongly.

How come so few are OK with torture being used to the same ends? It's OK to kill someone but not whip them or cut off a hand?

I think its quite stupid to make an absolutist statement that we should never ever under any circumstances, use torture. Honestly, what if you knew for a fact someone enemy combatant/terrorist/whatever had a piece of information that would save thousands of lives, and he wont share it? You just want to lock him away and give him a lawyer and let the chips fall where they may? There's a line and a situation out there where it might be the right tool for the job and possibly the only one. In nearly all realistic situations it probably isn't. That doesn't mean we should never do it should it really be needed.