I agree with RASTAMAN.
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Originally Posted by Silverhair
It has been learned that much of the information that resulted in the arrest, in Britian, of the recent terrorist plots to blow up airliners, was gained from Pakistan. It is very likely that such information was gained by torture.
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The suspected terrorists had been under surveillance for at least a year by the British Security Services, who hadn't seen any need of early arrests. I'm not sure the new intelligence from Pakistan was very important to the British services.
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Originally Posted by Silverhair
Is torture ever justified? Please don't give a knee-jerk response. What if you are trying to prevent a nuclear bomb from getting to New York, and you have capture the terrorist leader who has all the info?
(...)
Where is the bar set? Is it a sliding bar? Is it more moral to allow millions to suffer and to die so that one person's may claim to be moral?
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The fictional Times Square nuclear bomb plot and the need for torture is a talking point, first used by
Alan Dershowitz; its purpose is to challenge our abstract opposition to torture. But this scenario is flawed, because it assumes an improbable number of variables :
-first, the CIA knows there is a nuclear bomb plot,
-second, agents capture a terrorist,
-third, the capture takes place at the precise moment between the plot's launch and the arrival of the bomb/the bomb's detonation,
-fourth, the interrogators somehow know almost everything about this specific terrorist and his ticking bomb (because they were able to capture him and they know he is related to the plot), but they are missing a few critical details that can be obtained only through torture.
All of these circumstances are so far-fetched that Dershowitz's argument is spurious.
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Originally Posted by Silverhair
Where is the real morality? What if we are not talking about nukes and NYC, but only some company level battlefield tactical information - highly useful to our company commander today, but useless tomorrow. Gaining the info would possibly save two or three lives in his command.
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Again, this assumes an improbable cluster of variables. They assume the guilt of the suspect; but in real life situations one rarely has such certainty : if a hundred suspects were arrested, would they all have to be tortured ? What if most of them were innocent ? And anyway, the chances are that the costs of torture (bad
PR) would outweigh the benefits.
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Originally Posted by Silverhair
I am not really concerned about what some court or legislature says the law may or may not be. Those are written in air conditioned rooms without the the adrenalin rush of fear in the veins.
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Even if torture was used only in extreme cases (that mostly assume too many variables), it would quickly become routine. If averting a nuclear bombing in New York City justifies torture, would a school bombing justify the practice ? What about a murder spree ? What about a kidnapping (tell us the location of the prisoner) ? Pretty soon we would resort to torture whenever an innocent person would be danger of losing his life, and we would be back in the Middle Ages.
Recent history illustrates my point : at first, torture was to be used only against high-level Al-Qaida terrorists in Afghanistan. Then it spread to Guantanamo, where many innocents, who have now been freed, were tortured. Finally, it followed our troops to Iraq, and it was probably used on hundreds of people.
Is torture ever justified?
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