Torture

One problem with this (classic) scenario is that it assumes that the good guys have so much information as to have placed the bad guy in their clutches but lack just “one little fact more” to be able to locate the ticking bomb.
It’s a silly scenario.
The more likely scenario (bureaucracies being bureaucracies) is that we roundup a thousand people of the correct demographic and just start processing them on the likelihood that someone will make up a good story.

Common sense and history shows that the real players are in isolated cells and never have direct knowledge of other cells or even specifics of their own cell’s activites. The man who built the bomb would not know who the person was who placed it. The person who placed it would not know who developed target sites. In all reality, the one who placed the bomb would detonate it and go out in a blaze of glory, so he couldn’t be captured and the bomb defused. That and the fact that coercion elicits any response the victim thinks will end the pain, pretty much rules out this notion that it is a widespread practice in the so called war against terrorism. It is of course used in 3rd world countries to crush political resistance against a regime. The right to legal representation has relegated the rubber hose to the history bin in all Western nations.

The fascinating and disturbing thing is that so many people, so far from being reluctanctly forced to support torture by the (basically nonexistent) evidence, seem actually to want to talk themselves into believing that torture is an effective tool. That says something unpleasant about the human psyche.

Would it have made sense to “render” Atta to a place where he could have been interrogated in a way that might have prevented Sept. 11? That’s not a simple question for me to answer, even as I share the conviction that torture is always and everywhere wrong.

This assumes that it was known that Atta had something dreadful in mind. The state of intelligence on September 9, 2001 was such that, while it could have been anticipated that al-Qaeda had something in mind, it was not clear that Atta was the keystone person.
It also assumes that torture would in fact produce “the truth” instead of what Atta thought his questioners would be satisfied with, and that he knew the full details of the plan.
Quite a few assumptions.

THe most charitable reading of Ignatius and Juan non-Volokh is that trying to say that you’d want Atta to be arrested and interrogated, not tortured, and rendition might’ve been the only way.
But that’s bullsh*t of course. He could’ve been held on immigration charges–he’d been out of status for a while, overstayed a tourist visa. Also, while I couldn’t quote chapter and verse from the INS regulations on this, I’m also pretty fucking sure that even if he hadn’t been out of status, you can revoke someone’s student visa for plotting a terrorist attack.

Katherine–That’s a bit much, isn’t it? I mean, if Atta had been held on immigration charges, all of the current administration’s political opponents would have opposed that detention, wouldn’t they?
Steve–I confess that I don’t know whether torture ‘works’ or not. But it seems to me that opponents’ assertions that it doesn’t are vulnerable to the same charge–that they’re assuming it doesn’t work to avoid the harder question of what to do assuming it does work.

But it seems to me that opponents’ assertions that it doesn’t are vulnerable to the same charge—that they’re assuming it doesn’t work to avoid the harder question of what to do assuming it does work
It is astounding how discussions of torture revolve round hypotheticals (‘ticking nukes’) which have absolutely nothing to do with the numerous, readily-available, non-hypothetical actual cases of torture happening at this very moment.

That’s a bit much, isn’t it? I mean, if Atta had been held on immigration charges, all of the current administration’s political opponents would have opposed that detention, wouldn’t they?
Is this supposed to be a coherent argument for torturing Atta instead? “The outcry over Atta’s detention was such that the government was forced to torture him, in order to appease the critics”.

Thomas, both common sense and analysis of historical examples seem to suggest that a torture victim will simply say whatever s/he thinks the interrogator wants to hear. This, combined with other considerations broached in this thread (such as the unlikelihood of any one individual, who is part of a cellularly-organized terrorist group, knowing full details of a plot), suggest that torture proponents would have a heck of a lot of work to do to even begin to mount a serious moral defense of torture on the grounds of necessity. Given that, the paucity of empirical support for their position is pretty striking. Everything that I know of points to the truth of the proposition that torture is a great tool for intimidation, but quite lousy for gathering accurate information. A government that makes use of torture is, to the extent that it does so, simply reducing itself to the moral level of a nasty dictatorship.

Torture is wrong. Countries that practice torture ought to be treated as international pariahs, people who believe that torture is OK ought to be shunned. That is all.
Maybe the Single Most Telling Thing about America’s adventures in torture is that Matt’s response is not the automatic reaction of 98% of the American population, or of the Republican Party.
Instead, we get all these utilitarian arguments, would you torture Saddam Hussein to save a busload of 11-year-old schoolgirls, etc.
The principle that “there are some things you just don’t do, even if it’s to your advantage to do them” has evidently become an absurd notion to America. Maybe it always has been. But I don’t really see how there can be such a thing as “morality” if that principle’s excluded.

Sorry, I’m not willing to go _quite_ that far. If 1) the ticking-nuke scenario came true and 2) there existed good reasons to think that torture or some other normally prohibited practice might avert the catastrophe, I would say “go for it”. It’s just that in the real world, as opposed to the movies or TV, that set of circumetances is vanishingly unlikely to arise. Which of course is also why the ticking-nuke scenario is so drastically irrelevant to discussion of what he Bushies are actually doing.

Anderson you state that
The principle that “there are some things you just don’t do, even if it’s to your advantage to do them” has evidently become an absurd notion to America.
But I’m not sure that that is a fully ethical position. It is unethical to forgoe a small injustice that would have prevented a larger injustice. Society condones murder if that murder serves a purpose, like preventing even more murders. Yet you would advocate that condoning toture, if that torture could prevent murder, is unethical. So society shouldn’t condone torture if there is a high probability that the torture will prevent murder in the future? We allow police to murder escaping suspects if their is a high probability they will murder in the future. What’s the difference?
It appears to me that torture is perfectly reasonable in the right circumstances. So the debate should be on what are the right circumstances.

Abb1,
If there was so much time for a judge to issue a warrant it would appear that torture would be of little value and a gross injustice. But I guess that’s your opinion, which remains of the same quality of crazy as usual.
I on the other hand would go with the real life example that makes sense. If a US patrol comes upon an unlawful combatant laying bombs in front of schools, it would seem, at least at first glance, ethical to torture him for the other schools he had mined, and the areas his friends were mining. This is information which should be easily verified so that undue torture (what a phrase, “undue torture”) isn’t administered.
Since, in my scenario, the cost of a seperate bomb going off is so high, and likely enough to present a reality, the torture of one individual caught in the act would be the lesser of the unethical choices. The least ethical choice would be to not torture the unlawful combatant and allow for the possibility that Iraqi school children will be bombed (as they have in the past).
You just can’t allow innocent school kids to be bombed because you don’t want to dirty your soul with the screams of their bomber.

Abb1,
But it is a real enough scenario. And in my case the torture is justified. Which is my point that in some cases torture is justified. So the real arguement should be when you replace the word “children” with “US Soldier”, “Iraqi Police”, or “innocents at the market” does the same hold true? I don’t know the answers to those, but I do know that those questions should be the debate.
Argueing that torture is never justfied is unethical in the extreme. Argueing that torture is rarely justified is obvious. Hammering out an ethical line of when and when not it is justified is just too scary for those on the left.
So we are left with Bush doing what he thinks is right and those apposing him taking a line easily argued against (All Rush has to do is bring up the Captain who fired his pistol near the ear of a captured roadside bomber and got a full admission of where many more bombs were). Which puts us with no balance to what Bush thinks is right.

[Tried to post this before, but there was a glitch; if it double posts, mea culpa.]
(1) Jet appears to conflate law with morality; but the former by its nature is obliged to be practical, the latter’s reason for being is the assumption that practicality ain’t everything.
The classic statement is Dostoevsky’s, which has been cited on many blogs in this context. You can secure lasting peace and justice for the world, just by torturing a small child. Do you? That is the difference between morality and expedience.
(2) Thomas, it’s said that the Army’s own interrogation manuals (written presumably by its better interrogators) reject torture on pragmatic grounds, including the “tell-them-what-they-want-to-hear-so-the-pain-stops” problem. Haven’t read them myself, so anyone who can contradict me, please do.
(3) Spaces between paragraphs would be pleasant, wouldn’t they?

Jet, you said “Society condones murder if that murder serves a purpose, like preventing even more murders.”
Generally, most societies tend not to support this line – leaving aside the morality here – because there is no way of really knowing if such killing will really save lives in the future. This is not too dissimilar from the Iraq war: there was a “threat” that Iraq might have posed in the future, therefore (IMO unjustifiable) means were used to deal with the “threat” in the present.
And this is the real point of the torture debate – we have no way of knowing what will happen, but we are aware of what we are doing. So a guess about the future justifies an unpleasant reality in the present? Not an argument I find convincing.
A second point to make is the legal status of this – the moment the legal system concedes torture is acceptable in limited circumstances, the precedent becomes available for widespread abuse of detainees and you can be sure the circumstances it is ‘justified’ under will be widened drastically.

Jet, your logic is the logic of a coward. Sometimes doing the right thing means that you might die, and some things are wrong, even in war. If during World War II we invented a virus that would kill every German (but no one else), we would have been wrong to use it, even though it would have ended the war almost immediately.
It’s eerie how suddenly the government, the same government that apparently can’t be trusted to run our health care or our retirement pensions, can be trusted to distinguish the guilty from the innocent, and to only torture the guilty. It only takes a little fear to turn many libertarians into believers of big government at its worst.

Walt Pohl,
Logic of a coward? So, you are trying to make a counter-argument and you start with that. Let me tell you, I’m deeply impressed. Absolutely brilliant opening line. But all joking aside, you need to get a grip. If you can’t have a calm rational discussion about torture, then what can you have a calm rational discussion about (and yes for those dry humorless souls who haunt this place, that was tongue in cheek)?
And what the hell are you talking about? We trust our government with far worse than torture every day. Or did you think it was some grand jury deciding where those bombs fell at night? But I can think of a quick and dirty way to implement torture. Give it immediate Senate oversight. Make each case has to go before a JAG criminal investigation. Give some hard, detailed, rules on when it is okay. Make the officers criminally accountable. Only allow military officers the ability to make the decision (no CIA). And make each case’s details public after one year. That should limit the cases to only the extremes that most people would agree with, ie, almost never. But since that is the only way I’d agree with torture, it is obviously better to ban it as impractical.
On a separate note, Dostoevsky must have been too deep into the fire water. The most ethical choice is to kill the small child. Dostoevsky was interesting (I’ve read most of his stuff, but have not studied him), but he didn’t reduce the decision to its most simple form ie, it is a choice to kill one or a choice to kill millions, there was no third choice.

Jet: “On a separate note, Dostoevsky must have been too deep into the fire water. The most ethical choice is to kill [sic; torture] the small child.”
“Ethical”? I don’t think that word means what you think it means. Got any kids, Jet?
Not to come down on Jet; Jeremy Bentham, presumably, would’ve made the same pick. Which is why most of us aren’t really utilitarians all the way down.

On the Dostoyevsky thing, I wrote this a month or two ago:
“Terrorism and torture and certainly war in an unjust cause, are worse than terrorism and torture and war in a just cause. But the ends and means cannot be so neatly separated.
The thing is, everyone always claims that their ends are just. One of the best ways to determine whether their stated ends are honest, or whether their stated ends will really be achieved, is to look at their means.
If you abstract it out enough, bin Laden and Torquemada and Martin Luther King and Rabbi Hillel and a Quaker hiding a fugitive slave in her basement all shared an ultimate end: serving the will of God on earth. But bin Laden proposes to get there by means of the slaughter and, if the Taliban is any indication, enslavement of innocents, and Torquemada wanted to get there by the torture of Jews and heretics, and King and Hillel had very different means. It is by looking at their means, that we judge whether they are really serving God or the devil. (or what is best or worst in man.)
That’s perhaps too extreme an example. Here’s another one: Yasser Arafat’s cheerful willingness to see Israeli teenagers blown up in coffee shops cast doubt on his claim that his desired end was a two-state solution and not the destruction of Israel.
I would actually argue that in evaluating self-described liberation movements throughout human history, the means chosen are a better predictor of what happens than the stated ends. I think it’s pretty clear that an Irish Catholic in 1917, a Russian peasant under the tsar, just about every African in the 1950s, a black citizen of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, a Palestinian today–they all probably had stronger grievances than the colonists did in 1775. I mean really, tea and stamp taxes? They have a point about “No taxation without representation”, but that’s the slogan on the D.C. license plates. The Boston Massacre was four people–it’s more on the scale of Kent State than the Potato Famine.
And yet, things turned out very well here. They were worse in Ireland, and incomparably worse in the U.S.S.R, and really just about the entire continent of Africa. Look at Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, and look at Mandela’s South Africa. And do you realize how unbelievably lucky we were, black and white alike, to have the civil rights movement led for so long by a man like King? It’s not that the stated ends don’t matter. Of course they matter. But the means predict the actual ends far better than the stated ends do.
This isn’t an original insight of mine, either. You can find it in novels from 1984:

(‘You are prepared to commit murder?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘To betray your country to foreign powers?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases — to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face — are you prepared to do that?’ ‘Yes.’)

to The Brothers Karamazov:

(That’s rebellion,” murmered Alyosha, looking down. “Rebellion? I am sorry you call it that,” said Ivan earnestly. “One can hardly live in rebellion, and I want to live. Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature- that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance- and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.”
“No, I wouldn’t consent,” said Alyosha softly.
“And can you admit the idea that men for whom you are building it would agree to accept their happiness on the foundation of the unexpiated blood of a little victim? And accepting it would remain happy for ever?”
“No, I can’t admit it….)

to Lord of the Rings (too many examples to quote one. It’s 1/3 of the damn plot, or more: the Ring cannot be used to do good, even for the wisest person or the strongest person or the person with the best intentions. “That is where it would begin, but it would not end there, alas!” Or words to that effect.)
Alyosha’s answer is the right answer, and Winston’s is the wrong answer, even if you’re a pure utilitiarian. If someone tells you that the way to achieve human happiness or liberation or God’s will is to torture an innocent child to death–whether it’s a voice claiming to be God, or the party leader, or the leader of the resistance, or anyone else–they’re almost certainly lying, whether deliberately (as in 1984) or not.”

I agree a rational discussion is possible and desirable. But we’ve already had it. And the conclusion that pretty much the entire world came to is that torture is never, ever justified as policy. To the extent that countries are able, indeed legally obliged, to exert universal jurisdiction over acts of torture. The boundaries of torture are laid out in the convention on torture, signed decades ago and ratified by the US a decade ago. The problem with torture is that boundaries are always, always crossed. Torture is by its very nature extremely vulnerable to the slippery slope, on both a personal and a political level.