Torture
Dean
During the first two years of this weblog, I wrote regularly about the subject of having America torturing prisoners to get information out of them to help our goals in the global war on terrorism. You can read a roundup of everything I've written on the subject if you click here, but if you want the gist of my position, its this:
No. No, no, no, and no. Maybe in the worst circumstances, but still even then, probably no.
I will make room for the most extreme sort of case: let's say we know for a fact that a nuclear bomb is hidden somewhere in Chicago and is set to detonate within 12 hours and we are certain that you know exactly where it is and how to defuse it. In that case, fine, give me the pliers and the blowtorch and I'll do whatever I have to do to make you talk. But even then, I want you to force me to stand up before a grand jury, a court, and a prosecutor to explain why I felt I absolutely had to do what I did. It should be along the same line of argument as "justifiable homicide"--and make me live with the consequences if I choose wrong.
On the other hand, I'm not necessarily against "torture" in quotes and with a small "t" -- like putting someone on very bland and boring diet (nothing but baloney sandwiches and vitamin pills and water for a month maybe), making them listen to awful music, making it hard for them to get a good night's sleep, scaring them by maybe yelling at them a little (not in a way to rupture eardrums) or letting a dog bark at them--okay, I can live with all that, if the information you're after is important and you really think all of that will work. You want to play a little "good cop/bad cop?" Okay. I can live with that too. If you've got a really good reason.
But needles under the fingernails or breaking bones or cigarette burns or any of those games? Not in my America, buddy, and not from anybody being paid by my tax dollars. Not unless you're so sure it's needed that you're willing to put your career on the line and maybe even risk jail time.
Like I said, click here if you want to browse through my historical take on the question.
What fascinates me is that every 6-9 months or so, I notice this topic showing up in the blogosphere. It seems to go in waves, where people talk about it for a while, then forget it, then it pops up again.
It's often surprising to me who'll try to defend torture and who won't. People on the left are as likely to defend it as people on the right are to repudiate it, in my experience. For example, left-wing civil libertarian icon Alan Dershowitz has been in favor of allowing torture (of the non-lethal variety) ever since 9/11, while many right-wing sources have taken an absolute "no way, never, Americans do not do that period" stance.
Which always makes the discussions interesting.
I say all this by way of noting that the "torture" meme is back in the news and back in the mix of discussion again. I can't think of anything to say on the subject that I haven't said before, but Instapundit has a roundup of the latest round of torture links. It all seems worth reading, if only to settle in your own mind where you stand on such questions.
Each such prisoner is confined alone in his own cell, with a small port-hole for distributing food and water and for putting shit buckets out for collection.
He gets no human contact with anyone. Nothing to read. No writing instruments. No paper. No visits by anyone from the outside.
When needed he is removed from the cell under guard, taken to an interrogation room, drugged with sodium pentathol or some similar drug, questioned, then returned to his solitary cell.
No arguments. No civil rights. No options. No explanations. Once per week an overhead shower inside the cell is used to clean the prisoner and the cell.
The only possible means of his committing suicide to end all this would be if he ingests some of his own body wastes, in hopes of getting a fatal bacterial infection.
I estimate no more than 60 days needed to break him for life, without anyone's hand ever having been laid upon him.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
One of the greatest forms of evil is refusing to live with the consequences of your actions. In the your hypothetical case of a "nuclear bomb in Manhattan," given the choice between spending my life in prison for torturing some guy or allowing millions of people to die, I'd choose life in prison without hesitation. But that's exactly what the choice should be - with the caveat that a judge at some point might decide that it was mitigating circumstances.
However, the law should be written to force me to go stand before that judge, because if it's not worth spending a great deal of time in prison for, then it's not worth performing the torture. Keeping a strict societal rule in place forces people to think of it in exactly those terms, which is how it should be.
Our actions have consequences, and they always should.
I mean come on, are you really being serious here? I'm having a hard time imagining that this is anything but a rather transparently disingenuous attempt to set up yet another straw man for the purposes of Left-bashing. Be honest with yourself: if you surveyed 100 representative right-wingers and 100 representative left-wingers (assuming everyone answered honestly), do you really believe the distribution would come out even remotely equal on the torture question? Sorry if I'm sounding "condescending" again, but this just blew me away, sort of like the comment a few months back about the modern American left being equivalent to the Nazi party.
Whether you believe torture is acceptable or not, or how fucked-up you think your opponents are, you should at least acknowledge the issues on which they have almost universally consistent positions. This is one of those issues.
As for what is and is not torture, I don't see the point of hashing it out among ourselves. There are laws on this subject, both US laws and international treaties, which (in theory) have the force of US law. I'm not an expert, but I expect most Americans (perhaps even me) would be able to accept certain forms of torture that are currently banned. That doesn't make them legal, even for the President of the United States.
As s so often the case, there are two separate questions: morality and law.
There is one country in Europe that allows all the conditions for torture to be practiced, that country is Spain. It has been documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and two years ago the UN's Rapporteur Theo Van Boven drew the ire of the rightist Aznar when he stablished on his report that there has been cases of torture in recent times against Basques, Catalans and immigrants. I say NO to torture with no exceptions.
Lesser destruction where some human life is directly at stake, any torture that does no permanent physical or mental damage is fine with me.
No torture is ever acceptable for political secrets that do not involve loss of live.
As to whether torture is ever allowable, I suspect each of us has his limits. Situations must surely exist where the suffering, even the great suffering, of one evil man is less important than the survival of even one good one. To say otherwise is to equate good men with evil ones. And that is evil.
One thing that I think needs to be included in the decision to torture, along with the importance of the information to be extracted, is the past behavior of the person being tortured. A hypothetical, if you will (and it's my hypothetical, so I can be as far-fetched as I like! ;-P , but I'm trying to prove a point):
Jeffrey Dahmer and Abraham Lincoln both have information vital to national security, but neither of them are willing to cooperate. Would I have trouble torturing Jeffrey Dahmer? Not in the least. Based on his disregard for human suffering, he deserves no better than what he gave back to society. Would I have trouble torturing Lincoln? Absolutely. He earned the right to the basics of human decency.
Is this judgmental? Yup. Do I care? Nope. As I said, there are no moral absolutes, so everything we do is based on our best judgement of any situation.
I do, however, agree with Dean that in our society in America, the torturer must face the music for the decision made.
"If extreme circumstances arise that require its use, then those circumstances are certainly extreme enough to justify a presidential pardon for the parties involved.."
Two words refute the idea of timely pardons in general: Gerald Amirault
So, how do you determine the difference between knowing in advance there is a bomb somewhere which will go off in 12 hours....and finding it out by applying torture to a terrorist? What about the need to get intellegence to circumvent dirty bomb, nuclear attacks and other actions that are in the planning to inflict mass casualties.
Terrorists have no rights.
Geneva convention, irrelevant to the discussion ...just like all laws: made for law abiding citizens to keep them law abiding.
Criminals (i.e. terrorists) will do want they want...either as individuals, as organizations, or as nations!
Oh, it's great for terrorizing people, but isn't worth a damn when it comes to gathering accurate information. Just go back to the FFI sixty years ago; more than a few Maquis were tortured by the Gestapo -no slouches in the torture department- but didn't give up their comrades. Another example would be how US servicemen handled themselves in the Hanoi Hilton.
What makes you think one of these holy warriors wold be any less determined?
Another problem is: what if your subject lies, and how can you tell?
The real problem here is that the old women of both sexes who hyperventilate about what they call torture, even though they misuse the word. Several practices were banned due to the Abu Grahib mess which have rendered Americans less safe, and prisoners more dangerous, including the use of hoods when transporting prisoners.
Other techniques, such as sleep deprivation, have also come under fire as "inhumane." Just how do those old women expect us to interrogate these men? Seriously?
Torture seldom works when applied to the guilty.
In the case of corrupt police forces, they are trying to extract a confession from people they know are innocent; they are not looking for the person or group responsible for the crime or the act of terrorism, they are looking who to pin it on.
To get someone to talk, I'm okay with isolation, drugs, mind games, and the like.
No torture. There has to be a difference between us and them other then we is us and they is them. Torture is one of the lines. There are others, of course.
Every time 'torture' is discussed, one of the described tortures the US uses is so-called Stress Positions, where they have you stand or sit in some uncomfortable way for whatever time...
...I do this for health, nearly every day, at 45 minutes a shot. I call it stance training, and its part of my wing chun kung fu studies. I seriously roll my eyes every time it gets mentioned. Millions, probably billions of people do it every day all over the world, many for hours at a time in one position.
And this doesn't count the yoga ppl who the same thing. Or the meditators.
I also did the same thing in boot camp, for the same reason, and in place of punishments such as push ups or running laps. Often by holding a rifle at arm's length for however long they said to.
This is not torture. Its relaxing.
But its considered a forbidden technique in our Armed Services.
In the wake of 9/11 I heard more than one lefty and self-described liberal talking favorably of torture, and even saying those who opposed it were irrational. Have they changed their minds since? I don't know, you'd have to ask them. In the meantime I've watched for years while people on the left made excuses for all sorts of torture-happy regimes just because they happened to be LEFT WING regimes.
I'll never forget the lady who said, "You know with dictators, there's positives and negatives. If that dictator provides free education and free health care, I like that dictator!" Feh. If you don't think such people are as common on the left as they are on the right then, as I said, you're exposing both your ignorance of the right and your naivetee about the left.
By the way, where's the "gratuitous left bashing" when all I said was that I found people on all parts of the spectrum willing to try to rationalize torture?
WTF?! Hell NO- that isn't what I meant at all! Jeezuz H. Christ on a pogostick, man!
As it is, however, if we believe a man has information on the whereabouts of bin Laden, placing his testicles in a vice and giving him to the count of ten is perfectly ok by me - we are at war with beasts, good people; inhuman filth which is outlaw in the strictest sense of the word - they have no protections of civil society because they have specifically and knowingly rejected such protections as soon as they take it upon themselves to target unarmed noncombatants for death. If an al Queda person is tortured, even to death, then no crime of any sort has been committed - it is akin to torturing an inanimate object. We do no moral harm to ourselves by taking whatever action proves necessary to defeat the aims of those who's whole purpose in life is to murder the innocent.
It's time to toughen up - this is war, cruel and hard; and against the cruelest, hardest enemy we've ever faced. If you have qualms about it, then spend some time looking over footage of 9/11 until you get over it.
But as for martial arts techniques: I've studied a good bit of martial arts. Some of those training techniques, in addition to being questionable, would be considered torture if done to an unwilling person in my view.
It is all rather besides the point; talk to professional interrogators and they'll tell you that hurting people is rarely necessary and is often counterproductive.
I was objecting to the debasement of what is called torture. He agreed, but then (rightly) pointed out that everyone has a different breaking point, and that one of the things they teach you in SERE school (he's a Marine) is that if you are tortured, you WILL eventually break, and that it's your duty to make them break you each and every time.
My God, if that isn't a frightening thought, I don't know what is.
I grew up reading accounts about our POWs in VietNam, so if I get angry and sound unsympathetic at times on the torture issue, that's perhaps why. It's hard to me to be sympathetic when asshats like Ted Kennedy go on about stress positions and I remember Adm. Denton, who I lived down the street from in high school. What that man lived through was inhuman.
But my husband pointed out that, once they break you, no matter how they break you, you have to live with that knowledge for the rest of your life. That is inherently dehumanizing.
Just a thought, to bring a little balance into the discussion. One of the reasons I love my husband - the man can still surprise me after 27 years.
Well, I never used the word "gratuitous", but in general, you have little positive to say about the left, and that's an understatement. The main point I was addressing, however, is that you seem to delight in saying things that are ostensibly "neutral" or "evenhanded", while in fact they are little more than backhanded slaps at the left. If you honestly believe that any significant number of left-wingers would support the use of torture, then I think you are simply allowing your distaste for the anti-war/anti-Bush/Michael Moore crowd to color your judgment.
You do seem to meet some interesting people such as the lady you mention, but they are not representative of liberal thinking, and I believe you know that. In fact, I think you are quite sincere in your opposition to torture, and that you believe since you oppose it, most of the people who support your stances on the War on Terror as a whole probably agree with you. But think about the way many of your fellow pro-Bush bloggers talk about Arabs and Muslims. I'm sure some of the rhetoric is simply rational criticism of "the enemy", but how many of those bloggers do you think would shed a tear over the torture of a suspected terrorist who happened to be Muslim? Maybe they wouldn't actually enjoy hearing about it (although I'm sure some would), but I think the general sentiment on the right would range from "shit happens" to "durned Ay-rab prolly deserved it".
I guess none of these things sounds particularly convincing to someone who views the far left as equivalent to Nazis, but I just find it hard to imagine how you could really believe the essence of this point: that left-wingers and right-wingers are equally likely to favor the use of torture. This just strikes me as roughly analogous to stating that practicing Christians and atheists are equally likely to support gay marriage. Torture is anathema to left-wing thinking, in precisely the same sense that homosexuality is proscribed by the Bible. This is just plain not the case with right-wing thinking, which tends to regard any person or group classified as an "enemy" as at least temporarily not deserving of the same protections that other human beings receive. Again, you may or may not argue that this is a more "pragmatic" way of thinking than utopian leftism or pacifism, but you simply cannot say that there is an equal basis for supporting the use of torture within these ideological groupings.
Eric Haney, who wrote about his experiences in Delta Force, says you never need torture.
There is a story about WW II in which the Allied High Command prepared some Resistance leaders to help the invasion of the continent at the wrong time and the wrong place. They then arranged for the leaders to be caught when they returned to France.
The Gestapo tortured the information out of the Resistance guys and, due to the latters' heroic efforts to resist, the info was considered solid.
It was, of course, a matter of disinformation.
The morality of the thing aside, the Allies depended on the skill of the Gestapo torturers.
In other words, they presumed torture would work when done right.
Well, shee-yit, Walter, you got us right-wingers pegged. When we’s line dancin’ down at the hootenanny, drinkin our Fudd beer and listenin to Lurleen sing, we talk about them durned Ay-rabs. Caint figger them sumb*ches out.
Enlighten us. Why do them durned Ay-rabs do what they do? Is it due to the growing influence of Wahhabism and their determination to force most of the world’s population to live under their restrictive interpretation of Shariah law (including the oppressive criminal hudud codes)?
The laws that govern terror-supporting nations like Sudan, Iran and Saudi Arabia allow for the use of torture. In many cases, they require it. Our laws don't.
How has the left ever effectively fought to stop an oppressive state from torturing its people? How has the left ever effectively fought a genocidal regime? I can find many examples of Leftists who deliberately downplayed and denied that those crimes were happening. (Walter Duranty and Noam Chomsky are two easy examples)
I totally agree with Dean. Americans have always tried to create laws that support human rights, equality and dignity. I think most Americans find the idea of legalizing any form of torture abhorrent. That’s not a right that should be given to a government, no matter what the situation is. It’s against our constitution, it’s against everything we stand for. Torture, even if it’s (in extreme situations) necessary, must always be a violation of our laws.
That's not what I'm addressing here. I'm talking about torture, and whether active support for it is equally balanced between right and left. You say you believe torture should always be illegal, and on that we agree completely. If you object to my characterization of the probable right-wing response to the use of torture, then give me a single objective reason to believe I might be wrong. But before you do that, consider whether your objection is substantive. Think about the general tone of right-wing commentary on the War on Terror over the last three years. Even if you agree with that tone, do you honestly believe that by surveying that commentary, you would not find a significant amount of positive advocacy for the use of torture? Would you find even remotely as much in left-wing commentary, as opposed to just the occasional exceptions like Dershowitz?
"if it's done by and to consenting adults in S&M clubs, then it's not "torture""
Urthshu responded:
"WTF?! Hell NO- that isn't what I meant at all! Jeezuz H. Christ on a pogostick, man!"
I didn't say that YOU said it. I was giving an ADDITIONAL example, from my own experience. I gave THREE examples of non-war-criminal ordeals: military, religious, and sexual. I suppose I could have included fraternity hazings, but I've never been in that milieu, so I didn't think of it.
Do you want one objective reason why you're wrong? I voted for Bush and I'm anti-torture. (Despite the fact that I'm a liberal, I'm willing to bet that you'd consider any Bush voter to be right-wing).
I don't think I need to prove that the Left was far more tolerant of the torture, genocide and oppression that Communism inflicted on millions of people than the right. 100 million dead and they're still saying that communism wasn't all bad. That's the humanitarian Left?
If you're saying that the Left objects to Americans torturing people, we have to look at the larger picture. The Left objects to what Americans eat, drink, wear, spend, breathe, say and do. There is not a single American action that the Left doesn't object to. It's no indication of their moral values, it's just a relexive action.
The far left (Communism) is objectively worse than the Nazis in terms of numbers murdered, maybe because they lasted longer. The biggest murderer was Mao. The second was Stalin. The third was Hitler. Not only that, but most of us on the right say that the Nazis were on the left. After all, it was the National Socialist party, and it's platform included many socialistic points. The only reason to call it the right was that Hitler didn't want to sit next to the Communists, so he said that the Nazis were so far to the left that they wrapped around to the right, and led his party to the other side of the hall. The true conservatives on the right were the aristocrats who wanted to restore the German monarchy.
I defy you to show how the Nazis were conservative, or even reactionary. Nazis are leftists. Futhermore, given that liberalism had succeeded in becoming the orthodox position in America after the Civil War, I'd say that true liberals, like me and Dean, are also on the right, with some in the middle. But folks these days are calling things liberal, like political correctness, which aren't.
But then again, if I read you correctly, you aren't a leftist either. You're a liberal fairly near in the middle, like most Democrats.
Proudly Liberally and Conservatively Yours,
Wince
Now, I do not consider dogs, loud music, sleep deprevation and the like torture. That amounts to living in a city in the US, or being a parent. Unless I get to sue for torture, those that oppose those measures can stuff it.
Seriously though, no one I have seen has advocated using women to do the intelligence gathering. The worst thing, short of pork, you could do to a 'devout' Muslim male is force him to comply with the orders of a woman. I'd happily apply any number of 'torture' methods if it saved American lives. I'm sure I'm not the only woman, either.
Torture doesn't work most times, at least not physical torture. Mental can indeed be more damaging, but what the Hell? It is a terrorist (and I would expect it to be quite well proved by the time torture was used), not a Brownie for God's sake! They want to suffer for their twisted version of religion, let 'em.
I do support the idea of being required, after the fact, to stand in front of a Grand Jury. If it is that important, then it should remain that important afterwards. Now, the only question I have is what about national security...IE if we avoid a terror attack by using torture, but can't disclose all the information in open court. What then?
In answer to your last question, perhaps a special military tribunal rather than a civilian court would be best if secrets are involved.
Wince:
Excellent spectrumology. Yes, the Nazis opposed restoring the monarchy, and, yes, they were much closer to the Communists in everything they did, particularly torture, slavery, and mass murder, than to any conservatives. I have known many so-called "liberals" who lionized Angela Davis, Herbert Maucuse, and Che Guevara, and who admired and defended Ho Chi Minh, Mao, and Stalin, and who today admire Castro because of the "free" goodies he bestows on his slaves. Leftists have been admiring tyrants since Robespierre started lopping off heads. When the revolutionaries crushed a royalist peasant revolt at Valmy, some revolutionary intellectuals proposed Nazi-like medical experiments.
I know very few conservatives who similarly praise Pinochet, Somosa, Franco, Salazar, etc.. If they defend them, they do so reluctantly, as necessary evils to stave off worse evils. As to the torture controversy, John Derbyshire, very conservative, and a very interesting conservative, who writes in the "National Review", is on record as opposing legalized torture.
To paraphrase Don Rumsfeld here, there are things that we know that we don't know, and there are things that we don't know we don't know.
If you catch Bin Laden or Al-Zarqawi, grate them all over and roll them in salt if that's what it takes to save even one innocent life.
If you catch a random jihadi who MIGHT know something, stay strictly non-violent, unless we're talking ticking nuke in downtown NYC.
People who don't deserve dogs barking at them don't generally end up in Gitmo anyway.
There was one occasion where the British did indeed use such tactics, but here they loaded faked informaion on the body of a dead man dressed up in the uniform of a ranking officer. The body was dropped in the sea by a Royal Navy submarine near the coast of Spain, where it was considered all but certain that German agents would get access to the information and pass it on to the appropriate intelligence collection centers.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
The Allies didn't need to go thru such rigamarole as Richard describes; Great Britain had already turned the entire Nazi organiztion before the war. Add to that their marvelous plot which convinced the Nazis that we had nearly double our actual forces, and planting General Patton directly opposite the closest crossing to France (Calais, IIRC) with a phantom army did the job nicely.
All this faux controversy is coming from the Democratic Party leaders, who are (as usual) trying to make Bush look as bad as possible. Perhaps some of them honestly think that sleep deprivation and barking dogs are torture.
Hell, put their sorry asses through Marine boot camp; then they'll tell the difference! Heh.
Yes, I know, and sorry if it came off harsh. You're more a libertarian, so I guess that doesn't faze you- but that kind of stuff is very much torture in my book, quite alien and shocking to my mind.
OK. Different people have different tastes. I'll only say, with regard to this whole issue, that I must confess that I myself have an inordinately low pain threshold. I know I'd crack under torture. I'm not like Arnold Harris. I'm a sissy. So, if there's something that even I would voluntarily submit to, then it isn't torture. Certainly not in the sense we're talking about here.
I guess what it is for me is that I'm going to trust the military and law enforcement authorities of the United States; with oversight, it goes without saying, but I'm going to trust them.
It's a certainty that our military and law enforcement people understand that torture can be entirely counter-productive; from making a man dig in his heels out of pride to merely getting the tortured person saying whatever he thinks we want him to say in order to get the torture to stop - but if the authorities have in their custody a terrorist and they believe that they only way to get him to talk is to apply physical pressure, then they should do it - Solzhenitsyn points out (and our own people who have been tortured by our beastly enemies in the psat can confirm) that there is always something which will get a person to talk - sometimes it's just humiliation, other times it's a threat to a particular part of the human (especially male) anatomy - but the people we have in custody do not have a right to be silent. We may shoot them out hand if we wish, their lives are at our disposal - the deal is, cooperate and we'll let you live in semi-comfort, don't cooperate and it will go very, very badly for you and you'll wind up dead for sure.
The only results of that would seem to be:
A. He's already a sicko and not fit to live with human beings.
B. He becomes a sicko and not fit to live with human beings.
C. He goes crazy because he has to act like a sicko who's not fit to live with human beings.
In case of C., he commits suicide or just needs to be locked up.
(insert "she" for "he" if you want, the sex of the torturer is immaterial)
Actual, real, nail-pulling torture is horrible. As a torturer you would have to not see the 'subject' as a person. Once you've dehumanized one person, the next becomes easier.
What the lefties are calling 'Tantamount to Torture' is ridiculous. Blaring Barney music at full volume for 8 hours might be cruel and unusual, but it ain't torture.
A major point to consider is that prisoners subjected to or even threatened with physical torture will say almost anything to stop or ward off the punishment.
But it should be remembered that the purpose of interrogation is to obtain information, and not to administer punishment. You punish an enemy by beating or destroying his army and his ideology, not by watching him writh and scream in physical agony.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Excellent.
One thing they might try that no one could justly complain of is intubation. I was intubated while in the hospital a few years ago. You may well be familiar with it It consists of sticking a tube down the patient's throat. It was not a comfortable situation!, but it was necessary. My question is: if it is done routinely to patients in hospitals, why can't it be done to terrorists?
Mark Noonan:
Excellent also. I agree with you completely that terrorists are scum and deserve no consideration. Nothing any of our soldiers have done to any of them so far gets any complaint from me.
My criterion for defining torture in a legal sense is this, as I've said: If it was done by the Spanish Inquisition or the Gestapo or the KGB or the Viet Cong, it's torture. If it's done by the military to our own soldiers, or in martial arts schools, or in monasteries and convents, or in BDSM clubs, or in fraternities (or sororities), or in hospitals, or in any of a hundred other institutions of a free society, then it's not torture.