A question for those who oppose torture.

silver 2039

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Suppose you have captured a terroist. He has hidden a bomb somewhere in a city that could kill anywhere from 5-1000 people depending on how powerful it is and where it is located and when it goes off.
You don't know any of those. You have tried all other types of interogation methods and none of them have worked.
Would you use torture to extract the information that could save 5 lives or perhaps up to a 1000 lives?
 
None of them worked ?

I would of course use similated torture.
Simply certain "dugs" / "nacrotics" has a effect of heighting the sences and bring about naucouses, Where in this state simple use a large knife to scare spefice parts of the body (namely the ummm testical area) and other body parts.
( Which will seem very real to the subject that he is being multilated alive )

Should this fail then the only alternative a lengthly break down of the subjects will.
 
No... How do you know he's a terrorist without a trial?

What happens when you pull out all of his fingernails and burn his genitals and he hasn't told you a single thing because he doesn't KNOW a single thing.

We're not animals... all people are considered innocent until proven guilty in a courtroom regardless of how convenient an alternative approach may be... If we give that up then we have nothing.
 
What makes you think that if he hasnt told you yet he will tell you at all. Isnt there something about dieng for allah getting you 70 something virgins in heven? Well I say burn the balls off. :)
 
I would never use torture, for ethical reasons. Law must be civilized, even if we re dealing with terrorists. If we use torture, then we are going back to the status of barbarian, uncivilized and immoral people.
 
While I believe in strong interrogation techniques, going over the line to torture is absolutely wrong. Besides, its ineffective.
 
If I am absolutely certain this person is guilty, and knows how to stop an attack, I think I could use just about any method. I would give someone the benefit of doubt, but if they tell me upfront they planted a bomb and he's not some loony making stuff up, I would do what it takes to prevent the attack.
 
silver 2039 said:
Suppose you have captured a terroist. He has hidden a bomb somewhere in a city that could kill anywhere from 5-1000 people depending on how powerful it is and where it is located and when it goes off.
You don't know any of those. You have tried all other types of interogation methods and none of them have worked.
Would you use torture to extract the information that could save 5 lives or perhaps up to a 1000 lives?


ÿou couldve easily changed the title to;"a question for sane non-facists"

howcome you have captured him, right between the short span of time he has hidden a bomb somewhere and the time he is gonna set it off?!
i mean, it would make sense to blow up a bomb shortly after youve planted it, dosent it? so was he waiting for you to arrest him and save the day or what?
how come you know theres a bomb, and it has been hidden (recently), but you dont know where it is?

what a weird unreal scenario, people who want to legally torture people usually draw this BS scenario up!

i said it before and ill say it again: the only people who deserved to be tortured are torturers!




from: http://www.g2mil.com/Torture.htm




Much blame falls upon Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who dismissed questions about abuse as a joke, claiming those prisoners were horrible people. This caused severe damage with America's law abiding allies, and most of these horrible abused prisoners were released this year after the US Army concluded they were innocent. Mankind has been fighting wars for thousands of years; this is not a new issue. The world thought the torture question had been resolved decades ago through the Geneva Conventions. The United States lost 400,000 dead during World War II, but never tortured prisoners to "save lives." Nevertheless, many devolved Americans have begun to question the ban on torture. Here are four reasons why torture is wrong:

#1 Torture may save lives, but is likely to backfire and cause more American deaths in the long term.

There is a debate if torture is more effective than bribes, tricks, wiretaps, and informants. Let us assume it is effective and may prevent an attack. The problem is that reports of torture by Americans causes anger toward the USA and spawn more terror attacks. One of the reasons that most Iraqis now hate American occupiers is because of the widespread and officially sanctioned torture in Iraq. After the routine torture at Abu Ghraib prison was exposed, the US Army dispatched investigators who determined that 80% of the arrested Iraqis had committed no crime. Whenever there was an explosion in Iraq, American forces arrived and rounded up suspects for interrogation, most were bystanders. These innocent Iraqis have thousands of friends and relatives who now hate American soldiers. This wasn't a "few bad apples" as some claim. Although the truly nasty photos have not been released, those published show a dozen or more soldiers openly abusing prisoners in the middle of a cell block for everyone to see.

Whenever former CIA Director William Webster was briefed on a proposed covert operation, he would always ask how it will look when it becomes public. Webster knew that most secret operations eventually became public, and the fallout from such disclosures were sometimes more damaging than whatever the operation might accomplish.

If senior leaders in the Pentagon had evaluated the damage to American credibility that would occur WHEN news of torture became public, they would have turned down the idea. In an era of e-mail and digital cameras, any wrongdoing can be exposed worldwide within hours. The senior military man in Iraq, General Ricardo Sanchez, approved the torture and a US Army captain has stated Sanchez was there during torture sessions. This is why Sanchez has been quietly retired, and why a major cover-up is underway. In the end, they'll lock up a few mid-level officers. See the great movie "Breaker Morant" for an example of how Generals evade blame for war crimes.

#2 If the USA ignores the Geneva Conventions, other nations and groups will ignore it.

US troops taken prisoner now face the prospect of torture, not just for information, but as payback. Even the Nazis during World War II generally adhered to the Geneva Conventions. At that time, allied planes were bombing German cities to rubble killing thousands of civilians weekly. Perhaps torturing downed Allied pilots might have provided information to save German lives, but the German military treated allied POWs well. As the French fought to retain their colony in Vietnam during the 1950s, they routinely abused and tortured prisoners. So it was no surprise that the North Vietnamese abused American POWs two decades later in the same Hanoi prison used by the French.

There was outrage in the USA during the 1991 Gulf War and the recent invasion of Iraq about the treatment of American POWs. Some Americans were roughed up a bit, but nothing serious. Given the war conditions, the Iraqi medical treatment of Private Jessica Lynch was outstanding. In contrast, an Iraqi General died while being tortured by US Army officers from the 3rd ACR, but the Army was reluctant to press charges. A year before that, two Afghanis died from beatings by American soldiers. An Army doctor listed the cause of death as homicide, yet no charges were ever filed.

Some argue that only POWs are protected by the Geneva Conventions, so anyone labeled as an "enemy combatant" or "terrorist" is not covered. That is false. POWs cannot be charged with crimes committed while fighting. However, all civilians must be treated humanely; no torture. They can be tried and convicted of crimes, and even executed, but not tortured.

#3 There are never "ticking time bombs" where torture is justified.

The most common argument for torture is that if a terrorist (or a "commando" if he is on your side) is caught and brags that a big bomb will explode and kill hundreds of people, he should be tortured to save lives. In such cases, a high-level court or authority could issue a "torture warrant." This idea is advocated by Alan Dershowitz, who traveled the nation last year advocating this idea. Unfortunately, the values of most Americans have sunk so low that few were outraged, and Harvard didn't even fire this "Professor of Law." If Dershowitz had referred to terror suspects as n******, the nation would be aghast. Indignant idiots would exclaim: "I can't believe he used the 'N' word," but saying they should be tortured attracted little attention.

The problem with this idea is that no suspect will brag if it will result in torture, or alert his captors to look for and disarm his bomb. In rare cases in which something is about to happen, the information is needed within minutes, and arranging a court hearing or permission from a VIP during that time is near impossible. In addition, "ticking time bombs" are only in movies. A terrorist uses a fuze that explodes a few minutes after he is safely away, or he just blows himself up. Finally, while terror groups may cooperate, they are smart enough to limit the details of an attack to only those who will carry it out. If one member of the group is arrested or is missing, they will abort the attack anyway.

Another issue is that senior government leaders do not want to openly violate international law, lest they find themselves unwelcome at embassy dinner parties and have unkind things said about them in the media. So if they have authority to allow torture in rare and urgent cases, they will delegate that authority down the chain-of-command. However, mid-level officials know to evade blame too, so the authority is pushed downward verbally until hillbillies from a rural Army reserve unit in Iraq hear vague orders from unknown officers and decide to rough up everyone. They are left unsupervised since officers don't want to be held accountable. After a few weeks, the situation devolves into anarchy as women and teenage boys are raped, prisoners die from beatings, while children of prisoners are abused to get their fathers to talk. Yes, all this happened in Iraq; read the news.

#4 Civilized people don't torture people.

In the great movie, "The Bounty" Captain Bligh, played by Anthony Hopkins, and a dozen of his men are set adrift in the South Pacific on a small boat. They are soon starving and one of the weaker seamen suggests to Bligh that once he dies, the others eat his corpse to survive. Captain Bligh rejects that idea by stating: "No Sir! We were born as civilized men and we shall die as civilized men." That statement rings true in regards to torture. There is more to life than staying alive. A society must have standards and laws, and once those are dropped, man will devolve and the society collapse. So if a young soldier or high-level politician suggests they torture a prisoner in hope of getting information which may save lives, the man in charge must know to say: We are civilized and don't torture people. If we die, then we die as civilized people.
 
I always love the "What if they had a nuclear bomb?" argument used to justify sodomizing & electrocuting Baghdad cabbies for fun.

Theres no point fighting for freedom if you have to give it up in the process. Might as well just save lives, cut to the chase, and negotiate a surrender, because you've already lost.
 
No... How do you know he's a terrorist without a trial?

What happens when you pull out all of his fingernails and burn his genitals and he hasn't told you a single thing because he doesn't KNOW a single thing.

We're not animals... all people are considered innocent until proven guilty in a courtroom regardless of how convenient an alternative approach may be... If we give that up then we have nothing.

Boom your family and freinds just blew up,


I have no problem with people who threaten my country being tortured, i dont want to know about it or do it, but i sleep safely at night knowing that our SAS and SIS are there torturing terrorists
__________________
 
nobody blew up, maybe not so bad after all? :D

im sure he will confirm all his friends and realtives are fine and that youre just buying into the right wing medias fear mongering.

there there, dont be affriad big fellow, if any bad guys show up uncle jaws will get them.

feel better now? :)
 
Nobody said:
Boom your family and freinds just blew up

Yes, but probably that would happen if you used torture or not. In fact, its quite likely you would not get the answer in time if you did use torture.

How do you know that your man knows where the bomb is? Did you torture somebody else to find this out, or were they afraid of being tortured? Then they probably tried to convince you of whatever it is they think you want to hear. In other words, torture means you end up chasing all kinds of imaginary ghosts of your own creation. This, of course, confuses any attempts to actually get the intelligence you need - delays it, sends it on goosechases it, renders it impossibly complex as the falsities multiply exponentially.

Torture is good for only one thing, destabilization. If you want to create a failed state, repress a people into poverty and degradation, or perhaps satisfy a sadistic element among your supporters, torture works great.
 
Once you start treating people as guilty before tehy are proven to be guilty in a court of law, once you start torturing people who may well be innocent, you no longer have the moral high ground and you're not any better than the terrorists.
The same goes for assassinations and other forms of execution without a trial, by the way. Soldiers should only be allowed to kill someone who is either firing at them or is a mortal threat to them in some other completely certain way.
But that's a bit off topic, ain't it? =X
 
Since it's a conflict between two opposing morals (save lives or avoid torturing people; pick one, can't have both), we should probably ask: what is the thing that makes it "more" moral to let a few thousand people die than to torture one person?
 
If the terrorist had enough training to plant such a bomb no doubt he'd be trained in the one technique to resist giving information away during torture - focus on what you will say rather than what you won't.
 
"If you will do it for a good reason, you will also do it for a bad reason" — Terry Pratchett.

The argument seems to be that you become co-responsible for blowing up people if you don't torture the terrorist? You don't.
You do, however, become responsible for the torture. Welcome to a nice and slippery slide into general abuse...

The public may of course hold you responsible for failing to prevent the attack. That's their prerogative, but I fail to see how saving your ass under those circumstances by using torture would be particularily moral.:coffee:
 
The television series '24' deals with questions along these lines fairly regularly..

I would most likely jump on the bandwagon of 'Yes, I would torture a prisoner if it meant definitely saving innocent lives' argument, but before I could make that commitment, I would like a clear definition of the word 'TORTURE' in this hypothetical situation.

Does it refer to battery leads and sensitive parts of the body, or permanent mutilation, beatings, etc? That's physical torture.

Does it mean sleep deprivation, loud noises, implied threats? That's psychological torture.

Because I think perhaps there Should be an expressed difference between these two methods. And if you make this separation clear to persons before asking the question, 'Is torture justified', I believe you would probably get a lot more 'yes' answers if the definition of torture was limited to pyschological torture only.

Now I do realize that this is detracting somewhat from the original question: 'Do saving lives justify torture?' But I'd simply like to know more about the methods.

And for that matter, just how certain would it be that lives would be saved by gaining the information? Because the way I read the original question.. it sounds as if the option of torture may or may NOT result in preventing the bombs killing people. And if that's the case, then no, I wouldn't justify torture (either kind).



-Elgalad
 
ComradeDavo said:
If the terrorist had enough training to plant such a bomb no doubt he'd be trained in the one technique to resist giving information away during torture - focus on what you will say rather than what you won't.

No, not nessecarily.

I think torture is justified, but only in circumstances where the victim is almost certainly hiding something that could save lives (and only then). I would not employ methods that would lead to permanent disfigurment etc, and so would opt for electric shock, sensory deprivation etc. Similarly, were I tortured, I think I would be able to forgive the torturer if he followed the above (and he had reason to believe that I was withholding info that could save lives).

Of course, I hope never to be in either of the above situations, but I believe the above is what I'd do.
 
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