Your stand on torture
 

This is a tough one. It really is. Take a slow breath and leave your hot emotions behind, we do not want this to go up in flames. Just give your reasons, calm and reasonable please. If somebody starts to voice juvenile rants here, I will be the first to ask the mods to lock this thread.

Question: what is your stand on torture?

The poll is open for 10 days. The poll is public, that means your name is visible under the option you have chosen.

You have these six options, that I explain in detail here, since the poll headlines only allows limited number of characters. Use these descriptions to decide your pick.

Read the options twice to make sure you really understood the sometimes ethically complex implications. I intentionally left out thenoption for multiple choices, since either you torture, or you don't - you can't have it both, and you cannot torture in a humane way. You need to make a choice: Yes, or No. Saying it is jutsified for some reasons, but it should be avoided for other reasons, is no option that can be practised.

The story behind this poll:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7185648.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7138144.stm

Bush has excluded the CIA from being prhibited to use waterboarding, but now "US national intelligence chief Mike McConnell has said the interrogation technique of water-boarding "would be torture" if he were subjected to it. (...) In December, the House of Representatives approved a bill that would ban the CIA from using harsh interrogation techniques such as water-boarding. President George W Bush has threatened to veto the bill, which would require the agency to follow the rules adopted by the US Army and abide by the Geneva Conventions, if the Senate passes it. (...) If it ever is determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it," he said.
CIA officials have been quoted as saying that water-boarding has been used on three prisoners since 2001, including al-Qaeda recruiter Abu Zubaydah, but on nobody since 2003."

I was involved in treatment of torture victims ropughly ten years ago, so my perpsective on it is a very close and personal one. I know what torture can do, I have seen it. It cannot only make people speak, it also can break them open and rip the soul and living will out of the body.

Therefore I am sometimes shocked to see how easy and thoughtless some big mouths sometimes talk about it on TV, or on the streets, and deal with it as if they were talking about wether or not the penalty for jumping the traffic lights should be raised by ten Euros or not, or they make it an issue of binary law-and-order "logic" alone.

Some will also argue wether or not waterboadring is torture. It is my convictzion that making somebody believe that he has to die now by drowning causes agony. If that agony would not be so painful that the subject cooperates, I wonder why it then cooperates indeed (water boarding is said to be extremely effective). Therefore, I conclude that OF COURSE it is torture. Or in other words: "Senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who was tortured by the North Vietnamese as a prisoner of war, has said that water-boarding is torture: "It no different than holding a pistol to his head and firing a blank."

Not the perfect option for me, but I choose - 4 - . I don't like it, but I like the other options even less.

OTHER - NO, torture is useless.

If someone is restricting my breathing rights with a rope and weights are tied to my feet, I'll tell them whatever they want, even if I'm innocent. Torture really doesn't work; it just gets someone to yell and scream whatever you want to hear.

Most torture in the world is not for intel gathering, but to break people and sent them back into society as living zombies, to intimidate the rest by serving as an example. Believe me, it works, and it works perfectly.

On information gathering, your info can (and will be) be checked. If it is wrong, they come back and start working on you again. After the first repetion you have learned that. I am sure that sooner or later almost everybody would give up and break down. Only a question of time, and determination of the torturer.

Works great for intimidation, that's true, but we had captured Iraqis during the war that we interrogated. They told us pretty much whatever we wanted to hear. Of course, as you said, we checked it and the data was wrong (not to mention irrelevant), so we executed them by firing squad.

Interrogated, or threatening torture on them, or leave them in the belief to get tortured, or actually tortured? ;)

If the latter, for whatever the reasons, you did not continue to torture them, but executed them. But it was a violation of the Geneva convention anyway.

If it is an innocent being accused of being a terrorist getting "harshly interrogated", and he cannot say something because he does not know anything, and thus only tells what he imagines the other wants to hear, then this would qualify for option 4. A POW also can be put here.

If a terrorist is captured and dies under torture, we simply do not know if he would have broken later on, or wamnted to speak but simply waited too long, or whatever.

Torturing a POW for military information on his side's psotion, is a violation of the Geneva convention anyway. It is meant to give POWs certain protections. So one now would need to argue wether or not the GC makes any sense at all in a situation of defined chaos and maximum barbarism and slaughtering.

We did the latter, and the Geneva Convention could go to hell because shooting innocents should earn you and WOULD earn you execution under my command. That was my idea, and I stuck to it. They didn't know anything on what we asked them. They just said whatever we wanted to hear because they knew it would stop. They were useless privates who probably knew more about farming than the proper way to assemble their rifle.

Succesful interrogation is incompatible with torture.....

Anybody from the interrogator business saying something else means he/she is incompetent for his job, and there are quite a few!

(Last ones here in germany where those loosers from the police in Frankfurt if I remember right?)

You mix two things up.

You say you shot dead Iraqis for having shot (I assume intentionally) civilians, and you would have done so no matter if they had valid information, or not.

You also say you tortured them, but describe them as unknowing, simple men and useless privates. Why did you torture them, then, if you knew they would not know anything? Obviously not for information, it appears to me. And not for intimidation of the Iraqis, or did you send the abused bodies back to the other side of the front, or arranged them so that they would be found?

Plain revenge, maybe, for them having shot civilians?

That would be an option that I indeed have forgotten: torturing for personal satisfaction.

For the purpose of discussion, I will assume torture is effective. This is debatable, but
not something I am qualified to speculate about.
Further more, I will assume that torture is in it's self a bad thing. I make this assumption
based on the common consensus and my own humble compassion for all of humanity
to some extent.

This in mind, it seams to me that the question can be boiled down to:

Is it right to do any evil if you think that more good will come out of it?

Making decisions with this maxim is problematic. It could potentially used to justify
anything, there are problems with predicting outcomes, it sets a dangerous president
for evil acts, and the morality of your ends are most likely highly subjective.

The term "torture" and it's ends are too broad for me to universaly condem it, but
I struggle to find a situation in wich the problems with it would not be significant.

That is the major moral dilemma here, isn't it. You ask:

Is it right to do any evil if you think that more good will come out of it?

Poll option 6 reads:

Hundreds killed by terror is better than to do torture ourselves.

I have trouble believing that torture is effective, except where the object is the destruction of a person.
Torture is the worst kind of message a country can send - We do not seek our own security, but your pain and suffering.

Knowing that such questions are asked in Presidential debates makes me ill.

No need in believing... There are studies by "professionals" who abstained from torture as beeing "unproductive" .... Of course they meant the physical kind or even the threat of physical harm. Instead they worked very hard in turning the victims mindset, believings, ethics, etc. all upside down into a more "favorable" setting.
If you consider such actions in scope ("mental torture") then the same studies advise this indeed as "very productive with great potential".

Yup, to invoke the "ticking bomb" example, one of note in moral philosophy:

Lets say there is a criminal who knows the location of a massive bomb. He won't
tell the police where the bomb is, however he is known to be a coward and will likely
tell the police about them bomb if they kicked him a bit i.e. a very mild torture.

It looks open and shut at first glance, but I don't think it is.

As a hypothetical it's a cobbler, difficult to come down on either side.

This is mostly due to the assumption of perfect knowledge, which makes the situation less and less relevant. If you knew this much about the character, you probably wouldn't be in this situation in the first place.

Oh quite, but even if we don't assume perfect knowlage, or at least no more perfect
than in every day circumstances, it is still a difficult question.

The situation has certinaly occured, all be it in a less stark way.

Jury is out for me for now.

Dirty Harry, part V, I think. It caused a public uproar in Germany when it was released in the mid-80s. It's not a bomb but a girl kidnapped and burried in a sealed box, running out of air.

What weighs heavier: the rights of the criminal, or the interests of his victim and it's right to live and be healthy? Not torturing a terrorist, or preventing the killing of hundreds? Having both is not possible, that is why I excluded multiple choices. What makes an ethic value saying that torturing is wrong, and that there are too many risks for innocents become victims, so superior to an ethics that says: torturing terror suspects and even accept the risk to torture an innocent or two by misake is morally superior if it saves the lives of hundreds who else would get killed.

If you would have had a word in it, and decided against torturing, and then learn that the investigations failed to find the needed info and now 400 (or 40, or 4000) are dead, what would you say, how would you feel, what would to tell their next of kin?

With this in mind, if you would have decided to allow torture, and then learn that your people caught an innocent one: what would you say, how would you feel?

Indeed.
Even if you are right not to torture, you could be accused of "moral indulgence"; you
have been moral and kept your own hands clean, but at the expense of others.
To switch from utilitarianism to Kantian/rule ethics: is it worse to do a small bad than
it is to do nothing about a greater bad.

However, things get more complicated when we consider that should not really be
discussing whether the decision to torture is right or wrong.
Instead we should be discussing whether it is right to trust other people or the
government to make that decision.

If we decide we should let them make that decision, then we can not complain if
we think they have got it wrong.

True. That scenario would be covered by option 5, i think.

Generalised rules and blueprints obviously do not solve the dilemma. I wonder if the single case examination could be a "moral" solution, done by a gremium that is not an internal government's or service'S affair, and that is accepted in public and countercontrolled by the public. Which would need that the currently apparently robust majority of people being against torture in general and for most principal reasons, would need to rethink the issue. Law-free spaces wothout any countercontrol like guantanamo of course cannot be the solution, or extraordinary prisoner deliveries into countries where torture is not forbidden.

Although I have seen what terrible conseqeunces torture (for just breaking people) can cause, i rate the interests of victims as higher than those of the criminal perpetrators, and that on a very principal level. So eventually I can imagine to accept the use of torture, but not on the basis of general rules, but only after close analysis of the single case in question by a gremium that is not under exclusive control of the government and it's services, by that avoiding any risks of automatic processes getting started once somebody finds himself trapped in the system. The risk of trapping an innocent still remains, that'S why I cannot imagine to accept torture as a standard procedure, and it should be reserved only for most extreme example and single, rare excepötions from the rule, and when there is reasonable assumption that torture indeed could be of help. ragaridng the subject's personality and character and biography.

And even then it does not feel well to accept it.

And hopefull it never will.

as long as it is not like this, I will stick to option 4, and run the risk of causing the suffering of many more innocents becoming victims by that. A real dilemma.

What I do not like is the hypocrisy. In europe, intel data from American sources of which it was known that it was won by "harsh interrogations", nevertheless was used in terror prevention. At the same time one was pointing finger at the US and complained that they were using these procedures. You either will the outcome, than you will the means as well, or you refuse both.

No, I only have a problem with people being too liberal with the term "Torture". I had to stand for an hour "TORTURE!", Someone ate something religiously offensive for lunch in my field of view "TORTURE!" I ran out of TP and did not get anymore for an hour "TORTURE!". You get the idea, but thanks to our, listen to the label not look at the content, society these days it's happening.

About those studies, it isn't like I disbelieve their existence, but frankly I'm interested in reading one if it is available on the web. Are there any?

For the answer, I nevertheless started from the assumption that torture is effective if applied correctly. As a utilitarian, I don't think I can answer 6, so I answered 4.

To add more nuance, I might allow torture under an unrealistic ruleset that went roughly as follows. A government interrogator (for example), if convinced of torture's efficacy in his instance, may apply for a special waiver. If approved (based on the potential value of torture in this case), then the interrogator may use torture, but if the process fails to deliver information that is verified to be true - thus the torture is clearly useless, both the interrogator and the waiver issuer is automatically proportinately punished without trial and the case is publicized so the public may judge constantly how torture serves the society. The important part is that the interrogator does not have a prayer of getting away scot-free for using torture unless it brings result - which presumably will make all interrogators and others think very hard before using it.

Since such unrealistic schemes will never be approved, I'll just have to go with 4.