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.