selenite: I can go along with that . . .

Karl Gallagher (

selenite) wrote,
@ 2005-12-07 10:30:00

Current mood:	tired
Entry tags:	politics, war

I can go along with that . . .
Torture should be safe, legal, and rare.

(23 comments) - (Post a new comment)

	EVIL the_blue_fenix 2005-12-07 06:48 pm UTC (link)
	Sorry. Tried to find another word, none of them fit. A country that tortures people is not my country no matter what it calls itself. Western civilization has spent hundreds of years working itself _away_ from torture and terror as instruments of statecraft. No possible short-term advantage could be worth betraying who and what we are -- or claim to be. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	Re: EVIL joyeuse13 2005-12-07 07:13 pm UTC (link)
	Not only does it reduce us to the level of those we say we're better than, it also doesn't work very well. Tortured people will say anything to get it to stop. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	Re: EVIL selenite 2005-12-07 07:42 pm UTC (link)
	So if it actually produced useful results, you'd be okay with it? Turns out it does. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	Re: EVIL joyeuse13 2005-12-07 07:53 pm UTC (link)
	You missed the first part of the sentence. "It reduces us to the level of those we say we're better than." (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	Re: EVIL selenite 2005-12-07 08:09 pm UTC (link)
	I think torturing a murderer to get information to prevent future killings is a much higher moral level than people who consider little children legitimate targets. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	Re: EVIL joyeuse13 2005-12-07 08:17 pm UTC (link)
	Nope. It's just a different kind of evil. Do you say the end justifies the means? (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

Re: EVIL

selenite
2005-12-07 08:26 pm UTC (link)

Sometimes, yes. The whole point of "rare" in my post is that extraordinary situations happen and they need to be dealt with appropriately. Refusing to take action when needed is immoral--inaction is not a state of grace that absolves you of responsibility for what happens next.

In the various debates on torture one exchange I've seen come up again and again is this:
A: We should have a law forbidding torture.
B: But what about [hypothetical situation]
A: Well, then the guys on the scene should break the law and do what has to be done.

That's the stand I'm most opposed to--creating laws as posturing, even while acknowledging that some things are sometimes necessary.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	Re: EVIL joyeuse13 2005-12-07 08:31 pm UTC (link)
	And who makes that judgement? Who will you trust to decide what an extraordinary situation is? Our current president? Not hardly. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	Re: EVIL selenite 2005-12-07 08:37 pm UTC (link)
	62 million votes made it Bush's job to make that judgement. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	Re: EVIL joyeuse13 2005-12-07 08:39 pm UTC (link)
	Not mine. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	Re: EVIL selenite 2005-12-07 08:54 pm UTC (link)
	And if more than 59 million people had agreed with you, somebody else would have the responsibility. But I'd still think we'd need to have all options available to win the war. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	Re: EVIL selenite 2005-12-07 07:41 pm UTC (link)
	In a war where we're shooting people and dropping bombs on them, declaring one type of violence off-limits is posturing, not morality. Those people want to destroy our culture and impose theirs on us. Avoiding acting them against them to keep our hands "clean" is how Al Qaeda could grow to where it pulled off 9/11. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

Re: EVIL

the_blue_fenix
2005-12-08 10:39 pm UTC (link)

In a war where we're shooting people and dropping bombs on them, declaring one type of violence off-limits is posturing, not morality.

I disagree. We have always declared some types of violence off-limits but not others. Frex: We interned Japanese in WWII but we didn't use them for chemical warfare experiments as the Japanese did to prisoners.

This is not a new problem. We've fought a lot of cultures who wanted to impose their values on ours and who had no problem with torture as an instrument of their own policy. (Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and North Korea pop to mind to name but a few. We managed to beat them all just fine without sinking to their level.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	Re: EVIL selenite 2005-12-08 10:47 pm UTC (link)
	Torturing innocents is an evil thing which I never have or will condone. Torturing people who have committed evil acts and have the information necessary to prevent further atrocities is an ugly but in some rare scenarios necessary part of winning this war. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	We have met the enemy and he is us mnelson 2005-12-07 07:23 pm UTC (link)
	Is this what we should be saying about ourselves? Do we want US soldiers tortured and the torturers not punished because the US starts to torture prisoners? If we are supposed to be 'civilized', we have to act in a civilized manner. No matter what, the US has to keep its principles and morals. Although under this current administration, that's certainly difficult. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	Re: We have met the enemy and he is us selenite 2005-12-07 07:44 pm UTC (link)
	I can tell the difference between the enemy and us. US soldiers have never been protected from torture by the Geneva Convention or other treaties, because our enemies explicity reject them. Outlaw don't deserve the protections of civilized rules. Societies too "civilized" to do what's necessary to survive don't survive. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	And another thing mnelson 2005-12-07 07:30 pm UTC (link)
	my wife had an uncle in Stalag 17 during WWII and he was never the same. Condoning torture is wrong. The US is better than this. We have to be. A certain Jewish carpenter once said "Do onto others as you would wish them do onto you." (Reply to this) (Thread)

	Re: And another thing selenite 2005-12-07 07:45 pm UTC (link)
	Torturing innocents is wrong. So is imprisoning or executing them. We have different rules for dealing with murderers. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

Re: And another thing

archangelbeth
2005-12-09 01:26 am UTC (link)

I think... the point may not entirely be who gets tortured, but who does the torturing. Those who want to are exactly the wrong people to do it, because they don't care about answers or truth, they care about pain. Those who don't want to... should not have their souls stained by that sort of ick.

If someone believes that the situation is such that the rules must be broken, and does so, then... that person must take the punishment for breaking the rules, not get exempted because it's a loophole. If the person was right, then a lesser punishment, perhaps. But still a real one, or you get the people who just like the torture, and then they find some way to cook the answers so they get away scott free.

If someone is going to crack his honor on the anvil of necessity, he shouldn't be someone already without honor.

Though I don't see where the articles linked say that torture should be legal or safe. Just that polls indicate people believe it's sometimes justified. I can believe that, without wanting it to be "legal under certain circumstances." I think the "headline" proposed is sensationalist.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

Re: And another thing

selenite
2005-12-09 06:35 am UTC (link)

The US military doesn't have many sadists, and they're deliberately screened out of the HUMINT community (prison guards are less well checked). So I think we can count on them being honorable who are focused on the mission, not the pain. But saying "break the rules if you're right" is the lawmakers abdicating their responsibility and throwing it onto the troops. Soldiers deserve to have clear guidance. If they don't have that, they know senators will denounce them as torturers if they go too far, and as the cause of the disaster if they don't go far enough. That was how the counter-terrorism community was treated in the '90s and it produced a culture of risk-aversion that let Al Qaeda grow unhindered. We paid a terrible price for that.

As for "safe" in the headline, it's just there for the humor value. Obviously it's not funny for everyone.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

Back to that "safe" concept

tmc4242
2005-12-09 07:04 am UTC (link)

Let's put aside the word "Torture" for a while.

What we need is a way for our intelligence gatherers to get important information from enemy captives in a big hurry, without their co-operation, with high reliability, and without damaging the person under interrogation.

Now that is a lot to ask for, admittedly, but that I think is the intent of the quote that was the original title to this thread.

I know we have various researchers looking into different sorts of "brain scanners" for lack of a better term. Also better lie detectors are under development. There are probably pharmaceutical methods around as well. Seems to me what we need to do is perfect these techniques so we can get the information we need when we need it WITHOUT resorting to methods which produce unreliable information and compromise our collective ethics.

Some will surely argue that even this approach is unethical, but that's where the "rare" part of the quote comes in. If you can read minds, and the government has that ability, then you watchdog the crap out of them. It's for emergencies only. And it would be our moral responsibility to ensure that it stays that way.

Just my $0.02

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	Re: Back to that "safe" concept selenite 2005-12-09 08:42 pm UTC (link)
	Sounds like great tech, and I'm all for deploying it as soon as it works. In the meantime the guys in the field need a usable set of rules to work with. (Reply to this) (Parent)

carbonelle
2005-12-08 05:40 am UTC (link)

US soldiers have never been protected from torture by the Geneva Convention or other treaties, because our enemies explicity reject them. Outlaw don't deserve the protections of civilized rules. Societies too "civilized" to do what's necessary to survive don't survive

Shooting "insurgents" caught in the act of sabotage and murder in the field was di rigeur in every war leading up to this one and for good reason. Holding them for interrogation under stress (with the possibility of commuting their death sentence to imprisonment-for-the-duration) is just as important.

Not upholding the Geneva (or other, similar wartime) conventions ought to have consequences. If it doesn't there's no reason anyone ought to bother with them: The only ones who do won't be warring with each other anyway.

Aside: Whatever your opinion on "torture" (you'd have to define it before it was worth anything these days: Oh the humanity--! They let a menstruationg woman touch him!) the tag, "it should be safe, legal and rare" is hilarious. Talk about exposing certain intellectual cupidities in one swift blow...

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(23 comments) - (Post a new comment)

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