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Plainsman1963

Actually, not a change but a clarification. I tried to write my first reply in as clear a manner as I could (anything I could do to this person) but realized after the "torture family" reply that I wasn't as clear as I wanted to be.
I drew the line at harming innocents to try and save innocents. I would skin the terrorist alive if I thought it would work and not have too many qualms about that at all. He chose to be a terrorist and put us all in this position, he has given up any civil rights, imho.
But to harm someone who is not at all involved with this has just brought me down to the same level as the terrorists. I don't think I could do that.

I would rather face death standing than on my belly. If I harm innocent people to save other innocent people, I think I am low crawling.

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Yana Usdi

I don't imagine all or even most would react like that, it's one thing to die fast but another to suffer slowly. But, some are fanatics and between that and the fact that even an innocent man will confess under torture so we don't have any reason to trust anything said anyway, it seems as I said before a low result method. I don't pretend to be an expert on interrogation, but from the articles by experts that I have read recently it seems to be mostly the amateurs who think it's useful. Drugs or other methods to destroy inhibitions and just get them talking seems more useful, especially with little time to spare to truely break their will.

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Hiz Highness

I think a little too much faith has been placed in the torture method. It almost seems as if most users here agree that if you just torture someone long and hard enough they'll give you what you want. Consider the possibility that no matter how you torture this guy, he's not going to tell you the truth.

He may tell you something that will take you a couple of hours to confirm (thereby stalling your efforts until after the nuclear blast takes place). He may give you a wrong answer that looks very much like a right answer. Or he may just clam up totally.

Torture is not the fail-safe method for getting the truth out of people.

-HH

Niteshift

The question isn't so much about particular methods being better or more effective, nor about the mechanics of a device (and yes, that bomb scenario is possible according to our local EOD guys)..........

It's more of a question of can a situation not only change your view, but allow you to feel justified in changing it. We probably all agree that torture is generally wrong. But are there situations where your moral/ethical views of it change........and what does it take to get you to that level. And I'm curious about the thought process and reasoning it takes to get to the ultimate answer.

So far, some of the answers are interesting.

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Yana Usdi

Sure, being personally involved in a situation can change your view, though if it changes your moral/ethical outlook on it if you were able to step back or not is another matter. For me I'd hope it wouldn't, that when I calmed I'd see reason. On a rational level I know that torture is ineffective and the death penalty should be used on the "rabid dog" type rather than just out of vengeance, but if someone raped my wife I'd be happy to skin them then set them on fire inch by inch myself, and then I'd get nasty with them That's why we have laws against vigilantes.

That doesn't change the morality or effectiveness of it though, if I did that I'd be wrong. I can understand how abuse happens if I put myself in their position sometimes, but as I started this thread saying situational morality is too easy an excuse for too many things. Even if we sympathize, even if we understand, we can't support it. We can't afford to.

 

Hiz Highness

I've never had a stomach for torture. Even as a child when the other kids were playing "let's burn the eyes out of a beetle with a magnifying glass" I couldn't join in. If I step on a bug, and see it limping along afterward I gotta' kill it. I'm all about dealing the swift death blow, over watching long suffering.

If I thought torture was an effective method for gathering reliable information I could see adopting it in an extreme circumstance. However, I have long been told that torture is pretty useless for the purposes of intelligence gathering.

In the proposed situation anyone would do whatever was in their power to save the lives of the Californians. However, in order to save their lives we have to get the right answer out of our captive, and I don't see torture as the most effective way of doing that.

I'd probably ask to speak to the highest ranked officials in the US intelligence gathering communities and ask them what the best method of getting an answer out of the captive is. If they said "the only tactic we have in this situation is torture", then I'd turn control of the situation over to Mike Tyson (he seems creative enough) and head the h*ll out of Cali.

I'd be putting on some SPF-45 suntan lotion too, just in case the blast warms me up a little as I'm heading down the road.

-HH

JTP

Don't anybody take this personally...

I find it hard to understand a person's reluctance to torture in the situation hypothesized. Is it not the height of selfishness to firmly hold to personal belief that "torture is wrong" when a hundred thousand lives hang in the balance? I would find it difficult to justify 100,000 dead with "I don't believe in torture".

As to the effectiveness of physical torture, I think that we don't know the answer to that. I have also read that physical torture is less effective than imagined, however from my reading that was a statement confined to just physical torture. I would imagine a comprehensive mix of drugs, physiological stress and physical pain would be somewhat more successful.

Nonetheless, I would accept nothing less than 100% effort in our interrogations. This squeamishness is a luxury, like pacifism, not a tenable position in the face of true threats of the magnitude we are discussing.

Hiz Highness

Well, speaking only for myself I would say the disagreement is more of one over the effectiveness of torture. You may see it as 100,000 lives hanging in the balance of you torturing of a prisoner. I see it more as an issue where the 100,000 may be dead whether I torture the prisoner or not. There are no garauntees that the torture will work. What we can pretty much garauntee is thar after beginning the torture all other methods of extracting information will be closed to us.

I had the opportunity to talk to military intelligence interrogators during my service. I asked them if they were trained to torture people, and they replied that torture was an ineffective way of obtaining solid intelligence. This editorial seems to echo the same opinion: http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen...0405211643.asp

(Just one of many stories that will show up if you Google News "torture" and "ineffective")

No one has said we should offer less than 100% effort in this scenario. There just seems to be a division between those of us who say "let's consider all options" and those of us who would immediately begin torture without entertaining any other ideas.

I would submit this for consideration: Those who would begin torturing the captive immediately would be more likely to get the 100,000 killed.



-HH

Yana Usdi

Actually I view it exactly the opposite. It's the height of selfishness to excuse something like torture, even if we think we have good reason at the time. It starts us down a road we've gone too far down all too often in the past, one that our kids will have to pay for and live with. To avoid damage now, to make life easier now or to avenge something now for our own reasons we set a precedent that threatens the very basis of our laws and way of life. That's the height of selfishness.

Once we start down the road where it's easy to justify an action because we'll get results what stops someone from proposing that the Palestinian problem could be largely solved in an afternoon with fuel/air explosives? Same with what happened in Falluja, or wherever else, the ends justify the means after all. How many lives might we save in the end if we just took another step down that road, then another?

If we're fighting for our way of life instead of to adopt the ways of those we're fighting, we stick to what we know is right. If we don't we'll lose something a lot more important than a city.

Herb Ninja

So what if it is. Personally I live my life in selfishness. I buy marijuana and games and yummy foods with my income. I eat meals big enough to feed several starving people. If I wasn't selfish I would just survive on minimum, work maximum, and then give my extra money to help feed the needy. But i'm selfish. For the most part I live for myself. I burn gas instead of walking everywhere. I don't recycle my trash. And i'm certainly so selfish that if I couldn't bring myself to torture somebody, which now that I think about it I probably couldn't, I would "let" 100,000 people die. I couldn't have saved them from mortality anyway. Peace, HN-

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