Outrage overload
Published by Sabotabby February 12th, 2008 in Human Rights, Military bullshit, Rights? What rights?, Torture
If we need to have fascism, can it at least be well-dressed fascism?
Okay, so this fellow Scalia has actually managed the unthinkable, which is to change my mind on the ethics of torture. Previously, as you may recall, I had the sane belief that torture was always unethical, under any circumstances. But this good judge has convinced me that torture is ethical in precisely one situation.
Say you have a batshit insane lawmaker who has never missed a meal, let alone suffered actual deprivation or, say, stress positions or waterboarding. Say he’s trying to remove legal barriers to torture, since there are only legal barriers remaining, and not very many of those. Say he claims torture no big deal. I think it might possibly be okay to give him a little of what he wants to inflict upon random Middle Easterners—if only because this is such an urgent threat that can apparently be stopped by no other means.
The funniest/saddest quote in that article is this one, though:
“We don’t pretend to be Western mullahs who decide what is right and wrong for the whole world,” he said in the broadcast.
The guy is just insane. If we can’t waterboard him, he should at least be locked up for everyone’s protection.
Ultimately, it’s too late. The U.S. has already granted itself the right to abduct prisoners of war and citizens of other countries, imprison them indefinitely without legal recourse, torture them until they make false confessions, and now, it can execute them too.
David Sheldon, an attorney and former member of the Navy’s legal corps, said an execution chamber at Guantanamo would be largely beyond the reach of U.S. courts.
I think this is the point at which I can no longer be accused of exaggeration or Godwin’s Law violations when I make the claim that the U.S. is running concentration camps. Were I an American, I’d be hard-pressed to cast a ballot for any of the candidates right now, since none of them are talking about this no-longer-slow-at-all slide into fascism, let alone planning to put a stop to it.
You are against torture in every case, no matter what?
That’s a tough position to defend morally. How is it ethical to allow (yes, allow) dozens or even hundreds of people to be murdered by terrorists because you refuse to inflict temporary pain on their murderer?
The US waterboarded KSM. I grant you that waterboarding is torture. However, he had planned terrorist attacks that had killed thousands of innocent people. He was planning to kill thousands more.
Why is his temporary pain more important to you than the lives of thousands of innocent people? The ethical calculus does not favor your position.
kevin, where and when has torture ever gotten usable results? You inflict enough pain, and most torturees will tell you anything you want to hear to get you to stop. Usually you have no way of finding out whether the information given under torture is correct. Most likely it will a load of crap made up to sound like what the torturers want to hear. Read up on the witch trials in Europe and on the ‘confessions’ obtained in these trials. Or look at the ‘confessions’ extricated from American POWs in Japanese camps. Says a lot for the efficiency of torture as a means of obtaining information.
On the other hand, Scalia must be insane if he thinks that someone hardened enough to murder a couple of thousand people will start ratting on his mates or give out any useful information when someone gives him a few slaps in the face. They would most likely try to string their torturers along with likely but wrong information. They are prepared, sometimes even eager to die anyway. so what hope could anyone have of forcing them to tell what they know?
If Scalia gets his way, the USA will become part of the unholy community populated by the Holy Inquisition, Nazi Germany, Stalin’s secret police, Saddam Hussein’s secret police and many others. This would in effect make it impossible for any American government to intervene on behalf of human rights or the rule of law. The baddies would have won another battle. Sorry, but that man should be locked up in an asylum right away.
Thanks for that last bit; all these seriously decent folk running around like headless chickens: “The Democrats will save us! The lesser of two Evils!” when we should be in the fucking streets!
gnaddrig,
You are making that point that torture does not “work.” This may or may not be so. If it doesn’t “work,” then I agree with you.
I was making an ethical argument from a utilitarian point of view. Why should the temporary pain of one terrorist (e.g., KSM) tip the balance against the lives of hundreds of innocent people? I don’t think it does. If you disagree, I’d like to hear your arguments.
I would also point out that at least some of your examples above don’t really apply. The Inquisition and Stalin’s show trials didn’t want information; they wanted public confessions for their own ideological reasons. The Nazis and the Baathists might have actually wanted human intelligence much of the time, but I think it’s a very poor comparison to the US circa 2008.
they wanted public confessions for their own ideological reasons.
I’m not so sure that’s not applicable to the Bush admin as well.
Kevin, I presume you’re talking about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? I hope so, because he’s actually a good example of why torture doesn’t work. This is apparently what he confessed to:
What Mr Mohammed told the tribunal:
Not to mention beheading Daniel Pearl—not ordering it; he claims to have done it himself. (From the Guardian, available online here.)
So, Kevin, do you actually believe that one guy did all that stuff? Or do you think that maybe he would have copped to Kennedy and Hoffa too, had they kept going?
Torture does not yield accurate information. The Inquisition, Stalin, the Nazis, the Baathists—none of these regimes were interested in accurate information. That’s the justification they use, but the purpose for which torture is useful is as an instrument of political terror. If the U.S. government honestly believes that they’re getting accurate information rather than instilling fear in populations both domestic and foreign, it’s incompetent. The information it is getting is not accurate and relying on it could put innocent lives in danger, not save them.
Torture is unethical on both humanitarian and utilitarian grounds.
Why is his temporary pain more important to you than the lives of thousands of innocent people? The ethical calculus does not favor your position.
kevin, could you give me one example where information gained through torture actually helped save any lives?
I was making an ethical argument from a utilitarian point of view. Why should the temporary pain of one terrorist (e.g., KSM) tip the balance against the lives of hundreds of innocent people?
Well, you can come up with any number of examples where the general public would actually favour the use of torture to gain information. If the pain of one or a few alleged terrorists is believed to ‘buy’ the lives of a few hundred civilians, especially women and children, most people would go Let the bastards have it. The gutter press demonstrates this every now and then. A few years ago, a German police officer ordered the use of torture on the kidnapper to gain information on the whereabouts of a kidnapped boy. I think the kidnapper was not actually tortured, and it was found that the boy had already been dead at the time anyway. Now, to go one step further, imagine there are no lives at stake but some magnificent, irretrievable work of art like the Mona Lisa, or the last copy of Gutenberg’s Bible, or maybe the original copy of the Constitution. Would you let those be destroyed, or would you rather use torture to gain the information necessary to save the stuff?
The problem is not that it inflicting pain on one criminal individual to save many lives would seem inappropriate (on the presumption that torture is an effective means of gathering exact information which I think it isn’t). The problem in each individual case is that you can’t be sure whether the individual is really a terrorist, and that - if you do know he is - youmost likely won’t be able to verify anything he says, or if he’s having you on. For our societies in general, the problem is that once you allow torture, it will be difficult to draw a line. If a 500 lives are worth torturing for today, people will be tortured to save five lives tomorrow, and your neighbour’s hamster next week.
Allowing torture for any reason is opening a floodgate, and it will not be easy (that is to say, it will be all but impossible) to reverse that step. Any country doing that step will find itself on the slippery slowpe to becoming a terrorist state.
I for one would be sorry to see the USA go down there. You know, German soldiers in World War II did whatever it took to be taken POW by the American forces, not the Soviets, because they knew American soldiers wouldn’t touch a hair of their heads. The USA do have a reputation to lose, and currently they are doing all they can to do just that.
You set the bar far too low with your question. Of course torture sometimes works. The most obvious examples are with the Mossad or with the French in Algeria. I would argue that the former is more justifiable than the later, but it’s clear they both got results.
As for your slippery slope argument, I agree with much of it. But there is a reason why the slippery slope is often a fallacy. We don’t want to toture someone to find out if he stole the lunch money or not. But if you capture, say, Al Qaeda’s number 3 man, then I would argue his temporary discomfort does not take on a greater moral weight than the lives of hundreds of innocent people.
Does torture provide false information? Sometimes. Is it unethical? Sometimes.
By the same token, when we capture a highly placed confirmed terrorist with operational information, it’s both ethical and useful to get what information from him we can.
I see, yes. The Mossad’s torture of Palestinian prisoners has clearly led to an outbreak of peace, love, and understanding between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. There is now no longer any conflict or violence there because the information gained in these little interrogations has proven so very valuable.
No? Okay, what are these “results” of which you speak, then? I mean, besides successfully creating a lot of human pain and misery, which I suppose is a “result.”
Here’s a hypothetical (because we’re talking about hypotheticals; we haven’t yet had to torture a guy in order to find a bomb that is ABOUT TO GO OFF ANY SECOND NOW):
You have successfully captured a terrorist. He has information that, if extracted, will lead you to a location of a bomb that is set to blow up in New York City, potentially killing millions of innocent people. Torture hasn’t broken the guy—he’s a machine. His only weakness is his perverse attraction to children. You happen to have your five-year-old son with you.
He suggests a deal. He will give you all the information you need to stop the bomb from going off—if you agree to force your five-year-old son to give him a blowjob. There is no way to stop the bomb other than to accept this arrangement.
How can you ethically argue that the temporary discomfort of your child is worth millions of innocent lives, Kevin?
You know Kevin, I’m not so sure Algeria is any kind of example of the effectiveness of torture, since the methods used there just fed into the (ultimately successful) rebellion and undermined the legitimacy of the Fourth Republic, leading to a military coup. Incidentally, one of the chief operators in Algeria was Maurice Papon, Nazi collaborator, torturer, murderer, and all-around bastard. And Papon was more than happy to use the same tactics at home as abroad. I mean, call me crazy (or historical) but I think there might just be a lesson here about what happens when you mix torture and civil service.
The problem is: how can we make sure that no one is ever going to abuse the kind of power that a right to torture prisoners gives you?
If you place power into the hands of a person, a group of people, or an institution, you must have very strong safeguards in place to make sure that this power will never be abused. How are you going to control torture? Will there be full coverage by the international media? Will all elected representatives know what’s going on? Or will the thing be done in secret, by some unknown people belonging to certain parts of the army or the secret services, but no one knows exactly what part, acting on authority of, well, someone in power?
The “slippery slope” thing can be a fallacy, true. This particular slope would lead into a scenario that is too serious to be taken lightly.
Once the USA are torturing prisoners, I’d expect other states - who might reasonably fear sanctions now - to feel a lot more confident about their own practises. Rightly or wrongly, they would feel that the USA has now become like them.
The thing that bothers me the most about Kevin on this thread is that he seems to believe that one person being tortured to save some other hypothetical amount of “innocent” people is ethical in and of itself. It is not moral, nor ethical to start placing value on other people’s lives. Because if that one life being saved was MINE versus thousands of hypothetical people, I know damn well that I would pick me to keep living and not be tortured anymore. I may even throw a few names of people I don’t like towards the US gov’t, like maybe Kevin himself on this thread, to help my cause of living and of no longer being tortured. I value my life the most. I won’t lie. I think that is an extremely moral position to take. (valuing my life over anyone elses is the most moral thing to do–look it up—there are tons of philosophers that would agree). If Kevin wants to throw his life away because maybe that will save thousands of hypothetical people, then go for it buddie.
But supporting a government that is using its monopolisitic right to now apparently legally torture and kill people however it pleases to do so, is saying that he doesn’t care about innocence at all. He is only saying to me that he thinks it is just great that a bunch of sociopaths have the insane right to torture another human being for hypothetical reasons. There are a TON of people that I would love to see tortured and killed for many real life reasons that have used their power to murder thousands and thousands of innocent people in real life time. But ethically, it is wrong of me to follow through on those wishes and do any harm to another human being. So keeping that balance at the highest levels of power is kinda pretty important for the rest of us to have. That is why it IS really really simple on a moral and ethical scale for me to say that I DON’T AGREE WITH TORTURE of another human being
no. matter. what.
inkybrain,
The question wasn’t whether French torture in Algeria was wise as part of their grand imperial strategy. The question was whether torture ever evokes accurate information and saves innocent lives. My two examples (Mossad, French) are valid, so far as that question goes. I sort of regret bringing up the French example at all, because I don’t believe they had any business in Algeria whatsoever. My examples were limited to the more narrow question posed to me by gnaddrig.
***
Mia,
“I DON’T AGREE WITH TORTURE of another human being. no. matter. what.”
The counterargument is that what we do and what we fail to do have consequences, especially if you are in a position of power. If you do nothing and people will die because of it, then you are still making a moral choice. I have argued that waterboarding an Al Qaeda leader in order to save innocent lives is an ethically defensible position. That’s fine if you disagree. But your choice still has consequences, and those consequences privilege the temporary pain of a terrorist leader over random, innocent life.
Well Kevin, I would say it’s verging on sophistry to ignore the wider social, political and moral consequences of torture so as to narrowly focus on some kind of 24-esque “what-if” scenario. Just because you didn’t want or intend to address the larger issues doesn’t make them any less relevant. Particularly when your own hypothetical question itself relies upon “consequences” to gain any sort of persuasive force. Limiting the context as you do strikes me as arbitrary at best (and catastrophically misguided at worst), given that there is a real-world debate about the use of torture going on right now. I mean, maybe you missed the part of the post where Supreme Court Justice Scalia was cheerily talking about jabbing things under people’s fingernails. It’s not like we’re hooking up a car battery to Jeremy Bentham’s head and asking him what he thinks; this is properly an issue of law and policy, since it’s law and policy (among other things) that are at stake.
Put another way, if you really are advocating torture as a policy, then the onus is on you to explain how it would work. Would we have torture schools? It’s not like a video game, where there’s a health bar telling you when to stop the beating. Presumably it would have to be standardized in some way. What would the payscale be like? Do we want to incentivize torture as a profession? Would torturers get a christmas bonus, depending on their confessions-to-broken-finger ratio? Would they be allowed to enter other areas of civil service? And what argument could you make against using torture in regular criminal interrogations, where your same utilitarian numbers seem to stack up on public good versus private pain. And if you’re not advocating torture as policy, then I would ask, what good is your hypothetical, other than as a kind of philosophical parlor trick that pretty much immediately falls apart in social reality?
And anyway, you also rather conspicuously failed to answer Sabotabby’s question.
Here’s a logical fallacy for you Kevin: “if you capture, say, Al Qaeda’s number 3 man” - and you know this how exactly? You know someone is guilty of someone before you torture him? Wow, magic! Because we all know that only the guilty are caught. And that the identity of bad guys is always perfectly uncovered.
Of course, you might end up with some poor schmuck who looks like/has the same name as/was dropped in the shit deliberately by Al Qaeda’s number 3 man. How many people is that going to save?
The trouble, Kevin, is that you are thinking of perfect, and perfectly unlikely, scenarios when you (a) know something for absolutely certain, (b) know for absolutely certain that that particular person knows something extra for absolutely certain and (c) will tell you accurate information under torture that you know for absolutely certain will save “thousands”. That’s quite some hypothetical.
So maybe this is preemptive, and maybe this is a result of the prison industrial complex, but I feel obliged to point out that there are some humane ways of dealing with criminals, aside from torture. For example, you could try them, and then lock the guilty up. If you’re good at locking people up - and we are - http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=867
- then maybe we don’t need to commit crimes against humanity to prevent other such crimes against humanity.
Back to Mr. Scalia for a minute:
“I don’t look to their law, why do they look to mine?” he said.
“We don’t pretend to be Western mullahs who decide what is right and wrong for the whole world,” he said in the broadcast.
This is a bit rich coming from ‘one of the United States’ top judges’. His country keeps trying to influence governments, companies and organisations all over the world, sometimes nudging, sometimes bullying them to play by the rules made in Washington. A country that has been found to support or even organise coups against inconvenient governments, and that apparently considers itself the most important if not only true defender of things such as freedom, the rule of law, democracy, and that occasionally even invades other countries to remove criminal regimes and to enforce Western values. The rationale seems to be that if all countries of this planet did as told by the US government, then world peace and happiness would ensue. Only that these days the champion of freedom and all that seems to be rather disinclined to live by the rules he imposes on others. Looks like a classical example of a police officer feeling he stands above the law, thinking the rules don’t apply to himself.
The US used to live and let live, but the period of neutrality and isolationism ended with good reason when the US entered World War II. Since then, the US seem to have their fingers in almost everything going on on this planet. Whether this is good or bad, right or wrong, is another question, and there are no easy answers. But the fact remains that Mr. Scalia’s words are belied by the way his country has been behaving for the past few decades. Either Mr. Scalia doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or he is an unscrupulous liar. I don’t know which of the alternatives scares me more.
We don’t know whether American Imperialism is good or bad, right or wrong? Yikes. Also, the past few decades? Try the past century: we, as a nation, have been in imperialist military conflict every year–not counting ‘Indian Wars’, which we should–since 1899.
But even if you totally leave aside the question of “imperialism” on the one hand and “necessary intervention for humanitarian causes” on the other, Scalia is still wrong.
Iris, my previous post is basically about Mr. Scalia’s sanity and his misconception regarding his country’s behaviour, not so much about American Imperialism.
Not everything the US did outside the US comes under this heading, and while a lot of what the US did (and are doing) is certainly not good, and far too much of it downright evil, there are many things that are ambiguous at the very least, and quite a lot that on the whole would have to be called good.
Just take the event I mentioned – World War II. What would Europe look like today had the US not invaded Normandy and helped bring the Nazi regime down?