Update: Commenter Ian Coull nails the issue:
‘We’ go to war to preserve ‘our’ way of life. Soldiers go to war willing to die in order that some larger entity survives. Thus we find thousands of lives willingly sacrificied in order to preserve ‘civilization’ as we know it. The hypothetical question launching this thread translates into: Does ‘our way of life’ better survive the deaths of thousands of innocents, or ‘the adoption of a new social order which includes torture as a legitimate tool of our government’. I would argue the former less damaging.
…I just hate it when people write my ideas so much better than I do…
Patterico is a friend, and a smart guy, and someone who would make me cringe in fear if he were ever to prosecute me. And a wonderful husband and dad, I’m sure. I’m saying this in no small part because he took on a challenging hypothetical about torture, and I don’t think he’s a bad guy for asking the question.His hypothetical is this:
Let’s assume the following hypothetical facts are true. U.S. officials have KSM in custody. They know he planned 9/11 and therefore have a solid basis to believe he has other deadly plots in the works. They try various noncoercive techniques to learn the details of those plots. Nothing works.
They then waterboard him for two and one half minutes.
During this session KSM feels panicky and unable to breathe. Even though he can breathe, he has the sensation that he is drowning. So he gives up information – reliable information – that stops a plot involving people flying planes into buildings.
My simple question is this: based on these hypothetical facts, was the waterboarding session worth it?
He’s been getting slammed a lot for asking. He shouldn’t be, we ought to be asking the question – and the answer ought to inform us about who we are and what this country is about.
But here, I’ll disagree with Patterico, who says:
Sebastian starts by giving a clear answer to my hypo: yes. I think that is the only reasonable answer. I don’t mean to insult the people here who have answered no. I just happen to think that a “no” answer to my carefully phrased hypo reveals such an incredibly ideological mindset that I can’t relate to it. It’s 2 1/2 minutes of a mild form of torture with no lasting physical effects, performed on an undoubtedly evil terrorist and mass murderer, to obtain information certain to obtain thousands of lives. When someone says that such mild torture would be morally unjustified, that answer to me lacks common sense. And when it’s coupled with a smug self-righteous attitude, – well, I find it insufferable.
In my own case, I keep believing the answer has to be no, it wasn’t worth it.
I’ll skip the problem that you have to torture a lot of people to find the one who has the key information. And that you can’t possibly – in advance – know that the person you are about to torture has the combination to the ticking bomb.
Because if life was TV, and you could just torture the one person who did have the combination, and be sure that torture would make them give it up, some – but not all – the objections might be put aside. But not all of them.
Let me take his hypothetical a step further, and suggest that it shouldn’t be too hard to build a helmet that could be put on someone’s head, not damaging the skin, that would – when turned on – induce incredible levels of fear – or pain – inductively, acting directly in the brain. And, having switched it off, leave the person wearing the helmet unscathed except from whatever physiological reactions they had to the perception of pain or fear.
So there would be essentially no risk of “real injury” involved.
Would using something like that be appropriate in such a case?
I’ll say a firm “no” (with one weasel path out), and take a rambling, first-draft blog post kind of walk through why I say that.
First, and foremost, because – as I’ve noted – using something like this moves us into the realm of being a fear-based society; one that rules on might and terror. The corrosive impact of that stance is what drives this, and on some level it’s the violation of the integrity of the person by depriving them of all their power over themselves, and by – I’m not finding the right description, but somehow erasing the integrity of their ‘self’. Prison doesn’t do that; even Joe Arpaio – who keeps his prisoners in tents, offers them no recreation and dresses them in pink – does not violate their integrity in the ways that I’m describing – they still make choices, have some responsibility as to their behavior.
Bluntly, I’d rater shoot someone than torture them harmlessly. I believe it’s more moral; I’m violating their ‘person-ness’ less through an act of outright violence than through one that seeks to break their ownership of themselves in the ways that torture does.
And on a basic level, you can’t have a free society in which people don’t have that sense of personal integrity – that sense that they ‘own’ their own behavior and person. Once you violate that and make it clear that someone – the state – owns you, the nature of the political relationship is irrevocably changed.
There’s a logical lacuna in my argument, which is the only weasel path that I can see – which is that KSM isn’t part of our society (polity) and as such, who cares what we do to him?
I’ll reply that a Chinese Wall (as we used to say in banking) between what we do to foreign terrorists and our own citizens is certainly going to get breached when we confront equally serious domestic ones. And we have the pesky problem of defining who, exactly is a terrorist, and who is a political opponent.
So we’re back to the idea that the foundation of our society isn’t loyalty freely given, but fear of transgressing, and fear not of social ostracism, but of the torturer and the bullet in the back of the head.
There are societies built like that.
We’re fighting them.
Becoming one of them – even with harmless ‘fake’ torture – seems like a really bad idea. And, to be blunt, we can survive violent terrorism better than we (as the society we are today) can survive doing that and becoming one of ‘those’ societies.
Having said that, let me loop around and seemingly contradict myself – in order to make this position a little clearer, I think.
I’ll start with some personal history.
As a kid, I used to race cars – on the street. It was stupid, and dangerous, and I’m damn luck I didn’t kill someone else (forget killing myself). We raced sports cars (I had a Mini Cooper S) on Mulholland, between Laurel Canyon and Coldwater Canyon here in Los Angeles, late at night.
The police did a variety of things to stop us, and the more bitter members of the racing community hated the police, and acted out whenever they could.
One night, two of us were stopped at the side of the road, kicking tires and hanging out, when a police car pulled up, and two officer stopped and interrogated us, taking out ID and noting the details of our cars. We were separated, each taking to one officer – I was chatting amiably with mine, who was trying to lecture me on the idiocy of what I was doing, when the other officer suddenly spun the other racer around, put him on the hood of his car, thumped his head onto the hood a few times, and handcuffed him.
My officer watched me somewhat warily, and I shrugged and showed him my open hands. he told me to stand still and walked over to talk to his colleague.
They chatted with the other racer for a bit, and then uncuffed him and drove away. I walked over and asked what had happened; his nose was bleeding, and he had a welt over his eye. He was bitterly complaining about the brutality of the officer.
“I called him a fucking pig asshole…”
I laughed, which wasn’t what my friend wanted to hear.
“What did you expect him to do, dude?” I asked. I’d been taught by my African-American ‘uncles’ that it was best to be polite to someone who could shoot you and then worry mostly about the paperwork.
To this day – in the face of what would be uncontrovertibly torture by contemporary standards if done my a Marine in Baghdad – I can’t get really worked up about this.
My friend and I were idiots for being who we were. He was a bigger idiot for thinking he could act like an ass. My cop friends talk about this, wistfully, as ‘street justice’ and point out that today they often only have the choice of arresting someone or walking away – and that they wish there were some intermediate actions like this that they could mete out.
I’m fully aware of the risks of allowing this.
Sometimes a bloody nose is a useful teaching aid. And sometimes it’s torture.
But…in reality, the police officer didn’t remove my fellow racer’s ‘person-ness’, his agency – he reacted to it, and set boundaries around it for certain. The deliberation of “if you don’t do X, we will do Y and there is nothing you can do about it” was missing. The cop treated my friend as a person – while in Patterico’s example, KSM is simply a piece of talking meat.
And to an extent, that – more than anything is the point I’m trying to make. Not treating KSM with kid gloves isn’t torture. Reacting to abuse or bad behavior from him – even sometimes violence – isn’t torture.
Calmly sitting him down and saying you’ll put him into excruciating pain unless he talks to you is. Because you are denying him his ownership of himself, in some moral way.
A society that readily accepts torture reduces those who live in it to meat. It dehumanizes them. It dehumanizes those who do it. And it makes the societies in which those nonhumans live something other than the kind of human society we want to live in.
I’ll make another pass at this over the weekend, and try and clarify things, as well as bringing in the notion of historical contingency…but this ought to trigger some interesting discussion.
A.L.
I’m sympathetic to this line of reasoning, but we’re falling short here.
We have societies of dehumanized people; we call them prisons. We justly have these institutions because “humans” are not always a good thing, but we don’t seem to care much about what happens to the meat we put inside of them. We even make jokes about it.
Suppose KSM were put into a prisoner population where he would certainly be raped and beaten, and possibly be suddenly murdered. How does that compare to 3 minutes of waterboarding? Yet this is what we do to people who aren’t even killers, let alone terrorists with important information.
It seems to parallel the pacifist fallacy. So long as we are not deliberately ordering it done, and holding ourselves above it morally, then the death and suffering are irrelevant to us.
_”We have societies of dehumanized people; we call them prisons.”_
I agree- but that is a severe problem with our prisons, not an excuse to torture. Its an illustrating example though- we dont impose hard labor anymore, but we all feel pretty good that thugs and creeps get to go to prison and get raped and beaten ‘behind the scenes’. That is no way to run a justice system. We are a nation of law, not justice. This sort of vigilante vengence is neither.
If we NEED to torture someone for a damned good reason, it should be done in utter defiance of the law, and hence illegally. If its worth doing, its worth the cost, or its not worth doing.
*From Glen at #1*
_Suppose KSM were put into a prisoner population where he would certainly be raped and beaten, and possibly be suddenly murdered. How does that compare to 3 minutes of waterboarding?_
_It seems to parallel the pacifist fallacy. So long as we are not deliberately ordering it done, and holding ourselves above it morally, then the death and suffering are irrelevant to us._
The prison actions are due to the inaction of the state, plausibly deliberate, but more likely constraint by laws or lack of revenue. The waterboarding is clearly deliberate action. The willful inaction of a state is somewhat different from the willful actions, even knowing the consequences.
It is not above our laws or our morals – crimes are still crimes, and the murder of a prisoner holds as much weight as the murder of anyone else. Since the ability to enforce this as a society is financed by taxes, which are used as a sounding board for over 30% of the population, this shouldn’t be surprising.
*From AL*
I think you might have wrongly picked the link. But this heads back into the same territory, the “something will be stopped!” instead of the much more likely “we may get information which may or may not help us in finding more people”. It’s easy to phrase a hypothetical when you know the answer you want to hear – that, as much as his answer, deserves flak.
How do you know Patterico is wrong? I haven’t seen him say what he thinks yet.
He’s posing hypotheticals. He’s thinking.
I’m answering his questions, and making my own points. I am thinking too.
I hope he’s thinking about my points. I know he hasn’t provided an equally clear doctrine for me to consider. I am just considering the hypotheticals.
Sometimes you just have to put stuff out there, knowing that it’s not (except by coincidence) your final word. Through engaging with others, your thoughts may become clearer, or they may change course radically.
I think my comment #4 was too hasty, inadequate and incorrect. After all, Armed Liberal is just thinking out loud like everyone else.
OK, so far I stand by the comments I made in Patterico’s threads for his hypotheticals, and I want to elaborate slightly her on one point Armed Liberal touched on:
I don’t care what happens to him, except that I hope it is fatal.
I care about the harm we may do to ourselves in doing things to him.
Part of this harm lies in an inability to draw a line on the other side of which lie the cases where we would not be able to say even in retrospect that what we did was worth it. Once you say that your guide to what should be law is how each particular case will look in retrospect, you are lost.
Part of the harm lies in sundering the ideal unity of the nation in and out of uniform. People with natural and healthy sentiments are likely to treat torturers as tainted. That exacerbates a problem of military vs. civilian and nation vs. state relations that is already serious.
Part of the harm lies in cultural change. If there is one thing we should have learned from struggles over life and death issues such as euthanasia, its that concessions over issues touching on the sacredness and importance of the individual human being don’t end a problem where the concession was made, rather they lead to more and more demands for further dehumanizing and deadly practices.
The slippery slope is very slippery and very steep. I think we should not start down it.
I also think Armed Liberal is on to something big in his post, only I don’t know if he or anyone else can boil it down to a satisfactory level of simplicity.
(I hope this doesn’t wander off topic too much.)
I like the hypotheticals that Patterico and others pose. They get us to think; some answers ring ‘right’ and others don’t; we get to explore the why of it.
But a hypothetical is just that. Many, including the one Patterico poses, implicitly include a variation on a “suppose you were God” clause.
After the exploration, let’s come back to Earth and remember that we aren’t.
In this case, the clause takes the form of:
bq. U.S. officials have… a solid basis to believe [KSM] has other deadly plots in the works. [During waterboarding,] he gives up reliable information that stops a plot involving people flying planes into buildings.
Only God can know the value of the information that torture produced before the decsion to torture has been made.
In real life, “we” (citizens, the President, intelligence agents) can never know with certainty. Such assurances are not attainable. Ever.
Each of us should be able to come up with examples from our own lives where we were absolutely sure of something–and then found out afterwards that we were mistaken. Often we belatedly recognize some crucial, unexpected piece of information out in left field, undiscovered, ignored, or unappreciated.
We could extend the exercise by cataloging the slam dunks in history and politics that were not so.
So, suppose we agree that the only moral course is to instruct our agents to torture a certain person when it’s “near-certain” that he has information that would stop an evil plot.
What about when it’s “overwhelmingly likely”? And “very likely”? “more likely than not”? “to the best of our understanding?”
Let’s say we approve KSM’s torture in the “certain” scenario. (I do). Let’s say we extend this to the “virtually certain” case (I don’t, but I think Patterico does). By that extension, we are obliging society’s guards (“who will guard the guards?”) to start down the slippery slope that David Blue describes in #5, above.
What are the guidelines–under what conditions of likelihood is torture mandated, and what threshold separates the necessity of torture from it being forbidden as immoral?
I cannot come up with such guides. Even if they could be formulated, I can’t see how they would be applied in practice. Once we approve of torture under certain/near-certain conditions, the utilitarian argument will inexorably push the guards to resort to torture under a progressively wider range of scenarios.
In other words, what’s to stop the once-in-a-lifetime waterboarding of KSM from slipping to “we torture suspects, but only when we think it is warranted by our view of the totality of the circumstances”?
The question should be posed to oneself in the first person. People in groups notoriously do things that they would not do as individuals, horrible things. Group morality, which is quite often mob morality, is substituted for personal morality, group responsibility for personal responsibility, fear for compassion.
We have seen the effects of collective morality and it is not very pretty. So again, it seems more interesting to answer the hypothetical question posed in the form of “I would…”
#6 from AMac at 2:22 pm on Nov 16, 2007
Hits the nail right on the head with the “suppose you were God” argument. I think we all agree that nobody is God. The problem with the people that we are opposing is they feel that they are God’s surrogates.
Another aspect of the question that is not addressed is the opinion of the people in the plane and the building. It is assumed that they would want the person tortured and not die. I, personally, would rather die than see anyone start playing God on my behalf. A lot have people have died defending the Bill of Rights.
My answer to the hypothetical is a simple no.
We raced sports cars (I had a Mini Cooper S) on Mulholland, between Laurel Canyon and Coldwater Canyon here in Los Angeles, late at night
What a bad thing to do – but a lot more scenic than racing an ancient Dodge Dart on the Jersey Turnpike.
There’s a logical lacuna in my argument, which is the only weasel path that I can see – which is that KSM isn’t part of our society (polity) and as such, who cares what we do to him?
KSM isn’t a part of our society, he’s an enemy combatant. If we made a reasonable evaluation of what makes up our enemies’ military infrastructure, KSM, the organization he represents, the bankers and politicians who pay his bills, and the people who are employed by them are enemies, not subject to any protection under any civil law.
But, since that military/political infrastructure includes many of our most trusted allies in the war against terrorism, our government is not willing to make a reasonable evaluation. We hold hands with many of ‘those’ societies. We’re not fighting them.
In standard warfare, the troops are easily identified. They wear uniforms, they’re out in the battlefield. Their job is to protect the politicians and the financiers who direct them. But the politicians/financiers are also, legally, ‘the enemy’. In a standard war, harming the enemy’s economy, countering their propaganda and destroying their military forces are all equally important.
Terrorist ‘troops’ are not easily identified. Their identities are protected by the politicians and the financiers, who are in turn protected by nothing but implausible deniability, smoke and mirrors. These politicians and financiers are also ‘the enemy’.
Right now, our government refuses to harm the enemy’s economy, partly because they’re profiting from it. The most important part of the enemy’s propaganda is their implausible deniability. We never counter that. We don’t treat the financiers of terrorism as enemy combatants, we give them the full protection of our civil laws. We give the Saudi sponsors of terror diplomatic immunity.
When our government is willing to legitimize, empower and tiptoe through the tulips with the leaders of ‘those’ societies, the issue of torture is relatively small. We might be able to prevent one terrorist attack by waterboarding KSM. We could probably prevent hundreds of attacks by imprisoning the politicians and financiers who support him. For those politicians and financiers, one day without room service is torture. They’re easier to deal with and easier to catch.
If our government stopped empowering terror supporting states, if they enforced our own military laws, they could prevent tens of thousands of attacks.
He who controls the hypothetical, controls the answer. Patterico asks us to assume that waterboarding is legal, which to me means, it is not torture. I think A.L. leaps to a comfortable conclusion that he has already made, which is waterboarding = torture = never.
“Torture” is just a line we draw and at different times we might have drawn the line differently, but I think that is an important point to keep in mind. Because that which is permitted (such as sleep deprivation, humiliation, drugs, isolation, etc.) still might be immoral applied to someone not as culpable and knowledgable as KSM.
If waterboarding is legal, which we must assume, then its employment must be used for moral purposes, with proportionality and after exhausting alternatives. In fact, I think they are much the same considerations we might have in going to war. In this case, under the terms of the hypothetical, I think waterboarding KSM would be just.
It doesn’t follow that a specific policy on waterboarding follows.
I think the concept of the coercion invovled in waterboarding is indeed relevant. A big part of our system is that government isnt supposed to be in the business of forcing individuals to DO something. Thats why good samaritan laws etc have been dimly viewed. Generally it is supposed to take a judicial order to force people to actively do something- the executive branch can lock you up temporarilly but they arent SUPPOSED to be in the business of telling you what to do.
That concept has gone more and more by the wayside, for instance a cop can now drag you to a hospital and hold you down while blood is forcibly drawn, with no search warrant necessary. That kind of thing has begun to permete our society already, whether it be the battle against drunk drivers or whatver the crime de jour might be.
That may seem quite distant from waterboarding a known terrorist, but it comes back to values. Im less worried about what waterboarding does to these individuals than what it does to us, and that isnt just a platitude. This idea that if the cause is good enough, things are permissable that we generally find abhorrant is scary. Particularly in the hands of government. We hate and fear terrorism, but we hate and fear drugs, and drunk driving, and tobacco, and fast food and a million other things. I don’t think we will be waterboarding drive thru attendants any time soon, but i very much worry about the ongoing ceeding of authority to government. We set standands and pass laws to mitigate just that. We should think long and hard before tinkering with those laws, because once that kind of authority is granted it is almost never revoked. Worse, it _will_ seep into domestic issues sooner or later. We will have to be very vigilant about that.
David Blue (#4) – but we do know what Patterico thinks – I quoted him:
bq.Sebastian starts by giving a clear answer to my hypo: yes. I think that is the only reasonable answer. I don’t mean to insult the people here who have answered no. I just happen to think that a “no” answer to my carefully phrased hypo reveals such an incredibly ideological mindset that I can’t relate to it.
And yes, I’m rambling a lot here – but, to be honest, I haven’t fully baked my position yet.
A.L.
#10 from Mark Buehner at 4:25 pm on Nov 16, 2007
Agree 100%. If you give the government power, it will use it. The Bill of Rights was written to protect us from Government. Give the Government, which are only humans, power and mix in a little fear and you wind up with a very dangerous and ugly concoction. This is something that we should really be afraid of.
Cold blood? Is that the relevant distinction for A.L.? If the teen idiot refuses to show ID and bad-mouths the cop, using irresistable force against him is okay as a provoked reaction, but if a terrorist refuses to provide information, and taunts the interrogator with hints that there *is* a plan, then coercing him is wrong because it is deliberate?
As A.L. continues mulling over his position, let me pose the following inquiry – suppose our interrogators were trained to be hot-tempered, to let their passions drive them. Water-boarding would be meted out as “street justice”, as a way of setting bounds in reaction to a terrorist’s refusal to follow instructions. The interrogator would be treating the terrorist as a person, albeit a bad person in need of some slapping around, and moderate asphyxiation… Does that change A.L.’s analysis by removing the cold-bloodedness factor? If so, is this a desirable model?
AL: Keep baking! I have been closely following this discussion, both on Patterico’s blog, and *Obsidian Wings* – and your riposte here is one of the better blogosphere takes that I have read (so far).
At least your answer deals with the “torture question” on the moral/ethical level (where it belongs, IMO) rather than (as so many of the various blog-commenters have) focused on the minutiae of interrogation, or the specifics of KSM’s case, or whatever.
Myself, I find Paterrico’s “hypothetical” to be highly flawed as a foundation for discussion for a number of reasons: the two main ones being:
1). The hugely artificial construct of his “hypothetical”: based on certain knowledge, firm data, based, no doubt on unimpeachable intelligence and unmistakably correct.
As other commenters have pointed out: if torture is only “OK” based on such a limited and unrealistic set of conditions (e.g.: a “carefully phrased hypo”), it shouldn’t be OKed anyway.
2). The frame of Paterrico’s whole point (as he himself mostly admits): it’s not so much a “question”, but a “gotcha” jab; based on a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dichotomy directed at critics of torture policies. Answer “yes”, and you are shown to be a “hypocrite”; answer “no” and you are dismissed as a moral leper. QED.
Anyway, keep on rambling….
Without passing judgement on those who would say otherwise, I would answer the hypothetical ‘yes’. But there is a key problem with how it’s posed, that may make it less than useful in furthering the discussion.
As to why ‘yes’: A KSM is not only not a member of our society, but having in the hypothetical encompassed the slaughter of its members, is not even entitled to the courtesy owed a guest. As with a serial murderer who has already stepped far beyond the bounds of civilization, society owes a KSM in this situation no consideration whatsoever, and should be allowed to dispose of him for its own greater good. I will put preventing the slaughter of thousands above the genuine moral angst (or posed preening) of those who were not targeted for destruction. I could give a damn for KSM’s discomfort, since (having been convicted by his own statements) I would consider it equally moral to put a bullet through his head in the circumstances.
As to why it may not matter: Patterico poses this as a ‘posterior odds’ problem – at the point the hypothetical is given, it’s 100% that the guy key had the necessary and damning information in his skull and is therefore outlaw. Now Patterico may be doing this for didactic reasons, but of course real life is not so accommodating. Someone will have to (and did) make a decision without certainty, only some degree of inference that the terrorist holds such a secret. That puts us right into the hazardous area that Mark B. ably describes in #10.
Damn it A.L., you’re making me think!
I’ll get back to you when my brain stops hurting.
Thanks…I think…
bq. to build a helmet that could be put on someone’s head, not damaging the skin, that would – when turned on – induce incredible levels of fear – or pain – inductively, acting directly in the brain.
That is “Minority Report” territory. The department of pre-crime wants to speak with you. I do not think that this is applicable to someone who is a citizen in good standing.
I do agree with Tim in #15, KSM and anyone who declares that they are not of this society and actively seek the destruction of that society are outside of that society. They deserve NO consideration under the normative behavior of that society, NONE. So, if you can same some of your own citizens lives by a little coercion, then that is entirely within the confines of normal behavior.
Remember that Wretchard in his “3 Conjectures” does state that the actions that may need doing to save this society may change that society BUT that we are strong enough to weather the changes and perhaps learn from them. But survival is paramount unless you are deranged and wish to die or sacrifice yourself anyway.
My thoughts:
Waterboarding is torture.
Torture is wrong.
Torture damages the one being tortured.
Torture damages the one doing the torturing.
Torture will only sometimes produce important information – and other times wrong information.
Torture is often counter-productive to the strategic goals.
Even ‘a little’ torture can lead down the slippery slope of habitual torture.
All the same, under certain hypothetical circumstances I would do it myself, even with the risk of going to jail for it. War is an ugly thing, and often offers only two choices, Bad and Worse, and you have little information and less time to determine which to choose. Blanket condemnation may be the easy choice from the safety and comfort of our computer rooms, without responsibility for our actions (or inactions), but I am not sure it is the right choice.
Those of you concerned about slippery slopes and the slow descent into the Fourth Reich seem to be ignoring one of the assumptions of the hypotherical: “assume that the waterboarding is legal.”
It appears to me that slippery slope concerns derives from making torture legal, not from any individual act. Individual acts of torture during wartime and peacetime have been going on in this country for over a hundred years.
If you think torture should be illegal, but that in exigent circumstances, a person needs to step up and do the right thing even if its illegal, why isn’t Patterico’s hypothetical that very situation? What are the moral considerations to be made outside the law?
‘We’ go to war to preserve ‘our’ way of life. Soldiers go to war willing to die in order that some larger entity survives. Thus we find thousands of lives willingly sacrificied in order to preserve ‘civilization’ as we know it. The hypothetical question launching this thread translates into: Does ‘our way of life’ better survive the deaths of thousands of innocents, or ‘the adoption of a new social order which includes torture as a legitimate tool of our government’. I would argue the former less damaging.
Ian – d**n you!! <g>
You made my point so succinctly and well that I feel useless…
Thanks…
A.L.
David (#5):
The problem with this debate is that there are 2 slippery slopes in play, not 1; AL’s post begins to grapple with that fact, but does not fully acknowledge it.
The first has to do with principles re: integrity of the person, well expressed in the “I’m OK with shooting KSM, but not torturing him” sentiment. To which must be added the institutional logic involved over time, when you have (as Hayek puts it in TRTS, Chapter 10) “…jobs the badness of which taken by themselves nobody has any doubt, but which have to be done in the service of some higher end, and which have to be executed with the same expertness and efficiency as any others.”
The end result of that is either cleavages in multiple, as those who perform these duties become pariahs to society and possibly even their own institutions, or the eventual promotion of the types of folks drawn to these roles. Which has long term institutional effects of its own.
Those are fairly predictable effects, actually, borne out by history’s experience. So even “slippery slope” may be an inappropriate term, as the construct is not wholly theoretical.
Then we have slippery slope #2, which AL begins to acknowledge when he also says that not treating KSM with kid gloves does not constitute torture.
That isn’t really a slippery slope either, because it isn’t theoretical either. The Left has demonstrated again and again, in specific instances, that it is quite prepared to grant people like KSM privileges to which they are not entitled by law, to lie on their behalf, and even to directly abet their actions. Claims of ‘torture’ have been made for practices like putting magic marker on a female guard’s hand and smearing an inmate, then telling him it was menstrual blood (hence unclean, pig’s blood would have had the same effect). Or depriving Islamists who see the Qu’ran as a license to kill of Islamic reading materials. Or flushing Qu’rans down the toilet (and of course, the fact that this was false didn’t stop anyone).
Of course this tactic will continue to be used by our internal enemies. Torture will be defined down until it means just about anything except letting terrorists go on any minor technicality, soon after putting them up in accommodations far better than those enjoyed by, for instance, American troops in the field. Geneva Conventions “name, rank and serial number” limitations will be enforced, and have been openly agitated for, even though those held do not qualify for POW status – a fact that is then used to recommend habeas corpus provisions for rewlease, rather than POW standards.
The law has meant nothing, and been “we make it up as we go along” so far. That will prove no barrier in future.
The reason people make jokes about folks being raped in prison is their lack of faith faith in the justice system as presently constituted to handle crime in a manner that adequately protects the citizenry, and provide a real deterrent to future crime. This has not always been true, and its emergence is not an accident. Any more than the popularity of the Dirty Harry movies (the “shoot him” approach in pure form) were an accident.
The Left has simply transferred its pro-criminal mentality wholesale to the terrorism issue, right down to lawyers running around Washington for over 10 hours “trying to get surveillance warrants to help find American soldiers kidnapped in Baghdad”:http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/20071011/EDITORIAL/110110006/1013/editorial (thus destroying the odds of success – one is dead now, 2 missing). Why warrants? because the copper wires and fiber optics that carry some foreign conversations and e-mail traffic go through major hubs in the United States.
No, not a slippery slope – a predictable outcome.
Given a choice between “shoot KSM or torture him,” I shoot him. I shoot him as an illegal combatant who wears no uniform, and therefore is guilty of war crimes. I shoot him because he hasn’t talked, and therefore he has shown me that he has no value except a negative one, in that he might be bargained away and return to the field, or escape.
I shoot him because engaging in acts I would consider torture has profound moral hazards for the society I wish to protect. Whereas it has been demonstrated to my satisfaction that shooting such people, or even firebombing their cities en masse, does not.
But there’s that second slippery slope.
Given a choice between “become a society that tortures people like KSM, and a society that kowtows to and capitulates to them”… I choose option A, which retains at least a vestige of civilization and offers hope for a future that is something other than a new Dark Ages.
My preference hierarchy is thus:
* Shoot him, unless he gives me a concrete reason not to
* Torture him
* Kowtow to him/ Surrender to him
A serious debate needs to address both of those slopes.
Simply saying “we won’t torture him” is inadequate, unless it also addresses a set of guidelines re: what we will do and why – a set that can and will be defended ferociously.
Great post #22 Joe.
There are many things I should say in reply, but first: I said I stand by what I said in Patterico’s threads, and I do. For instance (link):
David Blue,
I liked your contributions to Patterico’s (way too long) comments thread and am glad to see one reposted here. That one (#23) touches on “public choice theory.”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice_theory#Perspective
With minor edits (apologies to Wikipedia), public choice
bq. attempts to look at governments from the perspective of the bureaucrats and politicians who compose them, and makes the assumption that they act … in a self-interested way for the purpose of maximizing their own economic benefits.
As you allude, it isn’t the economic interests of the waterboarding Guardians that ought to concern us most. Rather, it’s the psychological ones, in terms of the people attracted to the job, and with respect to the rather ample human capacity for rationalization and self-justification.
From Marx onward, the Left has supposed that there are ways to create institutions that are selflessly dedicated to society’s betterment, and will remain so over time. Some on the Right have tacitly agreed with the premise, focusing their disputes on what, exactly, an “improved” society would look like.
To the contrary, all permanent institutions are likely to be progressively “captured” by their denizens. If we create a structure by which waterboarding is legitimated, it will come to serve the interests of the waterboarding bureaucracy. Under the slogan “Protecting the public from terrorists.” (Who could be against that?)
#22 from Joe Katzman at 8:47 pm on Nov 16, 2007
Joe, I really liked this post, because it clarifies my feelings. You deal very directly with personal responsibility here.
*Given a choice between “shoot KSM or torture him,” I shoot him. I shoot him as an illegal combatant who wears no uniform, and therefore is guilty of war crimes. I shoot him because he hasn’t talked, and therefore he has shown me that he has no value except a negative one, in that he might be bargained away and return to the field, or escape.
I shoot him because engaging in acts I would consider torture has profound moral hazards for the society I wish to protect. Whereas it has been demonstrated to my satisfaction that shooting such people, or even firebombing their cities en masse, does not.
My preference hierarchy is thus:
* Shoot him, unless he gives me a concrete reason not to
* Torture him
* Kowtow to him/ Surrender to him
*
And, it appears to be implied that you would live with the consequences. Actually, I probably would do the exactly the same thing. IMO, where this behavior becomes odious is when it is condoned by institutions of govenment and is used as a fig leaf for sadism.
An honorable man will make honorable choices and live up to the consequences of his actions. He can then be judged by his peers who, we believe as a society will treat him in a just manner, even though this does not happen 100% of the time. In this case only one person out of a jury of twelve peers must judge that their were mitigating circumstances that allowed his personal behavior.
If you contrast this with a set of predetermined guidelines handed down by a bureaucracy that sets up different standards for different human beings, I see a big problem. I think that this is at the core of the Military’s objections to waterboarding.
The problem with the hypothetical is that it puts the messy part of the judgment in the realm of the collective and makes it easy for individual to wash his hands of any resposnibility.
If you are kind to a cruel man, does that make you a kind man, or a cruel man?
If cruel men should fear your retribution, and desist from their cruelty, does that make you a cruel man, or a kind man?
Some years ago, a Belgian kidnapper was arrested, charged, and convicted, all within the due process of law. He confessed, but refused to say where his victims were held. They could not make him talk. He was sent to prison, his victims died some time during the investigation, and their remains were discovered, by chance, at a later date. The little girls dead, their families distracted by grief, and the public felt outraged and betrayed.
How important is it to avoid having blood on your own hands?
I would rather be a kind man with dirty hands.
Robo #17: I don’t think you mean ‘Minority Report’ in the sense of complete fiction, but just in case, here’s a working pain ray that could presumably be downsized to fit AL’s specification. For any Dune fans out there, we can now build the Bene Gesserit’s torture gadget. Whoopie.
I suspect you were really talking about the putative citizenship of the torture subject. So what if I twiddle with Patterico’s hypothetical a bit and ask the following of the multitude: It’s not KSM. Instead it’s José Padilla, an American citizen, whose torture prevented another 9/11. (In spite of the problems of making the hypothetical an ‘after the fact’, I’ll stick with it to keep the only variant the citizenship.) No time to get any sort of warrant or indictment, let alone a conviction. But you did it anyway, and it worked. Right or wrong? Yes or no? If different from KSM, why?
Ian and AL, I suggest you consider carefully the slope where you’re standing. The key word that was handwaved in Ian’s post is ‘willingly’. At least in today’s US armed forces, the troops take a soldier’s chance knowingly and willingly. That was not the case with the victims of 9/11, or those in the hypothetical.
So let me put it this way: Would you, by your own acts, sacrifice the lives of thousands of your fellow citizens, unknowing and presumably unwilling, through violent acts for the moral satisfaction of some fraction of the remainder? Do you feel your hands would be clean if you allowed that to happen through someone else’s acts, when you could have reasonably prevented it?
While a lot of this is thinking out loud, I guess I’m close to PD’s #19. There are some situations that are outside the nominal law. We usually run into those edge cases that might be distasteful, stupid, or even immoral in some eyes, but aren’t at the level of being made illegal. They fall within the bounds of individual freedom and autonomy. (At least until the nanny corps comes along.)
This is one of the very few cases on the reverse side of the coin – where making the law is not, in fact, really going to stop the act – at least in the exigent circumstances of Patterico’s hypothetical. It does, however, set up enough of a barrier that a reasonable person is only going to proceed when they are morally certain that the act is necessary and sufficient to stop an atrocity. That can only be judged – in our way of doing things – by a jury of his fellow citizens. That may be argue for: illegal, but pardonable (by either executive act or jury).
(I don’t feel the same way about shooting our hypothetical KSM on the spot, assuming that act was illegal under the circumstances. A dead Islamist tells no tales. The reason for the transgression of torture is to avert a tragedy. Shooting the b****** is just for my own satisfaction, it wouldn’t avert anything. )
Keep on thinking, AL. I’m liking where you seem to be heading.
“Does ‘our way of life’ better survive the deaths of thousands of innocents, or ‘the adoption of a new social order which includes torture as a legitimate tool of our government’. I would argue the former less damaging.”
A lot of people – myself included – have been saying pretty much the same thing from the beginning of the torture debate. Terrorists cannot destroy our way of life. Only we can do that. We would most likely do it because we surrender our values out of fear.
It takes courage to live free and righteously. Part of that courage is accepting that bad things happen – including death – but that it is worse to dishonor oneself (or one’s country, etc) in trying to prevent the bad things from happening.
Katzman, you are trying to obfuscate the obviousness of the slippery slope(s). In the real world there will never be an instance where one is 100% certain that torture is going to prevent something bad from occuring. So where is the line drawn? At 80% At 50% certainty. How about 10%?
But really, this is a simple matter of ends justifying (maybe) the means. That’s all.
If the justification for torture is life saving potential then we end up needing to seriously discuss ordinarily absurd propositions such as follows:
Drunk drivers kill more people than terrorists. If torturing drunks gets a confession out of some (maybe many) that they often drive impaired and we could institute a program of forced ingestion of annabuse (a drug that causes violent physical reaction to subsequent alcohol consumption) for those who confessed, we could save many lives. Should we do it?
How about periodic torture of released child molesters to assess whether or not they are plotting to abuse childeren?
Only torture terrorists because they’re not US citizens? Why is citizenship a factor in how the greatest nation on earth treats human beings? And what of those terroristrs who are US citizens? Surely there are those citizens at least within the funding and support functions of the AQ network. It seems to me very easy to “slip” across that line. Padilla should show that civil rights, at least, can be made to not apply to US citizens.
Correct, A.L. Although given my comments in the original threads, which I thought depraved, my opinion must have been obvious.
Why do you suppose Patterico was offering hypotheticals laden with unrealistic side clauses? (Even the claim, echoed from GWB, that the Library Towers plot was unraveled thru KSM’s torture-induced confession is not true: that cell was already in custody)? It couldn’t be to gradually remove the fantastic parts of his argument to justify the actually-existing real world torture we conducted, could it?
Joe Katzman encapsulates my thoughts, but further I’d say “torture” is trivial and unimportant.
What is important is preventing the nuking of American cities.
Hypothetical: NYC and DC are nuked. About 10 million dead. Most of the Federal government including the President and Vice President, cabinet, Congress. Osama claims responsibility and it’s possible he got nukes from North Korea, Iran, or Pakistan. He further threatens more unless we submit to him.
THAT is worth talking about. Not “torture” which compared to 10 million US dead and two major cities ruined is nothing.
We are either serious about survival or we are not.
_The frame of Paterrico’s whole point (as he himself mostly admits): it’s not so much a “question”, but a “gotcha” jab; based on a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dichotomy directed at critics of torture policies. Answer “yes”, and you are shown to be a “hypocrite”; answer “no” and you are dismissed as a moral leper. QED._
He didn’t do it well enough. It should be like this:
We discover that some terrorists have access to time travel, and for reasons that are too complicated to describe in this short comment we have the following choice:
1. Waterboard Adolf Hitler for 2.5 minutes, with absolutely no lasting damage to him or to anybody.
2. Everybody in the world dies a slow horrible death over the course of the next three weeks.
Which do you choose?
If you say #2 then you have a misplaced sense of priorities. Every reasonable person will choose #1.
Therefore torture is not completely unacceptable; every reasonable person will agree to it sometimes.
“What kind of girl do you think I am?”
“We’ve settled that, now we’re dickering over the price.”
_Let me take his hypothetical a step further, and suggest that it shouldn’t be too hard to build a helmet that could be put on someone’s head, not damaging the skin, that would – when turned on – induce incredible levels of fear – or pain – inductively, acting directly in the brain. And, having switched it off, leave the person wearing the helmet unscathed except from whatever physiological reactions they had to the perception of pain or fear._
If we had that, we would use it. We would argue that it was OK, and the majority would go along. Technology that is available will usually be used, if it does something people want done.
We would use it as punishment on convicted felons.
Think about it. You can give somebody the experience of having their testicles burned off with a slow blowtorch. You can give them the experience of having them macerated and then slowly pulled off and then the nerves frayed just so to give phantom pain as long as the device is on — all the pain of hurting testicles without actually having them. And then you turn the machine off and they aren’t actually hurt at all.
We would use it in reality TV shows. “We don’t just vote you off the island, we show you how we really feel about you.” We would use it for minor discipline problems in prisons. We would use it for minor discipline problems in schools. We would use it in video games. If it was cheap enough kids would play “Truth or Dare” with it.
People would use it in S&M sex games. It would be an alternative punishment for minor traffic violations.
The concept that it was something that the federal government wouldn’t be allowed would just disappear.
The argument would be made that it is humane. The most humane negative reinforcement ever. If it was cheap enough and if we could fit it to dogs, it would probably replace choke collars.
We’d probably establish the custom that police could do it to anybody who didn’t give them sufficient respect, in their opinion. No permanent damage, after all. They put the little cap on you and you get the experience of a good flogging, back, buttocks, thighs, maybe insides of thighs, and you don’t know until the end whether the last few will be on your testicles or clitoris — perhaps we’d get customs about how much disrespect it takes to justify varying levels of simulated flogging. In practice it would happen a lot to lower-class citizens and much less to middle-class or above.
And people would learn to take it in stride. The experience of simulated drowning is just a simulation, you just live with it. Get over the fear. It would just be something people would expect sometimes, like getting raped in prison, you’d rather avoid it but sometimes you can’t stay out of prison so you just have to take it as it comes. It wouldn’t get people to tell the truth in interrogations at all.
Similarly with waterboarding. If we establish that it’s mostly harmless, people who’re in danger of being waterboarded if they get caught will get training in that. You have to accept that your captors might kill you — if you can’t accept that then you have no business doing anything that might get you captured. And the fear of getting drowned is just something people casn learn to handle.
Which is another slippery slope — if we agree that waterboarding is OK because it gets results, and then we find out that it doesn’t get that good results, it’s only natural to move on to something a little more extreme.
Let me take his hypothetical a step further, and suggest that it shouldn’t be too hard to build a helmet that could be put on someone’s head, not damaging the skin, that would – when turned on – induce incredible levels of fear – or pain – inductively, acting directly in the brain. And, having switched it off, leave the person wearing the helmet unscathed except from whatever physiological reactions they had to the perception of pain or fear.
BTW, A.L.: this idea has already been done: the device was called an “agonizer”: and was introduced in a famous episode HERE .
Note: in the original: this device was a favored tool of a totalitarian, dystopian dictatorship: doomed to collapse under the weight of its own oppression. Just a reminder.
A.L., Joe, et al:
Greetings! I haven’t posted on Winds in a long while, but I felt compelled to comment on your observations concerning torture. A.L., you said, among other things:
I’m guessing you’re going to be hit pretty hard for this observation, but the fact is that this is no weasel path. It points to a debate we haven’t yet had. One of the first principles that arose during the emergence of the common law in England was the notion of the “outlaw†who, because of his willingness to exploit and destroy the institutions that ensured his person-ness placed himself “beyond the protection of the King’s Bench.†It was the authority of the sovereign that extended the capacity to try for offenses, to settle disputes, and to acquit. Absent that, it’s all against all. And essential to the functioning of the Bench was the system of transportation and communication, which the outlaw had rendered impotent, placing everyone else beyond protection. So the outlaw, by the nature of his acts, was placed by tradition and edict outside the protection of the common law. He could be dealt with by anyone in any way, without retribution. This is potent threat. It was meant to be.
This period during the development of the common law didn’t last more than a century or so, until highway robbery was embraced within the traditions and institutions of the Bench, but the shift to a more amenable status involved securing the paths of transportation and lines of communication from the ravages of the highwaymen. And the threat to regard the interloper as beyond protection played no small part in reducing the frequency of attacks, thus helping to secure the paths and lines that supported “society.â€
The problem we confront with regard to terrorism brings us back to the same first principles. The threat of finding oneself beyond the sovereign’s protection hasn’t lost its bite merely because the sovereign power now rests with the people themselves, through representation. It is still the same raw incentive, the abandonment of which is the real threat to society. The real development of the law was not fundamentally motivated by a love for just justice as much as a need for stability. However, justice enters the picture because it’s the enticement of justice, and the threat and capacity to withhold it, that is providing critical leverage in Anbar, and elsewhere in the Terror War.
Not the only issue, I think, but a critical one. And clearly more than a weasel way out.
Finally, I’d suggest that any act that a volunteer will undergo without excessive coercion is appropriate to use in pressuring a modern “outlaw.†Granted, there’s some uncertainty at the margins concerning what sort of persons ought to qualify as valid volunteers, but the standard, such as it is, nonetheless avoids either of the predictable “slippery outcomes†that Joe has so adroitly identified. Not perfect. Better than the alternatives.
Just to clarify, in using the term “excessive coercion” I’m simply acknowledging that there’s almost always some degree of social pressure, and in the military there’s also the hierarchy of command. Not that I know exactly where the line between an un-coerced and a coerced choice lies in every instance, but the fact that such a line exists, even if ill-defined, puts the brakes on any slippery slope to “a society that readily accepts torture.” That’s a fear that would remain unrealized.
One more thing to consider, for those who care to take an even longer view of things:
In trying to explain the suicidal bent of Western European civilization in recent years, far and away the most frequently cited factor I’ve seen is Europe’s drawn-out, up-close-and-personal collective experience with the horrors and brutality of war in the 20th century. Simply put (in fact this is probably oversimplifying the matter a bit), as this hypothesis goes, the nations of Europe are still so disgusted over what they did to each other in WWI and WWII (and to a lesser degree, the Cold War) that they simply can’t bear to visit the same thing upon anyone else, not even clearly hostile invaders.
If Americans were to accept torture as part and parcel of warfare, would that not run the long-term risk of starting the American cultural psyche down this same self-destructive path? Accepting the notion of torture as a wartime necessity does not necessarily mean condoning torture in wartime. Alternatively, people sufficiently disgusted by torture could embrace this argument by becoming (assuming they’re not already) absolute pacifists on the very same grounds, just as so many Europeans now embrace “peace at any price” simply because they find war so revolting.
Of course, such blind pacifism already has a foothold among the American Left. But might not routine torture in wartime, coupled with the “c’est la guerre” argument it its defense, backfire big-time on the homefront, by encouraging pacifism, born of disgust over torture, to take hold in the American mainstream? If it does, our nation would find itself in the same big trouble as Europe, not only in this war against Islamic supremacism, but (assuming we still win it) in the next war against our next great enemy. (Yes, there’ll always be someone.)
I just came here to say Patterico was wrong to even bring it up, because that’s all they’re looking for. An opening. And by engaging them in it we are giving them one.
Torture is never okay, hypothetical past tense what-ifs or not.
bq. Only torture terrorists because they’re not US citizens? Why is citizenship a factor in how the greatest nation on earth treats human beings? And what of those terrorists who are US citizens?
Not quite the point I thought was cogent. I believe that those who DECLARE themselves outside of the main of our society AND wish to see the end of the same society AND will use the same devices on us and worse than those we would wish to use use on them are declared to be outside of the society and underserving of the prtections of that society. So, a little water up the nose is small compared to the defacto genocide they wish to commit on us. And make no mistake it will be genocide. If you choose not to “torture” you may die morally pure BUT you are still dead. I prefer to live and deal with the existential fallout LATER while still breathing.
bq. Hypothetical: NYC and DC are nuked. About 10 million dead. Most of the Federal government including the President and Vice President, cabinet, Congress. Osama claims responsibility and it’s possible he got nukes from North Korea, Iran, or Pakistan. He further threatens more unless we submit to him.
This is when Wretchard’s 3 Conjectures come into FULL play. At what level of pain will you intrepid souls be willing to write 1 x 10^9 in the casualty column for the enemy? Ask yourself that. How about make it more personal. Will you let them kill your Aunt Mary? Cousin Dupree? 1st child? Wife? When and how deep do we have to scratch you to have you say, “Screw ’em, kill ’em all!”
Torture is undesirable UNLESS the circumstances are dire. Are the present day circumstances dire ENOUGH? The enemy has said they wish our submission, our defeat or our death. Choose one. Those are their rules. I think that until you all have your comfortable lives disrupted by the savage you will continue this existentail debate. Just remember that if the disruption is big enough you may not get a second chance.
Re: #36 from Joshua: I agree with your speculation.
I think torture switches us from a track where we might win this long war, though the way will be hard and the cost high, to another track where we’ll definitely lose because we won’t have the moral resources we’d need to push Islam back; but the benefit of torture is that while losing far more definitely (and shamefully) we’ll lose more slowly, with fewer casualties in each year.
I am not prepared to accept that trade-off.
However, I don’t use this speculation as an argument, because I think the moral argument I make instead is correct, sufficient, easy to make and hard for sensible people like Patterico to dismiss, while historical speculations are easy to dismiss until unfortunately they’ve become facts, and arguments about how to save ourselves will be moot then.
Demo, “But might not routine torture in wartime, coupled with the “c’est la guerre” argument it its defense, backfire big-time on the homefront…..”
Just one of the problems with this argument is that we are told that we are engaged in a multigenerational “war”. Thus, torture would, indeed, be defacto an institutionalized part of our mainstream culture.
Torture, domestic spying,etc have all been coupled with the administration’s labeling of war without end. This is truly scary.
Robo, “So, a little water up the nose is small compared to the defacto genocide they wish to commit on us…”
Advocacy of torture has also been coupled with irrational fear mongering (see also Rockford, Jim).
Terrorists cannot commit a geneocide against us. I’m not really sure where they have stated this, but even if they wanted to they absolutely do not possess the wherewithall to do it.
“Hypothetical: NYC and DC are nuked. About 10 million dead. Most of the Federal government including the President and Vice President, cabinet, Congress. Osama claims responsibility and it’s possible he got nukes from North Korea, Iran, or Pakistan. He further threatens more unless we submit to him.”
See J. Thomas #31. I think that is the best reply.
The fact of the matter is we are currently torturing people and nothing like Rockford’s hyperbolicly paranoid scenario have occurred.
I recognize the point of AL’s post was not to debate the efficacy of torture as a means of obtaining accuarate and actionable information. However, whenever dealing with hypotheticals it is important to keep reality in mind.
From the Wiki article on KSM…………point here being that torture simply is not a way to obtain accurate reliable actionable information. The ticking time bomb scenario is not an excuse to torture because you don’t have time to sort out the wheat from the chaff. While you are off on the while goose chase that you have been deliberately put on, the bomb goes off.
” One CIA official cautioned that ‘many of Mohammed’s claims during interrogation were “white noise” designed to send the U.S. on wild goose chases or to get him through the day’s interrogation session.’ For example according to Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, a former FBI agent and the top Republican on the terrorism panel of the House Intelligence Committee, he has admitted responsibility for the Bali nightclub bombing, but his involvement ‘could have been as small as arranging a safe house for travel. It could have been arranging finance.’ Mohammed also made the admission that he was ‘responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center Operation’, which killed six and injured more than 1,000 when a bomb was detonated in an underground garage, Mohammed did not plan the attack, but he may have supported it. Dr. Michael Welner [‘an expert on terrorism and confessions and an associate professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine’] noted that by offering legitimate information to interrogators, Mohammed had secured the leverage to provide disinformation as well.”
In that connection, let’s quote another passage from the Wikipedia article: “On March 19, 2007, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh’s lawyers cited Mohammed’s confession in defense of their client. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, also known as Sheikh Omar, was sentenced to death in a Pakistani court for the murder of Daniel Pearl. Omar’s lawyers recently announced that they planned to use Mohammed’s confession in an appeal. They had always acknowledged that Omar played a role in Pearl’s murder, but argue that Mohammed was the actual murderer.”
KSM’s total list of confessions includes:
The February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City
A failed “shoe bomber” operation
The October 2002 attack in Kuwait
The nightclub bombing in Bali, Indonesia
A plan for a “second wave” of attacks on major U.S. landmarks to be set in the spring or summer of 2002 after the 9/11 attacks, which includes more hijackings of commercial airlines and having them flown into various buildings in the U.S. including the Library Tower in Los Angeles, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Plaza Bank building in Seattle and the Empire State Building in New York
Plots to attack oil tankers and U.S. naval ships in the Straits of Hormuz, the Straits of Gibraltar and in Singapore
A plan to blow up the Panama Canal
Plans to assassinate Jimmy Carter
A plot to blow up suspension bridges in New York City
A plan to destroy the Sears Tower in Chicago with burning fuel trucks
Plans to “destroy” Heathrow Airport, Canary Wharf and Big Ben in London
A planned attack on “many” nightclubs in Thailand
A plot targeting the New York Stock Exchange and other U.S. financial targets
A plan to destroy buildings in Eilat, Israel
Plans to destroy U.S. embassies in Indonesia, Australia and Japan in 2002.
Plots to destroy Israeli embassies in India, Azerbaijan, the Philippines and Australia
Surveying and financing an attack on an Israeli El-Al flight from Bangkok
Sending several “mujahideen” into Israel to survey “strategic targets” with the intention of attacking them
The November 2002 suicide bombing of a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya
The failed attempt to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet leaving Mombasa airport in Kenya
Plans to attack U.S. targets in South Korea
Providing financial support for a plan to attack U.S., British and Jewish targets in Turkey
Surveillance of U.S. nuclear power plants in order to attack them
A plot to attack NATO’s headquarters in Europe
Planning and surveillance in a 1995 plan (the “Bojinka Operation”) to bomb 12 American passenger jets
The planned assassination attempt against then-U.S. President Bill Clinton during a mid-1990s trip to the Philippines.
“Shared responsibility” for a plot to kill Pope John Paul II
Plans to assassinate Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf
An attempt to attack a U.S. oil company in Sumatra, Indonesia, “owned by the Jewish former [U.S.] Secretary of State Henry Kissinger”
(No confession yet to the murder of Abraham Lincoln, although I imagine it’s only a matter of time.)
_I’d suggest that any act that a volunteer will undergo without excessive coercion is appropriate to use in pressuring a modern “outlaw.â€_
Demosophist, i
ntent makes a big difference for torture. So I suggest you need a careful protocol for the volunteer torture.
Here’s my suggestion — the candidate torturer must agree to be tortured by anti-war activists, for no longer than one month.
If it’s waterboarding he’s volunteering for, they get to waterboard him as many times as they like each day, until he confesses to seducing the base commander’s wife and gives them the names of at least twelve of his fellow soldiers he’s done consensual homosexual acts with. When he gives them useful info they lay off for awhile.
They should be supervised by antiwar MDs who will keep them from doing things that might kill him or give him permanent brain damage, while giving him no emotional support whatsoever.
To make his torture similar to the torture he’ll be dishing out, he must agree that for up to a month he will be tortured by people who feel about him roughly the way he feels about arab unlawful combatants.
Why only a month? Because we need him to get to work. But it might be good to take a few of our prospective torturers — maybe 5% — and continue torturing them until their enlistments are up. And don’t tell any of them ahead of time whether they’ve been picked for that.
It doesn’t count if they volunteer to be tortured once by their friends. They have to volunteer to be tortured by their enemies, for basicly as long as their enemies want to continue.
Actually, this sort of thing would probably make our torturers much more effective. A better sense of what it’s like is bound to help. We should probably do it, completely apart from the silly idea about justifying torture.
I suggest anyone who thinks that torture has ANY basis whatsoever in our legal system go back and read enough legal history to understand why it dropped out.
The arguments against it did not come from Human law. The arguments against it came from Lex Dei and Lex Naturalis foundations. Which means that the question of citizenship (or whether someone was of the i banniti class) would be considered irrelevant. Lex Dei and Lex Naturalis was ALWAYS considered to trump human law, hence why certain things became the very basis of our legal system–such as double jeopardy clauses, presumption of innocence, right to hear the evidence against one, etc. etc. and so forth. All of these were considered to be part of Lex Dei and Lex Naturalis.
Before we decide to throw out over 1000 years of legal checks and balances, can people PLEASE at least look back and learn why they were put into place?!
In my opinion, we need such checks and balances even more. We’re drifting more and more towards a belief system of “quod princeps republicae vult, lex est” without ANY of the softening effects of Lex Dei and Lex Naturalis. We HAVE no Law of God and Law of Nature. There’s only what the State wants.
Talk about totalitarianism. And the people most interested in rushing us towards this at full speed possible in the name of “safety” call themselves conservatives.
Thus we find thousands of lives willingly sacrificed in order to preserve ‘civilization’ as we know it.
By allying with nations like Saudi Arabia, and by tolerating and encouraging the spread of their philosophy around the world, we are doing the exact opposite. We’re slowly diminishing civilization as we know it.
Thousands of innocent people are dying to preserve the careers, the financial status and the reputations of politicians who support these policies, like Jimmy Carter and James Baker. The barn door was left open and the horse escaped years ago. Closing the door by condemning ‘torture’ is a nice gesture, but it’s essentially useless.
The fact that we’re considering using torture is a sign of how far we’ve already fallen. It’s a tactic of brutality but it’s also a tactic of desperation. If we refuse to directly fight our enemies, this is one of the few of many bad options we have.
“become a society that tortures people like KSM, and a society that kowtows to and capitulates to them”
Why do these arguments always contain false dichotomies? How about if we become a society that outsmarts people like KSM? We could do it if we tried (and if we stopped listening to people like Baker and Carter)
I have pointed out repeatedly at Patterico that torture is useful only when false positive confessions are acceptable. For example, the Gestapo didn’t care how many innocent people they picked up after torturing names out of a member of the Resistance: bullets and jail cells are cheap. I don’t think we can afford false positives in the War on Terror, both for moral reasons and because our operational capacities are limited. How many AQ members can we arrest in Pakistan without backlash? Not a lot, and if we waste those opportunities on KSM’s grocer because it was the first name he thought of on the waterboard, we’ll lose.
On the other hand, false positives are good if you want to keep your own population terrified into stupidity. Like Jim Rockford.
Jim R – I’ve thought for a while that certain claims are like aqua regia; they simply dissolve everything else around them in the context of an argument.
You claim is like that – what can stand up to it? Torture? Nope. Universal wiretapping – hell, let’s just force everyone to wear a mike and small video camera and archive and scan everything they say. Anyone suspected of support of – or eventually sympathy to – the potential attackers is isolated from mainstream society.
I mean, we’re talking about preventing nuclear disaster here!
Seriously, what _wouldn’t_ one do to prevent it?
The problem is that our society (more than others, I believe) is a fragile clockwork kept from exploding into gears and springs by – more than anything else – our shared faith in it. So we could have a society that protected itself against nuclear terror By Any Means Necessary; but in short order, that society wouldn’t be our society.
And in that new society, I’ve got to tell you, I’m going to be much more on V’s side of the fence than the government’s.
A.L.
J.T.:
No I don’t think it’d be any more appropriate to make the “peace movement” (sometimes more like the anti-defense movement) the arbiters of what counts as a volunteered for procedure. First of all they’d still have the problem of trusting the military and intelligence authorities to stay within the bounds of the authorized procedure, which is something they’re constitutionally incapable of doing. Secondly it would be no more appropriate to make them the arbiters, by giving them a carte blanche for revenge (which is the whimsical implication of your post), than it would to put them in charge of the Department of Defense, or to elect the spaceman’s friend, Dennis Kucinich, as President. If we become that crazy we’ll be defeated and the choice of whether or not to torture will be a matter of Shari’ah Law.
Andrew:
Well that would be a valid argument if confession were the objective. If we acknowledge, however, that information is the objective in our case (in spite of the ad hominem Gestapo comparison) then the argument would be that false information (a more general notion than confession) must be acceptable. That’s true, of course. But it doesn’t follow that we wouldn’t care about distinguishing between guilt or innocence, or between false or accurate information. Indeed, we’d have a great many incentives to do just that. The problem becomes the cost of distinguishing between those cases. In some situations, where the information is uncheckable or where the cost of checking is too high this would be a valid argument against the use of the waterboard. However there are obviously at least some situations where we wouldn’t be limited in this way.
grumpy realist:
Presumption of innocence is, precisely, one of the issues with which we must grapple… and have admittedly not done so yet. But I’d argue that it’s a discussion we must have, because mass terrorism represents a qualitatively and quantitatively different kind of threat than ordinary crime, including serial murder. It pushes us toward a method dealing with Type II situations rather than the mare familiar Type I. We have not developed a body of law and tradition that covers it.
However the argument I made above, concerning the concept of the “outlaw” is not necessarily about torture. It’s about whether the threat of being stranded outside the body of western law is appropriate, at least for a time. There is precedent for it. And as Richard Fernandez pointed out awhile back, there are consequences if we embrace the “independent” terrorist within our body of law as well. For such a magnanimous posture virtually ensures the privatization of mass violence on a much broader scale, and by all sides.
#46 from Armed Liberal at 4:13 pm on Nov 17, 2007
Couldn’t agree more. If anything, the very mention of the city nuking scenario as a starting point for a discussion, It seems to me, renders the author’s position meaningless.
Ian (and A.L. since the update):
I’m not sure that’s an argument you’d win. What would be the incentive for loyalty to a regime or social order that fails to even try to protect its citizens from a mass attack, in favor of the preservation of the individual integrity of the non-state-affiliated attacker? (The case of the state-sanctioned attacker is somewhat different.) I suspect you’re thinking of a one-off situation, but if the protection of such intentional attackers became established and certain then there’d be a corresponding increase in attack frequency and sophistication. At some point this would fatally undermine the legitimacy of the social order. People would no longer fight and sacrifice for it. They’d opt for some alternative social order.
But what I’m really saying in some of my own comments below is that you’re presenting a false dichotomy. I don’t think we need to “make torture legitimate” under the recommended volunteer standard. Rather, I think it is morally legitimate, and hence would not undermine the traditions of this social order… although it would definitely append a new one. I think that’s probably necessary.
AL,
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
I will blog my full response, but can you clarify a couple of things for me?
Do you think your arguments would apply equally to:
1) Capital punishment generally?
2) Use of a non-painful truth serum to extract information from terrorists?
I ask #1 because your post seems to lean two ways. You talk about how you’d rather shoot a terrorist, but you also say that one of the things we’re fighting is governments who administer (among other things) a bullet to the back of the head.
I assume you mean an extrajudicial bullet to the back of the head — but it’s not always extrajudicial, as you know. It’s just that the judicial systems, shall we say, don’t match up to ours. By a longshot.
Curious to the answers to these questions.
In fairness I can see a somewhat troubling argument against the volunteer standard I suggested above. One could point out that suicide bombers are volunteers and that a volunteer for a torture procedure may be similar enough that it would change the fundamental character of the social order. Moreover, I’d suggest that there are key differences between a volunteer for a procedure like waterboarding and a suicide bomber, because the former can realistically count on survival as well as pain and discomfort. It’s not clear to me that a suicide bomber necessarily factors in the possibility of discomfort and pain, especially since many are “hopped up” before they commit the act, and in an effective trance state. And there are probably ways around the objection, for instance through some sort of psychological certification. Finally, we’ve certainly had soldiers willing to face near-certain death, if not exactly suicide, in very large numbers, without seriously undermining the nature of the social order. (I’m thinking, for instance, of the Battle of the Bloody Angle at Spottsylvania Courthouse.)
But I wonder why I need to raise this objection myself, to my own proposal?
My response is here.
_No I don’t think it’d be any more appropriate to make the “peace movement” … the arbiters of what counts as a volunteered for procedure._
I don’t know where you got that from what I said.
My point is that it’s very very different to go through a “torture” procedure once administered by your friends, than it is to have it done to you by people who consider you inhuman, as many times as they want.
So to go the “volunteer” route we should make it a lot like the real thing. I suggested finding antiwar activists who’d volunteer to torture the torturers, because they might tend to have the attitudes about our torturers that our torturers have about their own victims — and yet they aren’t the enemy, and they’ll give our torturers back when they’re done.
We wouldn’t make the antiwar volunteers ‘arbiters’ of anything, they’d get the chance to follow the particular procedures that we say are OK, that our torturers volunteer to have done to them.
So say you volunteer for waterboarding. What you volunteer for is not to have your waterboarding instructor do it once on you in front of the class, after half the rest of the class has had it once and the oher half is still waiting.
Instead you volunteer to have people who despise you do it as many times as they want for an indefinite but large number of days. They have to restrict themselves to just the procedures you volunteered for, the letter of the agreement. So if they waterboard you for 2.5 minutes and the agreement is they have to wait 30 seconds before they do it again, then they have to wait those 30 seconds every single time. That means they can’t waterboard you more than 20 times an hour. Or whatever it is you agree to. But the point is they aren’t your friends, they’re people who despise you who aren’t going to give you any slack, and it’s going to keep on for a long time.
And every day maybe they choose to go easier on you when you give them a list of your butt-buddies. They get to publish your false confessions and use them as anti-torture propaganda, so you have an incentive on multiple levels not to give in to the torture. But some people will break under the prospect of repeated waterboarding.
Again, the anti-war volunteers don’t get any particular say in much at all. They get to choose how to insult the guys they waterboard, but they don’t get to do anything the volunteers haven’t volunteered for. The point is that the volunteering is a whole lot realer if it’s things you volunteer to have enemies do to you for an indefinite time than if it’s things you volunteer to have a friend go through the motions.
So if we want to use the volunteer argument we need to do it something like my way. Because it doesn’t make sense to volunteer to let al qaeda prisoners take turns torturing the torturers by the same rules.
A.L.: You’re making the same argument you accuse Jim Rockford making: Waterboarding KSM for 2 1/2 minutes is not worth saving thousands of lives because we will lose ‘civilization’ as we know it, and create a new social order. Really?
AL:
This is not intended in any way to be a “gotcha” question, but it’s one that I’m mulling over.
Would you have been against waterboarding of KSM on 9/12? Or shortly after the attacks?
I have to admit upfront that while I’m against waterboarding today, that I’m pretty sure I would have supported the limited use of the tactic on September 12,2001.
My guess is that a lot of people today expressing opposition would be with me.
Perhaps not.
Thanks for raising the level of the debate. As we know, this is one issue that can get ugly fast.
SMG
Armed Liberal:
OK. Try this. Imagine the Americans have a camp outside their territory where they hold hostile illegal combatants and on occasion interrogate them in ways that would be in tension with their domestic laws. Suppose for the sake of this hypothetical that the people in this camp really are all hostile illegal combatants. (That is, the Americans are not detaining innocent people indefinitely in this place.)
I would be in favor of shooting all the inmates of this camp and closing it, in fact demolishing it, as I think Abu Ghraib should have been demolished.
Do you agree?
I would have no problem with shooting the inmates at the rate of one a day: the firing squad fires once a dawn every day till the camp is cleaned out, let’s say in a little under a year if there are three hundred odd prisoners. The facility will still be rubble in a year, and nobody gets out alive, which is what I want.
Do you agree?
I would not care in what order our enemies got shot, just as long as they were humanely shot dead in a tolerably short time (like months, even most of twelve months, but not years). If the least talkative, least cooperative jihadist gets shot on January 1 and the most talkative, most cooperative jihadist gets shot let’s say late in November of the same year – OK.
Do you agree?
If you disagree, why? (I don’t want to “read your mind” on this.)
grumpy realist: _I suggest anyone who thinks that torture has ANY basis whatsoever in our legal system go back and read enough legal history to understand why it dropped out._
Torture is still permitted in the U.S. criminal system, so long as the torture was committed by someone who was not an agent of the U.S. government or its states and so long as the jury is instructed to consider to consider the veracity of the confession given the evidence of torture. At least this was true 20 years ago.
SteveMG –
I hadn’t thought much about it on 9/12, to be honest. Trying to put myself into the mindset that I had then? Wow, I don’t know. I was pretty pissed off and irrational then.
So I’ll waffle on that one – I know I’m dodging, but I just honestly can’t say.
David B –
Absolutely. Run decent hearings for them, and if they are found to have been fighting outside the bounds of the Geneva Convention, shoot them. I don’t know why keeping them for the rest of their lives is suddenly an obligation.
Patterico emailed me when he saw the post and asked what I thought of capital punishment in the context of ‘violating the personal integrity’ of the executed.
I don’t see it as the same thing, any more than I see prison as the same thing; one can maintain one’s self and dignity in prison, even while you behave in ways that keep you out of trouble with the jailer (see Ivan Denisovitch) as opposed to completely eradicating you (see Winston Smith).
The question of truth serum, or the helmet that tels if you’re lying is more interesting. Intuitively, I don’t see those as problems, but probably ought to think it through a bit.
There is another issue here, which is realy about ‘slop’ in the system, and the fact that while it’s possible to make arguments and set rules here in my living room, the reality of carrying them out may well be different.
In short, I support traffic laws, but still speed. I’ll write more about what that means in a bit.
A.L.
Thank you for your straight answers, Armed Liberal.
You didn’t say anything I would take up cudgels with.
I think we’re all just trying to think this out. It’s an unpleasant discussion that not many years ago hardly anybody thought that we would ever need to have.
AL has an important point, and it’s something that he’s having trouble saying. I don’t know how to resolve the issue but I think I can say the point clearer.
Torture is really only a small part of the issue. Torture is a minor example.
Imagine this — imagine that there’s some special technology for making people do things. And technology is always amoral in itself, it can be used by whoever gets access to it, for whatever purpose they can use it for. So anybody who has the technology could perhaps make you do things you’d rather die than do. But you don’t get that choice, you have to do what they want.
There’s something fundamentally wrong with that. If you know who you are and what you want, and you get into a disagreement about your rights and the other side kills you, that’s bad but at least you’re *you* when you die. If they can just make you do things with no choice, that’s a deeper slavery than we used to have.
In the old days, lots of slaves and indentured servants knew they had choices. Maybe not good choices, but they got to choose. Do things that Massah says not to do, fail to follow orders, and you get punished. Possibly killed. Maybe sold to a worse master. But you get to choose among bad choices. What if you were given no choice at all?
Torture is a minor example of this. With some tortures you get a choice. Tell us what we want to know or we cut off a finger. No? OK, we cut off a finger and then we ask you again. Choices. But really effective torture gives the victim no choice — he’s so disoriented by what’s happening to him that he does things he’d rather die than do.
I believe that AL’s issue here is not primarily with pain. If we had ways to harmlessly give people pain with no damage and we did it, with no particular result except whatever revenge we felt we accomplished, it would be a different issue.
The issue is what we do to the insides of people’s heads. Try a bigger example than torture. Suppose we had a way to actually change people. Behavioral conditioning. Careful subtle brain surgery. Some sort of forcible hypnosis. So we could actually take somebody and make him become somebody else. Would it be wrong to do that?
It would certainly be useful. We could take terrorists and turn them into double agents. They’d know everything they did before but they’d *want* to help us as much as they could. Let them go back to what they were doing before, and let them report whenever it’s safe. Far more info than we could get by torture.
It would be useful all sorts of ways. We could empty the prisons — actually _cure_ our criminals. Turn them into law-abiding citizens who smile all the time. We could eliminate antisocial behavior. Somebody doesn’t like gun control? They can be cured of that. Libertarians who think the government has too much power? That’s curable too. Maybe we would require that people be treated to turn them into safe drivers before they can get a driver’s license.
We could still allow free will whenever it’s harmless. But when people have a choice and one alternative is obviously bad for society, why should they be allowed to make that choice for themselves? It hurts society whenever they make the wrong choice.
I don’t like that approach. Of course, it can be argued that it’s best for everybody. People who’ve been treated will all agree that they’re better off. They’re happier and they have no objection to having it done and they’d be glad to have it done again if they need to change some other way. That’s the kind of people they’ve been turned into. They’re happy this way. They smile all the time.
Of course only the government should be allowed to change people involuntarily. If you’re a shy woman and you want to dance naked on tables and choose to change of your own free will, that’s real different from getting turned into a bimbo without your permission — even if you’re happier afterward. Nobody but the government has the moral authority to decide what people should turn into.
I don’t like it.
By this reasoning AL’s problem with torture isn’t that it’s mean. The problem is that it’s effective. It makes people betray their ideals without choosing to do that. Any other effective method would be just about as bad that way. Of course the short-run pragmatic people think that’s just what’s good about it. It gets results regardless of what the terrorist wants.
But that slippery slope is still there. A long time ago europeans had a ban on crossbows — they could shoot through armor and so a peasant with a crossbow could kill an armored knight. It was profoundly subversive to european civilization. But then they decided it was OK to use them against arabs. And it wasn’t long before they were getting used regularly against european knights and society did crumble.
If waterboarding is effective and mostly harmless, it’s only a matter of time before the government is making you tell them where you hid your guns, and who else you know of that has guns.
And it mostly doesn’t matter what we think now. The argument from expedience — bad things happen if we don’t torture known terrorists. Bad things happen if we don’t torture suspected terrorists. Bad things happen if we don’t torture known criminals. Bad things happen if we don’t torture suspected criminals. Bad things happen if we don’t torture known deviants. Bad things happen if we don’t torture suspected deviants.
Sure, it gives people some discomfort but it gets results, and no longterm injury. You argue against it? Are you sure you’re not a suspected deviant, comrade?
Just for the sake of a little perspective, consider Stan Brubaker’s argument in the Weekly Standard that a “first clause dominant” reading of the Fourth Amendment is appropriate because it preserves (for all concerned) the “robust standard of reasonableness.” Granted, torture is a different issue than search and seizure, but it still is concerned with the acquisition of information by the government, and is directly related to some of Patterico’s alternative information gathering scenarios. I think what Patterico is saying is that the argument concerning torture has a tendency to drift in the direction of absolutes, and Stan’s cogent logic suggests that this isn’t necessarily constitutionally or ethically sound since it encourages the abandonment of a far more coherent standard.
“Why do you suppose Patterico was offering hypotheticals laden with unrealistic side clauses?”
For the reasons I stated, Andrew J. Lazarus. To separate the people who oppose torture for practical reasons (like me) from those who oppose it in all cases no matter the subject, the stakes, or the duration (like you).
J.T.:
There’s a surprisingly transparent implication from this statement that “peace advocates†are a good stand-in for the enemy, and a tacit admission that the “we support the troops†claim isn’t quite straight up. I didn’t even stipulate that the volunteers would be military personnel, necessarily, so it’s not clear to me why they’d be despised by peace advocates. Perhaps you can clear that up. Moreover, I should think that an accredited peace advocate would take the position that all torture is wrong, as many do here on Winds, so there’s some ethical inconsistency to deal with.
Second, setting things up in such a way that peace advocates would have a ringside seat to interrogations is just patently silly, so I assume that’s not what you meant. Overall your notion doesn’t seem very practicable, to say the least. A better procedure might be to use blind controls, so that interrogators wouldn’t know who was a volunteer and who wasn’t. Once the volunteer’s role is revealed he/she no longer qualifies. (Obviously, asking whether the subject is a volunteer is likely to elicit the same response, whether the subject is really a volunteer or not.) But the main problem with this approach is that interrogators don’t routinely use waterboarding or other extreme measures. That’s something of a canard.
Finally, my proposed “standard†really just deals with the level of socially acceptable pain and discomfort, which is actually not the topic of either Patterico’s or A.L.’s post. It was mainly just an attempt to provide a “reasonable absolute†in order to smoke out the nature or quality of the opposition to waterboarding, and to some extent the nature and quality of the support.
That’s all I have time for right now, but thanks for coming along for the ride.
_There’s a surprisingly transparent implication from this statement that “peace advocates†are a good stand-in for the enemy_
Well, sure. It would be real real impractical to actually volunteer to be tortured by the real enemy, on the assumption they could be forced to follow the rules.
_I didn’t even stipulate that the volunteers would be military personnel, necessarily, so it’s not clear to me why they’d be despised by peace advocates._
I guess we could get S&M devotees to volunteer to be flogged and do stress positions, and maybe we could find some who’re used to being waterboarded. We could find some bodybuilder with abs of steel to volunteer to be hit in the stomach, and so on. It just made such sense to me that the torturers themselves — soldiers or contractors or CIA agents — would be the ones volunteering to undergo the same treatment they were going to dish out that I never thought of anybody else.
_Moreover, I should think that an accredited peace advocate would take the position that all torture is wrong, as many do here on Winds, so there’s some ethical inconsistency to deal with._
I’d expect that too, generally, but there’s a few in every crowd. And where else would we find people that our official torturers would expect to be their enemies, that we could trust to follow the rules?
_Second, setting things up in such a way that peace advocates would have a ringside seat to interrogations is just patently silly, so I assume that’s not what you meant._
I have no idea where you got this. We seem to be talking at cross purposes a lot. Given the way you’ve consistently misunderstood me I might be misunderstanding you too. I hope so.
I’m talking about people who’re just about to graduate from torture school, volunteering to undergo the same treatment themselves to prove that they don’t think it’s all that bad. I thought that was what you were talking about.
_A better procedure might be to use blind controls, so that interrogators wouldn’t know who was a volunteer and who wasn’t._
You mean, have the official torturers torture each other, on the assumption they can’t tell each other from arab terrorists? That doesn’t make any sense to me.
_But the main problem with this approach is that interrogators don’t routinely use waterboarding or other extreme measures._
I thought your idea was to justify the extreme measures by showing that the people who dish them out can also take them. Now I’m lost, I have no idea what you’re advocating.
_It was mainly just an attempt to provide a “reasonable absolute†in order to smoke out the nature or quality of the opposition to waterboarding, and to some extent the nature and quality of the support._
Ah. You were just doing rhetoric. It wasn’t supposed to make sense.
Our freedom depends on our ability to resist. Our ability to resist, in the long run, depends on our ability to endure. If we cannot accept our own deaths, or even the deaths of people we love, as the price for our freedom, then we cannot remain free. Conversely, if we stick to our ethics and our values, then the terrorists cannot defeat us, however badly they hurt us. If we refuse to violate the norms of our civilization out of fear, we communicate, powerfully, to our enemies that they cannot subdue us, because we will never break.
So if I take my family to the theatre, and some terror group attacks with sarin, What then? I would hope that my surviving family and friends would turn up at the theatre the next night, and that the show would go on. We cannot have a guarantee of survival, but courage does assure us, the living and the dead, that we will preserve our honor and the best values of our society.
Also, let us put the more extreme bed-wetting to rest. The attacks of 9/11 killed 3000 people, an appalling number. Since then, no terror attack in the West has killed that many people. By contrast, during the years of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a spike in the murder rate, partly from gang wars and the drug trade, added 10000 homicides, over three times 9/11 _every year_, for at least five or six years. North American society survived that without suspending the laws or civilized norms. I submit we can survive our current situation with our honor and dignity intact, if we choose to do so.
J.T.:
Where did I say this was an exercise to “pre-punish” the torturers? That was in your head. And when haven’t you been lost?
There’s a TV show that induces people to eat bugs, enter a cell filled with spiders, and do other scary stuff in order to compete for money. I should think that anything that people will do merely to compete for a prize would be fair to use on a terrorist or outlaw. The idea isn’t that complicated, really.
Again, people in the military, news reporters, etc. have all volunteered to experience waterboarding. To whatever intensity this was inflicted it seems reasonable to use the same intensity on a terrorist outlaw in order to obtain information, assuming there is efficacy in doing so.
One can also imagine people volunteering to experience pain and discomfort to even greater intensities in order to legitimate the use of those techniques as part of a “ticking time bomb” scenario. These are grave extremes, so reason can take this into account, I should think.
The examples above simply impose some reasonableness into the debate, in lieu of the absolutes that seem to render people catatonic. Such reasonableness is a more robust standard than any of the absolutes most people seem compelled to champion.
I also probably misspoke when I said that A.L.’s objection wasn’t related to concerns about causing pain and discomfort. The example he used was a device that caused pain and discomfort, but that would have no lasting effects, even in memory. So pain and discomfort were still an issue with him, especially since he’s opined that truth serum, etc. would probably be OK.
Finally, you haven’t dealt with the “outlaw” issue at all. If it’s clear that someone is a key part of an organization that would do the things KSM planned and executed why shouldn’t we threaten to place him beyond the protection of the law, or hold out the enticement of the law’s protection to his comrades in exchange for their cooperation?
_There’s a TV show that induces people to eat bugs, enter a cell filled with spiders, and do other scary stuff in order to compete for money. I should think that anything that people will do merely to compete for a prize would be fair to use on a terrorist or outlaw. The idea isn’t that complicated, really._
O ho o ho, is that all! Well OK, why didn’t you say so. Look up stuff like that on the internet. There are people who pay good money to have their penises split in half. We could do that to suspected terrorists too. There are people who have big hooks embedded in their backs or chests and get suspended in the air from them while they drip blood. There are lots of people who accept anal sex for relatively small amounts of money — that ought to be OK too, right? And then there’s eating excrement, and having sex with goats or rottweilers.
So by your standard — anything that americans will do for money is OK to force onto suspected terrorists or anybody else we decide to deny due process to — then the Abu Ghraib guys were pikers. Bring on the homosexual rapists and Rottweilers! Get out the hooks and the bags of shit, bring on the plastic surgeons to do subincisions and start the transsexual operations. Hell, we have professional sword swallowers, and amateurs usually throw up for the first month or so, we can force swords down their throats and do forced bulimia.
When I think about it the one that might have the biggest effect is the transsexual operations. Here’s your suspected terrorist, and he gets castrated and reshaped, given hormone injections to grow breasts, get an artificial vagina, and then once he/she’s partly healed up, start the double rapes. What’s not to like?
_Again, people in the military, news reporters, etc. have all volunteered to experience waterboarding. To whatever intensity this was inflicted it seems reasonable to use the same intensity on a terrorist outlaw in order to obtain information, assuming there is efficacy in doing so._
That’s exactly what I’m talking about. To do it the same way, you tell the suspect “We’re going to waterboard you *once* and then never again.” That’s what these guys are volunteering for, right? If they’re going to volunteer for something like the terrorist suspects get, instead you should tell the reporter something like “You’re volunteering to have your ex-wife waterboard you as many times as she likes for as many weeks as she likes, until she’s convinced you’ve told her everything she wants to know about your money, other women, and whatever else she’s curious about.” How many volunteers do you think you’ll get?
_The examples above simply impose some reasonableness into the debate,_
Hahahahaha! Hahahaha! Pull the other one!
_Finally, you haven’t dealt with the “outlaw” issue at all._
Here’s my take on that. If the government’s resources are temporarily stretched too thin so they can’t keep order, then they have to do the best they can. Battlefields are chaotic places and sometimes people get killed without due process there. When we can take prisoners of any sort safely away from the battlefield and then give them due process then we ought to, and occasionally that isn’t practical.
But when the government is powerful then it ought to give everybody due process regardless of their race or political philosophy. We can afford it. We gave due process to Charles Manson and we can give it to rabid fanatical islamists.
The reason is not particularly that those particular people deserve it. It’s more a question of how much you trust your government. Our government has tremendous power and we want rules on how it uses that power. “Hi! I’m from the government and I’m here to declare you an outlaw with no rights!” No thank you. If we use government torturers we might win the war against the islamists in, say, 20 years and then we’ll still have a government with torturers on the payroll. All the arguments why it’s OK to torture terrorists can also be used to say it’s OK to torture tax evaders.
“There’s a TV show that induces people to eat bugs, enter a cell filled with spiders, and do other scary stuff in order to compete for money. I should think that anything that people will do merely to compete for a prize would be fair to use on a terrorist or outlaw. The idea isn’t that complicated, really.”
Wrong. Faulty Logic. Artist have been know to have themselves shot, cut off their penises piece by piece. Entertainers have been known tow mutilate themselves through compulsive plastic surgery.
To say that it is alright to do anything to a person that some masochistic type of people would do to themselves for money is definitely glib. I will not even get into what people will do to themselves for religious reasons.
But before you glibly ask someone “And when haven’t you been lost?” Maybe you should think your way through things a little bit more carefully.
J Thomas,
Thanks for thoughtful contributions to this thread. (Many others, too.) Helpful to me as I try and work through the implications of varied postions on this.
If I can get meta for a second, this matter shows up as a classic deontology vs consequentialism slugfest. One of the deeper (probably ‘wicked’) problems is: what heuristics are to be used to correct things that are out of balance? Then there’s the epistemic problem: what the hell is actually going on?
Someone once opined that a question such as “which is the best form of government?” is more prone to folly and “rentseeking” than a question such as “how ought scoundrels be dealt with?”
There’s some irony in the notion that they are completely distinct questions.
And it seems to me that it keeps coming back to my two “favorite” questions: who(m) do you trust? and on what basis?
Systems this big are so noisy (in the sense of error-filled) and opaque they’re almost theological. They certainly tend to the evangelical (appeals to faith and come-to-Jesus moments).
Here endeth the airy-fairy pronouncement.