Posted on 11/11/2005 9:07:04 AM PST by SirLinksalot
When torture is the only option ...
DAVID GELERNTER
SEN. JOHN MCCAIN's proposed legislation incorporating into U.S. law the Geneva Convention ban on mistreating prisoners. The bill, which bans cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, passed the Senate 90 to 9. To say it's got momentum is putting it mildly.
But President Bush says he will veto the bill unless the CIA is exempted. Vice President Cheney has led the administration's campaign for the exemption. It's a hard sell; pro-torture politicians are scarce around Washington.
But of course you don't have to be "pro-torture" to oppose the McCain amendment. That naive misunderstanding summarizes the threat posed by this good-hearted, wrong-headed legislation. Those who oppose the amendment don't think the CIA should be permitted to use torture or other rough interrogation techniques. What they think is that sometimes the CIA should be required to squeeze the truth out of prisoners. Not because the CIA wants to torture people, but because it may be the only option we've got.
McCain's amendment is a trap for the lazy minded. Whenever a position seems so obvious that you don't even have to stop and think — stop and think.
SNIP
Michael Levin published an article challenging the popular view that the U.S. must never engage in torture. "Someday soon," he concluded, "a terrorist will threaten tens of thousands of lives, and torture will be the only way to save them."
Suppose a nuclear bomb is primed to detonate somewhere in Manhattan, Levin wrote, and we've captured a terrorist who knows where the bomb is. He won't talk. By forbidding torture, you inflict death on many thousands of innocents and endless suffering on the families of those who died at a terrorist's whim — and who might have lived had government done its ugly duty.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
NOTE: Just telling me that I am "perverse" or the contect of my posts is "perverted" is NOT debate, and does NOT disprove the validity of what I am saying. ;) Come on. You believe what you said right? You think you are right and I am wrong, well back it up. Come on. 8)
Sherwood Moran didn't interrogate radical Islamists, so we don't have any record of that.
I wonder if his methods would work, though. I haven't heard of anyone else using them.
Yeah really. Every time I have to listen to rap music from someone else’s car, or going down the street or on a commercials, that to me is "torture". The things the military is accused of is NOT torture. Hell's bells I've seen worse at a frat party with pledges!!! C'MON ON! 8) Things the military is being accused of as war crimes and torture any decent lawyer could get dismissed, and even a bad lawyer could plead it down to malicious mischief or 3rd degree assault or some other misdemeanor. It's pathetic that the military is held to a higher standard in time of war, than the war critics hold their own children in highschool and college. What a warped sense of reality.
Well. If we try that, and then that didn't work with most or all, could we THEN try it my way? 8) Just for grins to see how it panned out? 8)
It probably has, but it won't be publicized. It also depends what is under the rubric of torture. Use of drugs and other mind altering substances? Retribution against loved ones? Pain? The bottom line is it depends on the individual and the methods used. Almost anyone can be broken.
Lenny Bruce had a routine about a man who is brought to a room where he proclaims that he would never betray his country. Then he says (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "What are they doing to that guy over there? Why are they putting that funnel in his ass? What are they doing with that molten lead? They're pouring it in the funnel? The funnel that's in his ass? They're pouring hot lead in his ass? They're giving him a hot lead enema? Okay, I'll tell you anything. I'll tell you about my mother. I'll make up secrets."
I heard a variation where Bruce says that when faced with the hot lead enema, he would make a shoe shine rag out of the American flag.
I only gave that link as a source of information about Sherwood Moran and his method of interrogating Japanese POWs.
It would be like "good cop, bad cop" but with terrorists instead of perps. 8) You get your shot at him, and then when you're done, if he didn't sing, I get my shot. 8) Either way, no real torture in the true sense of the word has taken place.
Yeah fine...outlaw torture. Feel good about ourselves that we are suicidally principled. The first real instance of a nuclear bomb ticking in an American city, and the chance to extract the location from a smug terrorist sneering in our kumbuya faces - this law will be chucked out the window, along with the authors.
You really need to come down off that high-horse you have mounted...jeezlouise..
I think there are probably as many meanings of terrorists on this thread, as there are posters...and the same with torture...
To ME---having a private part pierced would be torture..and yet there are teenagers that do it for kicks...
Putting panties on someones head is what we did at Girl Scout camps when I was 10...and everyone laughed...and yet you act like our country should be swallowed up because some idiots did that...idiots that have been court-martialed.
As far as secret prisons...unfortunately, because of traitors and democrats, there WERE secret prisons. I for one, am disappointed they were leaked... I HOPE our government is doing things to keep our country safe..that doesn't have to have the scrutiny of the stupid MSM...
and idiots like Kerry, Kennedy, McCain and YOU passing judgement every single day!
Dershowitz has been touting torture as a technique for interrogating terrorists for some time and in a lot of places. He probably reached his largest audience in the 60 Minutes segment aired September 22. The segment, which was hosted by Mike Wallace, had several other speakers, among them Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, and a retired one-eyed French general who tortured Algerians years ago and thinks the US should do it now. But it was Dershowitz who had most of the airtime.
We first see Dershowitz taking his book Shouting Fire from a shelf, holding it so it faces then camera, then carrying it to a student at a table and opening it, as if he were going to read some inspiring text. The next shot is a head and shoulders closeup and that's the shot they use of him for the rest of the segment.
Dershowitz is a very physical speaker. When he gets polemical, he jabs at his listener or audience with one, sometimes two index fingers, and he punches individual words out, almost shouting. His first statement on the program, for example, went like this (with the words in capitals said far louder than the words not in capitals):
If you got the ticking-bomb case, the case of the terrorist who knew preCISE [begins poking with one finger] ly WHERE and WHEN the BOMB would go off and it was the only way of saving five hundred, a thousand lives, EVERY [begins poking with two fingers] democratic society WOULD HAVE and will use torture.
That may give you some idea of the style. I won't try to imitate that any more. And I'll put it in more readable type:
DERSHOWITZ: If you got the ticking-bomb case, the case of the terrorist who knew precisely where and when the bomb would go off and it was the only way of saving five hundred, a thousand lives, every democratic society would have and will use torture.
MIKE WALLACE: Just in a ticking bomb case?
DERSHOWITZ: If anybody has any doubt about that, imagine your own child being kidnapped, the kidnapper being there, and mockingly telling you that the child has three hours of oxygen left and refusing to tell you where the child is buried. Is there anybody who wouldn't use torture to save the life of his child? And if you would, isn't it a bit selfish to say "It's okay to save my child's life but it's not okay to save the life of a thousand strangers? That's the way people will think about it.
So if you oppose torture you're selfish? The analogy turns the basic principle of criminal law topsy-turvy. The purpose of criminal law is to remove from the individual the need to and right of avenging criminal injury; the state, which is presumably objective and fair, takes on those tasks. People who are injured by a criminal may want to reciprocate in kind, but in civilized society that is not permitted. The reasons are very simple: how can society be sure that the violent action you take to avenge violent action will be appropriate, that it will even be delivered to the right person? Civilized society substitutes the notion of justice for the obligation of revenge, the rule of law for the rule of personal power. Of course someone knowing that Dershowitz's mocking kidnapper knew the secret that would save a child's life would want to extract that secret by whatever means. But that is not the same as policemen torturing people who may or may not know something they want to know.
WALLACE: And that is how, Dershowitz says, some people have begun to think about terrorism suspects in custody right now. "The question is, would it be constitutional?
DERSHOWITZ: It's not against the Fifth amendment if it's not admitted in a criminal case against the defendant. But it may be in violation of due process. But what is due process? Due process is the process you are due under the circumstances of the case. The process that an alleged terrorist who is planning to kill thousands of people may be due is very different than the process that an ordinary criminal may be due.
Dershowitz, a defense appeals lawyer, is here advocating the administration of punishment before trial. He's juxtaposing "an alleged terrorist" ("alleged" means that someone has made an accusation that the person in question has committed an act of terrorism or is thinking about committing one) and "an ordinary criminal" (someone who has been convicted). He's talking like a politician, not a lawyer. This is sophistry of the worst kind. The murders of civil rights workers by a Mississippi sheriff and his friends weren't against the Fifth amendment either-but they were indeed a violation of due process and they were also murder. Dershowitz treats due process as if it's some evanescent talking point, the legal equivalent of situational ethics. But it's not the circumstances of the case that sets the terms of due process; it's the law. And, thus far anyway, torture is against the law in the United States of America. And notice how, as Dershowitz warms to his argument, the numbers of potential deaths escalates: what was "five hundred, a thousand" a moment ago is now "thousands of people."
WALLACE: So if a liberal defense attorney says it, what chance does a suspected terrorist have?
An excellent question, which Dershowitz evades entirely. He ignores the potential abominations and instead goes to amoral utilitarianism:
DERSHOWITZ: I want to bring this debate to the forefront. It's going to happen. And If it's going to happen we can't just close our eyes and pretend that we live in a pure world.
WALLACE: And if it's going to happen we might as well make it legal by having judges issue what he calls "torture warrants," in rare cases.
DERSHOWITZ: Get a warrant. Justify in front of a judge the fact that this is the only conceivable way to save thousands of lives which are immanently endangered.
WALLACE: Torture warrants. I must say, it sounds medieval.
DERSHOWITZ: Well, It sounds like a contradiction in terms, because torture sounds illegal and a warrant sounds legal. My suggestion is that we bring it into the legal system so that we can control it. Rather than keeping it outside of the legal system where it exists in a nether land of weak approval.
That's the way Dershowitz would deal with violent abuse of civil and human rights by the police: since it's going to happen, we should legalize it.
What's wrong with this logic is this: bringing something into law only makes it legal; it does not make it right. Hitler got the Reichstag to legitimize nearly everything he did. The Nazis didn't just commit abominations against those groups they loathed. They legislated those abominations. The worst of what they did was perfectly legal. The only things absent were morality, justice and decency.
Kenneth Roth, who was a former federal prosecutor before he became executive director of Human Rights Watch, commented, "Alan Dershowitz has been spending too much time on the lecture circuit. He should go back to the classroom for a bit....A judge has no right to allow something that the Constitution flatly prohibits under any circumstances and that is the cruel, degrading treatment involved in torture." Roth pointed out that the US is signatory to anti-torture treaties. But Dershowitz would use illegal behavior by government agencies in the past to justify ignoring all of that:
DERSHOWITZ: If anybody has any doubt that our CIA over time has taught people to torture, has encouraged torture, has probably itself tortured in extreme cases, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
His rationale is entirely utilitarian:
DERSHOWITZ: I have little doubt that torture has, on occasion, prevented the deaths of innocent people. That's what makes this issue so complex.
WALLACE: And if a foreign country uses torture, excessive force, to get information, that information can then be used in a US court?
DERSHOWITZ: [grinning] Unresolved issue of Constitutional law. If we had anything to do with it, it's clear it cannot be used in an American court. But if serendipitously a silver platter is presented to us on which there is a confession elicited by another agency and if it's a reliable confession, probably it could be used.
"Serendipitously" the way those thugs of Henry II serendipitously murdered Thomas Becket in 1170?
WALLACE: Professor Dershowitz, had we been having this conversation on September tenth, people would have said "What in the dickens are those two fools talking about."
DERSHOWITZ: Prior to September 11th I used to give a hypothetical in my class, If an airplane loaded with terrorists and civilians were flying toward-I used to use the Empire State Building-would it be appropriate to shoot it down? That was a debatable issue on September 10th. It was not a debatable issue on September 12th. Things change. Experiences change our conception of rights.
They very well may, but is that the way the law should work? Should last week's or last year's atrocity change our basic ideas of justice and decency and due process? Should our fundamental ideas and principles be victim to the whims of the most depraved and vicious? Is there nothing worth holding on to? Is torture our only reasoned response?
Grins?
Your continued self righteous arrogance is really amazing. You suggest that I "hang my head in shame", yet what have you ever done for Vets? My father did four tours in Vietnam, and he feels the same as I, because he knows what REAL torture is, and what I have outline is NOT TORTURE. You continue to make insulting posts towards me and you STILL have not responded to ANY of the specific things I have posted to you, ONCE AGAIN, like in posts #107 and #114.
You don't respond to anything, you just make broad sweeping generalizations, and then you presume to know the mind of veterans. Hate to disappoint you, but most Veterans agree with what I'm saying. And ESPECAILLY on Veterans day this is appropriate because our Military is NOT made up of torturers like the terrorists are. Our miliary is made up of HEROS and PATRIOTS, and the things that I have described are time proven information extraction techniques, and there is nothing "torturous" about them. Name me one thing I listed that is "torture". Just one. For once respond DIRECTLY to something I said and quit reading off your moveon.org talking points sheet. 8) Your liberal mantras only go so far. If you can't prove what I say is wrong, how in the world can you believe what you say is right? Simply insulting me doesn't make you right, it just points out the hollow nature of your posts. 8)
I'm not so sure that techniques that worked on japanese would work on fanatical islamic terrorists. There is a whole other side to the islamic terrorists that just wasn't present in Japanese culture, even the whole "Emperor is god", "kamakazi" Japanese mentality. It's just not the same. Didn't run as deeply.
Another person living in the real world. 8) Welcome.
Who can be tortured? Only those participants? Anyone with knowledge? Wives, daughters?
Are there limits? Do you plan to cut off a finger joint every minute while playing the theme to Jeopardy? Rape the daughter or mother?
I don't think the Army Field Manual applies to the CIA or other covert assets.
Not my method. Sherwood Moran's method. It doesn't work if the interrogator doesn't mean it, or so I've read.
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