Posted on 12/14/2005 8:24:07 AM PST by SirLinksalot
TORTURE FOR DUMMIES: EXPLODING THE TICKING BOMB ARGUMENT
What if you knew for sure that the cute little baby burbling and smiling at you from his stroller in the park was going to grow up to be another Hitler, responsible for a global cataclysm and millions of deaths? Would you be justified in picking up a rock and bashing his adorable head in? Wouldn't you be morally depraved if you didn't?
Or what if a mad scientist developed a poison so strong that two drops in the water supply would kill everyone in Chicago? And you could destroy the poison, but only by killing the scientist and 10 innocent family members? Should you do it?
Or what if an international terrorist planted a nuclear bomb somewhere in Manhattan, set to go off in an hour and kill a million people. You've got him in custody, but he won't say where the bomb is. Is it moral to torture him until he gives up the information?
Questions like these have been pondered and disputed since the invention of the college dorm, but rarely, until the past couple of weeks, unstoned. Now the last of these golden oldies—about the terrorist who knows where the bomb is set to go off—is in the news. Not because it has happened, but because of Sen. John McCain's proposed legislation forbidding the use of torture by the United States government.
It feels strange even to have to use the term "proposed legislation" about a subject like this. When you think of all the things the law forbids, with varying degrees of success, it is hard to believe that torture by public officials isn't on the list.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
The first one is predicting the future..can't do
The second one is the same...can't do
The third is reacting to something that is happening right now....can do...planted is the key word
McCain is what McCain is -- a political chameleon who would be President, like Hitlery, AT ANY COST OR PRICE. As we have seen in the past, McCain is very well known for playing both sides of the aisle -- and in a very disingenuous way. Also, a co-author of the bill which represents the first real breakdown of the Constitution's First Amendment, he has proven he is quite interested in deconstruction of our republic, along with other RINOs and Libs.
I am all for torturing any scumbag terrorist if it means SAVING ONE AMERICAN LIFE. It serves TWO purposes -- saving American lives and incentivizing other terrorists to take their stock-in-trade somewhere else.
McCain, the rest of the RINOs, and the libs can go stuff it.
Knsley himself acknowledges the dilemma we face. He is responding to Charles Krauthammer's article and he responds thusly :
No kidding. McVain's "base" is the Leftist media.
No kidding. McVain's "base" is the Leftist media.
----
Precisely true! Many people don't realize that is his targeted political platform -- the socialist media. IMHO, that says it all about McCain. Another carpetbagging huckster.
If you had ironclad intelligence that Michael Kingsley was going to type again, would it be wrong to see that he takes his ritalin?
I'm guessing that Kinsley didn't raise these points in his argument against sodomy laws.
That's because it is. McCain isn't talking about banning torture. It already is banned. Anyone found engaging in the practice will be punished. He's talking about rendering terrorists leaders to countries with less than sterling human rights records, and letting them use techniques that we can't.
He's also talking about extending the definition of torture to include conventional interrogation tools. Which is all fine, from a moral standpoint. It will mean that we won't be able to exploit many of the terrorists we catch, and that their plans will remain unknown to us.
Gentle, soft sell interrogation techniques are extremely effective against certain types of prisoners. They are flat out useless against others.
I think torture of a KNOWN terrorist is acceptable, but it needs to be done under very controlled criteria and circumstances. Should require approval by a really expert committee of people who won't be participating directly in the torture or interrogation, and then be conducted by highly trained people who don't take the measure lightly, and who have thoroughly thought through why the decision was made to use torture instead of other measures, in the case at hand. The big problem with torture is that is often induces the invention of false information matching the torturers preconceived expectation of what the "truth" will be. And obviously, torturing someone without being 100% sure that the person is a vicious criminal, is just totally unacceptable. If we could save lives by torturing Saddam Hussein or Robert Mugabe, I say full speed ahead. But torturing someone who just happened to be discovered in the company of a nest of terrorists is risking torturing someone who was an unwilling participant, and may not even have been given access to any sensitive information.
I see no reason for all this posturing. McCain is Kerry in sheep's clothing.
When a person is imprisoned, he loses his freedoms. ALL of them. That said, the solution to ALL the problems caused by the imprisoned is simple.
Want to know what crimes have been committed? Just administer sodium pentathol and be done with it. Think of the man hours and dollars saved in courts, both ours and the international ones. The burden of proof in a hypodermic needle.
He leaves this as a dangling counterpoint in his article. He mentions this as a potential killer argument against his own thesis, but then fails to address it. Does this guy not have much training in writing persuasive essays, or is he simply a little confused?
It depends what you mean by torture, doesn't it?
None of this is very pleasant, but Kinsley's argument simply doesn't stand up.
I would say that doing permanent physical damage to prisoners, or driving them permanently insane, should be ruled out. But using pain against hardened terrorists to prevent more murders of innocent people seems reasonable to me. And certainly using confusion, sleep deprivation, and the like seems reasonable.
As people have already pointed out, Kinsley's first two examples are theoretical and impossible in real life. His third example is only too real.
Refraining from torturing hardened troops in uniform is something we do because we have signed an international convention, and because that convention is meant to protect our own prisoners. The Geneva convention doesn't apply to terrorists, partly because they don't wear uniforms, but also because they will never respect the rights of OUR prisoners, so there's nothing to be gained by treating them well.
Krauthammer's article was carefully considered and entirely reasonable.
As for the McCain bill, it is sinister because it leads to more micromanagement of war by softhead civilians and the press. How the hell do you fight a war with the ACLU looking over your shoulder ready to accuse you any time you fire a shot at the enemy? We already saw that too many times in Iraq--soldiers put through trials purely to please the fruitcakes in the press who were using them to force a political point on the administration.
When not playing "hide the salami" Kinsley like most libs likes to use the slice the salami argument to minimize clear distinctions. Its an old trick (if you can't drink until you are 21, why not at 20 1/2? If its ok at 20 1/2 why not 20, or 19, etc. They never apply these arguments to their issues, such as partial birth abortions, gun control and limiting free speech. Their positions are absolute with no room for any slicing.
Now, while this Leftist pundit is busy trying to address abstract moral concerns, the grown-ups are trying to address real-world practical ones.
It may come as a surprise to the author of this piece, but it's not all about you - in other words, it's not all about whether or not Americans feel like we're happy lovey-dovey moral people. Americans aren't the only ones familiar with our legal system; terrorists and potential terrorists do their homework as well. Torture laws aren't just for domestic consumption; they're for foreign enemies to know as well.
We allow torture not only so that we can actually use it, but so that we can threaten to use it. Explicitly or implicitly, terrorists always know that the possibility of getting pieces of their body slowly removed lingers in the background. Without that knowledge, our "soft interrogation" techniques are much, much less effective (when does the "good cop" ever have any leverage without the "bad cop"?). With McCain's laws on the books, terrorists can feel secure in the assurance that, as long as they hold out, they'll get their very own cell, their own Koran, their three meals a day, and the worst thing that'll ever happen to them is they'll be forced to talk to a Human Rights Watch advocate.
All I know is that when (not if) an attack is made and hundreds or thousands (or more) are dead and maimed if it then comes out that we had someone in custody who had advance knowledge of the event and we failed to pry that information from him we will see an end to this idiocy about "torture".
Actually I need to qualify that statement. The howling about "torture" will end only when friends and relatives of the leftist fools who wish our defeat in this war are killed or maimed. If it is just people killed or maimed anywhere outside leftist enclaves the defeatists will only shut up for a day or two then take up where they left off.
I really don't see why this is so hard.
Here is my proposed outline for US Government policy on torture, which I would love to see codified into law:
1) Torture shall never be used as punishment. (That addresses the COnstitutional issues.) Any government agent found to be inflicting punishment torture (PT) is subjuect to dishonorable discharge, loss of rank, forfeiture of benefits, and sentencing to prison for a long time.
2) Non-punishment torture (NPT) may be administered only where the proponderance of available evidence and intelligence suggests a high likelihood that the subject has , and is withholding, critical information.
3) Critical information is defined as: actionable intelligence that will enable the government to prevent a known danger from inflicting critical or widespread damage on any US interest.
4) NPT may only be administered upon the order of a reasonably high level military officer, perhaps also requiring some type of judicial warrant for NPT.
5) NPT methods are to be strictly defined and limited, with non-complying methods to be prohibited.
6) NPT will cease immediately once its administrators have reasonable belief that its continuation will not yield actionable intelligence, or will kill the subject.
Of course, these guidelines need refining and fleshing out.
But I think they pretty well lay out an ethical, practical and just approach to the use of torture by our government in wartime.
Here the author demonstrates woeful ignorance of the purpose of such things as the Geneva Conventions and torture laws.
We don't condemn torturing uniformed soldiers simply because we feel bad about it. We condemn it because doing so keeps our soldiers safe. However, it only does so when the enemy is also an adherent to the Geneva Conventions, and is useless against an enemy whose modus operandi is to behead prisoners, miltary and civilian alike, with rusty kitchen knives.
Will having a policy of torturing officers of a foreign army increase the risk of our soldiers being tortured by that army? Yes. Will having a policy of torturing teenage terrorists increase the risk of our soldiers being tortured? No, because the terrorists will torture them anyway. This is not a moral conundrum, it's a practical one.
Yes, indeed, why are we having a conversation about it? When the terrorists stop torturing and murdering the people they abduct, I'll think about not confusing, sleep depriving, or degrading my captured insurgents.
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