Posted on 10/22/2001 3:55:35 AM PDT by spycatcher
Imagine we had someone in our custody on September 10 who we knew could tell us how to prevent the murder and destruction of the next day. Now, I think it would be unpleasant, but hardly morally impermissible, to take a cheese grater to his face or make him watch Caddyshack II until he gave up the information we needed.
This seems like a no-brainer to me. But it doesn't to a lot of readers who chastised me for condoning torture. So I thought I would use this opportunity to offer my grand theory of democracy and explain why I don't think guilty people should have rights.
First, let me clarify. Guilty people do have rights in our system, and that is necessary and good. But it isn't necessary and good for the reasons most people think. Guilty people (by which I mean murderers, rapists, practitioners of mopery) have rights only because we aren't sure they're guilty. If we were sure, they would have no rights.
The Case For Torture
Take this torture thing. Now, I am not "pro-torture." I agree with numerous readers when they say torture is morally corrupting. Even when we torture those who deserve it — pedophile rapists or the "comedy" troupe "The Capital Steps" come to mind — torture demeans the torturer, and the whole society that condones it.
But let's keep in mind that there are all sorts of things which are similarly demeaning. Cops have to do things everyday, including kill people, which they find personally degrading. Nobody wants to wake up a homeless veteran and tell him that he can't sleep on a grate. But sometimes cops have to do that. Occasionally, prison guards are forced to treat grown men with families like animals. But we still need prison guards. And soldiers are sometimes ordered to do horrific things which cause them trauma for years, even decades — but sometimes those horrific things are necessary (and sometimes they're not). Torture isn't all that different.
Torture is against the law in Israel (we can't say the same about most, if not all, of her neighbors). But Israel's Supreme Court grants an exception, the so-called "ticking bomb" excuse. If Israeli authorities are positive there's a bomb about to go off somewhere which will kill untold numbers of innocents, they can use "physical pressure" — or some other sanitized euphemism for torture — on someone in their custody, if he has information about how to prevent it.
Imagine if the FBI announced that we were in a similar position on September 10, but we declined to whack the guy around "because torture is always wrong." Six thousand people die; the country loses billions of dollars which could have been spent more productively. Hundreds of thousands of people lose their jobs, and hundreds of millions live in fear. Do you think the guy who made the decision not to fill a pillow case with a bunch of oranges and make like Barry Bonds would come out a national hero? Do you think the gang at an NYPD funeral would say, "Hey there goes the conscience of the nation!"?
Torture needs to be against the written law, but — like police brutality — it is recognized by the hidden law (see "Restoring the Hidden Law") as a sometimes necessary tool for protecting society.
Still, we must remember that the written law should forbid torture not because some people don't deserve it, but because it's so difficult to figure out who those people are.
The "Rights" of the Guilty
This is part of a general misperception — advanced by universities, courts, and Hollywood — that it's always wrong to be unfair to guilty people. Shows like Law & Order tell us that if a cop uses racial profiling or an illegal search, that means that maybe the murderer should go free. A host of Warren Court rulings (Mapp v. Ohio, Gideon v. Wainwright, and of course Miranda v. Arizona, to name just three) established the notion that if you didn't catch guilty people according to the rules, they were, in effect, not guilty — or not punishable, which is essentially the same thing.
(Teenagers have a similar philosophy which says that if parents "invade your privacy" to find your stash of pot and dirty magazines, it's unfair when they punish you because they had "no right" to snoop around the back of your sock drawer. America's most famous teenager, former president Bill Clinton, subscribed to a similar argument by asserting that he was unfairly caught "mentoring" an intern.)
As dissenters noted, the Court could have punished the cop for breaking the rules, rather than rewarding the criminal. But that's a topic for another day. The point here is that we give all these procedural rights to guilty people because it's the only way we've come up with to guarantee the rights of innocent people.
Look at it this way: If we discovered that all career criminals had earlobes shaped like human thumbs and that absolutely no innocent people do, it would be entirely just and fair to "profile" all people with thumb-lobes. Cops could stop cars for "driving while thumb-lobed," and there would be nothing wrong with it whatsoever. Similarly, if cops were psychics and could discern with absolute clarity the guilt of perpetrators, it would be silly to read them their rights.
The problem is that criminals don't have recognizable birthmarks, and cops aren't psychics. Which is why we have arguments about which procedures are fair and just, and which aren't. To the extent that it's wrong to racially profile, it's wrong because we shouldn't hassle innocent people because of their race — not because we shouldn't hassle the guilty. The guilty are, well, guilty. We give the guilty lengthy and expensive trials only because we want innocent people to have a chance to avoid being unfairly punished. If innocent people were never arrested, there would be no reason to give guilt people trials. We'd move straight to sentencing.
--click link above for remainder on the subject of Democracy--
Certainly. You've convinced me you're a posturing windbag. You are one whether the story is true or not.
Chorus: "Two people had to hold me back from beating the snot out of him."
If smallpox is next we may not be around to debate it.
These guys gave up any right to being treated like humans when they fried and crushed 6,000 people in an office building
I say kill them, once you get what you want. After they tel you who their accomplices are, kill them. And then kill the families of the terrorists, so that the very idea of of being a terrorist has such a stigma that no one will ever want to do it.
TG, you fail to see that there is no grey area. This is not a post-modern academic argument.
If you think what I have proposed is extreme, let me tell you: that's what the terrorists want to do to you.
"There's no doubt that torturing terrorists and their associates for information works. In 1995, Philippine intelligence agents tortured Abdul Hakim Murad, whom they arrested after he blew up his apartment making bombs. The agents threw a chair at Murad's head, broke his ribs, forced water into his mouth, and put cigarettes out on his genitals, but Murad didn't talk until agents masquerading as the Mossad threatened to take him back to Israel for some real questioning. Murad named names. His confession included details of a plot to kill Pope John Paul II, as well as plots to crash 11 U.S. airliners into the ocean and to fly an airplane into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. His co-conspirator Ramzi Yousef was later convicted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Similarly unappealing methods helped the CIA uncover the millennium bomb plot of 1999, after al-Qaida terrorists were questioned in Egypt and Jordan."
From what I understand, most US POW's will and have talked under torture without shame. The ones who end up despised by peers are the ones who simply tell everything when asked. Not sure how this compares with your training but here's the CIA torture manual
---max
In September 99 the Israel Suprume Court said NO to the "ticking bomb" excuse. All forms of torture are illegal without exception. However, an interrogator can plead "ticking bomb" and take his chances with the court. JUDGEMENT HERE
But let me ask you in the event of someone close to you having been kidnapped and the police have one of the kidnappers who know where they hostage is being held but won't talk even after truth serum has been tried.
What do you suggest next given that there is no way the kidnapper's demands can be met.
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