Since the beginning of the Global War on Terrorism, the capture and prosecution of terrorists has been a focal US goal. To nobody’s surprise, most of the apprehended suspects have been reluctant to tell US military officials any information they may know regarding the locations of other enemies of state or of possible future terror attacks. To get these men to talk, the CIA and US military have used practices branded as “torture”, by definitions in the Geneva Conference and in the US Congress’s interrogation guideline. The Bush administration first issued to military officials that any policy that may end up saving American lives can be used, except for those that directly caused “organ failure or death.” In 2004, the White House retracted these statements and declared that it will and only has approved interrogation methods that have obliged to Congresses’ strict and clear guideline to legal interrogation. However, last week, the New York Times uncovered two secret memos, sent by then Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to US military officials and CIA leaders, designed to fudge their way around Congress's clear guidelines against torture. The memos approved the use of illegal techniques and said no CIA practices would violate the restrictions. The White House has dismissed allegations that it has supported the use of torture, even in light of the newly found documents.My question to you guys is:
Is the use of torture against suspected terrorists EVER acceptable?
If you believe no, would you still say no even if there is a highly probable chance that the suspect has some sort of knowledge of an impending terrorist attack that could potentially kill hundreds or thousands of people?
If you believe yes, then wouldn’t this direct undermining of international torture regulations expose US soldiers to risk of torture if they are captured? Isn’t this a question of morals too?
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/10/our-view-on-pri.html#more
12 comments:
I can't really answer this question until "torture" is defined (by the government's definition). My answers vary depending on how severe the "torture" is. If toture consists of killing, then no, it is not ok to torture suspected terrorists because that is morally wrong. Instead, this person should be held captivated (but not physically harmed) until all the information is released ot the CIA. Killing one person to save a whole bunch of people is still not right. There are other measures that can be taken to prevent terrorism from spreading.
i'm not sure if what the government is using against the terrorists is "torture." they use psycological torture (something like simulated drowning?) which i suppose is torture, but i think its acceptable in this case. i think it's important for our national security... if there's a terrorist who knows about some large attack, i'm pretty sure that all of us here would agree that getting that information is really important... if we could have stopped 9/11 using these methods, i'm sure we would have.
as for worrying about if our own soldiers are going to be treated this way... the terrorists are already torturing our servicemen out there, as well as other innocent americans. so i don't think that's really an issue right now...
-coe
ooh, sorry to post twice, but i just reread aileen's comment and thought of a lecture i saw on the internet...
imagine you're the conductor of a trolley car (meaning it's on a TRACK, you can't steer it off). you're rolling down a hill at maximum speed, and you notice that there are six or seven workmen on the track below you (who are totally oblivious to you). you then realize that your brakes aren't working.
you KNOW that if you keep going down the track, you will kill them all. then, you notice that the track branches off onto another possible path, but this one has one man. (he is also totally oblivious to you)
so, do you steer off the current track and onto the next, killing the one man? or, do you stay on the same one, killing the seven?
-coe
I remember that we were presented with that scenario in B&B last year! There is definitely no one definite answer and we took polls in the class. Most people said that they would hit the 7 over the 1. But when the number 7 got raised to 100 or 1000, people said they would steer off track and hit the 1 man. How do numbers play into this and when is enough people enough to change one's decision in this scenario?
I also remember that b+b scene i think we all determined that the answer lay in numbers. The less you can hurt the better.
But to get back to the torture question...I don't think you can be too specfic in defining which types of torture should be allowed. If you are going to allow barbarism you can't put artifical limits on it, it's in my opinion an all or nothing deal.
Personally I think, even though i am very opposed to torture in general, in some cases it is necessary to gain information that could protect our country. I don't exactly know how loosly the Bush administration ahs been using the term "national security" but I think if torture of one person prevented 9/11 then it was necessary to save hundreds of American lives.
I'll leave that numbers question to someone braver (I still think about that B&B class last year, and I still don't know my opinion).
I'm here to pose another question: By torturing prisoners, could that raise the risk of a major terrorist attack? My rationale is that by using torture, it spreads anti-American sentiment, especially among nonterrorists who are tortured, thus strengthening terrorist groups determined to hurt the US.
Here is another different take on torture. My book focuses a lot on the torture used by the Pol Pot regime in 1970s Cambodia and how people were tortured into "confessing" the "truths" about their plots against the regime, even if such plots did not exist. The interrogators were urged to "unearth the buried "truth" that the prisoners are hiding" (Chandler, David, Voices from S-21, Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Berkeley: Regents or the University of California, 1999), 22), but for many there was no secret plot hiding deep inside. I do not know a lot about the US torture methods, but could it be that the "truths" that are being extracted from these potential terrorists are not "true" as we would interpret the word, but versions of the truth that the government desires? My problem with torture (besides the whole morality thing) is that if the prisoner is telling the truth from the start, they have no hidden secrets, how does the torturer know this? The person is tortured into admitting something just to stop the pain. I don't think any information gained from torture is reliable, so why even go to the trouble of it if the info is useless?
In response to Coe: What makes psychological torture acceptable when physical torture is not? In my mind, I see very little difference between the two.
I do not think that torture is ever acceptable. Firstly, as mentioned by Jordan, it is often unreliable and would cause enough anti-American sentiment to put more lives in danger than it would save. My response also has to do with my personal belief that torture is more morally reprehensible than murder. In terms of Aileen's statement that killing one person to save several people is still not right, I think that depends on the situation...In response to the B&B question, although it woudl greatly disturb me I think that I would prefer to do what would kill the least number of people. However, if the less number of people would be caused more pain, that would greatly increase the difficulty of the question. This might also all stem from the fact that I personally fear intense pain more than death, whereas people who fear death more might interpret the situation differently.
Also in repsonse to the physical vs psychological torture branch of this discussion, I remember Mr. Villicana telling us sophomore year that the way that drowning is simulated in psychological torture is one of the most intense forms of torture that is currently practiced. Apparently when they train people for the army they prepare them for what might happen under interrogation, and the simulated drowning is the one that even the most well-trained soldiers can only withstand for a minute or something like that. The mind is where physical pain as well as psychological distress tems from, and the two can be equally intense. Therefore, I think that what the government is using can definitely be definied as torture.
I don't think the hypothetical situation of "We know this one person has information about an attack that is going to happen imminently" used to justify torture ever really happens outside of movies and television. It seems like a vast oversimplification. I think in that case, torture may be justifiable, but more often the government uses that hypothetical to justify torture in all situations that tangentially rate to national security. I'd also be worried about the use of torture in that it may violate international agreements and be a reason for US soldiers being tried for war crimes later on in history.
Also, I'm reading the same book as Jordan, and agree with her that torture may throw off the government as suspects try to please the interrogator. The author explained that he couldn't use any of the confessions as facts, because they were so unreliable and barely any were corroborated with outside sources, so it muddied the history of Cambodia at that time as well.
i think this whole question is incerdibly hard to answer... I agree with what most people said... although just a question toward's katie's comment... how would it create anti-american sentiment? don't other nations use torture too?
i also think that the main difference b/n the scenario coe gave with the 7 vs. 1 and the terrorist torture is that the supposed 'terrorist' may be completely innocent and have no information to say...
and, as aileen asked, what is considered torture? i know that historically tickling was torture...
My book addresses torture as well. It provides a kind of slippery slope argument for why torture is always unacceptable and how it is dangerous to make torture "acceptable" sometimes. I think it dangerous to ever deem torture acceptable because it is hard to know where to draw the line, which could lead to torture occurring much more frequently than is truly "necessary."
When i read the post, I immediately though of what Jordan mentioned about how when people are tortured they will give confess to things they haven't done just to escape the pain. Besides torture being inhumane and cruel, it is also not the most accurate tool for gaining information.
Of course, there is also the argument that if we torture others, when American citizens are held captive, it is only fitting that the other countries torture them. We set ourselves up for many dangerous situations when torture is deemed acceptable.
Tal, that's a good question. In response, I think that if any country tortures people from another country and it is found out, people from the country of those getting tortured will be angry, even if they are torturing as well. For people who dislike America, seeing their fellow countrymen tortured by Americans could turn their dislike into hatred.
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