Now let me state up front, that in my heart, I don't believe in torture. However it is fairly disgusting that you can have someone in custody saying "Yeah I know something, but I'm not going to tell you. What are you going to do about it?". Since the entire idea of "convincing them to talk" is off the table, they aren't afraid at all. They can even be down right arrogant that what they know could save a ton of lives, but they aren't going to say a thing. Is it ever right to use torture methods to extract information? If it is right, how would we ever police when it would or wouldn't be acceptable to do? What is to stop a cop/soldier from claiming that every person in custody had critical information that had to be extracted?

What is torture? I think that we can all agree that physically beating someone is torture. What about being deprived of sleep? How about listening to Kevin Federline music? What about sleeping in an area that's just smaller than what's comfortable? How about sleeping next to Twist when he snores? Is solitary confinement torture? Can you torture someone with kindness? Is being annoying torture? Was reading this post torture?

I guess what I'm getting at is I don't expect that our prison camps in places like Iraq to be pleasant places to stay, heck I don't even think our prisons here should be pleasant, so my question is what exactly is torture?

Dave

I'm not sure I view "truth syrum" types of drugs as bad as torture, in extreme circumstances. I haven't really decided.

What's everyone elses thoughts?

My general opinion... not as bad, with the caveat that as far as I know, we don't currently have a truth serum per se, more stuff that works like a somewhat improved version of getting someone drunk -- you can get someone to talk and they're not at their most calculating, but they still might just make stuff up. So, good for getting information you can verify but maybe not, say, amassing evidence against someone for court.

I think this kind of thing or any unusual prisoner treatment probably should require a warrant similar to the way wiretaps are where they can even go ahead and do it but need to get the warrant approved in the next 72 hours or whatever. If you absolutely need to drug a guy to prevent a nuclear attack, no judge the next day is going to be like... no that wasn't okay. I just think that level of oversight and need to justify your choice to someone prevents dumb, embarrassing #### like Abu Ghraib without taking tools out of the government's hands when they're actually needed.

Yeah, I think the oversight of the legal system would be a step in the right direction.

Some PSychology professor named Zimbardo took a bunch of college students and made them play prison guards vs. inmates for two weeks. He had to abort the experiment after 6 days because they were going all Abu Ghraib on each other...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3683115.stm

For more detail: http://www.prisonexp.org/

I did a case study on the experiment for an organizational psych. class I had to take. Pretty weird.

I would say drugs are bad and we could be sued if they are proved innocent of the crimes, and the bad PR sessions recieved will ballon up into something far worse than we could ever be attempting to prevent in the first place. Truth be Heard.

The most common misconception is that torture is more likely to give you actionable intelligence. Torture is useful for one thing: Getting the victim to say whatever will make the pain stop, true or not. (Consider how many people confessed to witchcraft or similar crimes during the Inquisition, Crusades, and their offshoots.) It's why courts in Western countries consider evidence obtained under torture to be inadmissible.

The sad part is that people are even having this discussion. It really should end after "Torture is immoral. We must not do it. We're better than that as a country."

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

Some information is verifiable, once in hand, but not easily attainable. Think passwords. If such information were extracted from someone via torture, it would be a simple task to check whether it's true, or the person was just telling you whatever would make the pain stop.

Another tactic would be to extract known information alongside the unknown information. If the known information checks out, when the torture victim eventually breaks, then the unknown information is much more likely to also be accurate.

>The sad part is that people are even having this discussion.
>It really should end after "Torture is immoral. We must not
>do it. We're better than that as a country."

Agreed. I don't see gathering information as a justification of destroying someone's life. Torture leaves deep scars in people.

Yeah but a point blank question...

There's multiple nuclear devices in every major city in the world. I happen to know where they are, only I'm not telling. Assuming you can't get me to tell, millions of people will die.

Would you :

1) Do nothing.
2) Use physical torture.
3) Use drugs.

I tend to agree that CIA-style water torture on every schmuck you capture in Iraq is immoral and shouldn't be done, but I think there are extreme circumstances where risking bad information is still better than doing nothing at all.

If such an unlikely situation were to occur, the officer in question can break the law and request a Presidential Pardon, which by definition has to be public, and done after the fact. Pardons are also subject to review by the Supreme Court, and accepting a pardon means you're admitting guilt. All of that means that the officer in question had better be sure they're 100% right and that the subject's story is credible.

(That said, I'm not aware of any 'ticking bomb' situation that has ever occurred like that outside of a Hollywood set. Anyone know an example?)

Quite different from sanctioning the practice. And if you did it more than about once a decade, people would have serious questions about just how Jack Bauer the situation really was, and there would likely be serious political fallout.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

Mostly because he's a fictional character.

and dont cheat with the (nt) :p

Basically, Jack Bauer is this bad-ass counter-terrorism agent, and when all else fails, he tortures someone until they talk. Usually he actually has someone guilty who's withholding information, but not always. :P

Kind of an anti-hero.

nt