Moral Justification for Torture

[Pilot_51]

I'm sort of in the middle on this. I agree with torture only if there's no better (more humane) way, and only if the person being tortured actually has real information that means the difference between life and death for innocent people. I don't care who you are, being tortured for information you don't have would be like hell on earth, no way out except to lie and then once they find out you lied you're in for worse torture.

Isn't technology advanced enough that we could get reliable information out of prisoners without torture? Maybe a creative way of using a lie detector or brain scanning or something, which I think would work even if they refuse to talk and someone is asking a bunch of questions.

[Mormon]

Well we have the lie detecting tests and what not, but they're not infallible. People get past them. And even then, the fact that we know they're lying doesn't get us anywhere. We need the real information.

As far as I know, veritaserum hasn't been discovered.

[ShadowMarth]

Mormon, there's a reason they're called "terrorist cells". They form close groups. Finding one would make finding the others simple, because they would live closely, work together constantly, and information leading to them would be all over the first person's home. Let's see, search through his address book, or torture?

Technology is certainly not to that point yet. Lie detectors work reliably only with yes or no questions, and only if the person decides to answer your questions. Not to mention, you can train yourself to pass a lie detector test. Furthermore, when get get brainscanning... that'll raise a whole suite of other issues.

[arthur_is_tight]

Thats why the FBI don't use the lie detector test and its really hard to train yourself to pass the test its almost impossible!!!!!

[Mormon]

It's pretty possible considering how many people have done it.

[arthur_is_tight]

Done what??? Pass the lie detector test

[Mormon]

you just answered your own question?

[Pilot_51]

I saw a few years back that someone invented a more effective lie detector using a heat sensing camera (I'm not sure if it was infrared, the image was all colorized). They tested it on someone who could fake out the traditional lie detector and he couldn't fake out this one.

[arthur_is_tight]

Wow thats cool
I mean but still the FBI still doesn't use them

[ShadowMarth]

Well, the Facebook debate is conclusively over, I think. However, I just found an extremely good relevant article with first hand interviews of troops back from Iraq.

MotherJones.com | News

Some good quotes...

The sounds were meant to disorient, but also to mask the screams. More than half the time, even if they were cooperative the detainees were beaten, kicked out of their chairs, punched in the windpipe or gut, pulled by the ears—blows that wouldn't leave lasting marks. Occasionally things got out of hand, but with their medical training, the military-intelligence officers could stitch up or bandage injuries, avoiding a call to the medics and an entry in the logbooks that the Red Cross could read.

The first time Ben saw a detainee get beaten, he took the lead interrogator aside afterward to ask, "Was this stuff really allowed? Didn't it violate the Geneva Conventions?"
"These aren't pows; they're detainees," he was told. "Those rules are antiquated and don't apply. You can't get any information without breaking that stuff." Ben asked other officers, but "it was basically like, 'Dude, you're actually worried about how we're treating them? They wouldn't afford you the same respect.'"
If there is anything Ben hates, it's not having all the information. Like most, he hadn't listened when the Geneva Conventionswere covered in basic training. But as it happened, when first arriving in country he'd asked a military lawyer for a cd-rom of various documents, just to have on hand. Now, scrolling through the text on his laptop, Ben saw what anyone could: All prisoners—civilians and combatants—are protected against violence. There is no separate category for unlawful combatants. "Outrages upon personal dignity" and "humiliating and degrading treatment" are prohibited. Abuses like those at the Tiger base were "grave breaches." War crimes.


Ben made a verbal complaint to his platoon leader and later to his platoon leader's boss, asking for an investigation. The officers seemed surprised. "They said they'd look into it and tell their superiors," Ben recalls. "But it didn't seem like a priority." Nothing happened.

In the summer of 2003, the interrogators threw a detainee against a concrete wall, punched him in the neck and gut, kicked him in the knees, threw him outside, and dragged him back in by his hair. For the entire two-hour ordeal, the prisoner wouldn't talk; Ben later found out he spoke Farsi and couldn't understand the interrogators' English and Arabic. Afterward, Ben hid behind a building and cried for the first time since his dad's death. "It was like a loss of humanity. Like we were trading one dictator in for another. I had to weigh my integrity against my duty. Why couldn't I stand up more? Why was I hesitant?"

One afternoon, with a sitcom on TV and his dog skidding around the sofa, I grilled Ben about torture. After returning from Iraq, he studied the philosophical theories surrounding the issue to prepare for just these kinds of conversations—particularly in case he ever got to talk to Senator John McCain, to whom he'd written during the drafting of the Detainee Treatment Act. We discussed the ticking-time-bomb argument—the hypothetical challenge arguing the morality of torturing someone who knows where a bomb is hidden—which Ben called "total bull****" since "we aren't living in some fantasy 24 kind of world where those sorts of situations occur." Besides, he said, torture will induce false confessions. And most of the detainees at Tiger didn't even have anything to confess; like 70 to 90 percent of those jailed across Iraq, according to a 2004 Red Cross report, they'd been arrested by mistake.