Antonin Scalia says, "...it would be absurd to say you couldn't, I don't know, stick something under the fingernail, smack him in the face."

"I find it curious that in the debate involving the so-called "ticking bomb" scenario, there has been a pre-supposition that physical, psychological, and/or emotional coercion will compel a source to provide actionable intelligence, the only issues in contention being those legal and moral arguments in favor or in opposition. To the best of my knowledge, there is no definitive data to support that supposition and considerable historical evidence to suggest the contrary."

- Former USAF interrogator Steven M. Kleinman's Statement before the Senate 9/25/07

Returning to the matter at hand:

"I'm very tender," he said.

Thomas Hilde Testimony: Unreliable, Torture Must Be Used Broadly

Thomas Hilde testifies at Helsinki Commission hearing.

Recent advocates of torture use claims of necessity and the moral importance of information it can provide as a justification. Yet information gained from torture is "notoriously unreliable," and so in practice torture is rarely an isolated procedure, says University of Maryland research professor Thomas Hilde, who edited the forthcoming book, On Torture. He specializes in international social, political and environmental ethics.

Advocates invoke the "ticking time bomb" as an example of the need for torture - often the hypothetical case of a terrorist who has planted a nuclear dirty bomb and must be tortured to reveal its location before it explodes. Hilde rejects this example as a "crude utilitarian justification for the use of torture: torturing one bad man vs. saving many innocent people...More likely...is the case of torturing many innocent people in search of what might justify the act of torture."

To be effective, torture must be used broadly in order collect patterns of information as a means of corroborating bits of data. Single bits of coerced information must be verified. "How does one know when one has meaningful or true information?" Hilde asks. "The information must... be previously unknown in order to justify using torture. Yet, its moral significance must also be previously known in order to justify the act."

Torture becomes institutionalized, Hilde maintains, by the very logic of information-gathering. "There must be trained interrogators/torturers and thus also trainers, a legal and administrative apparatus, a cadre of doctors and lawyers and data analysts, and others, all of whom would be required to suspend their moral decency...We end up with a swelling institution in search of its moral justification, causing increasing damage to innocents and ourselves, all in search of the supreme moral justification - the time bomb - only to find that, in the end, it is we who have become the moral equivalent of the time bomb."

Thomas Hilde
Research Professor
University of Maryland School of Public Policy
Contact: (202) 321-7384 (cell); thi✧✧✧@u✧✧.e✧✧

http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire111601.shtml

"The first thing to be said about torture, as a means of discovering facts, was said by Aristotle in Book 1, Chapter 15 of Rhetorica: torture doesn't work very well. Under physical torture, some people will lie; some will say anything to make the pain stop, even just for a while; and a surprising number will refuse to yield. Robert Conquest, in The Great Terror, gives a figure of "one in a hundred" for those who failed to confess under the methods used by Stalin's secret police. However, most of those pulled in by the NKVD were ordinary people guilty of nothing at all. Dedicated resistance workers, fanatical terrorists, or revolutionaries would show better stats. In his memoir Nothing to Declare, Taki Theodoracopulos tells the story of a young WWII Greek resistance fighter named Perrikos, who blew up the German HQ building in Athens on orders from Taki's father. Arrested and tortured to death by the Nazis, Perrikos revealed nothing, claiming to the end that he had acted alone, under no one's orders. There were many such cases."

^^^lolz even NRO realizes torture is fucking stupid

"so-called torture"

the only surprise is the source. Derbyshire's the man who's calling Obama "O'Bama" and an empty suit.

agreed

I honestly have never seen any good statistical data indicating that torture does or doesn't work. What I've seen, instead, are good arguments and educated opinons on both sides of the issue. Personally, I'm not expert enought to have a strong opinion either way.

But arging that "torture doesn't work" is the wrong way to go, unless you have VERY good evidence to back up your case. 'Cuz the obvious rebuttal is "no, no, look: it does work! I'll prove it to you." Which puts the whole debate on the wrong footing. We shouldn't shun torture because it's ineffective. If it worked better, would we then embrace it?

Mr. Que, in 1973 my parents were asleep in their house and the door was bashed in by two fbi agents who came into their bedroom, shone maglites in their faces, called them by their names, and said they were under arrest. it turned out they thought my dad was somebody else. because the guy they were after had a beard and my dad also had a beard. they had been spying on the house and i guess the "beard" evidence was just too overwhelming. (the guy they were looking for was a friend of my dad's who was a minister and had married two people who were in prison for conspiracy.)

The key point to take from the long quote Shakey posted is that torture DOES work, provided that you're willing to torture enough people and rigorously cross-check your data. This needs to remain a moral argument.

Tracer, that totally sucks, for real.

it was terrifying, their house was in the middle of nowhere in blount county tennessee. at least they didn't actually get arrested, thrown in jail with no lawyer, etc

The key point to take from the long quote Shakey posted is that torture DOES work, provided that you're willing to torture enough people and rigorously cross-check your data. This needs to remain a moral argument.

where is that key point? this does not NEED to remain a moral argument at all.

What if we had strong anti-torture laws across the board, but when Jack Bauer saves LA, he is pardoned?

Scalia also dissented when the court struck down California's medical marijuana law, if I remember correctly. For him, it was a state's rights issue.

one thing thats kinda confused me throughout this whole torture debate maybe you guys could help clear up jack bauer he is real?

To be effective, torture must be used broadly in order collect patterns of information as a means of corroborating bits of data. Single bits of coerced information must be verified. "How does one know when one has meaningful or true information?" Hilde asks. (...) Torture becomes institutionalized, Hilde maintains, by the very logic of information-gathering.

Describing the institutional steps needed to make torture effective.

If this isn't a moral argument, then all the pro-torture folks have to do is demonstrate that it does or at least can work. It becomes a question of improving torture in order to make it more reliable. And I think that's totally the wrong way to go.

you know the intel is real cause you send a tac team into the abandoned warehouse and there's the nuke, duh

thats not proving that torture works as an information-gathering device, thats assuming a priori that it does and describing the next steps one would take in order to make it effective

see this is why I won't just ban burt stanton or whoever is annoying some regular posters at a given moment because every time ILX massive wants to complain about some person who is boring and insipid and annoyingly gauche in their adoption of unoriginal stances on a series of subjects, ILX massive goes and has one of these threads

http://www.evemag.com/issue6/graphics/murphy.gif

"Am I real?"

contenderizer all I can do is point you to people who HAVE reviewed extensive data about torture and they seem to uniformly claim across the board that it is ineffective (thus the links/quotes I posted). I agree that this is just one of several arguments against it, but as people will tend to discount moral arguments based upon their own personal ethics, the utilitarian tack should be addressed and refuted as concisely as possible.

provided that you're willing to torture enough people and rigorously cross-check your data.

many x-posts
uh, this is kind of the textbook definition of ineffective (ie, waste of time and resources; energy expended vastly exceeds reliable data gathered etc.)

Limbaugh and company always cite the case of KSM, who endured waterboarding, but several CIA operatives doubt the integrity of the intelligence gathered, for what it's worth.

Never said that the Hilde quote proved anything. Was just trying to explain what I thought was important about it. I don't think the utility of torture has been proved or disproved. But I think arguing about whether or not it works shortchanges the moral argument.

"if the cops think someone knows who committed a murder in the meatpacking district, is it legal to beat the shit out of them until they fess up? this is a fascinating legal question etc etc"

but... most people who favor torture will automatically argue that the utilitarian argument trumps the moral argument (see Limbaugh etc)

the frustrating thing about scalia is that he is nothing if not internally consistent.

This is a myth. He was on opposite sides of a particular interpretation on the Constitution in two cases that were released ON THE SAME DAY a few years ago (Ring v. Arizona and Harris v. United States). That was the day I realized that Scalia is nothing but a talented blowhard hack.

If you want a frustrating justice who is truly internally consistent, look at Clarence Thomas.

the anti-torture position isnt going to win a moral argument against the us govt

Another angle: Ok fine let's imagine the 24 scenario actually happens, and by some unlikely happenstance we have the single mastermind of the plot to blow up LA and he knows where the bomb is and we have a psychological profile on him that says "gives in to torture."

Does anyone think that the interrogator in this situation would say to himself, "Aw nuts! Bound by the law!"

i dont think hed say "aw nuts"

also I wouldn't be surprised if once torture is institutionalized you get a kind of law of diminishing returns in effect - ie the more torture is used the less reliable information is gathered, as everyone can assume they'll be tortured whether they provide any information or not (this certainly seems to have been the case in Stalinist Russia, judging by the bio I read a year or so ago. People would just say whatever to avoid torture, creating lots of unreliable info)

x-post

the key thing here is that torture induces the prisoner to tell the torturer what they want to hear, rather than the truth

Shakey, I don't want to get caught up debating a position I don't hold. But I have done some reading on this, and I don't think the situation here is like global warming, where there's an overwhelming body of evidence that only an idiot would stand in opposition to. I think it's convenient to say that torture doesn't work, but from what I can tell, the hard evidence isn't there. The anecdotal evidence that it isn't terribly effective is VERY good, but from what I can tell, it's not correct to make a blanket statement saying that "it doesn't work".

I mean, when you refute Hilde's point by saying that institutional torture is, "the textbook definition of ineffective (ie, waste of time and resources; energy expended vastly exceeds reliable data gathered etc.)," then you invite the rebuttal: "No. Really. It works. Look at all we've learned. We foiled that cell in Basel. Saved countless lives. Would you have had them die just to save a few dollars?" The kind of argument you're making turns this into a bean-counting contest.

"bean-counting contests" are essentially inseparable from moral arguments where the US govt is concerned

well it'd be more than saving a few dollars - it would be sparing a lot of innocent people being tortured, which is kinda more important...?

KSM – one of the few suspects we know who WAS tortured – is hardly innocent. The moral question is whether you torture him anyway.

I mean basically a society that institutionalizes torture on the level Hilde is talking about would end up expending its material resources and manpower brutalizing the majority of the populace - which is not a recipe for a healthy, functioning, long-lasting society (lolz N. Korea)

well it'd be more than saving a few dollars - it would be sparing a lot of innocent people being tortured, which is kinda more important...?

But that's a moral argument, isn't it?

I mean basically a society that institutionalizes torture on the level Hilde is talking about would end up expending its material resources and manpower brutalizing the majority of the populace - which is not a recipe for a healthy, functioning, long-lasting society (lolz N. Korea)

Not necessarily. That's a worst-case scenario. The pro-torture crowd would argue that they have something much more human, reasonable and cost-effective in mind.

"humane"

In other words, torture basically "works" when you can use it indiscriminately on a population and don't care much about the collateral effects, because the goal isn't really just isolated bits of information, it's control.

"bean-counting contests" are essentially inseparable from moral arguments where the US govt is concerned

-- max

No way. Far too cynical. Morality and ethics play a huge role in determining the behavior of individuals within the government and the government as a whole. Plus there's that whole democracy angle.

one thing i don't understand is whether the pro-torture people feel that these tactics can be used against non-political suspects

could a homicide unit in philadelphia, for instance, waterboard a suspect?

In other words, torture basically "works" when you can use it indiscriminately on a population and don't care much about the collateral effects, because the goal isn't really just isolated bits of information, it's control.

No. Again, this is absurdly overstated. Torture (maybe) works when you are scientifically rigorous about the collection and verification of data. You don't have to torture everybody, and you certainly don't have to apply it "indiscriminately". Indiscriminate use of torture would, I imagine, diminsh the value of the data retreived.

youre never going to win this making a moral argument because the morality of the us government is a utilitarian morality, and its moral stance on torture is predicated on the idea that torture "works" as an information-gathering device. if you really want to get rid of torture, and not just save your conscience, youre going to need to argue that it doesnt work.

Results 1 - 10 of about 245,000 for does torture work

well it'd be more than saving a few dollars - it would be sparing a lot of innocent people being tortured, which is kinda more important...?

But that's a moral argument, isn't it?

well I think its both - on one hand I don't think its much of a stretch to consider people a "resource". what good is a brutalized and demoralized populace, they usually can't accomplish much or generate wealth etc.

x-post

i mean torture is basically built-in to us. we're conditioned to look at things as containers of resources and information. we torture the planet, essentially, to get energy from it; why not torture human beings to get information from them? the moral attitude that allows for torture is all over the place; and i think the only way to stop it is by arguing that it doesnt work.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050530/klein