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."

Mr. Que, have you ever actually read any of the stories of the Guantanamo detainees?

considering our armed forces basically passed out flyers in Afghanistan that amounted to "cartoony terrorist = big bag o' money," it's not that much of an outside chance

yes i have--i'm not saying that false imprisonment doesn't happen

i'm not saying that false imprisonment doesn't happen

-- Que

Then what are you saying? That we should simply accept them (and perhaps torture, perhaps murder) as the price of safety? 'Cuz the, "if you don't break the law, why would you worry about getting picked up by the FBI?" bit reads more like a threat than a reassurance.

Those of you who've stolen library books, beware.

Then what are you saying? That we should simply accept them (and perhaps torture, perhaps murder) as the price of safety? 'Cuz the, "if you don't break the law, why would you worry about getting picked up by the FBI?" bit reads more like a threat than a reassurance.

that's not what i'm saying.

how many people in the world do you think the US is throwing into vans and beating right now? can you ballpark it for me?

being drowned underneath a massive "wau cock"

could have done without this mental image

You mean secret renditions since 9/11? A couple hundred? At the very least.

the threat of terrorism is exaggerated
the threat of torturing innocent people is exaggerated

Agreed.

Look, in the past six years the U.S. has basically created the premise that it can invade any country it sees as linked to terrorism and then detain its citizens for any reason it pleases and without any process. That doesn't have the slightest thing to do with whether someone "breaks the law" -- there's no rule of law in that process at all.

que in commenting on the rarity of unlawful us detention i believe was responding to a poster up thread who was personally afraid of being kidnapped by the us government.

which in no way precludes him from being a heartless fascist himself. which he most certainly is!

totally hartless totally fascist: that's me

lol "hartless"

also OTM:

the threat of terrorism is exaggerated
the threat of torturing innocent people is exaggerated

in the past six years the U.S. has basically created the premise that it can invade any country it sees as linked to terrorism and then detain its citizens for any reason it pleases and without any process.

Hurting 2 OTM. Equally troubling is that this premise extends to US citizens as well. When suspected of "associating with" or "aiding" anyone even tenuously linked to terrorism, US citizens apparently lose all due process protections and citizen rights. This suspicion may even extend to Americans in general, allowing the government to suspend the rights of ALL citizens, e.g.: covert domestic wiretapping, etc.

also it's worth noting that this kind of thing hasn't happened more in part because it has been fought tooth and nail by organizations like the ACLU

the biggest problem no one's brought up w/ this torture argument is that there is no evidence that 'smacking someone in the face' or whatever actually gets a guilty person to spit out what they know

was gonna say surprised no one's said "uh, shit doesn't work, doggie."

that and its not possible to know if someone knows something and its unkind and it undermines our relations w/others

those are the four main problems

bring in the clean team!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/11/AR2008021100572_pf.html

It would be nice to know what fans of the "24" ticking time bomb scenario make of these other ridiculous hypotheses:

1) due to shonky intelligence you know that ONE out of FIVE people from the same building knows where the bomb is - the other four are innocent, but you don't know who is who. Do you torture all five to get the info?

2) you have a definite suspect this time but he's known to be a tough guy who's almost impervious to pain and bodily harm. However he's a real family man with a young daughter (who is innocent of all this bomb malarkey) - do you torture her in order to get him to fess up?

The admissions made by the men -- who were given food whenever they were hungry as well as Starbucks coffee at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

3) If SUPERMAN knows where the ticking time-bomb is, can you use kryptonite?

the biggest problem no one's brought up w/ this torture argument is that there is no evidence that 'smacking someone in the face' or whatever actually gets a guilty person to spit out what they know

This is too easy. Anyone who's ever had a little brother knows that the judicious application of discomfort can produce aggreeable results. Torture and mistreatment do work, at least some of the time, and that's why they've been so popular throughout human history. There are negative consequences, sure, but pretending that torture doesn't work is the wrong approach here.

i hope to christ above they mean the bottled stuff. xp.

altho, gtmo has been a military base for a century before getting famous as a detention camp. ok i'm not surprised at all there's a starbucks .

torture does not produce reliable information and this has been proven statistically time and time again

This is too easy. Anyone who's ever had a little brother knows that the judicious application of discomfort can produce aggreeable results. Torture and mistreatment do work, at least some of the time, and that's why they've been so popular throughout human history. There are negative consequences, sure, but pretending that torture doesn't work is the wrong approach here.

-- contenderizer, Wednesday, February 13, 2008 11:00 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

not really dude. if someone's willing to blow up a city why would he suddenly flip because he gets hurt? + people are known to confess to crimes they have NOT committed when tortured, so how can you know the confession is real?

I think contenderizer is partly right here. Saying that torture NEVER works is facile and wrong. It's more like torture might sometimes work but is also very likely to produce false confessions and the situations in which it's used are never as cut-and-dry as "this person will reveal the key to the secret plot to blow up LA" (let alone the lol ticking bomb)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2302-2005Jan11.html

the argument is more - tortue produces enough bad info to render the good info unusable

"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.