> "Let me give you a punchline: If he were to order that once in government, the American armed forces would refuse to act," Mr. Hayden told Mr. Maher. "You are required not to follow an unlawful order. That would be in violation of all the international laws of armed conflict."
Of course. This is totally how the world works, and, in particular, how the American armed forces act.
Well, it helps when the next president says "it's okay, we should just move on", instead of prosecuting those committing those crimes.
Keeping government officials accountable for crimes is what will stop them from doing it in the future, not a sense of "duty", or even more laughable "international treaties" - as if that's going to stop a CIA agent from following a direct order from above.
No. Make it clear that they will be prosecuted for war crimes, and then actually do it after it happens. That's what will put an end to this. The same should go for abuses of surveillance powers.
Yeah, you absolutely never order someone to do something illegal. Instead, you simply give your people some disavowable waterboarding equipment, and a bunch of evil prisoners, and then demand results, while making sure there is no oversight.
Alternatively you ship them to a country that is more than happy to openly and gleefully torture.
But you never simply order your troops to torture. That would be politically stupid.
The writer Ian Banks was very much opposed to torture and wrote that even if in some cases it could stop deaths (e.g. torture of terrorist to find the bomb that will save lives), it should still always be illegal. In other words - the torturers will be breaking the law, and should be fully prosecuted, even if they saved lives in the process of the torture.
This is a different way of looking at it than the usual ways of "it's all bad, illegal and should never to be used, ever" or "some forms are less bad and should be legal sometimes" and "only when there are lives saves should it be legal"
A bunch of people I've met seem to love it for utilitarian reasons. But even if, for the sake of conversation, I grant that it has utility- I still say we shouldn't ever do it.
I'd rather have an america where some people die of terrorism, than one that I feel ashamed of.
To hell with the argument that we need to become evil in order to avert evil.
But you shouldn't grant that it has any utility, as soon as you start torturing a suspect any information they give is uncertain. You'll never know without further research if it's made up to stop the torture or if it's real information. There is already enough uncertainty in the intelligence game without generating even more.
Some information is verifiable. It's useless in a war setting as bad information can be extremely costly, but questions like "Where did you hide the money?" are different as digging is generally a low risk activity.
So, from a utility standpoint, it's far more likely to be useful for the Mob than any government.
I won't grant that it has utility, but that's from my ignorance. It might have utility; I don't know and am not qualified to say.
The argument used matters to me, because if tomorrow it's proven that torture works, I still believe that civilized nations should be against it. If we hinge the argument on its utility, then when we lose that premise we lose the argument.
It might be evil (or better, ethically unjustifiable) in some in ethical frameworks, but it's certainly not in mine. There is not a universally correct ethical framework.
Even within the utilitarian framework (where "the ends might justify the means"), which you seem to be representing, you have to consider all of the "ends". Protecting innocent lives is only one of the considerations.
Most people, if asked in a vacuum, would put protecting innocent life at or near the top of their priority list. I certainly do. But if you think feeling good about yourself is more important, then that is your prerogative. As you say, there is not a universally correct ethical framework.
You're being needlessly combative. This isn't about feeling good about myself.
Of course I put protecting innocent life near the top of the priority list. But that doesn't mean I think it's right (or ever justifiable) to kill the families of suspected terrorists. That doesn't mean I think that Americans should give up the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, and 15th amendments of their Constitution (all of which could be claimed as barriers to "protecting innocent life.").
Nobody's talking about giving up protections unilaterally. We're talking about when they come into conflict with other, also important, values. And you say I'm the one being needlessly combative?
If you don't think "feeling better about yourself" is an accurate summary of the principle that you are placing above protection of innocent life in this hypothetical torture scenario, please word it in a way that you find preferable. Or was that what you were doing when you listed a number of American constitutional amendments?
All you're doing is highlighting the fact that "evil" is a subjective word and everybody applies it slightly differently. And I think that when we have a conversation like this thread has become, all we're really doing is taking a straw poll of other peoples' definitions to see the lay of the land.
So- you get that my definition of evil places actions on the same level as results- and I get that yours doesn't. I'm not sure that we can do anything but agree to disagree.
Well, yes. The point is to convince others that it is possible to agree to disagree on this issue. That's not always a given when one side sees the issue as a moral crusade.
am I missing something? the article is mostly speaking of CIA not doing it because evidence shows it doesn't work, not because moral, legal or ethical issues.
Article 1 of the German constitution is "Human dignity is inviolate". Ie, a human life has inherent value, and threats against it must not be used for any purpose, however "good" those purposes might be on the surface. I think there is a wealth of good that emerges from this one single principle.
IIRC, a German police chief tried to torture a kidnapper to reveal the whereabouts of a child whose life was under threat. The police chief was charged even though the child's life was saved (I may have got the details skewed but I believe the key points are true).
You're referring to this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_David_Lukas_Olsen (see biography, the german article is much more extensive on the case). You have your details wrong: The vice police chief threatened a suspect kidnapper with torture, but the child was already dead by that time. The police chief was later convicted (though more a slap on the wrist than a real punishment)
Strictly speaking, he wasn't comparing people who "opposed" waterboarding to birthers or truthers; but rather "interrogation deniers", or in his own words:
individuals who hold that the enhanced interrogation techniques used against CIA detainees have never yielded useful intelligence.
Still, the juxtaposition of operative viewpoints is... fascinating, to say the least.
On the whole it sounds like waterboarding has been added to the list of things the CIA continually swears it would "never do" -- like, you know, assassinating foreign leaders; getting into bed with torturers, death squads, drug runners and mafiosi of various stripes; spying on not just on American citizens, but on rival branches of the U.S. government itself -- but of course has kept on doing, and doing, and doing anyway, since its very inception.
Have there been studies detailing the efficacy on these methods to obtain information that lead to the saving of lives?
E.g. if X people were subjected to waterboarding, what % of X revealed information that lead to derailing terrorist plots? And then we'd need a control group as well that wasn't subjected.
Edit - downvoted for what, trying to quantify this topic and weigh the pros and cons? Christ.
I think it might be quite hard to do those studies for ethical reasons.
From what I remember, the consensus among professional interrogators is that torture is largely useless, because people go more or less instantly from not saying anything at all to making up any old nonsense that sounds vaguely plausible just to make the pain and confusion stop.
Psychological torture is even less useful, because people simply stop making any sense at all after a while.
The most reliable methods were based on extended conversations, with the interrogator pretending to be an equal and gradually persuading a prisoner to open up and/or reveal possible gaps in their story.
This kind of interrogation isn't fast, but the ticking timebomb excuse for torture has never been very convincing anyway.
Pain on its own is very unlikely to change the mind of anyone who's so indoctrinated they volunteer to take part in a mass terrorist attack.
I have no doubt that if torture had led to significant success stories, someone would have either announced it or leaked it to get some points for the pro-torture side.
"They communicated this to agency higher-ups in Washington, who nonetheless insisted on the use of the practice, and asked to watch it take place." I don't know what's more fucked up; to order torture, or to ask to watch.
Do they actually have the exact questions asked? I tend to wait on declaring it "despicable and disgusting" until I know what was asked and not the interpretation of it.
If I remember correctly, messing with sleeping habits (telling them they had 8 hours sleep when they had 3, putting them on a variable length day, etc.) and getting their body off cycle is more effective. Depending on who you are, that might be torture or it might not be.
It's unfortunate that we've become so jaded but I thought the same thing. That was too specific a statement. CIA officer's won't do the torture, it will be Saudis, Israelis, British, etc.. Or American's that are employed as "contractors."
I don't understand the recurrence of torture. It's very clearly shown it isn't reliable. We train our military to resist coercive questioning, to plant misleading answers, and avoid use of yes or no answers to prevent video edited confessions later. Is it reasonable to suppose that none of our opponents will be aware of these techniques? An untrained person is just as likely to tell you anything that might make you stop as the crucial fact you need (presuming they even know it).
It might save lives. It might lead to mistreatment of many innocent people. How do you know which beforehand? If you can't know, are you happy with the abandonment of innocent until proven guilty?
Last, I've noticed an increasingly positive portrayal of torture in TV of late, say the last ten years. It's neater. The good guys seem to do it as a matter of course. It's more likely to be effective. Is this coincidental? Am I just watching the wrong shows?
It's simply lazy writing. "Capture" is an easy way to show progress over a season. The public now knows torture happens, so not showing it seems less realistic. And TV shows are under 40 minutes per hour show. So, it's hard to show things that dead end.
IMO, I think we are going to start seeing more plot lines where torture results in bad Intel for dramatic tension.
I was disturbed to see this when I took the kids to see Zootopia this weekend. The protagonists threaten to harm a petty criminal, who then coughs up the information they need. It made me wonder -- the writers seem to have been so careful with their message, so should I take this to mean they endorse torture along with racial tolerance?
No, they were trying to make a plausible scene. Many people do give up information when threatened with torture. You probably even remember just such an instance from your grammar school days!
However, because most people, even on HN, have a cognitive bias that forces them to prefer believing that their favored course of action has no downsides ("halo" bias), it has been popular to repeat the high-status meme that Torture Doesn't Work.
Which is true -- it often doesn't "work" for many of the reasons given. But sometimes it does.
Any position against torture that actually plugs into a consistent worldmodel will also accept that it does, in fact, sometimes work, and also have a way of appropriately weighing the ups and downs of any course of action without being tripped into rebranding every down as an up for the CoA you like, and up as a down for every CoA you don't like.
Regardless of whether it "works" sometimes, I consider torture unacceptable, inhumane, and bad policy. I don't give a fig for plausibility. This is a messagey children's movie with talking sloths. Having the good guys sweat a perp by threatening his life is something you don't just back into!
Well, it's debatable. Take the Battle of Algiers, during the Algerian War of Independence. Several bombs go off every day. French paratroopers take over, kidnap, torture with electricity and most often assassinate a bunch of people (total death toll ~ 3,000 people, a bunch of them innocent). Three months later, the FLN support network in Algiers has ceased to exist.
On the other hand, a successful operation by French intelligence led to the FLN torturing a number of their members (based on forged documents), which started to denounce additional members, etc, resulting in the torture and execution of hundreds of loyal FLN members.
So, operationally, torture can work (but it's not a sure thing), and it has been part of (AFAIK) the toolkit of all counter-insurgency efforts to this day. The problem is that whoever uses it instantly loses the moral high ground.
Without transparency and prosecutions, Brennan's words, and any other assurances, carry no weight. The leaders and the foot-soldiers who tortured people all walk free. They got to keep the money they made in torture, and some are able to conceal their identities. All these people would do it again, to you or me or members of your family, at the stroke of a pen changing a policy, or under greater secrecy. Any German would tell you the US will inevitably use torture again, and in our lifetimes, because we left the ability to do it readily at hand.
An interesting opinion on torture came from Slavoj Zizek. He was commenting on a movie called "Zero Dark Thirty" which brought torture to a Hollywood audience.
His point was that torture should be so abhorrent, that it should be in the same category as rape. Even by discussing it and debating the benefits or downside of it, we've lost quite a bit of ground in a civilized society.
For example nobody debates or discusses the trade-off of rape. It is obvious anyone who advocates for it is mentally ill, or vile and is shunned by others.
But merits of torture now are open for debate. Maybe it does find terrorist, maybe it works, or, like in this movie "Oh but see, it affects the torturers just as much, so they are suffering too, they feel guilty too, don't blame them too much ..." and so on.
Now clearly we've lost that battle because we've already engaged in it.
You can argue the effectiveness of torture but this moral panic seems a bit too much in a world where we bomb and shoot people every day.
If you're otherwise fine with or at least accept war and its inevitable civilian casualties and the damage it does to people I don't see how you can be so against torture. Torture in that case is just a tool - you inflict violence to your enemies (instead of killing them) to potentially gain information.
>accept war ... and the damage it does to people I don't see how you can be so against torture
We have collectively abolished many weapons and practices: chemical (e.g. nerve gas), technological (e.g. blinding lasers), or (e.g. booby traps), as well as many tactics (e.g. public executions). We held meetings (the Geneva/Hague conventions), and agreed these acts were too evil to continue. Now those choices are uniformly accepted as being progressive for our society.
War is hell. We do hellish things to the "other" side. Historically, the "other" side often ends up being on "our" side sooner rather than later (alliances+migration). Every so often we decide which actions are too inhuman to perform, regardless of what uniform the human is wearing (if any). Right now we are deciding on whether the secrecy and severity of physical and mental torture, with no representation or defence available, is on the wrong side of who we want to be.
War has never been cleaner then it is today, civilian casualties are down to levels never seen before.
While torture (and all other cruel punishments) have been common for many years, today it just isn't acceptable for many people anymore.
Death is a better outlook then being tortured for days, weeks or even months without outlook at a future without being tortured.
War is the worst thing possible, but even wars have become less lethal and more "humane". The Geneva convention is not even 100 years old, before that plunder, rape and maiming and torturing where inseparable parts of war.
I hope most people don't "want" to go to war, but feel they are fighting a war for the greater good. Even isis isn't fighting a war because they want to have war, they are fighting for ideals and values. And the West is fighting for their ideals and values.
I can only recommend you to read "the better angels of our nature", it gives a much brighter picture of the future (and the present) then you seem to be experiencing.
War has never been cleaner then it is today, civilian casualties are down to levels never seen before.
While torture (and all other cruel punishments) have been common for many years, today it just isn't acceptable for many people anymore.
Death is a better outlook then being tortured for days, weeks or even months without outlook at a future without being tortured.
War is the worst thing possible, but even wars have become less lethal and more "humane". The Geneva convention is not even 100 years old, before that plunder, rape and maiming and torturing where inseparable parts of war.
I hope most people don't "want" to go to war, but feel they are fighting a war for the greater good. Even isis isn't fighting a war because they want to have war, they are fighting for ideals and values. And the West is fighting for their ideals and values.
I can only recommend you to read "the better angels of our nature", it gives a much brighter picture of the future (and the present) then you seem to be experiencing.
> If you're otherwise fine with or at least accept war and its inevitable civilian casualties and the damage it does to people I don't see how you can be so against torture.
Ah yes, the good old slippery slope argument...
Yes, why stop. We already have wars, as long as we have them, let's start drilling holes in people spines, sticking needles under their nails and so on. Qualitatively we already there so no need for outrage.
There are usually mitigating factors when it comes to torture. I don't think anyone has discussed the benefits/drawbacks of torturing someone just because that's what you want to do. It's always framed in the context of national security, or things like that.
"Horror... Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies!(...)You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment! Because it's judgment that defeats us."
Make of this what you will, but I believe there is some truth in these words. If IS terrorists were to truly fear falling into enemies' hands, if they themselves were unable to instill fear in their enemies by brutally executing people, they wouldn't have that much of an impact.
That being said, torture shouldn't have a place in any civilization. There's nothing civil about it. It's a contradictio in terminis.
66 comments
[ 37.3 ms ] story [ 275 ms ] threadOf course. This is totally how the world works, and, in particular, how the American armed forces act.
Keeping government officials accountable for crimes is what will stop them from doing it in the future, not a sense of "duty", or even more laughable "international treaties" - as if that's going to stop a CIA agent from following a direct order from above.
No. Make it clear that they will be prosecuted for war crimes, and then actually do it after it happens. That's what will put an end to this. The same should go for abuses of surveillance powers.
Alternatively you ship them to a country that is more than happy to openly and gleefully torture.
But you never simply order your troops to torture. That would be politically stupid.
This is a different way of looking at it than the usual ways of "it's all bad, illegal and should never to be used, ever" or "some forms are less bad and should be legal sometimes" and "only when there are lives saves should it be legal"
I'd rather have an america where some people die of terrorism, than one that I feel ashamed of.
To hell with the argument that we need to become evil in order to avert evil.
So, from a utility standpoint, it's far more likely to be useful for the Mob than any government.
The argument used matters to me, because if tomorrow it's proven that torture works, I still believe that civilized nations should be against it. If we hinge the argument on its utility, then when we lose that premise we lose the argument.
Even within the utilitarian framework (where "the ends might justify the means"), which you seem to be representing, you have to consider all of the "ends". Protecting innocent lives is only one of the considerations.
Of course I put protecting innocent life near the top of the priority list. But that doesn't mean I think it's right (or ever justifiable) to kill the families of suspected terrorists. That doesn't mean I think that Americans should give up the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, and 15th amendments of their Constitution (all of which could be claimed as barriers to "protecting innocent life.").
If you don't think "feeling better about yourself" is an accurate summary of the principle that you are placing above protection of innocent life in this hypothetical torture scenario, please word it in a way that you find preferable. Or was that what you were doing when you listed a number of American constitutional amendments?
So- you get that my definition of evil places actions on the same level as results- and I get that yours doesn't. I'm not sure that we can do anything but agree to disagree.
IIRC, a German police chief tried to torture a kidnapper to reveal the whereabouts of a child whose life was under threat. The police chief was charged even though the child's life was saved (I may have got the details skewed but I believe the key points are true).
It's incredible how quickly he's had a "change of heart".
individuals who hold that the enhanced interrogation techniques used against CIA detainees have never yielded useful intelligence.
Still, the juxtaposition of operative viewpoints is... fascinating, to say the least.
On the whole it sounds like waterboarding has been added to the list of things the CIA continually swears it would "never do" -- like, you know, assassinating foreign leaders; getting into bed with torturers, death squads, drug runners and mafiosi of various stripes; spying on not just on American citizens, but on rival branches of the U.S. government itself -- but of course has kept on doing, and doing, and doing anyway, since its very inception.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_positivism
CIA director John Brennan does not expect to keep his job for long in a Republican administration.
Have there been studies detailing the efficacy on these methods to obtain information that lead to the saving of lives?
E.g. if X people were subjected to waterboarding, what % of X revealed information that lead to derailing terrorist plots? And then we'd need a control group as well that wasn't subjected.
Edit - downvoted for what, trying to quantify this topic and weigh the pros and cons? Christ.
From what I remember, the consensus among professional interrogators is that torture is largely useless, because people go more or less instantly from not saying anything at all to making up any old nonsense that sounds vaguely plausible just to make the pain and confusion stop.
Psychological torture is even less useful, because people simply stop making any sense at all after a while.
The most reliable methods were based on extended conversations, with the interrogator pretending to be an equal and gradually persuading a prisoner to open up and/or reveal possible gaps in their story.
This kind of interrogation isn't fast, but the ticking timebomb excuse for torture has never been very convincing anyway.
Pain on its own is very unlikely to change the mind of anyone who's so indoctrinated they volunteer to take part in a mass terrorist attack.
I don't think studies of the nature I proposed are particularly hard to do, but they may be locked in classified status, so civilians wouldn't know.
I have no doubt that if torture had led to significant success stories, someone would have either announced it or leaked it to get some points for the pro-torture side.
"They communicated this to agency higher-ups in Washington, who nonetheless insisted on the use of the practice, and asked to watch it take place." I don't know what's more fucked up; to order torture, or to ask to watch.
That's pretty despicable and disgusting.
Sure. We outsource our torture after rendition to 'black sites' in places like Romania, Thailand, wherever.
This article and these official statements mean nothing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/02/05...
It might save lives. It might lead to mistreatment of many innocent people. How do you know which beforehand? If you can't know, are you happy with the abandonment of innocent until proven guilty?
Last, I've noticed an increasingly positive portrayal of torture in TV of late, say the last ten years. It's neater. The good guys seem to do it as a matter of course. It's more likely to be effective. Is this coincidental? Am I just watching the wrong shows?
IMO, I think we are going to start seeing more plot lines where torture results in bad Intel for dramatic tension.
However, because most people, even on HN, have a cognitive bias that forces them to prefer believing that their favored course of action has no downsides ("halo" bias), it has been popular to repeat the high-status meme that Torture Doesn't Work.
Which is true -- it often doesn't "work" for many of the reasons given. But sometimes it does.
Any position against torture that actually plugs into a consistent worldmodel will also accept that it does, in fact, sometimes work, and also have a way of appropriately weighing the ups and downs of any course of action without being tripped into rebranding every down as an up for the CoA you like, and up as a down for every CoA you don't like.
Not really the message I'd expect from a Disney movie.
On the other hand, a successful operation by French intelligence led to the FLN torturing a number of their members (based on forged documents), which started to denounce additional members, etc, resulting in the torture and execution of hundreds of loyal FLN members.
So, operationally, torture can work (but it's not a sure thing), and it has been part of (AFAIK) the toolkit of all counter-insurgency efforts to this day. The problem is that whoever uses it instantly loses the moral high ground.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B57bdjIxfQ0
His point was that torture should be so abhorrent, that it should be in the same category as rape. Even by discussing it and debating the benefits or downside of it, we've lost quite a bit of ground in a civilized society.
For example nobody debates or discusses the trade-off of rape. It is obvious anyone who advocates for it is mentally ill, or vile and is shunned by others.
But merits of torture now are open for debate. Maybe it does find terrorist, maybe it works, or, like in this movie "Oh but see, it affects the torturers just as much, so they are suffering too, they feel guilty too, don't blame them too much ..." and so on.
Now clearly we've lost that battle because we've already engaged in it.
If you're otherwise fine with or at least accept war and its inevitable civilian casualties and the damage it does to people I don't see how you can be so against torture. Torture in that case is just a tool - you inflict violence to your enemies (instead of killing them) to potentially gain information.
Sam Harris wrote a piece on why torture can be the lesser evil in some cases: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/in-defense-of-tortu...
We have collectively abolished many weapons and practices: chemical (e.g. nerve gas), technological (e.g. blinding lasers), or (e.g. booby traps), as well as many tactics (e.g. public executions). We held meetings (the Geneva/Hague conventions), and agreed these acts were too evil to continue. Now those choices are uniformly accepted as being progressive for our society.
War is hell. We do hellish things to the "other" side. Historically, the "other" side often ends up being on "our" side sooner rather than later (alliances+migration). Every so often we decide which actions are too inhuman to perform, regardless of what uniform the human is wearing (if any). Right now we are deciding on whether the secrecy and severity of physical and mental torture, with no representation or defence available, is on the wrong side of who we want to be.
While torture (and all other cruel punishments) have been common for many years, today it just isn't acceptable for many people anymore. Death is a better outlook then being tortured for days, weeks or even months without outlook at a future without being tortured.
War is the worst thing possible, but even wars have become less lethal and more "humane". The Geneva convention is not even 100 years old, before that plunder, rape and maiming and torturing where inseparable parts of war.
I hope most people don't "want" to go to war, but feel they are fighting a war for the greater good. Even isis isn't fighting a war because they want to have war, they are fighting for ideals and values. And the West is fighting for their ideals and values.
I can only recommend you to read "the better angels of our nature", it gives a much brighter picture of the future (and the present) then you seem to be experiencing.
While torture (and all other cruel punishments) have been common for many years, today it just isn't acceptable for many people anymore. Death is a better outlook then being tortured for days, weeks or even months without outlook at a future without being tortured.
War is the worst thing possible, but even wars have become less lethal and more "humane". The Geneva convention is not even 100 years old, before that plunder, rape and maiming and torturing where inseparable parts of war.
I hope most people don't "want" to go to war, but feel they are fighting a war for the greater good. Even isis isn't fighting a war because they want to have war, they are fighting for ideals and values. And the West is fighting for their ideals and values.
I can only recommend you to read "the better angels of our nature", it gives a much brighter picture of the future (and the present) then you seem to be experiencing.
Ah yes, the good old slippery slope argument...
Yes, why stop. We already have wars, as long as we have them, let's start drilling holes in people spines, sticking needles under their nails and so on. Qualitatively we already there so no need for outrage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD0rU6-7sKs&nohtml5=False
Make of this what you will, but I believe there is some truth in these words. If IS terrorists were to truly fear falling into enemies' hands, if they themselves were unable to instill fear in their enemies by brutally executing people, they wouldn't have that much of an impact.
That being said, torture shouldn't have a place in any civilization. There's nothing civil about it. It's a contradictio in terminis.