All you DUers who bring up the "ticking time bomb" torture hypothetical:

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

You know who you are.

Come here, to this thread.

Presumably the reasoning behind the "ticking bomb" scenario is the basic "end justifies the means" argument. Essentially, there is no evil means that could not be justified by saving the lives of others. Presumably any torture visited upon some person would be justified by saving millions, or a squad of U.S. soldiers, or whatever. Pulling out someone's fingernails. Smashing their child's limbs in front of them. Etc. etc. The end justifies the means. After all, it's U.S. lives at stake!

By the way, I disagree with the premise and do not accept it. Even assuming that you could with certainty extract that information through torture, it is still evil and should not be done.

But enough of my point of view.


You like hypotheticals?

Here's a hypothetical for you.

It's WWII. U.S. soldiers are captured by Germans. Now not every German soldier was some SS guy whose every waking thought was to exterminate Jews. Many, if not most, were no doubt simple boys or young men fighting in service of their country. On the opposite team.

Now maybe these German soldiers feel, or even know, that they can save some of their fellow German soldier's lives by torturing the American soldiers to get information about troop movements, whatever.

Are the Germans justified in doing whatever it takes to get this information? After all, they are just torturing one wretched GI to save a whole battalion of Germans!

If they are not, why not? If you have made the argument that the U.S. is justified in doing this to "protect itself", then why is no one else justified in doing so? Just because we are the most powerful nation and will have the most opportunity to do it to others rather than have it done to ourselves?

If they are justified, then where does this end? Essentially everyone can commit any evil act if they couch it as in the service of their country or saving lives?

[BootinUp]

1. Torture is always wrong.

Interrogation methods should based on ability to get reliable information, and upholding the moral standards that this country says it stands for.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

2. I agree with you, but I see a lot of DUers pimping the "ticking bomb" on

other threads. My answer to them is: no torture, no matter what.

I'd like to know what their answer to my hypothetical is.

[Webster Green]

3. It's a strawman argument..........too much watching "24"...

The devil-chimp wants to torture anyone and everyone he doesn't agree with. He wants to change the Geneva conventions and he wants to take us back to a pre-Magna-Carta mindset, where anyone can be held forever with no charges, no access to counsel, tortured to death....whatever.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

5. I know but I've seen at least a handful of DUers pimp this argument

(some obvious trolls, and at least one who has since been tombstoned) in recent days.

I honestly want to see their response. If they feel it's justified for Americans to torture to save American lives, why would it not follow that all other countries' soldiers could do the same to us?

And if it IS justified, does this not lead to a chaotic immoral world where people feel free to do whatever evil they wish if they can throw the appropriate justification on it?

[Webster Green]

13. Randi Rhodes makes an interesting point on this subject...

In the event of an actual potentially catastrophic "ticking time-bomb" scenario, some interrogator would no doubt do what needed to be done to obtain the necessary information from the suspect, if that were possible, and then face the consequences of violating whatever law, or convention applies. Given the circumstances, that person would no doubt receive a light sentence, and be treated as a hero, if he were successful at saving the day.

It is absurd to suggest that the Geneva conventions need to be revised to cover such an unlikely scenario.

The devil-chimp is torturing cab-drivers, or goat-herders or whomever happened to wind up in their dragnet.

[Spike from MN]

17. Actually, there's already an exception for that scenario.

I posted this on other threads but I'll repeat it here just to get the info out.

From KO's interview with Bill Clinton:

Like you take this interrogation deal, we might all say the same thing, if, let‘s say, Osama bin Laden‘s No. 3 guy were captured and we knew a big bomb was going off in America in three days. Turns out, right now, there‘s an exception for those kinds of circumstances in an immediate emergency that‘s proven in the military ranks. But that‘s not the same thing as saying, we want to abolish the Geneva Conventions and practice torture as a matter of course. All it does is make soldiers vulnerable to torture and make us more likely to get bad not good information.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14999415 /

Note: the transcript states "military ranks" but in the interview, it sounded more like "military reqs" which makes more sense. Not a whole lot of specifics there but he does mention an emergency exception so the "ticking time-bomb" argument doesn't hold water. It's already covered. Well, nationally at least. Maybe not internationally but I doubt anything would ever be pursued at that level.

[Webster Green]

18. Thanks for that.......I didn't know about it.

More proof that the argument is a strawman.

[Spike from MN]

24. You're certainly welcome.

I didn't know about it either and was pretty surprised when I heard Clinton mention it. I suspect there are a lot of others that haven't heard about it either which is one of the reasons I'm trying to spread the word. Gee, I wonder how many of our Congresspeeps even know about it.

[Benfea]

19. Yup.

As someone mentioned on AAR (I can't recall who), it's possible to construct hypothetical situations that justify any sort of immoral behavior. Just because I can concoct some cockamamie, convoluted and unlikely set of circumstances in which most people would choose pedophilia, that doesn't make pedophilia moral in the general sense.

Ask yourself this: if a ticking nuclear weapon justifies torture and we are actively torturing now, where's the nuclear weapon?

[Spike from MN]

25. I'll take it even one step further.

I have never seen "24" as I only watch one hour of TV a day (KO of course) but during the build-up to the Iraq war, I told a friend that Dubya was definitely going to invade Iraq and take out Saddam for one obvious reason: Saddam had everything Dubya wanted. Mainly:

• Complete and total power over all citizens of the country.
  
• Elections with 100% of the vote in favor of the leader.
  
• A populace that lived in fear of the leader 24/7.
  
• Freedom to torture and kill at whim, either to keep the populace in line or just for fun, depending on the mood of the leader.
  
• Oil. Lots and lots and lots of oil.
  

There were a bunch of other things but you get the general idea. Dubya hated Saddam because he was jealous of him. He wanted everything Saddam had. If this country keeps going down the track is has been and doesn't correct its course, he just might get his wish. Torture is just one more thing he needs to acquire in his goal to move America towards a more Saddam-like leadership. If the "Dems" (and I use that term loosely these days) go along with it, Dubya is one step closer to declaring "Mission Accomplished." And I'll be a helluva lot closer to becoming Canadian. ;)

[Bucky]

4. Man, you beat the crap out of that straw man. Good job.

Have there really been DUers who brought up the ticking bomb argument as a valid basis for a torture policy? I think we're practically unanimous on this topic--it's less than a shot in a billion that such a case would ever even occur. I've not seen anyone justify it here in DU, and if I did I'd expect them to be closet Freepers. Frankly, calling out DUers who might support torture smacks of McCarthyism to me. You might as well run a post saying "All you DUers who support slapping nuns and running over orphans with cement trucks--and you know who you are--are disgusting!"

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

6. Well most of them like do "dance around the issue" in a "delicate" way.

They don't usually like to come STRAIGHT OUT and say, it would be cool with them to torture some dude to save Americans, it's usually something like "isn't there SOMETHING we could do, that's more than our old interrogation techniques, and less than torture?"

"Like... torturing?"

[w13rd0]

7. A primary problem...

...with the "ticking time bomb" justification is a failure to recognize fanaticism for what it is. Psychological means at breaking them (legal means) are more effective. Causing pain, threatening with death, threatening loved ones, just feeds into their extremist psuedo-religious ideaology. It reinforces their view that they hold the moral highground and their tactics are justified. The only people they will get to "talk" through torture are those who don't actually possess actionable intelligence. When "broken", they'll say anything (terrorists in scuba suits with mechanical sharks anyone) to make the pain stop. Every study on the matter has shown that torture isn't an effective means of interrogation. It is a TERROR tool. It serves to terrorize the target population. "Did you hear what happened to Ramadi. They broke the legs of his youngest son right in front of him." That's why SADDAM tortured. He wasn't trying to get information out of people, he was trying to put fear INTO people.

And as we already know, putting fear INTO people is what the Bush administration is all about. They are, by definition, terrorists.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

10. I don't like to argue this on the grounds of whether it's effective.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/22/AR2006092201303.html

"I will leave others to claim that torture, in fact, does not work, that confessions obtained under duress -- such as that extracted from the heaving body of that poor Argentine braggart in some Santiago cesspool in 1973 -- are useless. Or to contend that the United States had better not do that to anyone in our custody lest someday another nation or entity or group decides to treat our prisoners the same way.

I find these arguments -- and there are many more -- to be irrefutable. But I cannot bring myself to use them, for fear of honoring the debate by participating in it."

My default position, for the sake of argument, in any such discussion is that it DOES work and the information CAN be reliably extracted, just to take that off the table and get to the moral part of the argument.

[mike_c]

8. the ticking time bomb argument has no merit....

The ends do not automatically justify the means. You've done a great job of framing how that argument can cut both ways, but I'd go further and say that, strawmen aside, even in the context of the ticking time bomb scenario at its worst, i.e. no doubt about guilt, the bomb, the victims, etc, abusing suspects is just plain wrong. If you know a bomb is going to go off, you do your best to take positive steps that you won't have to be ashamed of in the morning. You try to move people to safety if you can. You accept the limits imposed by civilized behavior, if for no other reason than to do otherwise makes you as bad as the bomber, just on the other side. And you use the legal system to seek justice afterward-- the whole justice system, with its protections for the accused, not some truncated secret military kangaroo court with a direct conduit to the gulag. WE ARE AMERICANS, DAMMIT. This is what we stand for. NO ARGUMENT SUPERCEDES OUR PRINCIPLES. THAT"S WHY THEY'RE WORTH DYING FOR.

[libodem]

9. I don't buy it either

I saw, The Green Mile, again recently. The Billy the Kid character was mean and crazy. He pee'd on the guard's shoes, spat in their faces, blew that chewed up cupcake in a guard's face, said the most provocative crap. He'd be dead if he was at Gitmo. The RW talk show hosts were all about how the detainees were crap-flinging savages, regular subhuman freaks. They made it sound as if only Gitmo prisoners were that rebellious, no other prisoners in history have ever been so dangerous. They deserved rough treatment. I suppose we can torture them for the same reasons. Not quite human. Maybe they don't even have souls. This ticking time bomb crap is the worst case scenario bait. Once you say okay to that then there are other 'good' reasons, too. You know what I wonder? What ever happened to Sodium Pentathol? Why can't they use drugs on these guys? Give them lie detectors? But, noooo, it's too much fun to waste all that spook training. Why waste all that PR letting everyone know we are not to be messed with, we are to be feared.

[Bluerthanblue]

11. as to your hypothetical-

NO, they are NOT 'justified'- The 'German soldiers' cannot know that torture would save anyone.

AND apart from the hypothetical- Those we claim 'hurt' us on 9/11,... on 'The Cole',.... WTC bombing #one,... the Embassy bombings,.... Oklahoma City,....etc. did so, because they viewed life, and human suffering, as something that was ....not as important, as advancing an agenda, revenging a wrong done (real or perceived) or as a means of "Protecting their people/agenda/beliefs".

Countering wrong with wrong simply makes more WRONG-
And as ..Lincoln (?) said: "Am I not destroying my enemy when I make him my friend?"


Should Hitler have been stopped? Absolutely- better yet, he should have been pre-emptivly prevented from becoming what he was, by not allowing a people to become as despondent, and desperate as the German populace had become post WWI.

War, and specifically the use of methods of terror including (TORTURE) to achieve an agenda, will never bring about peace- the best that could ever be hoped for in that situation is a cessation of war for a short time, until those who are being oppressed, or who are being REpressed, have mobilized a plan to 'begin anew'-

It is an endless cycle of violence, vengeance, victims and vainglory.

[Cronquist]

12. During the battle of midway.....

The Japanese captured and recovered a couple of pilots/navigators from the US navy. They were tortured & beheaded. The Japanese learned the disposition of the carrier fleets.

(Source is the book shattered swords the battle of midway. It is @ work & I don't have the exact reference)

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

14. I'm sure there are countless such examples. The question is, is such

behavior justified, if it saves a ship full of men, or a city, or one person?

I see some dancing around the position to suggest that it is, and I think it is not.

My question is, if there is justification, where is the line drawn? A city of a million people saved? One person saved? A 20 percent probability that you can get information that will save a million? One hundred percent probability that you will get information that will save twenty?

[Solly Mack]

15. and Japan stood a war crimes tribunal too

Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal Indictment

[Solly Mack]

16. Torture for Dummies:Exploding the "ticking bomb" argument.

http://www.slate.com/id/2132195/

[Cronquist]

21. not the captains of the first carrier division (nt)

[Solly Mack]

23. Neither were the vast majority of soldiers

but the country was...and the government was

and that's the point

[sam sarrha]

20. the ticking time bomb is allowing torture

[EFerrari]

22. We finally agreed on something. n/t

[aikoaiko]

26. I'm one of those DUers you're talking about and I find your hypothetical..

...very compelling.

Before I go on, let me say that because this is a discussion forum I sometimes try to discuss things with my fellows. Sometimes I even try to discuss ugly things like torture when I am feeling and thinking ambivalently. So thanks for being willing to discuss it -- some just sneer, I think, because of their hatred of all things Bush-like.

My answer to your hypothetical use of torture is I don't know. Perhaps I could argue that they shouldn't because soldiers agree to treat legitimate soldiers a certain way (decently even as POWs). Can it be argued that torture is ok when applied to civilians conducting insane acts of terroristic violence who are not bound by that same social contract of soldiers? I don't know. There are still so many good reasons to be against torture. Arguing for torture is always weak for me except when I get down to the possibilities of saving lives.

I respect people with a strong nonviolence moral standard. Some people are willing to die rather than do violence to another human being. I can respect that, but its not me. If I was sure that someone had information that could prevent the deaths of 1000s, and nontorture methods failed, I can't say that I wouldn't be willing to use some forms of torture.

tired... got to go to bed

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

29. You can't make some kind of separate ethical reality for soldiers versus

other human beings.

If you are arguing that torture may be valid for saving lives, how many lives? One? One million?

[aikoaiko]

35. Ok, I think we may disagree about different rules for different people

Soldiers versus terrorists. A reciprocity ethic is still possible. If your starting point is no human should ever inflict pain on another, then I can see why my division is not compelling.

Maybe one life would be worth using nonlethal pain. I could see some situations where I wouldn't blink.

But the problem with my position, I think is the slippery slope, as others have said.

[riderinthestorm]

27. It's been proven torture produces unreliable info

So why would you torture only to discover that the info you gained was so seriously flawed?

It makes no sense! Even with the ticking bomb scenario, perhaps even especially IF you have a ticking bomb scenario, torture would be the absolutely wrong method of extracting reliable information to defuse the bomb.

[Fovea]

28. In WW2 Nazi soldiers

Fought like madmen against the advancing Soviets.
Why did they do that?
Because they wanted to surrender to the Americans.
The Americans wouldn't torture them. The Nazis would.

Now, Bush wants us to be the Soviets.
I think the time bomb analogy is cosmically stupid.
There is no time bomb. When the big one gets into the harbor
they set it off. We are completely unprepared to even know it is coming.
And that is Bush's fault.

We could have used our resources to make us safer. Bush's RICO
organization used our resources to make themselves fabulously wealthy.

We should take all their toyz away, and send them to the Hague.

[leftchick]

30. Here is an Excellent essay on the ticking time bomb theory

And why it is completely WRONG...

<snip>

With torture now a key weapon in the war on terror, the time has come to interrogate the logic of the ticking time bomb with a six-point critique. For this scenario embodies our deepest fears and makes most of us quietly—unwittingly—complicit in the Bush Administration’s recourse to torture.

Number one: In the real world, the probability that a terrorist might be captured after concealing a ticking nuclear bomb in Times Square and that his captors would somehow recognize his significance is phenomenally slender. The scenario assumes a highly improbable array of variables that runs something like this:

—First, FBI or CIA agents apprehend a terrorist at the precise moment between timer’s first tick and bomb’s burst.

—Second, the interrogators somehow have sufficiently detailed foreknowledge of the plot to know they must interrogate this very person and do it right now.

—Third, these same officers, for some unexplained reason, are missing just a few critical details that only this captive can divulge.

—Fourth, the biggest leap of all, these officers with just one shot to get the information that only this captive can divulge are best advised to try torture, as if beating him is the way to assure his wholehearted cooperation.

Take the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, who sat in a Minneapolis cell in the weeks before 9/11 under desultory investigation as a possible “suicide hijacker” because the FBI did not have precise foreknowledge of Al Qaeda’s plot or his possible role. In pressing for a search warrant before 9/11, the bureau’s Minneapolis field supervisor even warned Washington he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.” But FBI headquarters in Washington replied there was no evidence Moussaoui was a terrorist—providing us with yet another reminder of how difficult it is to grasp the significance of even such stunningly accurate insight or intelligence in the absence of foreknowledge.

.....more

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20060926121321977

[Leopolds Ghost]

31. Even my quite liberal mom says she can "understand" the ticking-bomb logic

But the problem with the ticking bomb theory is simple:

** If we know enough to know something so destructive is about to happen, then we know enough to stop it.

** One captured terrorist is not going to have the information about exactly what an on-the-ground assassin or "soldier" is doing. This is like torturing a captured Russian spy in order to get the nuclear codes to stop Russia from bombing the US. Not gonna happen.

** If he did and we were that close to disaster, torture is unlikely to produce accurate information prior to the bomb going off (or the plane crashing into the George Washington Bridge and other targets in Manhattan, as the Blind Sheikh famously claimed it would in the media
at the close of Fitzgerald's blockbuster New York investigation. Of coursem some of those quotes have mysteriously been scrubbed from search engines, so not everyone remembers the George Washington Bridge business...) Why give away the game when you can lead investigators on a wild goose chase like in "Die Hard 3"??

** If the terrorist is willing to give away the game because he's insufficiently zealous or getting cold feet, then torture is not the most efficacious way of getting him to confess in a short period of time.

** Again, WHY do we know this stuff (planes gonna crash into WTC, just like the terrorists said they would to reporters in 1999 and 2000 -- ticking bomb gonna go off) and not able to DO anything about it unless exact information is known from exactly one person? Or are we talking about torturing everyone who might potentially be "the one" -- a figure undoubtedly masquerading as a harmless muslim?? Is that what we are condoning here??

Remember, in POLICE work, you take a harmless muslim, find EVIDENCE that an attack is going to take place, thwart the attack on the basis of physical EVIDENCE and TIPS from witnesses and accomplices who are WILLING to talk, and THEN get the "harmless muslim" to confess by showing him you got the evidence to prove he wasn't so harmless. Whereupon they gladly do confess, as with Moussaoui.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

32. I think torture may sometimes be justified, but should always be illegal.

If you believe something is important enough to justify torturing someone to learn it, then it must also be important enough to justify risking being sent to jail for.

I would only even contemplate trying to justify torture in the case of either attacks on civilians, I think, and even then it's a grey area. But it shouldn't be legal, because if torture is ever legal then inevitably you'll get it being used in cases where it shouldn't be.

The argument that led to the abolition of the death penalty in the UK wasn't "we don't think even serial killers deserve to be executed", it was "Evans, Bentley, Hanratty".

[6000eliot]

33. Or how about just one example of a time when torture stopped a bomb!

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

34. This isn't a hypothetical.

Thousands of troops with all sorts of valuable information were captured on all sides during WWII.

The Germans used to torture their POWs. The Soviets used to torture their POWs. The Japanese didn't torture their POWs.

America did not torture its POWs. Why not?

Because we're American. Or at least we used to be.