America before W.Bush and after W.Bush

[Rammses]

How exactly will it adversely affect reality.

"Let's keep quiet guys, lol." will only last so long if torturing is a regular event, obviously. It will also affect the torturers and the chain of command, who will in turn affect....

I never said it should be legal, why would I say to keep it quiet if its legal, and why would an innocent man be tortured?

I was pointing out the irrelevance of your hypothetical question with an even more ridiculous hypothetical question. The reality is that arabs, europeans, americans are tortured by americans for "the war against terror", a campaign that probably the majority of the world deems as dumb and counter-productive.

In my first post I said that the torturers should be very sure that the person they are going to torture knows something being that they are part of the terrorist group/whatever.

And how do you define something? Towards the vital information part of the something-spectrum, the above scenario becomes incredibly unlikely for obvious reasons.

[Beckwin]

How can anyone ever have absolute certainty in differentiating between the innocent (in the sense that they don't have the knowledge you're after) and those who -may- know something until after the fact? Circumstantial evidence can always be misleading, and you can't take back torture after the fact. You either have to accept that torture is going to inevitably be used on innocent people, or seek ways to minimize its usage in society, which a lot of people have tried to do.

You can never be sure, but this goes back to my original point. You can't unshrapnel innocents after you drop a bomb and take away all that pain to the person and their family. I am relating the torture from a regular war using bombs with collateral damage, mistaken targets and whatnot to achieve a cause, to the intentional torture of a person (who in most cases is more guilty than an innocent person hurt from a bomb).

What were the odds that the 51st bomb dropped onto, insert place being bombed, wins the war by killing whoever needed to be killed? Every bomb has a relatively low chance at winning with a high chance at collateral torture, whereas torturing a person, while intentional, isn't really worse. Just because one is up close and personal does not mean that it is worse to do.

I guess it's up to you what is worse, torturing 2 people (and don't immediately think of the worst kind of torture as their are 'nicer' kinds) one of who is innocent and the other gives information that saves 100's+ ppl or not torturing at all and having those 100+ people die as a result.

The point here is the deliberate and specific choice to do something inhumane- while trying to maintain a moral high ground. War/combat is ugly and there are few things worth protecting/maintaining in the middle of it, but that's exactly what the Geneva Convention was created to define. Again, the problem now is warfare is moving away from the realm of transparent nation v. nation conflict, so now enemy soldiers are now terrorists or insurgents or rebels, which the GC doesn't really cover (?).

[Blarg]

How exactly will it adversely affect reality.

"Let's keep quiet guys, lol." will only last so long if torturing is a regular event, obviously. It will also affect the torturers and the chain of command, who will in turn affect....

I never said it should be legal, why would I say to keep it quiet if its legal, and why would an innocent man be tortured?

I was pointing out the irrelevance of your hypothetical question with an even more ridiculous hypothetical question. The reality is that arabs, europeans, americans are tortured by americans for "the war against terror", which probably the majority of the world thinks is dumb and counter-productive anyway.

In my first post I said that the torturers should be very sure that the person they are going to torture knows something being that they are part of the terrorist group/whatever.

And how do you define something? Towards the vital information part of the something-spectrum, the above scenario becomes incredibly unlikely for obvious reasons.

Hypothetical or not it still shows that its actually immoral to not torture that person and that torture isn't always wrong.

Keep in mind my original post when reading what I write, 'if you are willing to drop a bomb you should be willing to torture someone' maybe I will post a big tl dr of what I'm saying because I didn't really think this way (I never really gave it much thought) before reading it.

[Blarg]

The point here is the deliberate and specific choice to do something inhumane- while trying to maintain a moral high ground. War/combat is ugly and there are few things worth protecting/maintaining in the middle of it, but that's exactly what the Geneva Convention was created to define. Again, the problem now is warfare is moving away from the realm of transparent nation v. nation conflict, so now enemy soldiers are now terrorists or insurgents or rebels, which the GC doesn't really cover (?).

You KNOW that bomb is going to kill innocent people and you will still deliberately drop it. This moral high ground is all in your head, just because the bomb is doing its damage dropped from thousands of feet in the air does not divorce it from its known outcome.

[Demosthenes11]

psst
terrorists should not be given the same rights I have

That is all

Stop calling yourself a republican, you make them look bad. Everytime you post you use exageration to try and get your point across and more often than not end up attacking an issue that is not even being addressed at all. And other times, much like this, you drop by into threads with simple two to three sentences without even explaining your position, furthermore you have the audacety to act like your opinions aren't up for debate.

uh, I would never call myself a republican; those cockbags have fucked up the word.

This issue is being adressed by people saying "we need to give captured enemies more rights" and dont even act like people arnt saying that, read the thread. I'm not gonna go into some lengthy debate only to have people go retort liberal lunacies. I'll read the thread and be happy interjecting things like that into it because it's really not worth the time typing up some response people aren't going to read / are going to say stupid shit with / refuse to argue thoughtfully (which im guilty of sometimes, but is again a reason im not posting)

[Kuya]

uh, I would never call myself a republican; those cockbags have fucked up the word.

???

[Beckwin]

The decision to engage in conflict automatically requires an acceptance for combat-related civilian casualties. However, I (we) believe that same decision to engage in conflict does not automatically require a willingness to conduct torture.

Do you see what I'm saying?

And for the record, I'm not pro-bombing the fuck out of everyone. I'm for anything that reduces the "ugly" as much as possible in armed conflict, and that includes conflicts I don't support, especially from our side since we strive to maintain the moral high ground (but have been doing a piss poor job of it). I see your point about getting information to save lives, but I think what were talking about in terms of the Bush administration aren't drastic, last-minute disembowelments or beatings that end up saving hundreds of lives.

[Rammses]

How exactly will it adversely affect reality.

"Let's keep quiet guys, lol." will only last so long if torturing is a regular event, obviously. It will also affect the torturers and the chain of command, who will in turn affect....

I never said it should be legal, why would I say to keep it quiet if its legal, and why would an innocent man be tortured?

I was pointing out the irrelevance of your hypothetical question with an even more ridiculous hypothetical question. The reality is that arabs, europeans, americans are tortured by americans for "the war against terror", which probably the majority of the world thinks is dumb and counter-productive anyway.

In my first post I said that the torturers should be very sure that the person they are going to torture knows something being that they are part of the terrorist group/whatever.

And how do you define something? Towards the vital information part of the something-spectrum, the above scenario becomes incredibly unlikely for obvious reasons.

Hypothetical or not it still shows that its actually immoral to not torture that person and that torture isn't always wrong.

Keep in mind my original post when reading what I write, 'if you are willing to drop a bomb you should be willing to torture someone' maybe I will post a big tl dr of what I'm saying because I didn't really think this way (I never really gave it much thought) before reading it.

Just as my hypothetical question showed that it's not always wrong to kill an innocent man. They are both so far off the real situation that they are irrelevant to the original discussion and your original standpoint.

[Beckwin]

To clarify: we're not saying "we need to give captured enemies more rights", we're saying we need to respect existing rights we've agreed to make due.

Article 51.3 of the Commentary: IV Geneva Convention also covers this interpretation: "Civilians shall enjoy the protection afforded by this section, unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.".[3] In the words of the International Committee of the Red Cross, or ICRC "If civilians directly engage in hostilities, they are considered "unlawful" or "unprivileged" combatants or belligerents (the treaties of humanitarian law do not expressly contain these terms). They may be prosecuted under the domestic law of the detaining state for such action. Both lawful and unlawful combatants may be interned in wartime, may be interrogated and may be prosecuted for war crimes. Both are entitled to humane treatment in the hands of the enemy." [4]

[Blarg]

Well I guess I am really defending torture in general and not in the specific case of the iraq war where the 'positive' outcome on torturing goes towards a stupid war.

But anyway, I'm posting a BIG tldr about torture in general that while really long is an interesting read I think.

Imagine that a known terrorist has planted a large bomb in the
heart of a nearby city. This man now sits in your custody. As to the
bomb's location, he will say nothing except that the site was chosen
to produce the maximum loss of life. Given this state of affairs—in
particular, given that there is still time to prevent an imminent
atrocity—it seems there would be no harm in dusting off the strappado
and exposing this unpleasant fellow to a suasion of bygone
times.

Dershowitz has argued that this situation can be cast in terms
that will awaken the Grand Inquisitor in all of us. If a ticking bomb
doesn't move you, picture your seven-year-old daughter being
slowly asphyxiated in a warehouse just five minutes away, while the
man in your custody holds the keys to her release. If your daughter
won't tip the scales, then add the daughters of every couple for a
thousand miles—millions of little girls have, by some perverse negligence
on the part of our government, come under the control of an
evil genius who now sits before you in shackles. Clearly, the consequences
of one man's uncooperativeness can be made so grave, and
his malevolence and culpability so transparent, as to stir even the
most self-hating moral relativist from his dogmatic slumbers.

It is generally thought that the gravest ethical problem we face in
resorting to torture is that we would be bound to torture some number
of innocent men and women. Most of us who were eager to don
the Inquisitor's cap in the case above begin to falter in more realistic
scenarios, as a person's guilt becomes a matter of some uncertainty.
And this is long before other concerns even attract our notice.
What, for instance, is the reliability of testimony elicited under torture
? We need not even pose questions of this sort yet, since we have
already balked at the knowledge that, in the real world, we will not
be able to tell the guilty from the innocent just by looking.

So it seems that we have two situations that will strike most sane
and decent people as ethically distinct: in the first case, as envisioned
by Dershowitz, it seems perverse to worry about the rights of an
admitted terrorist when so many innocent lives are at stake; while
under more realistic conditions, uncertainty about a person's guilt
will generally preclude the use of torture. Is this how the matter
really sits with us? Probably not.

It appears that such restraint in the use of torture cannot be
reconciled with our willingness to wage war in the first place. What,
after all, is "collateral damage" but the inadvertent torture of innocent
men, women, and children? Whenever we consent to drop
bombs, we do so with the knowledge that some number of children
will be blinded, disemboweled, paralyzed, orphaned, and killed by
them. It is curious that while the torture of Osama bin Laden himself
could be expected to provoke convulsions of conscience among
our leaders, the unintended (though perfectly foreseeable, and
therefore accepted) slaughter of children does not,

So we can now ask, if we are willing to act in a way that guarantees
the misery and death of some considerable number of innocent
children, why spare the rod with suspected terrorists? What is the
difference between pursuing a course of action where we run the
risk of inadvertently subjecting some innocent men to torture, and
pursuing one in which we will inadvertently kill far greater numbers
of innocent men, women, and children? Rather, it seems obvious
that the misapplication of torture should be far less troubling to
us than collateral damage: there are, after all, no infants interned at
Guantanamo Bay, just rather scrofulous young men, many of whom
were caught in the very act of trying to kill our soldiers.33 Torture
need not even impose a significant risk of death or permanent injury
on its victims; while the collaterally damaged are, almost by definition,
crippled or killed. The ethical divide that seems to be opening
up here suggests that those who are willing to drop bombs might
want to abduct the nearest and dearest of suspected terrorists—their
wives, mothers, and daughters—and torture them as well, assuming
anything profitable to our side might come of it. Admittedly, this
would be a ghastly result to have reached by logical argument, and
we will want to find some way of escaping it.34

In this context, we should note that many variables influence our
feelings about an act of physical violence, as well as our intuitions
about its ethical status. As Glover points out, "in modern war, what
is most shocking is a poor guide to what is most harmful." To learn
that one's grandfather flew a bombing mission over Dresden in the
Second World War is one thing; to hear that he killed five little girls
and their mother with a shovel is another. We can be sure that he
would have killed more women and girls by dropping bombs from
pristine heights, and they are likely to have died equally horrible
deaths, but his culpability would not appear the same. Indeed, we
seem to know, intuitively, that it would take a different kind of person
to perpetrate violence of the latter sort. And, as we might expect,
the psychological effects of participating in these types of violence
are generally distinct. Consider the following account of a Soviet
soldier in Afghanistan: "It's frightening and unpleasant to have to
kill, you think, but you soon realize that what you really find objectionable
is shooting someone point-blank. Killing en masse, in a
group, is exciting, even—and I've seen this myself—fun."35 This is
not to say that no one has ever enjoyed killing people up close; it is
just that we all recognize that such enjoyment requires an unusual
degree of callousness to the suffering of others.

It is possible that we are simply unequipped to rectify this disparity—
to be, in Glover's terms, most shocked by what is most
harmful. A biological rationale is not hard to find, as millions of
years on the African veldt could not possibly have selected for an
ability to make emotional sense of twenty-first-century horror. That
our Paleolithic genes now have chemical, biological, and nuclear
weapons at their disposal is, from the point of view of our evolution,
little different from our having delivered this technology into the
hands of chimps. The difference between killing one man and killing
a thousand just doesn't seem as salient to us as it should. And, as
Glover observes, in many cases we will find the former far more disturbing.
Three million souls can be starved and murdered in the
Congo, and our Argus-eyed media scarcely blink. When a princess
dies in a car accident, however, a quarter of the earth's population
falls prostrate with grief. Perhaps we are unable to feel what we
must feel in order to change our world.

What does it feel like to see three thousand men, women, and
children incinerated and crushed to ash in the span of a few seconds ?
Anyone who owned a television on September 11, 2001, now knows.
But most of us know nothing of the sort. To have watched the World
Trade Center absorbing two jet planes, along with the lives of thousands,
and to have felt, above all things, disbelief, suggests some
form of neurological impairment. Clearly, there are limits to what
the human mind can make of the deliverances of its senses—of the
mere sight of an office building, known to be full of people, dissolving
into rubble. Perhaps this will change.

In any case, if you think the equivalence between torture and collateral
damage does not hold, because torture is up close and personal
while stray bombs aren't, you stand convicted of a failure of
imagination on at least two counts: first, a moment's reflection on
the horrors that must have been visited upon innocent Afghanis and
Iraqis by our bombs will reveal that they are on par with those of
any dungeon. That such an exercise of the imagination is required to
bring torture and collateral damage to parity accounts for the dissociation
between what is most shocking and what is most harmful
that Glover notes. It also demonstrates the degree to which we have
been bewitched by our own euphemisms. Killing people at a distance
is easier, but perhaps it should not be that much easier.

Second, if our intuition about the wrongness of torture is born of
an aversion to how people generally behave while being tortured, we
should note that this particular infelicity could be circumvented
pharmacologically, because paralytic drugs make it unnecessary for
screaming ever to be heard or writhing seen. We could easily devise
methods of torture that would render a torturer as blind to the
plight of his victims as a bomber pilot is at thirty thousand feet.
Consequently, our natural aversion to the sights and sounds of
the dungeon provide no foothold for those who would argue against
the use of torture. To demonstrate just how abstract the torments

of the tortured can be made to seem, we need only imagine an ideal
"torture pill"—a drug that would deliver both the instruments
of torture and the instrument of their utter concealment. The action
of the pill would be to produce transitory paralysis and transitory
misery of a kind that no human being would willingly submit to a
second time. Imagine how we torturers would feel if, after giving
this pill to captive terrorists, each lay down for what appeared to
be an hour's nap only to arise and immediately confess everything
he knows about the workings of his organization. Might we not be
tempted to call it a "truth pill" in the end?

No, there is no ethical difference to be found in how the suffering
of the tortured or the collaterally damaged appears.

WHICH way should the balance swing? Assuming that we want to
maintain a coherent ethical position on these matters, this appears to
be a circumstance of forced choice: if we are willing to drop bombs,
or even risk that pistol rounds might go astray, we should be willing
to torture a certain class of criminal suspects and military prisoners;
if we are unwilling to torture, we should be unwilling to wage modern
war.

Opponents of torture will be quick to argue that confessions
elicited by torture are notoriously unreliable. Given the foregoing,
however, this objection seems to lack its usual force. Make these confessions
as unreliable as you like—the chance that our interests will
be advanced in any instance of torture need only equal the chance of
such occasioned by the dropping of a single bomb. What was the
chance that the dropping of bomb number 117 on Kandahar would
effect the demise of Al Qaeda? It had to be pretty slim. Enter Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed: our most valuable capture in our war on terror.
Here is a character who actually seems cut from Dershowitzian
cloth. U.S. officials now believe that his was the hand that decapitated
the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Whether or not
this is true, his membership in Al Qaeda more or less rules out his
"innocence" in any important sense, and his rank in the organization
suggests that his knowledge of planned atrocities must be
extensive. The bomb is ticking. Given the damage we were willing to
cause to the bodies and minds of innocent children in Afghanistan
and Iraq, our disavowal of torture in the case of Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed seems perverse. If there is even one chance in a million
that he will tell us something under torture that will lead to the further
dismantling of Al Qaeda, it seems that we should use every
means at our disposal to get him talking.

IN ALL likelihood you began reading this chapter, much as I began
writing it, convinced that torture is a very bad thing and that we are
wise not to practice it—indeed that we are civilized, in large measure,
because we do not practice it. Most of us feel, intuitively at
least, that if we can't quite muster a retort to Dershowitz and his
ticking bomb, we can take refuge in the fact that the paradigmatic
case will almost never arise. From this perspective, adorning the
machinery of our justice system with a torture provision seems both
unnecessary and dangerous, as the law of unintended consequences
may one day find it throwing the whole works into disarray. Because
I believe the account offered above is basically sound, I believe that
I have successfully argued for the use of torture in any circumstance
in which we would be willing to cause collateral damage.36 Paradoxically,
this equivalence has not made the practice of torture seem any
more acceptable to me; nor has it, 1 trust, for most readers. I believe
that here we come upon an ethical illusion of sorts—analogous to
the perceptual illusions that are of such abiding interest to scientists
who study the visual pathways in the brain. The full moon appearing
on the horizon is no bigger than the full moon when it appears
overhead, but it looks bigger, for reasons that are still obscure to
neuroscientists. A ruler held up to the sky reveals something that we
are otherwise incapable of seeing, even when we understand that
our eyes are deceiving us. Given a choice between acting on the basis
of the way things seem in this instance, or on the deliverances of our
ruler, most of us will be willing to dispense with appearances—particularly
if our lives or the lives of others depended on it. I believe
that most readers who have followed me this far will find themselves
in substantially the same position with respect to the ethics of
torture. Given what many of us believe about the exigencies of our
war on terrorism, the practice of torture, in certain circumstances,
would seem to be not only permissible but necessary. Still, it does
not seem any more acceptable, in ethical terms, than it did before.
The reasons for this are, I trust, every bit as neurological as those
that give rise to the moon illusion. In fact, there is already some scientific
evidence that our ethical intuitions are driven by considerations
of proximity and emotional salience of the sort I addressed
above.37 Clearly, these intuitions are fallible. In the present case,
many innocent lives could well be lost as a result of our inability to
feel a moral equivalence where a moral equivalence seems to exist.

[archibaldcrane]

Hypothetical or not it still shows that its actually immoral to not torture that person and that torture isn't always wrong.

You can't have perfect knowledge that torture is going to work, and in fact it's success is very rare, and that's why it's wrong, regardless of the potential information to be gained.

Noone is arguing to give "captured enemies more rights", people are arguing to uphold the Geneva Convention.

[Beckwin]

The Dershowitzian situation is 24 material, and subsequently a "no duh" situation. The fault in that article (which was an interesting read) is that it's assuming torture must be a black/white issue. 24 shit is obvious yes, assuming there is no other timely way to obtain the information in order to save countless lives. However as Archibald points out torture hasn't been shown to be highly effective in general, and we do have that whole Geneva Convention to generally prohibit it in the first place. And I will continue to disagree with the article, when it asserts that

"if we are willing to drop bombs,
or even risk that pistol rounds might go astray, we should be willing
to torture a certain class of criminal suspects and military prisoners;
if we are unwilling to torture, we should be unwilling to wage modern
war"

One does not require the other in the case of torture, as I said earlier.

The bit about a "torture pill" was interesting theory/hypothetical, but in all practicality we should actually be much more likely to produce real/common truth serums or make use of drugs to extract information. The humaneness of that may fall into question, but a degree of transparency on training coupled with modern, public medical knowledge of drug effects and safety levels should be satisfactory.

[Xavier]

How can anyone ever have absolute certainty in differentiating between the innocent (in the sense that they don't have the knowledge you're after) and those who -may- know something until after the fact? Circumstantial evidence can always be misleading, and you can't take back torture after the fact. You either have to accept that torture is going to inevitably be used on innocent people, or seek ways to minimize its usage in society, which a lot of people have tried to do.

Conversely, if somebody has critical information but you don't have absolute certainty, you can't take back all the people who might be killed if you fail to obtain information in time. So you either have to accept that people are going to die in terrorist attacks, or seek ways to prevent those attacks from happening within reasonable measures.

"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."

[Ace-o-fire]

How can anyone ever have absolute certainty in differentiating between the innocent (in the sense that they don't have the knowledge you're after) and those who -may- know something until after the fact? Circumstantial evidence can always be misleading, and you can't take back torture after the fact. You either have to accept that torture is going to inevitably be used on innocent people, or seek ways to minimize its usage in society, which a lot of people have tried to do.

Conversely, if somebody has critical information but you don't have absolute certainty, you can't take back all the people who might be killed if you fail to obtain information in time. So you either have to accept that people are going to die in terrorist attacks, or seek ways to prevent those attacks from happening within reasonable measures.

"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."

- Ben Mother fucking Franklin

[Blarg]

The Dershowitzian situation is 24 material, and subsequently a "no duh" situation. The fault in that article (which was an interesting read) is that it's assuming torture must be a black/white issue. 24 shit is obvious yes, assuming there is no other timely way to obtain the information in order to save countless lives. However as Archibald points out torture hasn't been shown to be highly effective in general, and we do have that whole Geneva Convention to generally prohibit it in the first place. And I will continue to disagree with the article, when it asserts that

"if we are willing to drop bombs,
or even risk that pistol rounds might go astray, we should be willing
to torture a certain class of criminal suspects and military prisoners;
if we are unwilling to torture, we should be unwilling to wage modern
war"

One does not require the other in the case of torture, as I said earlier.

The bit about a "torture pill" was interesting theory/hypothetical, but in all practicality we should actually be much more likely to produce real/common truth serums or make use of drugs to extract information. The humaneness of that may fall into question, but a degree of transparency on training coupled with modern, public medical knowledge of drug effects and safety levels should be satisfactory.

I think the point about torture not always being effective is addressed in the article in that we deal with the low odds of our bombs actually competing the desired task which would be similar to the, I would think better odds, of torturing getting the desired result. That still doesn't address the black and white nature of if torture is actually the greater good in one case or another but I think its clear that there are some cases where it is justified and the best course of action. Whether that '24' scenario has happened or will happen in the future is hard to know but if/when it happens it would be interesting to see how people react based on whatever the outcome is.

[Demosthenes11]

cuz the geneva convention was totally talking about waterboarding and the "torture" we do

[archibaldcrane]

cuz the geneva convention was totally talking about waterboarding and the "torture" we do

Both are entitled to humane treatment in the hands of the enemy.

How could you possibly consider waterboarding to be humane treatment? You can't, so shut the fuck up. You think we should -clearly- violate the Geneva Convention, that's your position, stick to it. Don't try to pretend that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to waterboarding. Your position of "fuck the geneva convention" has some merits, so go with those.

[Nibe]

A

[Demosthenes11]

i don't even know why I try

is tickling inhumane too?

[archibaldcrane]

i don't even know why I try

is tickling inhumane too?

The trolling continues.