Comments on: THE MORAL PARAMETERS OF TORTURE

By: James Adair

James Adair — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:50:31 +0000

between 1000AD and 1300 Ad the Assassins operated a system of terror and assassination against the Leaders of their enemies.A secret Society which was able to infiltrate any organisation with dedicated religious fanatics who had been promised the same 70 Virgins in Paradise as havethe Jihadists of today.
The Old Man of the Mountain,as their founder and his successor were referred to,was always successful in their murderous policies until the Mongols arrived on the scene and massacred them and all their followers.
Till then the Kings of the Earth had bowed down,had paid what blackmail the Old Man demanded,had given up all their legitimate claims and submitted to his will.
Yet as a rule,the Old Man chiefly assassinated Sultan’s,Kings,Viziers & Military Leaders while today the Jihadists and their supporters have openly declared Eternal War against all Infidels in accordance with the plain words of their Holy book which demands Genocide or Submission to Islam as the deserved Fate of all Infidels.
Many have already bowed the knee,many have been massacred,many have converted to Islam,whole countries,such as Spain have caved within days of a single attack and the greater part of the Western Media has been terrorised into an effective collaboration therewith.
Most astonishing perhaps is the patent alliance between the Extreme Left and the Jihadists,which together with the complaisant Media have encouraged the infiltration of jihadist advocates throughout the Institutions of the West, particularly in Academia.
We are told that we must n infuriate the Jihadists by referring adversely to their apocalyptic threats and their mjurderous designs,that we are guilty of Hate Crime if we criticise their bestial crimes or any aspect of their conduct.
The appalling tortures they inflict with sadistic and triumphant joy must be ignored while hypocritical “Liberals” and even such redoubtable essayists as Rick Moran fulminate aginst those who differ on any point concerning the definition of torture and claim that the Waterboarding of 3 Master Terrorists known to have plotted the
destruction of their entire civilisation including the entire popu;lation of their own nationis the unspeakable crime that must NEVER be countenance.
Come off it Roberta!

By: bsjones

bsjones — Sat, 02 May 2009 05:44:34 +0000

cdor,
Silly rabbit,
The world works nothing like you imagine it does.

By: Watcher of Weasels » So Many Tortured Firsts - Waterboarding Our Way To Policy

Fri, 01 May 2009 16:56:34 +0000

[...] is a criticism of an article by former council member Right Wing Nuthouse, whose author Rick Moran also has a winning non-council entry on the same subject; waterboarding as [...]

By: cdor

cdor — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:26:44 +0000

I first posted comment #34 at Wolf Howling. He has excellent and, perhaps, less emotional expositions on this subject. I suggest a click on his above links.

By: cdor

cdor — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:03:47 +0000

I have a child and I would rather see my child burned to death in excruciating pain rather than see a murdering puke slammed against a wall that was designed to give under pressure. Because of my high moral values, I would be comfortable with my wife having to jump from an 80 story high window to escape the afformentioned excruciating death rather than have the perpetrator of the next mass murder causing these horrendous and unnecessary deaths swallow water until he cannot breath…than, of course allowed to breath again.

This is the position of moral superiority of John Liebowitz in his discussion with Cliff May (http://tinyurl.com/cx8vum)
and also Mr. Moran and those of you who agree with them. And really that is just fine with me, as long as it is your child and your wife and you. When it comes to my family, up yours (if you know what I mean). Is there a bridge too far, a method too morbid? Absolutely, but only because those methods are not necessary.

Mr. Obama could very easily have taken your same high moral position and given orders, which would have to have been obeyed, stopping any coersive interrogations without releasing the details of our ‘previously used’ techniques to our enemies. He chose instead to give our enemies a huge advantage without allowing the American people the ability to make an informed decision based on all of the facts. He only released half of the “memos”. What is in the other half? Five or six intimately involved high ranking and publicly known officials of Clinton, Bush, and Obama’s administration have stated that only after we coersed these psychopaths were we able to glean information that saved future horrendous deaths of innocents. Those innocents could be your or my child or wife.

The POTUS swears to protect all Americans. That is what Bush did. I only pray that Obama has a card or two left in his pocket, because it looks to me like he laid our entire hand on the table. If he expects to play poker successfully with the Islamofascists who are fervently looking to cause us as much misery as Allah empowers them to achieve with a poker hand on the table while theirs is close to their vest, we could all be in very serious trouble indeed. Furthermore, by exposing these mild, but apparently effective techniques, Obama may very well have forced his successor to go much further with much more cruelty in the future.

By: GW

GW — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:23:47 +0000

Rick, regarding the “ticking time bomb theory,” you might want to consider this article from the NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/19/opinion/israel-s-fine-line.html

By: mannning

mannning — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:14:37 +0000

A good addition, busboy. Your rule says “do the job by the book, or it will blow up in your face.” I like that rule! Prudence is a virtue that most conservatives value, along with justice, temperance, and fortitude, of course.

By: GW

GW — Fri, 01 May 2009 03:58:55 +0000

Hello Rick. I find that on issue of politics and conservatism, you are an invaluable resource. But I just cannot disagree with you any more strongly on this issue. Indeed, your essay above has driven me to write two posts in response, one defining what I see as the applicable moral parameters, a second responding to your arguments in this post. They are too long to post here, but if you care to read them:

http://wolfhowling.blogspot.com/2009/04/moral-confusion-at-rightwing-nuthouse.html
http://wolfhowling.blogspot.com/2009/04/moral-ethical-prudential-considerations.html

Hope all is well.

By: busboy33

busboy33 — Fri, 01 May 2009 01:36:20 +0000

@ manning:
If there is such as thing as the appropriate procedure for torture, that is it. That’s what the government should do.
I suppose it comes down to faith in the government. The Legislative branch SHOULD set spending by carefully and objectively assessing the pros and cons of all spending and income generating proposals. After open, through and objective debate on each merit, the representatives of the citizens should set the most frugal budget that practicality should allow. They SHOULD do it this way . . . but I don’t think that there’s anybody here that thinks they actually DO it that way. Heck, most of them admit they don’t even read the stuff they “debate”.

“The answer, then, is: despite high expectations, especially of saving lives, and despite a careful identification of the probable knowledge of the captive, we do not know going in what the result of any form of interrogation may be, and the possible failure to garner anything of importance is always present.”

Given the odds of torture potentially failing to yield worthwile results, and given the odds that it will be abused and inporperly implemened, how can we as a people give it the benefit of the doubt? Why are we assuming it was all for the greater good rather than assuming it was wrong?
I’ve got no problem with brutal, bloodthirsty murders being locked away in Gitmo for life. We SHOULD make “a careful identification of the probable [culpability] of the captive” . . . but we’ve released hundreds of people because we didn’t. They had one guy released when the tribunal finally (after years of detainment) finally laid out the basis for the “careful assessment” of his guilt — the killing of a subject in the Mideast. As soon as he found out what the accusations was, his advocate literally used a cell phone to call the “victim”, who was alive and well.

One of the bedrock principles of America (and I always assumed of Conservatism itself) was that we don’t trust the government do do what they should. Checks and balances are totally unnecessary if the players are doing what they should. But they don’t.

Accepting all of those procedures you proposed as absolutely, irrefutabily true, let me add one final caveat:

10. unless each and every one of these 9 rules is strictly adhered to, the system is guaranteed to not work properly.

It MIGHT be worth it to torture a prisoner. It could yield life-saving results. I could gab this guy walking down the street, torture them, and it might yield life-saving results . . . I might find out that he’s a serial killer. But I shouldn’t precisely because I haven’t followed those 9 steps. I don’t have objectively justifiable information sufficient to cross that line, despite the potential benefit of doing so. “I thought it was the right thing to do” will not save me if I’m wrong, and “I was afraid he was going to hurt me” might be understandable but its not going to absolve what heppened.

By: mannning

mannning — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:21:22 +0000

busboy raises a good point. If torture does not yield good information, then what is the point of it?

1. This boils dowm to how one selects the prisoner to be subjected to hard interrogation. It is obvious that few line soldiers possess much in the way of actionable intelligence. So, the first objective is to establish the stature of the prisoner in the ranks of the enemy.

2. For the current brand of terrorists, this is not an easy task, since they wear no uniforms, have no insignia, and their buddies will usually not give their leaders away. It thus takes time to ferret out who the bossman is from a group of captives. It may be necessary to use some limited hard methods simply to get to the bossman.

3. Once the bossman in identified, there is still the problem that even he may have very limited knowledge of the grander scheme of terrorist operations. What this leads to is a very careful development of the command structure of the terrorists over time and through many interrogations, and identification of those who must possess significant intelligence. In this, the low level bossman may be able to help a bit.

4. Slowly and painfully the command structure is defined, with or without hard interrogations, and the main leaders are targeted for capture.

5. It is when a “superboss” is captured that interrogations become prolonged and serious, since the probability of finding actionable intelligence is highest with such a person. Here is where hard interrogation methods may well be employed more fully.

6. Since much of the important information such a major leader possesses is extremely time sensitive, it is necessary to find out all he knows about imminant operations quickly, before the enemy reacts to his capture and changes things to minimize the impact on their operations.

7. The interrogations may succeed or fail to produce good intelligence, for quite a large variety of reasons. When they succeed, it can be spectacular; when they fail, it can be one of the most frustrating situations imaginable for all concerned. This is true regardless of the methods used.

8. The one thing that seems to be true is that the interrogators will find out over a long period of time most of the life history of the captive, where he has been during his lifetime, what he has been trained to do, and the names of just about everyone he knows. Whether any of this information leads to real actionable intelligence is problematical. Some bits of information may turn out to be useful when correlated with other sources.

9. The answer, then, is: despite high expectations, especially of saving lives, and despite a careful identification of the probable knowledge of the captive, we do not know going in what the result of any form of interrogation may be, and the possible failure to garner anything of importance is always present.

Yet, it is reported that significant intelligence has been forthcoming from our captives at Gitmo. I imagine that the detailed facts about this will not emerge for some considerable time.