Quote:
Originally posted by Cletus Miller
Okay. I don't necessarily disagree with you with respect to bona fide Al Qaeda members/operatives/whatever (e.g. KSM). But what about someone who isn't, but was arrested/captured based on either bad information or wrong place/wrong time? With your basic stance on this, how do you avoid torturing the genuinely uninvolved?
Or do we have to torture anyone who might be linked to Al Qaeda (by proximity or bad information or whatever) in order to establish who is and who isn't? Doesn't torture become counter productive (even for the purposes you state) if used too broadly?
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That is the trade off. If you torture people you are going to end up torturing innocent people. That is unavoidable. Just like if you decide to jail people, you are going to jail innocent people, or if you employ the death penalty you are going to put to death innocent people. Our society has decided that jailing people is necessary for the good of society even though we are going to end up jailing innocent people.
Imprisoning someone is really a form of torture. What seems so strange to me is that everyone admits that certain forms of coercive techniques can get people to divulge information they don't want to otherwise divulge. Even these interrogators that argue that torture doesn’t work, admit that they use coercive techniques to get information they just claim that what the coercive techniques they use are not torture, and the more extreme techniques other people use are torture (and of course those don't work). "We use water boarding, which works, but water boarding is not torture, but other stuff that is torture does not work."
Of course torture, like anything else, can be screwed up so it ends up not working. The opportunity for abuse is immense, and sadists will gravitate towards being interrogators just like Pedophiles will gravitate towards being priests. I think torture that causes permanent physical damage is always unnecessary.
You should always use as little torture as is necessary. But if you have captured someone you are pretty sure that is a high level Al Qaeda operative that you have strong suspicion they have lots of valuable information, I am for giving our interrogators a lot of leeway in doing what they feel is necessary to get the information. Of course giving our interrogators this leeway will open up chances for abuse and will lead to some innocent people getting tortured. But I think it is worth the trade off.
The enemy’s number one asset and their biggest vulnerability is secrecy. They can't operate if they can't keep secrets. One of the best ways to get to these secrets is getting them out of captured operatives who won't want to give the secrets up, but I am fully convinced they can be coerced into giving up those secrets. Almost every man has a breaking point, even a religious zealot.
In more conventional wars the key to success is not capturing their undercover operatives and getting them to reveal information. Doing that can be helpful, but it would not be the key to our success and the cause of their downfall. In the war on terror, secrecy and obtaining information are the most important weapons in the war. In addition, our torturing their operatives is not going to make them treat our people any worse.
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