Glenn A Knight
In my study
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
The Torture Debate - Summarized
John Dickerson has a nice way of summarizing major issues by presenting the major arguments on both sides. He calls it "Debate-o-matic." Here's the example from Friday, April 24, on the torture issue: This Week in Torture. Once you decide which side you're on, you can use some of these arguments on your opponents. Or, in another scenario, you can picture yourself using these arguments on your friends, and see how you like the image.
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3 comments:
Glenn:
Dickerson writes: "And much of the information was already public, so future terrorists are not learning anything new."
Part of this statement is correct but the important part is patently false. The memos specifically spell out the outer limits American officials are allowed to reach. To cite one example, the memos inform us that no dunking in a waterboarding session may last longer than 40 seconds. This is critical information for training a would-be terrorist that knows how to count to 40. Any argument to the contrary is nonsense. This sort of information was not publicly known before the release of the memos.
It is one thing to argue we shouldn't be waterboarding people. It is quite another to claim that sharing specific (previously unknown) procedures with your enemy is of no value to him.
Opponents of waterboarding are on much firmer ground in opposing the procedure on moral grounds - for those that believe in the existence of objective, inarguable, universal, and unchangeable morality. The "they knew it anyway" argument adds nothing to the debate, except possibly a good reason to distrust the sincerity or judgment of waterboarding opponents.
Regards,
Zabeli
It is true that knowing the rules and limits placed on our interrogation techniques might help the people designing something like our own SERE program, i.e., training programs for people likely to be subjected to interrogation.
I would have three reservations about that, though. First, from the waterboarding of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed some 183 times, and from some other hints, there is the possibility that the interrogators would exceed the limits specified in the rules.
Second, no matter how well trained one is, there is a major difference between training and the real thing. At least in generally, your trainers are not willing to see you die, nor do they want you to be permanently damaged. You know that, but you cannot have the same confidence about your real-life tormentors.
Third, now that the U.S. has withdrawn all the permissions and gotten out of the torture business, there is no way to know what the guidelines might be if we were to find it necessary to revisit these techniques.
I'd like to mention one other thing. When the Miranda and Escobedo cases were decided forty years ago, police all over the United States declared that we might as well give up and let the criminals take over. If we couldn't question people without advising them of their rights and allowing them to have a lawyer present, we'd never again get a confession or useful information. It hasn't worked out that way. The police worked out ways to catch and convict criminals under the new rules.
Because of that, I take with a grain of salt arguments that the prohibition of torture will hamstring us in our fight against terrorism.
Hi Glenn ... returning to your blog for a moment, in response to your email.
You ask if "other countries hate you" (the US). I think it is rather that there are certain aspects of the US that are distasteful. In particular, any reasonably priced coffee bought along the west coast south of Santa Barbera, and "burgers" from White Castle on Long Island, come to mind. How you-all can convince yourselves that you are ingesting food is beyond my comprehension.
If you wish to draw analogies to my reaction to the US's response to the "torture test", please feel free. In fact, it would be great if you-all felt free, not slaves to the economy, or whomever you fear.
I think it is important to conduct a process which establishes who did and said what - ie to determine culpability and turn over the rocks - but that is somewhat distinct from the pursuit of retribution, or punishment to discourage future offenders.
A resource I ran across many years ago, in browing among the library stacks, was the Nuremberg Tribunal proceedings (42 vols, immense). It is now online, via Library of Congress. Here is the URL:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/NT_major-war-criminals.html
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