Disclaimer:
This is certainly a hot-button topic.
Both sides might say something they don't really mean, but let's air this out, and I'm declaring
that nothing I say here "counts."  If you want to quote something I say here, I want the option
to retract because sometimes when it's life and death and it involves people close to you - things change.

So if you quote me - quote the above paragraph, too.

Bart,
Okay, so you insist that the Hitler/Atta question be addressed, before you'll consider arguments against torture.

On the subject of Hitler, my problem with torture is this: Hitler is a moot point.  We only know now what we know now,
because it's already happened.  Ethics discussions always require us to consider non-historical hypothetical situations.

It's easy to say this was good/bad with the benefit of 60 years of hindsight.  If the US had gotten their hands on Hitler in 1937,
what information would be have tortured out of him that would have stopped him from killing several million people?

Knowing what we know now, we might have gotten a little satisfaction out of torturing him, but what meaningful information
would we have gotten that wouldn't have been useless in the face of our actually having him in custody?  Having him would
have been more useful than torturing him for information.  It's not like the US didn't know at far early stages that Hitler was
exterminating people--it was reported in the New York Times, for pete's sake.  We knew, and we didn't do anything.

The other reason that it's moot is that we never do seem to get custody of guys like Hitler.
What we get are privates and corporals and sergeants, oh, and occasionally a captain.

Sarah, that's kinda cheating.
Obviously there's no such thing as time travel.
You were supposed to make the jump and answer the question instead of
looking for ways to discredit the question which enabled you to avoid it.
 

About Mohammed Atta: think about how many guys are named Mohammed Atta in the world.  (It's not that unusual
a name in the Arabic world.)  Now imagine that some unfortunate, well-meaning guy named Mohammed Atta
(I'll call him Mo), who happens to be a Saudi national, comes to the US and wants to learn to be a commercial pilot.

The FBI gets info that a guy named Mohammed Atta is planning to fly a plane into some important building.  So, they go
\round up all the Mohammed Attas they can find, including our innocent, well-meaning Mo, and proceed to torture them.
(Remember in the Terminator movie, where Gov. Gropenator goes around with a page out of the phonebook and kills
everyone he finds named Sara Connor?)

Only problem is, our friend Mo doesn't know shit about a plan to fly a plane into a building, but after a while he starts making shit up.
Two problems arise: we've tortured an innocent man and we've perhaps bought into a lot of bullshit that may distract us from actual,
relevant information that would help us prevent the crime.  Torture should not be used as a replacement for actual intelligence
gathering and investigation.  That's just stupid.

One final note: Whatever happened to the Golden Rule?  My husband is a former Marine who has been in combat zones.
I wouldn't want him tortured in captivity, therefore, I don't think anyone else ought to be either.
Sorry this is so long, Bart, but you said we had to address the Hitler/Atta question.
And I promise, as soon as I get a job, I'm sending you some money.  You have a great page.

Sarah
Tampa, FL
 

Sarah, this will probably cost me that donation - but you did it again.
You hired Sherlock Holmes to look for loopholes in the question which enabled you to
avoid answering the question. That tells me the questions, as asked, put you in a box that
would've forced you to agree with me so you changed the questions.

Let me try on more time, and instead of looking for ways to avoid it,
could you actually invest your mind in the question to try to answer it?

Let's say you work a drawbridge and you witness a man giving another man a bomb
to put on an airplane and the ONLY way to save the hundreds of people on that plane
was to open the bridge while the bomb delivery person was on it.  Would you?

Dang, I hope they're not  all  this tough  :)

Civilized societies sometimes have to take it on the chin from lowlifes who know no bounds of decency.

Whoa, you're saying you'd allow another 9-11 to take place to hang onto the "civilized" tag?
 

It's just part of the price you have to pay, and the moral burden you take on, when you become civilized.

If 9-11 is "just part of the price you have to pay," maybe the Republican should win this next election.
(Don't write - I'm just making a point.)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you just said we'd have more 9-11s under a Democrat than the GOP
and I'm afraid that's the fulcrum that will swing this election to Mr. Never-Elected.
 

Civilized societies don't engage in torture for two good reasons:
1. It's immoral, and

Whoa, in a war there are rules?
Isn't that why we lost the White House, the House and the Senate?
Because the GOP uses underhanded tactics and we refuse to?

Example: Gore told Democrats to stay away from Florida after the election while the GOP
flew in hundreds of "locals" so they could protest/stop the vote - and they succeeded.

2. It really doesn't work well.

I believe that's 100 percent false.
I just saw a statistic that only 5 percent of men won't break.
Today, they train pilots who become POWs to go ahead and tell what you know,
because there's no sense in holding out if you're going to eventually give in anyway.
 

Since #1 is a given, I'll address #2 with reference to Atta, Hitler, and any other villian
you'd care to name, including your smirking chimp.

Hmmm, are you a friend of Sarah's?

First, when people are tortured, they're likely to say anything you want them to say, even if it's not true.

No.
If I have a terrorist and I want to know which flight has the bomb, I would torture him
until he gave me the correct number. Those stats say 95 percent will talk, and that flight
will land safely instead of blowing up Lockerbie-style. How can you say there's no value
in saving the lives of, say, 200 people?
 

Second, fanatics and intensely loyal people resist torture for a long time (check out Nazi torture
of resistance members in WWII). In fact, they often resist long enough to make their information
irrelevant -- i.e., you're still torturing Atta while the planes are hitting the towers.

Besides the stat I recently saw, I have nothing to refute that.
If the Air Force expects their pilots to crack, who are you betting on to remian silent?
 

Third, using torture encourages sadistic people and we should do all we can to discourage them.

I think that works in "normal" times, but not when it's life and death.
Do you remember the first Dirty Harry?

Harry knew the bad guy had buried the kidnapped girl underground, and he only had hours to break him.
He did break the guy, but the purp was set free because they tortured the confession out of him.
If that was your daughter, you'd wear your "civilized" sign proudly at her funeral rather than
save her life and admit you aren;t as civilized as you would like to be?
 

That said, if some fiend had my wife or daughter buried alive, let's say, with only a few hours of air, and if
that fiend was in my custody, I'd torture the life out of him, if necessary, to save them. But that's because
it's personal. Me against him. Outside my personal realm, all due respects to the 9-11 dead, it's just statistics.

Wow! I swear to Koresh I didn't read ahead - that was spooky.

It seems we're closer than I originally thought. I've said a lot of times that Dukakis blew his only chance
when he said he wouldn't want the man who hypothetically raped and mudrdered his wife to be executed.
That told America that a Democrat can't be trusted with the presidency.  It took Clinton's approval of
the death penalty and and pictures showing him hunting with a rifle to calm those fears.

People die every day from bad, stupid and evil things, but we're not justified in torturing people on the
off-chance (and it is just an off-chance) that we'll find out something in time to prevent a tragedy.

Not too far down the slippery slope of condoning official torture, we find some zealot inserting needles
under Bart's fingernails, trying to find out if he knows of any imminent threats against George (Hoho-haha-ho,
you've got to be kidding! That ignorant piece of slime is really your president?) Bush.

Socially Hostile to Interrogation with Torture
 

I'm left with much confusion.
You said you'd kill to save your family, but others can't?
That's what I heard, but it might not be what you wrote.

Torture - is it safe?

Bart,

 I agree, "imminent" is a crux.  I would imagine that in 1937 not many predicted Hitler's acts of genocide
"imminent" and obviously the FBI and this administration didn't expect the threat by Atta "imminent".

 But another crux is the uncertainty of "knowing".  What if bush, "knowing" Iraq possessed WMD used
 torture to try to find them?  Have you ever seen the movie "Marathon Man"?  The character played by
 Dustin Hoffman has no clue what is going on but the character played by Lawrence Olivier thinks he
 does and keeps drilling away on his un-anesthetized teeth and asking "Is it safe?"

 Steve
 

Steve, that's true.
The danger is being "sure," then taking life-and-death action and killing an innocent man.
Two kids on a bus could be making plans to "shoot up the place" and actually be talking
about their tactics playing a PlayStation2 game - I agree and admit that is a crux.

This is similar to using a firearm.
I carry a Glock in my car, and if I see a man slapping a woman, I'm not going to jump out
waving it because it's not my place and "slapping" isn't death-imminent. In that case, I'd dial
911 and tell the cops to hurry over.

But...

Let's say the man knocks her out then starts beating her head with a rock.
At that point, there's no time to wait for the cops - I'd have a life-and-death decison to make.

As a rule, unless I'm inside my house or a hotel room, The Baby doesn't come out.

Sidebar: I nearly fainted when I saw Marathon Man.
               That, and the chainsaw scene from Scarface.

Bart,

You assume that torture will work. But there is an alternate scenario. Let's say we think something big will happen tomorrow,
and we arrest someone like Atta, but he's somewhat inured to pain and skilled at giving disinformation under torture. So we
raise the alert level to "arrest-and-torture-suspicious-Muslim-foreigners purple", haul in everyone we can find who Atta-boy
has associated with in the last year and start torturing them. We know that people under torture tend to say what they think
the torturers want to hear whether it's true or not, but this is an emergency so we do it anyway and hope. Still, after 24 hours
we unfortunately have nothing to go on but Atta's disinformation and our own suspicions as regurgitated by the torturees.
So either a) another building comes down or b) it was just a mistake. But in either case, we have blood on our hands.

Ed, I didn't say we should go Ashcroft-crazy and torture every guy with brown skin.
I'm talking about certainty of guilt and 3,000 certain dead.
 

Efficacy problems aside, Do we really want the US to become another probable-cause-torture-chamber country?
And why draw the line with foreigners? Why not torture US citizens suspected of any kind of complicity? Why not truth serum?
And LSD? and every other mind-raping drug in the medicine chest? Speaking of rape, do any of these suspects have daughters?
And why wait until purple alert? In fact, forget the color codes, terrorism will always be with us, so we'll always be justified.
And isn't any form of dissent probable cause?

What you're describing is a nightmare.
9-11 was a nightmare.
One must balance the nightmares and make a decision.
 

Is it really the case that all it takes for us to jettison our standards of decency is that someone else does? Once we've crossed
the ethical Rubicon can we ever go back? Can we honestly say we are moral when we are always prepared to do evil in the
service of a higher good? Has anyone in the history of the world ever done evil without claiming it was for a greater good?

I dislike black and white thinking, but I keep coming back to the following simple dilemma.

    Once they attack us, we will fight back with all morally defensible fervor, but never using techniques we all know to be evil, like torture.
    The reason we are better than our enemies is we don't do evil things. If we did the evil things they do, we would be as evil as they are.

    Once they attack us, all standards of decency are suspended. Our survival is at stake. But don't worry, after we vanquish them using any
    and all methods, we'll somehow pull back, re-adopt our old standards of decency, and become the good guys once again. At least, until
    the next sufficiently threatening evil comes along. We can switch back and forth as often and easily as we turn a light on and off.

I wish there were a third choice, but don't see it.
Given the above options, I believe we must choose the first one, even at the risk of our own survival.

Ed, I'm trying to keep an open mind, but when you say, "even at the risk of our own survival,"  that makes me want to vote for Bush.
We need to avoid all talk that would make Ol' Bart want to vote for Bush.

It is cold comfort to realize that if a choice is moral, it is often the harder choice. Yet it must be chosen or we don't get to call ourselves
a moral people. If you choose survival at all costs, you're just a survivor -  there's nothing noble about it. You're no better than a
victorious species of insect in the grand evolutionary drama.

Ed P
 

Ed, aren't we the country who dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima?
Then waited three days and dropped another one on Nagasaki?

We'd arguably be speaking German or Japanese if America thought like you.
Our history has some ugly spots, but we're still alive.

 Bart, you wrote

>  I think torture is rarely justified, but if we had apprehended Mohammed Atta
>  on September 10th, and we knew something BIG was scheduled for the next day,
>  you'd stick with your "torture is wrong - period" principles and let 9-11 happen?

 Thanks for having the balls to say that.  I've been thinking the same as I hear all these politicians
 say how absolutely unacceptable this treatment was, in any circumstances.  Especially the lying sons
 of bitches like Rumsfeld who authorized it (according to ever-reliable Hersh).  I've been thinking:
 I'm uncomfortable with this, but if torture will, in very special circumstances, save a few thousand
 lives, then - and only then - it's legitimate; it's acceptable to me.

 The flip side of it is twofold: it's bound to get out of control (as it obviously did at Abu Ghraib,
 reaching prisoners who didn't deserve it, delivered by MPs who didn't have the training or authority
 to deliver it), and it tells the world that it's OK; that is, if we're ever willing to apply torture we legitimize
 its use by others. Pandora's box or slippery slope, I guess.  So, on that basis, I'm willing to accept a
 policy that it is never ever done, not because it's absolutely wrong (I think it would have been right
 in Atta's case), but because the overall harm is worse that the overall benefit.  But I could go either way.

 The thing is, this "shocked, I tell you, shocked" reaction on the part of all the politicos is simplistic crap.
 Thanks for cutting through it.

 Peace,
 --Carl

Time and time and time again the talking heads on the various Entertainment News Channels,
including a few senators, overlook the "primary" issue on the Iraq abuse scandal.

The Red Cross (ICRC) and others have reported that up to 90% or more of the prisoners
are not "insurgents" but innocent people swept up in a network of arrests.

You want to take al-Zawqari (if he's still alive) behind closed doors, shake 'em up, stick a
broomstick up his a**, force him to masterbate, etc, etc, do so (leave the cameras at home).
Not many would complain.

But when you take an 'innocent' person, and subject him/her to sodomy, beatings, intimidation
and abuse, well, that is the work of facists, plain and simple.

JJ
Auburn, AL
 

JJ, I agree.
We've seen Bush giggle when talking about killing people and we know he's a f-ing madman.
But if Bill Clinton ordered somebody tortured - I would generally support him.

This is of course, a false question. You can't know what anyone will do in the future with certainty.
You could just as easily, and just as impossibly, meet Hitler in 1937 and convince him that Jews are
just regular folks and change his attitude toward them, rather than fantasizing about a car bomb.

Dude, this is a 50 year old question.
I fully realize there's no such thing as time travel - even for Catholics!
The question is meant to provoke thought, to get people to draw lines.
If one is undecided about stopping Hitler that says something.
 

This Greater Good type of argument is often used to justify crimes against people. Greater Good was
used by Poindexter, North and gang for criminal behavior in Central America and Iran. It is a type of
logic used to justify violence rather than reasonable solutions to conflict. Violence begets violence.
It's really pretty simple.

--Swami
 

No, it's not simple.  Calling it simple is simple.
Obviously hypothetically, if I was to rape and kill your wife, burn down your ranch and steal your children,
would you say, "Go in peace, my brother, because violence only begets violence."

No, you'd hunt me down and kill me.

Bart, I'm surprised at you.

This isn't Se7en or 24, this is real life.
Torture does not get good information.
Intelligence professionals have been saying this for years:
You get garbage from torture.

I have not heard that before, and it's my opinion it's not accurate.
 

What on earth makes you think that if you had tried to torture
Mohammed Atta prior to 9/11, he wouldn't have lied?

G. Gordon Liddy notwithstanding, if you duct tape a man to a chair
and use a Bic lighter on him, he's going to give it up all his secrets.
Atta could lie all he wanted, but his "bad weekend" would continue
until we found all his insane co-conspirators with the box cutters.
 

This stuff works great in the movies, and it makes for great cinema
if it's done well, but they're movies.

Your pal,
Avedon
 

I don't understand why you'd say that.
Can someone cite a case where torture failed to work?

I'm not talking about torturing a man ignorant of the right answer.
I'm talking about a man with a secret who refuses to tell it.
 

No hard feelings...

Hey Bart!

No, I wouldn't torture anyone under any circumstances.

Tom, I'm guessing it would be more accurate to say you've never been in that position,
and can't imagine circumstances under which you would ever torture a man, but to say
you'd never do it seems very illogical.  Finding your child's kidnapper, for example...
 

If you take Hitler out, some other nut (who might have been smarter) creates Nazi Germany.
Or the Soviet Union (another mess we created) turns into an unstoppable juggernaut
(which is the premise of the game Red Alert if I'm not mistaken).

That's true.
That's a valid point that Star Trek made many times.
They'd go back in time and fix something only to have no Federation when they returned.
 

If you take Atta out on September 10, the rest of the jackals are still in place and 9-11 still happens.

...unless he's tortured into giving up the plan.
 

Better for your example to get rid of him in the early 90's and possibly stop the OKC bombing as well
(if  you buy into the theory that McVeigh got some help from Atta's posse).  And it probably still wouldn't
have made a difference because there's always another idiot waiting to do the same thing.

Torture is torture and always wrong.  It rarely produces anything but sadistic pleasure for the torturers.
If you are going to do that to me, why should I tell you what you want to know?  So you can kill me
(if you say you're going to 'make it stop' in the middle of something like that, that's what I'd be thinking)?
Better for me (as the torturee) to feed you BS and be happy that I helped the cause one more time.

Tom
 

Tom, I understand where you're coming from, that's why this debate opened with,
"I think torture is rarely justified."

Bart:

Sometimes it appears that you are one of the good guys, but some of the positions you take put you
in some really scary company.   For example, torture is "rarely" justified?  Give me a break.
Maybe Sean Hannity or Michael Savage could use you on their shows - these fascists say the same thing!

One thing you can say about me is that I'm not a "cookie cutter" liberal.
As stated earlier on this page, Clinton got elected in part, because he was a pro-death penalty liberal
who was photographed holding a rifle, meaning he wasn't going to be another Mondale or Dukakis
 

Let's see, the four greatest murderers in human history were:  Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Saddam.

I doubt Saddam belongs on that list, but please continue...
 

(Political killings in China in the past century are now coming to light, and we may know more in the
 future about these butchers as well.)

What elements do these four dictators have in common?  Political imprisonment, repression of rights, torture,
and mass murder.  It probably started slowly in each of these dictatorships, a little torture, a few executions,
and a few political prosecutions.  Eventually, these practices all evolved into mass murder of millions of people.

I believe you might be saying torture is a tool that is very often handled without just cause.
 

As for the two false premises that you insist respondents address regarding torture, i.e., Atta and Hitler,
each of these are easily and logically defeated in making the intrinsic moral case that all torture is wrong.

Cool!
I love a good tangle!

First, with regard to Atta, if you knew what his plans were you could just stop the plans, period.
If you do not "know" what the plans are, you are only guessing.  (Kind of like George Bush's pre-emptive
war strategy - we think he has weapons, so let's invade and worry later about the truth, after we have killed
thousands of civilians.)

I believe you are pre-supposing conditions that might exist.
Let's say Atta skipped out on his rent. His landlord seizes his computer and finds evidence that Atta
and 19 others are going to do evil things the next day. The cops find Atta and put the screws to him
to give up the other 19 and which flights they'll be on.
 

So what are you going to do, start torturing everyone who might have a plan to attack us?

Why have you chosen to abandon common sense with that odd personal attack?
I'm not looking for the "fun" or torturing "everyone who might have a plan."
I'm talking about saving 3,000 lives when we have the means to do that.
 

We just tried that, in one of Hussein's prisons in Iraq, and look at the results.  Hundreds of innocent Iraqi men
have been tortured and some killed.  If we weren't already hated in the world, we are now.  And what has already
been one response? Al Qaeda has used this as one reason to behead an American.  Where does it stop?
 

"Where does it stop?" is not an answerable question.
Remembering that the word "rarely" means something, I'm trying to save lives.
 

With regard to Hitler, first of all you imply assassination here which is not the same thing as torture.

Non-sequitor.
We're talking about preventing a greater harm by doing that which seems extreme at first glance.
 

Second, it is clear that the Israeli "pre-emptive" assassinations are not working - killing the leaders
of Hamas only leads to new leaders arising and retaliation by the Palestinians.

Neither of us can speak to the irrationality of that situation.
I'm talking about preventing 9-11, not getting to factions that have warred for 2 millenia to stop.
 

Third, your premise in itself is fallacious.
Namely, your premise assumes that one could travel back in time.
Since this cannot occur, your premise cannot be logically refuted.

You are wasting words and time by stating the obvious.
Is that really the first time you've heard that question?
I realize I'm old, but I've heard that at least 100 times in the last 40 years.
It's a rhetorical fork in the road designed to steer your argument one way or the other.

Tell me, when you see a Superman movie, do you stand up in the theater and say
"This is a farce because no man can fly?"

For example, if one could travel back in time, numerous possibilities arise and why would one
simply not travel back to the beginning and prevent Eve from eating that apple?

By any chance, ...are you Catholic?

But, since you raised the rhetorical issue with specific regard to Hitler and the Holocaust, here is the rhetorical response.
Anti-Semitism has been an evil in Europe since the Dark Ages and has been especially prevalent in Germany.  Adolf Hitler
had extremely broad nationalist support in Germany and most of his speeches, plans, and polices were written, prepared,
or implemented by a well established and evil regime - the so-called "Third Reich".  After all, you can't launch massive land
invasions of Eastern Europe, Russia, and France without the support of a few million people.  One man alone cannot slaughter
millions.  At the start of this process it is quite possible that the "pre-emptive" assassination of Hitler would have created a
cult figure or martyr and the war could have been even longer and more bloody.  For example, Hitler claimed the reason
he invaded his neighbors was that he needed to avenge German losses from World War I.  Well, what started World War I?
The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.  One man being killed helped incite two bloody wars that probably killed over 50 million people.

OK.

No Bart, you cannot become evil to fight evil.  You can only resist evil.
If we become torturers we will eventually be tortured, its called divine justice.

Bob in San Diego
 

Bob, is the world really that simple?
I've never shot a man because I've never had a reason to shoot a man.
But if I HAD to, I would, and I think you would, too

I think 9-11-1 was a "had to" situation and if you disagree - that's OK.

Sidebar:
Imagine the subscribers I'll lose today...

  Care to comment?

 Note: If you have a strong opinion about torture but fail to address the Atta/Hitler question
            I will not print your e-mail..

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