654 thoughts on “Canine Princes in Amber 5/22”

1. @Maximillian: “…who did the predecessor resemble?”

   Wait, you missed all this?

2. Max : Uh, folks- I don’t want to be ele Kratman-apologist here, but can we avoid insulting people’s religious beliefs?

   Well, there’s your problem.

   I know people who are Catholics. Hell, I’m related to them. They’re good people.

   I’m not insulting Catholicism. I’m not even insulting Krapman’s claim to be a Catholic.

   I’m attacking his apparent belief that his creepy little apologism for torture is somehow compatible with his claim to being a Catholic.

   Now, my argument on this is based on an appeal to authority. But as appeals to authorities go, bringing in the Pope with regards Catholicism is a pretty good one. If you’re a Catholic and the Pope says the thing you’re so desperately trying to justify is a mortal sin, then you might want to consider either your support for it or your claim to belong to the religion.

3. And, of course, the fact that rubbing his nose in the contradiction reduces him to inane babbling is icing on the cake.

4. Myself, I think that torturing people is a mortal sin, that all forms of torture should be condemned, and that Christians should collaborate towards its abolition and support the victims and their families.

   This Christian adamantly agrees. We’re supposed to be better than that.

5. They can be livid, or they can pretend to be. The problem is that it’s either inanity or hypocrisy because, as mentioned, the threat of torture is still out there to help them.

6. Oh, XS, am sure everyone present is just overwhelmed with your profound Christianity.

   “And lying she knew was a sin, a sin;
   Yes, lying she knew was a sin.”

7. SS, can you come up with the refutation you found most persuasive?

8. I do wonder, though, how many people could honestly say they’d never employ torture if it meant saving a loved one or even their most beloved. I suspect those who say they never would are just lying to themselves, while for those who admit they would, “We’ve established what you are; now we’re just haggling over the price.”

9. Maximillian on May 28, 2015 at 11:22 pm said:
   @Steven Schwartz “Saying “We did everything we could do” might be a salve for the emotions, but it’s not likely to be effective in the real world — and you will have given away a bit of what, in theory, separates you from the enemy you’re fighting in order to get it. There’s a reason that the French reviled Paul Aussaresses, even as they debated whether the guilt should be more evenly spread around.”

   Well, because I am almost pathologically compelled to be the Devil’s advocate, I will say that is easy for the modern French to say that they deplore his work. Not as easy for the contemporary people to say.

   Having said that, have any of you watched the Criterion Collection release of The Battle of Algiers? That was a fascinating view of the conflict, which *appeared* to be from a neutral point of view.

   I have not only re-watched it recently, but I have read extensively around the real facts. Pontecorvo’s film is indeed nuanced and as balanced as possible (although he doesn’t deny that he had a position). But it’s still fiction. The real people who fought that war had diverging opinion on the effectiveness of torture (and indeed, of each other). Massu did, by the end of his life, say that he could have achieved the same results without recourse to torture. Darius Rejali in an article on Salon says that actually, the intelligence that allowed the French to win the Battle of the Casbah was gained by means that had nothing to do with torture. To quote:

   And the French had an awesomely efficient informant system of their own. Massu took a census in the casbah and issued identity cards for the entire population. He ordered soldiers to paint numbers on each block of the casbah, and each block had a warden — usually a trustworthy Algerian — who reported all suspicious activities. Every morning, hooded informants controlled the exits to identify any suspects as they tried to leave. The FLN helped the French by calling a general strike, which revealed all its sympathizers. What made the difference for the French in Algiers was not torture, but the accurate intelligence obtained through public cooperation and informants.

   Conversely,

   Torture forced “loyal” Algerians to cooperate, but after the battle, they either ended their loyalty to France or were assassinated. Torture forced a politics of extremes, destroying the middle that had cooperated with the French. In the end, there was no alternative to the FLN. As Paul Teitgin, the police prefect of Algiers, remarked, “Massu won the Battle of Algiers, but that meant losing the war.”

   I wasn’t there, so I have to trust the historians, but I have read Henri Alleg’s The Question and I could not help but notice that a great deal of effort and man-hours went into not making a history professor reveal a totally trivial piece of information, about an organisation that had nothing to do with the FNL anyway.

   One book that I beg everybody to read as I have done recently is “None of us were like this before” which has a lot to say about that, and about the consequences of torture on American soldiers and the people who originally were on their side in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also has copious amounts of the same horror and disbelief by professional interrogators for what bloody amateurs who had watched a lot of 24 were doing.

10. “I do wonder, though, how many people could honestly say they’d never employ torture if it meant saving a loved one or even their most beloved.”

    I could be wrong, but I think Tom’s approach here is “I’m not a good Catholic, but rather than try to become a better one, I’m going to suggest everyone else is a bad one too so I don’t look so bad.”

11. …and have an extra for my sins. Grumpy.

12. As an ex-Catholic, I would like to say that torture is incompatible with being a honest Catholic, but it is clearly not. I wish. I do think it is somewhat incompatible with being a good human being, but Tom is right that between saving your honour and saving lives, you should probably save lives. I just don’t think that historically that’s what torture has been used for and I very, very much doubt it is of any use in pursue of worthy goals.

    But if you want to terrorise people and obtain false confessions, yep, torture is the way to go.

13. In fact, the Catholic Church did not abolish the capital punishment until 1969. It has so far, as far as I know, never issued a blanket condemnation of the use of force, up to and including the taking of life, and of course it has a long and inglorious history of blessing armies. As far as I know, the only religious community that is unambiguously and radically against the use of military force is the Quakers.

    (Most of my familiarity with how and where torture has been employed and to what ends comes from a long and depressing militancy in Amnesty International.)

14. Also, best book about torture hands down, much better than Rejali’s Torture and Democracy, is John Conroy’s Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture alas out of print, but easy to find second hand. Conroy spent most of his life investigating torture in the Chicago Police Department. It is illuminating but very depressing reading.

    And indeed Tom is right: my take home message from all the books about torture I have read is “there but for the grace of God go I”: torturers are perfectly ordinary people who did what they did because they thought it was the right thing to do. The ones that end up talking about it are, of course, also the ones that paid the price for it, and it is not a pretty price, although Conroy points out that their victims had it a lot worse and, overwhelmingly, saw no justice done. Or if you want the whole incredibly depressing conclusion:

    “Although the men who tortured Jim Auld and the other hooded men were known to the authorities, none were ever punished. The politicians and army officers who gave the orders for the torture and protected those who carried it out did not suffer a moment in jail or even a moment’s threat of indictment.
    The men from the Nahal Brigade who broke bones on the orders of Colonel Meir were also never called to account. Meir did suffer emotionally during his long trial, and the penalty ultimately imposed on him diminished his pension significantly, but he did not spend a single day in jail. His notoriety subsequently proved to be an asset, and he is now more comfortable than he was before the men from Hawara and Beita where so viciously clubbed.
    In Chicago, Commander Burge lost his job and Detective O’Hara and Yucaitis served fifteen-months suspensions, but none of them were charged with any crime. Their colleagues at Area 2 who, according to Office of Professional Standard investigator Goldstone, had participated in systematic abuse, were never called before any judge, jury, or hearing officer to answer for their crimes.
    It takes no genius to see a pattern here, and that pattern is repeated throughout the world: torturers are rarely punished, and when they are, the punishment rarely corresponds to the severity of the crime.

    [ ]
    For the victims of the Area 2 detectives, for the Palestinians tortured by the Israelis, for the Northern Irish tortured by the British security forces, for most torture victims, there can be little hope of help from their fellow citizens or outsiders. A few will be rescued by the calmer of human rights activists and the chain of events that that calmer initiates, but for most, any rescuing done will be done by the victims themselves, using their own internal resources, shoring up themselves and their fellow victims as best they can during the process, and perhaps – if they or their families are very resourceful – getting some psychological help if they are released. Only a tiny fraction of working torturers will ever be punished, and this who are can expect their punishment to be slight compared to their crime.
    It seems a very small leap to argue that torture is the perfect crime. There are exceptions, yes, but in the vast majority of cases, only the victim pays.”

15. @Anna – Thank you

16. @TK This document contains most of the major objections, in a cogent form, with links for support.

    “The problem is that it’s either inanity or hypocrisy because, as mentioned, the threat of torture is still out there to help them.”

    I do find it interesting to see how quick you are to throw fellow veterans under the bus, as it were, by dismissing their concerns. The gentleman I spoke to said that it was harder, specifically *because* the torture had been practiced. The threat *did not* make it easier. Clear?

    “I do wonder, though, how many people could honestly say they’d never employ torture if it meant saving a loved one or even their most beloved.”

    As is pointed out in the above document, but I’ll summarize here: there are so many assumptions loaded into this statement that it’s a worthless thought experiment.

    1) Is torture their only choice?
    2) Are they good enough at it (or do they have people who are good enough at it readily to hand) that it can be guaranteed to work? And to work better than any other possible mechanism?
    3) Are they sure that it is worth the larger cost? (Just as an example, since we’re playing with the extremes of moral calculus here: Is it worth torturing two people to save one person, knowing that those two people’s families will take their revenge for the original torture? And how can we know they won’t?)

    “I suspect those who say they never would are just lying to themselves, while for those who admit they would, “We’ve established what you are; now we’re just haggling over the price.””

    And I suspect, with good reason, that people who present very extreme scenarios (like the ticking time bomb) in order to justify things that will be used under much less extreme scenarios (since, as the article linked above indicates, in order to justify the use of torture in the TTB scenario, you need to have, readily available, skilled professional torturers, far more likely to succeed than the interrogators we already have — are they to be trained (and how are they to be trained?) to sit around for their professional lives waiting for that one ticking time bomb?) have motivations beyond an abstract sense of “right” and “wrong” — they’re asking for permission to unlock the cabinet in which the weapons are stored, and using whatever rhetorical tool serves their purposes.

17. Kartman:Oh, XS, am sure everyone present is just overwhelmed with your profound Christianity.

    I doubt it. I’m not overly invested in what others think of me, which is why I don’t self-Google or pick fights with everyone that criticizes my work.

18. There is one objection to the “you would if it was yoir loved ones” scenario that I would like to make. Even granted that in a moment of extreme grief or anger I was driven to do something against my convictions and principles – advocate the death penalty, say, or approve torture – why should my actions in such moments of extreme emotion be any guide to me or anybody? The wisdom, rationality, morality, what have you of a behaviour should be considered with detachment and as much impartiality as one can muster, not in a fit of grief stricken rage.

19. Turn in the amateur headshrinker’s certificate you got with the five boxtops and SSAE, Glenn; no, that’s not it.

20. The cite to the original, Steven, not your excerpts. Certainly, you can point out what you found most persuasive.

21. @TK Does your webbrowser not follow links? Look at the first two words of my previous post.

    I do not keep bibliographic records of all articles I read; and, of course, some of my input came from conversations. The PDF I linked you to, above, will serve as a cogent presentation of the objections to the scenario.

22. Krapman : I do wonder, though, how many people could honestly say they’d never employ torture if it meant saving a loved one or even their most beloved.

    The answer to that is fairly simple and obvious – it’s what we do with killing people now. Enforce the law.

    If you think it’s necessary to employ torture to save a loved one, go ahead and torture – and then turn yourself in and accept arrest. If someone working for the government feels it is vital to torture a terrorist, then they should do it, document the process, and turn themselves in for mandatory prosecution. Each and every case of torture should be prosecuted, and any mitigating circumstances should be presented as just those – not justifications – in front of a jury.

    What you want, Krapman, is not the ability to torture people. What you want is the ability to torture people with impunity – the dream of every petty bully and would-be tyrant throughout history. You don’t have the guts to face up to responsibility for your actions.

    And, as we’ve seen so well, the moment you accept justifications for torture for the most extreme reasons, the process starts being used for more and more reasons until it gets used for every reason and no reason. America is now a country that routinely accepts the torture of prisoners – and it’s thanks to filthy cowards like you and yours that it bears that stain that it can never get rid of.

23. I will not fill up blog space here with speculation so far off theme, but I have presented one thought-experiment in torture over on my own blog, if people want to continue the discussion.

    @CPaca: “– and it’s thanks to filthy cowards like you and yours that it bears that stain that it can never get rid of.”

    I want to make one, very minor, quibble. I don’t think we can get rid of what we have done; I think we can, with great effort, demonstrate to the world that we are not who we were — that we are better than that.

24. Steven Schwartz on May 29, 2015 at 1:48 pm said:

    @CPaca: “– and it’s thanks to filthy cowards like you and yours that it bears that stain that it can never get rid of.”

    I want to make one, very minor, quibble. I don’t think we can get rid of what we have done; I think we can, with great effort, demonstrate to the world that we are not who we were — that we are better than that.

    To be honest the US is not unique in this. I have very little patience with American exceptionalism – the US is not the worst or the best country in the history of humankind. Other countries have tortured prisoners, and prisoners of war, and innocent bystanders rounded up more or less at random. The French did in Algeria. The Italians did at Genoa not so long ago – and the Italian police has a long and grubby history of carelessly letting people drop from windows, smash themselves against walls, and so on. The Brits – well, let’s not even open that can of worms. And other countries have turned over a new leaf and prided themselves of being the shiny city on the hill.

    We’re all in this together. Well, we’re pretty much all better than North Korea, so that’s something, at least.

25. Yes, my eyes skipped right over your link, SS. My bad.

    I am very unpersuaded. I am unpersuaded by the characterization of the TTBS in the piece, by the “:debunking” of the assumptions, and by the emotional appeal it makes, itself.

    I don’t think the writer (hereinafter “him” or “his”) understands how torture is used (and for a cognate, note how the authors / drafters of the Ottawa treaty purporting to ban AP mines didn’t really understand what a mine is, or that to ban AP mines they’d have to ban explosives, plastic containers, sensitive chemicals, hand grenades, batteries, clothespins, plastic spoons, conductive wire, dud artillery and mortar shells….in short, ignorance doth not a cogent argument make).

    He’s right that it’s a thought experiment. Whether it engages emotions, generally, may be doubted. It doesn’t engage mine, in any case. But what it is, more importantly, is a thought experiment in the usefulness of torture when you can get fairly rapid feedback and confirmation. I am sure that was too icky to enter his mind, his mind being set on a particular agenda, largely because his own emotions were engaged, much as with the Ottawa Treaty, mentioned above.

    It is a pity, really, that he didn’t address imminence as a function not of time, but of time and harm. He did get the idea of time, and of the idea of numbers, but failed to join the two. I suspect that may be because he realized where that could lead, which is to say, for example, if you have a movement trying to develop a world scathing plague and expect success in 50 years, that just might be immanent enough. That he asks the questions, “how immanent” and “how much time” is good. That he never tries to answer reveals the agenda.

    Ultimately, though, all his “might nots” don’t really debunk “might,” as he intended. “Might” is still out there, and for enough harm, soon enough, “Might” just might be sufficient.

    You don’t have to believe that, of course, and I don’t really expect you to. What you, and the writer, ought consider though is the prospect of what happens if torture really is banned, indeed banned so thoroughly that the prisoner’s fear of it no longer operates, and we then have a nasty terrorist attack, in the megadeath range. I wouldn’t expect emotionally based bans to withstand the calls for torture then.

26. Anna, the loved ones scenario isn’t grief or anger based. It presupposes something like the scene in Dirty Harry, where he tortures the Scorpio Killer to get a kidnapped girl back. it doesn’t work, because the girl is already dead, but there’s no particular reason it shouldn’t have worked if she’d been alive.

27. “As far as I know, the only religious community that is unambiguously and radically against the use of military force is the Quakers.”

    Actually, Anna, historically there’s a certain amount of hypocrisy with the Quakers and the use of force. Once asked to donate money for ammunition, might have been during the Seven Years War, aka, here, “The French and Indian War,” they coughed up the cash, and wrote a very, very thin cover to make it seem that the cash was intended to buy food. Nobody was fooled.

    As for blessing armies, an army is a morally neutral tool. How it is used gives it or takes from it its morality, though even there its morality and those of the men who comprise it are not necessarily the same. In any case, the Kriegsmarine Captain seconded to 1st SS Panzer as a chaplain might be foolish, silly, or theologically beneath contempt in blessing Leibstandarte, but can the same be said for the chaplains of 1st Infantry and 29th Infantry Divisions, nearing the shore at Omaha Beach?

28. @TK:

    “I don’t think the writer (hereinafter “him” or “his”) understands how torture is used ”

    You say this — but give no reason to believe you, other than that “you think so”.

    “He’s right that it’s a thought experiment. Whether it engages emotions, generally, may be doubted.”

    GIven that it is used over and over again for rhetorical purposes, that is clearly one of the intents of the experiment. Indeed, you were the one who brought in the whole “What if it was someone you loved” — which is certainly an appeal to emotions.

    “. But what it is, more importantly, is a thought experiment in the usefulness of torture when you can get fairly rapid feedback and confirmation”

    The point of the original PDF is about the impracticality of the transference from the thought experiment to the real world. Which is what you’ve been trying to do by invoking it as an explanation for why we should torture.

    ” I am sure that was too icky to enter his mind, his mind being set on a particular agenda,”

    Given that he addresses timeliness of feedback and confirmation in Assumption #6, it was not “too icky” to enter his mind.

    “It is a pity, really, that he didn’t address imminence as a function not of time, but of time and harm. He did get the idea of time, and of the idea of numbers, but failed to join the two. for example, if you have a movement trying to develop a world scathing plague and expect success in 50 years, that just might be immanent enough. That he asks the questions, “how immanent” and “how much time” is good. That he never tries to answer reveals the agenda.”

    If you’ve got 50 years, you do not have a ticking time bomb that justifies torturing someone *now*. The fact that you consider it “immanent enough” betrays *your* agenda — that of normalizing torture, for whatever end.

    “What you, and the writer, ought consider though is the prospect of what happens if torture really is banned, indeed banned so thoroughly that the prisoner’s fear of it no longer operates, and we then have a nasty terrorist attack, in the megadeath range. I wouldn’t expect emotionally based bans to withstand the calls for torture then.”

    Indeed — as with so many other things, like large chunks of the Bill of Rights. The fact that you think the U.S.’s willingness to torture is what keeps us safe says a great deal, again, about your motivation and understanding.

    History has shown, over and over again, that torture breeds resistance — that torture breeds opposition to the torturers, who are willing to do a great deal of violence. I think it far more likely that the megadeaths will come because of the people we tortured.

29. Steven, be a little more careful. I don’t have any particularly good reason to suspect we’re competent enough or ruthless enough, now or over the past 14 years, to get much good from torture, nor have I suggested I thought so. No, my position is somewhat more theoretical than that.

    I think he doesn’t understand it because he gives no indication that he does understand it.

    When your enemy is already completely opposed to you, you may doubt that torture breeds resistance. Moreover, when your enemy’s propaganda arm accuses you of torture, and is believed, one doubts any further resistance merely because you act in accordance with his beliefs.

    No, Steven, if the potential harm is great enough, and other methods may not be enough, 50 years or 500 may justify torture…or may not. As I said, I don’t expect you to agree.

30. Anna, the loved ones scenario isn’t grief or anger based. It presupposes something like the scene in Dirty Harry, where he tortures the Scorpio Killer to get a kidnapped girl back. it doesn’t work, because the girl is already dead, but there’s no particular reason it shouldn’t have worked if she’d been alive.

31. “As far as I know, the only religious community that is unambiguously and radically against the use of military force is the Quakers.”

    Actually, Anna, historically there’s a certain amount of hypocrisy with the Quakers and the use of force. Once asked to donate money for ammunition, might have been during the Seven Years War, aka, here, “The French and Indian War,” they coughed up the cash, and wrote a very, very thin cover to make it seem that the cash was intended to buy food. Nobody was fooled.

    As for blessing armies, an army is a morally neutral tool. How it is used gives it or takes from it its morality, though even there its morality and those of the men who comprise it are not necessarily the same. In any case, the Kriegsmarine Captain seconded to 1st SS Panzer as a chaplain might be foolish, silly, or theologically beneath contempt in blessing Leibstandarte, but can the same be said for the chaplains of 1st Infantry and 29th Infantry Divisions, nearing the shore at Omaha Beach?

32. Oh, and look into the Jain, Anna.

33. “Steven, be a little more careful. I don’t have any particularly good reason to suspect we’re competent enough or ruthless enough, now or over the past 14 years, to get much good from torture, nor have I suggested I thought so. No, my position is somewhat more theoretical than that.”

    So, in other words, we shouldn’t be torturing now because we’re not competent enough or ruthless enough — and yet somehow, in the future, we’re supposed to develop sufficient competence and ruthlessness, in *case* we need it? Is that what you’re arguing?

    “I think he doesn’t understand it because he gives no indication that he does understand it.”

    Most people would consider a detailed explanation and argument against the hidden assumptions to be an indication of understanding. That you fail to is not his problem.

    “When your enemy is already completely opposed to you, you may doubt that torture breeds resistance. Moreover, when your enemy’s propaganda arm accuses you of torture, and is believed, one doubts any further resistance merely because you act in accordance with his beliefs.”

    And here we go back again with the torture-justifying hypotheticals. The world is not divided neatly into “Us” and “them” — and by using torture, we can reasonably suspect that we are driving people who might be neutral into the “them” camp — the experience of our recent GWB-created Terrorist Recruitment Drive in the Middle East shows that quite nicely, as does the increase in fervor and violence during, say, the Algerian War of Independence.

    Also, engaging in torture, if other people are not convinced of your need (and you have not provided any reason why anyone else should believe your judgments), you will alienate potential allies.

    “No, Steven, if the potential harm is great enough, and other methods may not be enough, 50 years or 500 may justify torture…or may not. As I said, I don’t expect you to agree.”

    That’s good, because I consider this a monstrous position, amounting to a blank check to torture — and you seem quite comfortable writing said check.

    I mean, really — “I don’t think we’re competent now, but we should be prepared to torture — and thereby develop the mechanisms to do so ruthlessly and competently — if the harm is potentially great enough 500 years in the future”?

    That’s what your words add up to. And it’s a pretty scary image, to say the least.

34. Didn’t say it wasn’t scary, SS. You should be afraid. Everyone should be afraid. But the proper response to fear isn’t to mimic the ostrich. The proper response to fear isn’t to lie to yourself, or to wrap yourself around comforting myths and pieties like a sailor around a tart’s leg after a year at sea. You can whine and snivel and nag and carp. You can try to ban this or that (hmmm…the human record on banning is, after all, so good…and how many slaves are in the world now?). None of it matters; if the threat is great enough, immanent enough, or has been acted on seriously enough, torture will be used without restraint and none of your nagging or carping will matter a damn, even if you can stop your righteousness from being undermined by idjits like Chewpaca.

35. “How it is used gives it or takes from it its morality, though even there its morality and those of the men who comprise it are not necessarily the same.”

    Actually, how it behaves also gives or takes from it its morality — an army which massacres civilians and prisoners is a less moral one than one that does not, for example.

    You may not agree with the validity or usefulness of Laws of War, but they do exist, and at times people have even attempted to follow them. It’s one of the things that people attempt to use as the differentiation between “armies”, “mobs”, and “terrorist groups”, for example. And one I wish we’d pay a bit more attention to.

36. I suspect I know a great deal more about them than you do, and support them – less the idiotic Protocols Additional – at least as much as you do.

    I took behavior generally as use. Now an army insufficiently disciplined that it cannot be controlled an behaves purely as it wishes isn’t an army at all, and whatever parts of it have broken loose from discipline have also broken loose from it.

37. By the way, SS, I didn’t address the other things you mentioned in your comment because there just seems to be no point. Neither of us is going to change position a jot for anything the other can say, and few if any others will either. it is, in short, just needless cruelty to innocent electrons.

38. Wow Tom!

    an army is a morally neutral tool. How it is used gives it or takes from it its morality,

    Did you just use the “Guns don’t kill people” argument about armies? Should we be prosecuting George Bush for all the abuses and excesses of the US armed forces in Iraq? After all if the army is neutral responsibility must lie with the Commander in Chief.

39. Tom, i think i saw Dirty Harry but it was a long time ago, and I don’t remember the plot. Good point about the Jain.

    I would dispute that an army is a neutral tool if you take seriously the commandment Thou Shalt Not Kill. That is, if you take it in its most rigorous and absolute literal meaning. I don’t, and I still have problems with the idea of an army.

    As for the “you would if it was done do your dearest” scenario, what I mean is, in the cold light of day, would I torture somebody if they had, say, buried my parents somewhere with a ticking time bomb? Well, I once had to be physically restrained from assaulting a neighbour who might have been involved in the disappearance of my cat, but in hindsight it was probably a good thing I was stopped from going and breqking* her legs.

    It all depends on a very specific scenario though. Would I torture somebody if they had a nuke under my home city? No. Maybe because I live in London, and if we had to torture everybody who wants to bomb London it would be a full time occupation and would not yield very good results. There are better ways – good police work, for one.

    I did live most of my life a stone’s throw away from megadeath – nuclear silos. Nobody needed to torture anybody to know they were there. I also lived in a country where trains and banks and rallies blew up with alarming frequency. One particularly unlucky train was bombed twice. Torturing people wouldn’t have been very useful because in at least half of the cases the bombs were placed with the help and assistance of the secret services.

    I am not an absolutist. I don’t think if we can conduct a thought experiment that would justify throwing live babies into the fire in one particular very singular case then this makes it generally ok to throw living babies into the fire.

    * a typo, but a felicitous one.

40. Tom Kratman: “Oh, and Mike, if you’re cool with xxxxxxx insulting me and me not being able to insult back, just ban me.”

    There are certain things I have decided I won’t post, as you have deduced. So long as you insist on including them in your comments, you are effectively banning yourself.

41. Krapman writes : None of it matters; if the threat is great enough, immanent enough, or has been acted on seriously enough, torture will be used without restraint and none of your nagging or carping will matter a damn, even if you can stop your righteousness from being undermined by idjits like Chewpaca.

    Not able to address my point about accepting responsibility and submitting to lawful prosecution if you decide to torture people huh?

    Why am I not surprised you don’t show the gumption to deal with that…?

42. So you have then decided that his “filthy cowards like you and yours” is acceptabe? Much double standard there, Mike?

43. Tintinaus:

    Possibly, depending on a) was it policy, or b) was there a general failure to train, and supervise, as opposed to a specific failure on the part of, say, Karpanski, or c) if not policy was it prosecuted to deter future similar actions? I haven’t seen the smoking gun to indicate that, say, Abu Ghraib was policy, (although arguably the policy of advancing worthless officers only because they are female may be culpable), nor has it been a general problem in the armed forces, and it was prosecuted, so in this case, probably not.

44. I don’t take that commandment seriously, Anna, because it’s not a commandment. It appears to be a mistranslation of “thou shalt not murder,” which is an illegal killing. War is not illegal; the OT is replete with legitimate and authorized killing in war; ditto for executions as a result of conviction of a crime.

    The other part of the ticking time bomb scenario, a part that SS’ cite got right but overplayed, is that, taken literally, it is limited. You are correct that the Red Brigades’ (?) train and bank bombing, specifically, were probably not going to be stopped completely- possibly not at all – by use of torture.

    That, however, doesn’t mean that you cannot ever effectively use torture to break – or perhaps sometimes only suppress – an organization . Marc Bloch broke, IIRC, and the Free French were never going to liberate France on their own, even though the German occupation, qua occupation, was not especially manpower intensive. There, I think, you have to get into the immanence as a function of harm and time (where time equals probability of success without the use of torture). And even there you have to balance that immanence against the other damage you will possibly do your society, especially if you are not careful.

    Careful? Well, for example, are you letting the results obtained from torture into your legal system? That’s a very high price to pay for some information. (Though, again, note that there is not much practical difference between torture and a plea bargain…and our legal system is almost utterly dependent on plea bargaining.) Also, how much effort are you devoting to torture? If you’re not sharply limiting it, you are certain to abuse it, where “abuse” is defined as “overuse to your own disadvantage.”

    “There are better ways – good police work, for one.” One of the problems with discussing this, leaving aside things like peoples’ brains simply fogging up, is that torture, even is useful, isn’t a panacea. There are places it can work and places – and people – where it can never work. Leila Khalid comes to mind. I wouldn’t waste my time with her; the girl who had her face reconstructed without anesthesia as a gesture of solidarity with the oppressed masses is just too damned tough. But because it isn’t a panacea doesn’t mean that anything else is a panacea. Laila’s don’t grow on trees. Your “good police work”? Does it include the judicial system? Does that include plea bargaining? If so, and clearly it is so, that is use of torture.

    “I am not an absolutist. I don’t think if we can conduct a thought experiment that would justify throwing live babies into the fire in one particular very singular case then this makes it generally ok to throw living babies into the fire.”

    I agree with you, but I am having a hard time coming up with a scenario that justifies throwing any babies into fires…presupposing I’m not a Carthaginian, I mean.

45. Fine then. CPaca, Mike apparently feels you are not up to dealing with insults of the kind you like to throw around. I am sure he knows you and your weaknesses better than I do. So you may assume that you are being protected from my answer.

    Hence, the very truncated version is this:

    CP, you don’t even know how you’ve been an idiot in the subthread, do you? Let me explain.

    In the first place, you took a position I have long since gone openly into print with, and tried to set an ambush around it. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Indeed arrogant as only the very stupid can be. Then you laid out the basics of the ambush, “Church,” “Mortal sin.” Extra stupid. Then, even after I showed that your ambush was anticipated and defanged, you still tried to spring the same ambush. Why? Self evidently because you’re a low grade moron with delusions of adequacy.

    Is that velvet glove enough, Mike? Is that sufficient to still leave him free to toss around things like “Filthy coward”?

46. Mr. Kratman, if the security forces were to wrongly get the idea that you had information about a ticking time bomb scenario, and were to use torture techniques on you in a vain attempt to get you to tell them… would you a) continue insisting that you had no information and could not help them, or b) make something up to get them to stop?

    And, assuming you survived, how would you feel about them afterward?

    (the first version of this question got moderated out – probably it was too graphic)

47. “I agree with you, but I am having a hard time coming up with a scenario that justifies throwing any babies into fires…presupposing I’m not a Carthaginian, I mean.”

    You’re chasing Lex Luthor through the timestream in a desperate effort to stop him from killing baby Kal-El. You’ve managed to get to Smallville ahead of him, and the only place you can conceal Kal-El is in a blast furnace.

48. oh, or they’re orphaned baby Mercurians and will freeze to death at temperatures below 400 Kelvin.

49. Wow. Is this comment thread still going?

50. I’ll ignore the babies, but wrt to torture, excellent, Danny (!), and the core of what’s wrong with Dershowitz’s analysis. Yes, he’s right to the extent that torture is “substituting one persons’s pain for another’s,” but what he sort of elides over is, “But what if that other is innocent and knows nothing about what you’re looking for?” He says, “torture warrants.” I answer, “Your faith in the legal system is most touching.”

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