The problem isn’t that waterboarding and similarly torturing suspected terrorists about their activities, organizations, and supporters doesn’t work.
The problem is that if you waterboarded or similarly tortured 1024 randomly selected “pro-life” activists they’d all confess to the terrorist attack on a church in the heart of Kansas that ended in the murder of Dr. George Tiller.
When in fact the chances are probably close to zero that any of them would have had anything to do about it.
That doesn’t mean that anti-terrorist groups shouldn’t investigate and prosecute the kind of terrorist organizations that endorse, sponsor, commit, and celebrate murderous attacks in Kansas churches. Just that such investigations and prosecutions should happen within the law.
Update: Hoo boy, did I ever put this wrong.
I was trying to propose that just as we wouldn’t torture domestic suspects we shouldn’t have tortured anybody. That evidently didn’t come across very well.
I was secondarily trying to propose that our relationship to domestic terrorists is the same as those of populations in other countries in hopes of creating understanding about why, say, collectively punishing a general population through bombing or blockades of goods (including food and medicine) doesn’t work because “sympathy with objectives” generally has no correlation to “complicit in extreme acts.” But I didn’t get that over very well either.
Submitted by 2986 (not verified) on Sun, 2009-05-31 15:31.
...Wha? I would say 1023 of your pro-life activists would be horrified by it and do whatever they could to help you catch someone who's both a murderer and a stain on their cause. This post really sounds like you're staying everyone whose religious or personal beliefs oppose abortion is a terrorist colluder.
Submitted by 2986 (not verified) on Sun, 2009-05-31 15:43.
Oh, okay, sorry, I reread and understand better now. Sorry about that.
There's still the answer that you don't demand confessions but information, but really all that does is replace 1023 convictions with 1023 wild goose runs.
[It's worse than that! In nearly all samples you'll wind up with 1024 wild goose chases. But the real reason anybody has resorted to torture isn't to gather credible information because it's a really inefficient, unreliable information-gathering technique. Instead it's to a) punish and/or b) extract confessions for whatever it is you want confessed. If you just wanted information you'd do ordinary, lawful police work. Thanks, Holly. --fl]
Submitted by 2986 (not verified) on Sun, 2009-05-31 16:13.
My first reaction was like Holly's. Now, I think I get that you're saying people will confess to anything, given enough duress.
But what I still don't get is why you'd even imagine that an investigation of a terror attack on abortion providers would use extreme techniques. Our government doesn't have a track record of going overboard to prevent or prosecute such crimes. When they nabbed Eric Rudolph and that Army of God would-be anthrax attacker, Clayton Waagner, they used normal pre-Bush law enforcement techniques.
If you want to inveigh against torture, I'm with you all the way. But I don't see torture as even remotely likely in the context of finding and punishing Tiller's murderer. I don't care for the imputation that a pro-choice administration might apply torture to secure reproductive rights. I don't think that's what you intended but it can be read that way.
By the way, "within the law" is probably too lax a standard, given how the law has been remade and redefined over the past 8 years to include things like waterboarding!
[I think I've been missing on all cylinders today. No, there's no chance Americans would use methods on real American terrorists, or randomly-selected suspected terrorists that we routinely used on generally randomly-selected terrorist suspects in our overseas adventures. Which was meant to be point #1 of my post. Nor would we have tortured them since we'd be actually wanting to *solve a crime* and prevent further ones, as opposed to extracting specific confessions in order to justify actions we wanted to take, as we routinely did with prisoners overseas. Which was meant to be point #2 of my post. And I'm actually pretty comfortable with the "within the law" nomenclature because it seems pretty evident that most actual law enforcement personnel, as well as most lawyers, believe the Bush administration misused their interpretations in illegal and/or criminal but certainly unprofessional ways. But did I say any of that? Nooo. So my bad for saying it, not anyone else's for missing it. Thanks, Sungold. --fl]
Submitted by 2986 (not verified) on Mon, 2009-06-01 05:59.
Let's say someone makes the argument that foo makes people fall in love.
To follow your train of logic:
The problem with foo isn't that it doesn't work (makes people fall in love). The problem is that, if you foo her often enough, she'll be too scared to ever leave.
Or, to rephrase that (pay attention to yourself):
The problem with foo isn't that it doesn't work. The problem is that it doesn't work.
Let me put it more directly:
The problem with torture is that it's abusive. Even if it were an effective and reliable means of intelligence gathering, it would still be torture.
In what other area of life do we debate the effectiveness of the claimed motives of people who inflict physical, psychological, and sexual abuse on others? We don't, or at least we shouldn't. Inflicting that abuse is wrong; motive is irrelevant, effectiveness is irrelevant.
[Oh boy, did I *ever* put this wrong. I was trying to propose that just as we wouldn't torture domestic terrorists we shouldn't have tortured any. That evidently didn't come across very well. I was secondarily trying to propose that our relationship to domestic terrorists is the same as those of populations in other countries in hopes of creating understanding about why, say, collectively punishing a general population through bombing or blockades of goods (including food and medicine) doesn't work because "sympathy with objectives" generally has no correlation to "complicit in extreme acts." But I didn't get that over very well either. My apologies, Anonymous. --fl]