Posted on 10/31/2001 9:16:12 PM PST by JohnHuang2
TownHall.com: Conservative Columnists: Steve Chapman
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Steve Chapman (back to story)
November 1, 2001
Should we use torture to stop terrorism?
It's the sort of question that, way back in spring semester, would have made for a good late-night bull session in a college dorm room: If an atomic bomb were about to be detonated in Manhattan, would police be justified in torturing the terrorist who planted it to learn its location and save the city? But today, the debates are starting up in the higher reaches of the federal government. And this time, the answers really matter.
Last week, The Washington Post reported great frustration in the FBI and Justice Department over the stubborn silence of four suspected terrorists arrested after Sept. 11, including one who wanted lessons in steering a commercial aircraft but had no interest in taking off or landing. Unless they can administer truth serum or torture, law enforcement officials fear, they may never get information about planned attacks that are still in the works. American lives could therefore be lost.
The question posed above is easy to answer. No one could possibly justify sacrificing millions of lives to spare a murderous psychopath a brief spell of intense pain, which he can end by his own choice. When the threat is so gigantic and the solution so simple, we are all in the camp of the Shakespeare character who said, "There is no virtue like necessity."
This indulgence of reality requires no great rethinking of fundamental principles. Rules that suffice for normal circumstances often have to be suspended for emergencies. We have laws against burglary and theft, and for good reason: Society couldn't function if homes and property had no protection. But if a starving plane-crash victim stranded in the wild broke into a locked cabin to get food, he wouldn't be sent to prison.
The complications of the torture issue arise once you move from the extreme hypothetical case to the messiness and uncertainty of the real world. Almost everyone would agree it's permissible to use forcible interrogation methods to prevent nuclear holocaust. But it's impossible to write a law that restricts the use of torture to cases where 1) a considerable number of lives are in peril, and 2) police are sure they have a guilty party who can provide the information needed to avert the catastrophe. The brutal techniques are therefore likely to spread.
We know that from experience. Most states that employ torture do it pretty much anytime it suits their law enforcement purposes. And Israel, the rare government to attempt to impose clear standards and limits on the use of coercion, found that the exception threatened to swallow the rule.
With an eye to the "ticking bomb" scenario, Israel authorized the use of "moderate physical pressure" to persuade suspected terrorists to talk -- including shaking them, covering their heads with foul-smelling hoods, putting them in cold showers, depriving them of sleep for days on end, forcing them to crouch in awkward positions, and the like. These were needed, the government said, because of the constant threat of Palestinian attacks on civilian and military targets. And, besides, they weren't really torture.
But this option quickly expanded beyond the cases where it might be excused. An Israeli human-rights group that successfully challenged these methods in court said that 85 percent of Arabs arrested by the General Security Service each year -- including many never charged with a crime -- were subjected to such abuse. That works out to thousands of victims over the years.
Israel found its carefully controlled approach escaping control in two ways. First, the brutal techniques were soon used in routine cases, not just extreme ones. Second, "moderate" pressure sometimes became immoderate: An estimated 10 detainees died from their mistreatment.
The problem is not with Israel but with human nature. To a man with a hammer, said Mark Twain, everything looks like a nail. Give police and security agents in any country a tool, and they'll want to use it, and even overuse it. If the government were to torture the suspects arrested after Sept. 11, it might find they don't know anything important.
There are, of course, other options for inducing cooperation from suspected lawbreakers, including carrots (light sentences, money, relocation with a new identity) and sticks (long sentences, extradition to countries known for harsh punishments). That strategy has worked on other terrorists, like the one caught trying to sneak explosives into the U.S. for a millennium attack.
So it would not be wise to formally authorize the use of torture to combat terrorism. And what if the cops someday have to try it to save New York City from a nuclear blast? I trust they'll do what they have to do, and forgiveness will follow.
©2001 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
townhall.com
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For me, this debate is akin to the death penalty issue. For now I'm sitting on the fence.
For me, this debate is akin to the death penalty issue. For now I'm sitting on the fence.
We can make them listen to Cher while looking at Hillary pictures.
I think that is explicitly not allowed in the Geneva Convention update of 2001
Then the answer is simple, reclassify all terrorists to prisoners of war and turn them over to the military for "interrogation" with the implicit threat that they are combatants without uniform and subject to execution as spies. This IS NOT a law enforcement issue, this is a military action directed at our own soil and people.
Will they Honor Your Daughters ?
The plan he divulged was Ramsi Youseff's plot to blow up 12 American 747s and DC-10s over the Pacific on the same day. More arrests followed, and the plot was broken up. The bombs were kept off the planes, several thousand people, mostly Americans, didn't die. The roughly treated prisoner is fine today.
Tell me that you wish he had been spared the month of rough treatment, and the jumbo jets had been blown up instead, maybe with your family aboard.
This is a WAR, and the rules are not the same as during PEACE.
Torture can never be "officially" permitted. (Uh, remember that occasionally US servicemen are captured.) However, if certain elements in that haven of human rights Guatemala want to persuade information out of some scumbag terrorists, well, what are we to do? Understand also that those terrorists could never be left alive. Dead men tell no tales.
If we must be 'civil' to the barbarians, hows about we flood their jail cells with sodium pentathol gas and then stick 'em under the hot lights for a few hours of grilling.
If we must be 'civil' to the barbarians, hows about we flood their jail cells with sodium pentathol gas and then stick 'em under the hot lights for a few hours of grilling.
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