Thursday, December 08, 2005
Krauthammer isn't making sense:Krauthammer pens an article in the Weekly Standard defending torture. Andrew Sullivan disagrees and writes in the New Republic. All very interesting. But let's examine Krauthammer a little bit. He says: (excerpts) ... there is the ordinary soldier caught on the field of battle. There is no question that he is entitled to humane treatment. Indeed, we have no right to disturb a hair on his head.
... there is the captured terrorist. A terrorist is by profession, indeed by definition, an unlawful combatant: He lives outside the laws of war because he does not wear a uniform, he hides among civilians, and he deliberately targets innocents. He is entitled to no protections whatsoever.
[In one hypothetical situation] the issue of torture gets complicated and the easy pieties don't so easily apply. Let's take the textbook case. Ethics 101: A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. It will go off in one hour. A million people will die. You capture the terrorist. He knows where it is. He's not talking.
... in this case ... torture is permissible QUESTION FOR KRAUTHAMMER: What do you do if an ordinary uniformed soldier from a hostile country is captured and you believe he knows where his country has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City? Torture or no?
posted by Quiddity at 12/08/2005 08:46:00 AM
15 comments
I would think 72 virgins would be much more effective than torture.
My response to the "ticking bomb" scenario is that, yes, if I really thought he knew, I'd torture him, then I'd submit myself to a criminal court for torturing him. I'm willing to go to jail to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, too. But I shouldn't be free to torture him without any repercussions to myself. Especially if I'm wrong about what he knew.
I never, ever thought I'd live to see the day when America had to have any sort of discussion about whether or not we should torture people. It's simply not something I ever thought my country would even consider.
Yet, here we are. Torturing people, holding them without trial, even beating them to death.
And anti-American nitwits like Kraphammer and Cheney and Bush are defending this.
Sorry to go off topic, but...
On Wednesday, December 7, Margaret Warner of the News Hours with Jim Lehrer interviewed a USAID official named James Kunder, who defended the president's viewpoint in his speech about Iraq. Electricity shortages were mentioned by a Democratic senator, and Warner asked Kunder about that. Kunder said the most stark, intellectually craven thing:
"There are more than 30,000 new businesses that have started since the military action commenced, and I'd like to point out the fact that while we have a problem in not being able to meet electricity demand in Baghdad and across the country, part of the problem is -- the problem, if you call it that -- is that there have been so many new Iraqi businesses started in many parts of the country, that we can't keep up with the demand."
"... there is the captured terrorist. A terrorist is by profession, indeed by definition, an unlawful combatant: He lives outside the laws of war because he does not wear a uniform, he hides among civilians, and he deliberately targets innocents. He is entitled to no protections whatsoever"
Interesting.
Deliberately targets innocents? Outside the laws of war? Does not wear a uniform? Hides among civilians? Doesn't this describe the behavior of most of the personnel of the "security companies" in Iraq?
Maynard Handley
Another objection to this highly unlikely scenario:
If the bomb-planter were a truly dedicated terrorist, he would have already thought up a list of time-wasting false locations, one of which he would supply every time he couldn't take the torture any more, sending the security personnel out on an endless series of wild goose chases until the time was up.
us is fucked....you should be discussing how to get out.
RedDan gets it. The practical problem with this scenario is that it's exactly the situation where torture is least likely to be useful. The terrorist knows he only has to hold out for an hour, and it's all over. And since this is the scenario designed to show how practical considerations can overcome the moral opposition to torture, that's a pretty significant flaw.
This torture logic snowballs into something pretty menacing... what if you don't have the terrorist, but you have someone who happened to live next door to one of his safehouses and he either won't or doesn't know where he is - better torture him to find out if he knows where the terrorist is... etc., etc., until you are justifying torturing just about anyone.
It is precisely because "unlawful combatants" are undefined in the Geneva Conventions that legal loopholes can be exploited to torture anyone.
The "ticking time scenario" is reductio ad absurdum. Of course you will try to extract that information from the prisoner in any way you can to save lives. Knowingly breaking the law on higher principles is always better than the absence of law itself.
Torture is a crime.
A ticking bomb is a mitigating factor at sentencing.
I like to turn the ticking time bomb scenario on its head. What if the guy you torture turns out not to be connected? What if it's a false alarm? What, then, is your responsibility to the person you tortured?
I mean, you know mistakes are gonna get made so if you want to torture, let's deal with the most mundane reality - the fact that we get it wrong. In fact, the thing that seems to be coming out about the present state of alleged USA torture is that we tortured and killed some people who were almost certainly innocent of what we accused them of.
Y'all are idiots! We should torture everyone, on a scheduled basis like dentist visits, just in case they might know about a bomb.
Where did this definition of terrorist come from ? If the target is military, it isn't terrorism. Moreover, the Geneva Conventions specifically recognise the right of indigenous populations to resist occupying forces.
Heck, under this definition, the colonial militias were evidently terrorists. The British goverment had far more legitimacy than the US does in Iraq.
There was an explicit understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union that if either country were to plant a nuclear bomb secretly in each other's city, the incident would be treated as a nuclear attack and would result in full nuclear retaliation.
If the Soviet Union were to plant an atomic bomb in Washington, and it were discovered, or if the Soviet Union had claimed to have planted a bomb in a U.S. city, our response would have been to destroy every city in the Soviet Union. EVEN IF THE BOMB HAD NEVER GONE OFF. If the U.S. was to plant an atomic bomb in Moscow, the USSR stood ready to launch every nuclear weapon it had at the United States. Even if our bomb had not gone off.
Yes, it seems extreme and insane, but you will note that at no time during the cold war did either side smuggle nuclear weapons into each others countries. And that is why.
The correct answer is, you put the uniformed soldier on a conference call with the U.S. president and the uniformed soldier's head of state.
The U.S. President starts by repeating the uniformed soldier's allegations and asks both the soldier and the head of state to conform or deny the allegation.
If either person confirms the allegation, The U.S. president then states that because of this incident, the United States intends to kill the entire population of the hostile country with nuclear weapons, and that the only way to prevent this is if the location of the nuclear weapon in New York is revealed, either by the the head of state or the captured soldier.
If both persons deny the allegation, the President states that if New York is destroyed by a nuclear weapon, it will be considered as an attack by the hostile nation, and will result in full nuclear retaliation.
Then you sit and wait, and if the bomb goes off, you keep your word. But you don't torture the soldier. There's no point in torturing the soldier. Even if he were to disclose the location of the bomb under torture, how can you be sure that that's the only bomb, or that the offending hostile country won't immediately smuggle in a replacement. In other words, the bomb isn't there because of the soldier, and the real problem isn't that specific bomb. The real problem is the action of the hostile nation in placing the bomb, and no amount of torture of a soldier can address that actual problem.
You don't bring a knife to a gun fight.
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