Perhaps in a moment of hyperbole, you say, "to make a man sit in his own shit and urine.... Try it on my son and I'll kill you."

To take a life in response to a deliberate humiliation is not a justified killing, is it?
DGus | 09.29.06 - 2:54 pm | #

Sigh.

Anybody want to strain at rhetorical gnats and swallow some more camels?
Mark Shea | Homepage | 09.29.06 - 3:18 pm | #

Mark
I apologize if this query has been answered before. I don't get a lot of time to read yours or Rod's postings, but I'd welcome your pointing me in the right direction.

The question I raise is not about defining torture, but in all innocence and true wondering: What do we do? These people don't give a flip about the Geneva Convention or about ethical concerns over torture-which doesn't mean we shouldn't care, but how do we stop them? How do we get information from them? How do we stay safe?

I mean these questions honestly, not provocatively.
jbrown | Homepage | 09.29.06 - 3:32 pm | #

Mark, I'm on your side on this issue, but I have a question. Someone on Rod Dreher's blog commented that we can't call torture intrinsically wrong because the Church in the past had approved its use on suspected heretics. I'm sure they must be wrong, but I'd love some help on this: did the Church, or her lawful agents, actually torture heretics? If so, was this in fact an approved practice, or merely one that was officially overlooked? (If you've dealt with this in the past I apologize for missing it.)
eCurious | 09.29.06 - 3:34 pm | #

As you know, I am 100% with you in opposing torture.

In the comments of the Disputations post you link to, it was proposed that the Golden Rule was a good statndard for treating prisoners.

I replied that I'm not sure it's a useful standard to bring in to the public square -- it lends itself to the, "oh, so anything less than a teddy bear and night-night story is torture!" argument, which, as we've seen, has a certain appeal.

The same thing goes for your "If they did to my son..." argument. If poeple were to detain your son in a comfortable cell, gave him access to a shower and three square meals a day, you'd probably still want to kill them, as I would if people were to do to one of my daghters.

IOW, I'm afraid that using the Golden Rule as a standard invites us to base moral decisions on "how I'd feel," which is part of how we got into this mess -- "well if there was a terorist who planted a bomb, I'd do..."

I love the Golden Rule, but I'm not certain it's useful as guide for how to treat prisoners. Or at least one that this culture is ready to hear.
JohnMcG | Homepage | 09.29.06 - 3:35 pm | #

That was quite a rant.

Love ya, Mark. Really. Enjoy yer blog.

But defining terms is not a "gambit" to attack the magisterium of the church. Where did you get that idea? Do you NOT have a definition of torture? Or do you just think yours is right and that's all there is to it? Is the definition up for debate, even if certified elsewhere by the Army? (BTW, I know waterboarding was just made illegal, and it's too bad. We apparently got a lot of good, life-saving info from KSM. So I disagree.)

Don't you realize there's a difference between recognizing a lot of terms are pretty subjective in definitions and being a full-fledged postmodernist?

That said, since you're interested in "gambits" so much, you should know that you've used one of the most manipulative there is -- and that's to confuse general and particular categories when criticizing someone.

If you disagree with my comment, comment in those terms, but don't lump me in with another group of commentators and then criticize the whole at one point, and me at other points. Say, "That's what these dimwits do 'cuz they don't want to admit the truth to themselves."

One thing you might want to do is explain why defining torture is a gambit, without trying to read my mind or determine the state of my soul or make assumptions that I'm trying to get around magisterial teaching, which you can't, you shouldn't and I'm not. Defining terms is an essential part of any discussion. Applying general principles isn't easy. That's not a cop-out, it's reality. Making fun of that is silly. Would you use no techniques whatsoever to pressure suspects during interrogation? Would you use some pressure, depending on what it is? What you use a lot, depending on the circumstances?

This is not a "24" gambit, it's reality. And posting a picture isn't reality, either. Reality's what happens when you get up from your computer.

Next time you criticize me, I'd suggest you don't be so snide. It doesn't make me want to agree with you.

Perhaps I set you off. Seems like I got under your skin. Sorry about that.
IB Bill | Homepage | 09.29.06 - 4:25 pm | #

IB Bill,

You must be new to this blog. Mark will ban you if you continue your questions any further.
Sydney Carton | 09.29.06 - 5:08 pm | #

Here's the deal -- everytime there's some bad news about the Administration practicing torture, excusing torture, or creating a legal space for torture, there's this sudden intense intellectual interest in finding a precise definition for torture.

Now, the word torture has been around for quite some time. But this interest in defining the term didn't seem to start until the news about Abu Ghraib came out, and has peaked and valleyed since then when news about the Admnistation's detention policies came out.
JohnMcG | Homepage | 09.29.06 - 5:36 pm | #

Being the cynical person that I am, I can't help but think that some of this interest in defining things is an effort to create confusion and ambiguity where there is none. We had been doing fine without a precise exhaustive definition of torture for years now. Why do we all of a sudden need one now?

If you want to pursue a definition to torture, go ahead. But please don't do it in response to each news item that the Administration may be practicing it.
JohnMcG | Homepage | 09.29.06 - 5:36 pm | #

How do we get information from them? How do we stay safe?


We have been commanded to avoid sin. We have not been commanded to get information from terror suspects or to stay safe.

If it's a choice between the two, then we accept not getting the information and being unsafe, and spend some time looking at the nearest crucifix.
JohnMcG | Homepage | 09.29.06 - 5:38 pm | #

JohnMcG--that's fine. But some of us would like to do both -- avoid sin but still protect our families. The two are not mutually exclusive. Like our Constitution, Christianity is not a suicide pact. That is why some of us agonize over where legitimate, coercive interrogation crosses over into torture or otherwise immoral treatment of prisoners. Let us not become monsters in order to defeat monsters. But let's also do everything within the bounds of morality to make sure the monsters do not triumph.
Ed Graham | 09.29.06 - 6:32 pm | #

What is wrong with the interrogation methods that were on the books on 9/10/01? Has there been some radical evolutionary leap in the human organism that now renders them useless? We needed information during WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq I. What were the regs then? They wanted to kill us then too, but we didn't feel a need to rewrite the regs to permit barbarism. So why now?
Mark Shea | Homepage | 09.29.06 - 6:48 pm | #

Mark--I guess my question is: why are the approaches we used in WWII, Korea, etc. sancrosanct? But to answer yours: Yes, something has changed -- we are fighting a different sort of war and are fighting terrorists who have different motivations and a sophisticated understanding of our conventional interrogation techniques. We simply were not getting information from most of the Al Qaeda prisoners. That doesn't justify immoral treatment, but I see nothing in morality that prohibits our side from asking, "gee, what can we do differently to get an advantage in these interrogations." If it ain't working, try a new approach.
Ed Graham | 09.29.06 - 7:00 pm | #

Gentlemen:

RE: Torture and Interrogation

It is in my opinion impossible to define torture. It is however very easy to define good and proper conduct towards captured personnel. One of the problems we now face is that there is apparently a belief that every detained or captured person has valuable information locked away in his head that, if we could only get him to talk, would win the war for us.

This is simply not true. The average grunt on either side knows no secrets. What do we expect to get from him? UBL’s e-mail address? The secret version of the Koran the enemy is using? The rate of fire for an AK 47?

Let us look at the average detainee at GTMO. We have had most of these guys there for several years now. Any information they once had is now stale. Most of these guys we did not capture. We bought them from either Afghan warlords or from Pakistan. We then transported them to GTMO without independent proof that they were indeed enemy personnel. Some of these guys are professional gun slingers. They fight for money. Others were innocents caught up in a sweep. Others were, for a golden moment, convertibles, now they hate us.

Torture or aggressive interrogation brings forth nothing useful; but is ruins the subject as an intelligence asset. Every guy we torture becomes a martyr for the enemy. Every guy we torture recruits more enemy fighters. Every guy we torture pushes moderate Moslems onto the radical side of the ledger. Torture simply does not work.

On the other hand intense observation of prisoners and informal interrogation yields many small bits of information that like a jig saw puzzle slowly comes together to give a clear picture of the enemy.

We do not know our enemy. He, on the other hand, knows us very well. That is why we are loosing.

God bless

Richard W. Comerford
Anonymous | 09.29.06 - 8:07 pm | #

It is in my opinion impossible to define torture. It is however very easy to define good and proper conduct towards captured personnel.

Exactly. It isn't possible to exhaustively catalogue every possible inhuman despicable thing someone might want to do to prisoners. And the only people looking for a comprehensive catalogue are those looking for the loopholes.

It is pathetic, inhuman, vile, and most certainly un-Christian. A whole section of Hell is going to be paved with Republican skulls over this one; right next to the vast square paved with the skulls of pro-abort Democrats.
Zippy | Homepage | 09.29.06 - 9:36 pm | #

Zippy--may I ask you a question Mark refuses to answer: In your opinion, is it ever licit to use any interrogation technique that would cause a prisoner any physical or psychological discomfort?
Ed Graham | 09.29.06 - 11:53 pm | #

In your opinion, is it ever licit to use any interrogation technique that would cause a prisoner any physical or psychological discomfort?

Sure.
Zippy | Homepage | 09.30.06 - 12:33 am | #

Ed:

Who said I refuse to answer? My answer is the same as Zippy's.

Nobody's ever asked me that before, believe it or not. I suspect they all assumed they knew the answer.
Mark Shea | Homepage | 09.30.06 - 12:35 am | #

JohnMcG writes: "We had been doing fine without a precise exhaustive definition of torture for years now. Why do we all of a sudden need one now?"

Quite simply because advocates for both extremes have taken positions and no longer trust the other side to reasonably define it, and legal prosecution against guards/soldiers/etc. are now highly likely as a result.

For every CIA agent arguing for waterboarding to be allowed and not considered torture, there is a newspaper or human rights 'expert' claiming that longstanding interrogation tactics like solitary confinement or sleep deprevation should now be considered torture, and the guards/soldiers that authorize it should be prosecuted as war criminals.

Which leaves the only real option to negate both extremes is to try and define more precisely each act as acceptable or not. I support Mark's efforts to have tactics like waterboarding condemned and stopped. But I also support better definition of if/when tactics like sleep deprevation, etc. can be used so that guards/soliders can't be brought to trial for simply doing things they felt were acceptable.

As such both your and Mark's argument that 'if it's not broke', is totally unpresuasive to me. The situation is clearly broken as evidenced by all the arguments about it here and elsewhere, whereas the entire topic used to be largely ignored by the public and simply left to the discretion of the guards/military.
Evan | 09.30.06 - 6:45 am | #

Ed Graham:

You posted in part: “is it ever licit to use any interrogation technique that would cause a prisoner any physical or psychological discomfort?”

When I read this part of your post I was shocked. It did not sound like you. It sounded to me quite ghoulish…as in “Sir do we turn up the electric shock level to the authorized maximum or just kept it at the usual minimum discomfort?”

On reflection your question makes a lot of sense. I think it should be approached in this way. We all live every day with physical or psychological discomfort. It is part of living in a fallen world. An interrogation subject is already experiencing great physical and psychological discomfort. In some cases the subject was born into a pre-technological culture (Afghanistan) with a history of fierce inter clan warfare with an occasional time out to fight foreign invaders. The subject was captured by a rival war lord. He was then sold to a young CIA officer who did not speak either the warlord’s nor the subject’s language. The subject’s first airplane ride was when he was transported in shackles to GTMO. On arrival the subject’s first physical contact with a woman who was not a family member was when he was stripped search by a MP.

The subject finds himself in a tropical environment away from his native mountains. He is introduced to an interpreter who does not understand the subject’s dialect. The subject is then introduced to his interrogator – me. I find the subject shackled to the floor in an air conditioned room, another novelty for him, guarded by a pair of beefy MPs, one a lady who could beat me in arm wrestling three times out of three.He is dressed in an orange jump suit.

Now I ask you. Under these conditions exactly what type of “physical or psychological discomfort” should I inflict on him to get him to tell me secrets - provided he knows secrets? Do you think if I smack him around he is going to break down and give me UBL’s cell phone number? Do you think he knows UBL’s cell phone number? How will I know if the interpreter is communicating effectively through the pain and fear I am inflicting on the subject? How do I even know the subject is a bad guy? How do you know the subject is a bad guy? Do you know he ui a bad guy just because he is a prisoner at GTMO?

A Christian will treat the subject with charity. Said treatment is also the best way to collect intelligence.

A good interrogator will not pile on additional physical or psychological discomfort on a subject. Instead he will offer the subject a way to reduce his physical or psychological discomfort.

No; it is never licit to use any interrogation technique that would cause a prisoner any physical or psychological discomfort. It is not only illicit it is stupid.

God bless

Richard W. Comerford
Anonymous | 09.30.06 - 10:12 am | #

As far as I can tell, the one thing quite clear about this bill is that waterboarding is now prohibited. Scott Shane and Adam Liptak write in today's New York Times:

"This bill is about so many things, and it’s a mixed bag," said Elisa Massimino, the Washington director of Human Rights First, a civil liberties group.

Ms. Massimino’s group and others criticized the bill as a whole, but she agreed with the Republican senators who negotiated for weeks with the White House that it would ban the most extreme interrogation methods used by the Central Intelligence Agency and the military.

"The senators made clear that waterboarding is criminal," Ms. Massimino said, referring to a technique used to simulate drowning. "That’s a human rights enforcement upside."

As I understood it, as far as torture goes, the entire debate was about practices that fell between the "organ failure-death" standard of the White House and the "cruel, inhuman and degrading" standard adopted by everyone else. The latter standard has prevailed, as seen in this language:

"IN GENERAL. No individual in the custody or under the physical
control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.

(2) CRUEL, INHUMAN, OR DEGRADING TREATMENT OR PUNISHMENT DEFINED. The term "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment" in this subsection shall mean the cruel, unusual, and inhumane treatment or punishment prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, as defined in the United States Reservations, Declarations and Understandings to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment done at New York, December 10, 1984."

In other words, if it's unconstitutional in the US, it's illegal on prisoners.

To me, it frankly seems that the torture issue is now being used to generate outrage about habaeus corpus rights, which are an entirely different problem altogether. As Shane and Liptak write:

The debate over the limits of torture and the rules for military commission dominated discussion of the bill until this week. Only in the last few days has broad attention turned to its redefinition of “unlawful enemy combatant” and its ban on habeas corpus petitions, which suspects have traditionally used to challenge their incarceration.
CPA | Homepage | 09.30.06 - 10:29 am | #

CPA:

Is a CIA paramilitary an unlawful combatant? How about U.S. Special Operations personnel who operate in civilian cloths? How about private contractors who are gun carriers in Iraq and Afghanistan? How about me when I was bodyguarding some principals last year who heads, according to some of our Islamic brothers and sisters, should be severed from their bodies?

The burden of ground combat is now increasingly being carried on the shoulders of Westerners who until recently would have been considered spies and mercenaries their own governments.

The blade cuts both ways.

Maybe we should focus on love they enemy?

God bless

Richard W. Comerford
Anonymous | 09.30.06 - 10:55 am | #

Richard Comerford: you make an important point in your 10:12 AM post. There is a difference between (1) the inevitable, incidental discomfort in being a prisoner; (2) necessary discomfort brought about by one's own behavior (solitary confinement, for example); and piling on additional discomforts in an effort to get the prisoner to talk. Although there are many discomforts which do not rise to the level of torture, we shouldn't be in the business of inflicting them except inasmuch as they are incidental to the process of holding prisoners at all.

Evan: sleep deprivation, taken to an extreme, is a form of torture.
Zippy | Homepage | 09.30.06 - 11:27 am | #

To me, it frankly seems that the torture issue is now being used to generate outrage about habaeus corpus rights, which are an entirely different problem altogether.

That may be a good point. I haven't done the diligence to know at this point if there is a torture loophole in here. Though sadly, I am morally certain that if there is such a loophole the Bush administration will exploit it, and the CIA will torture prisoners. The administration's actions have made that abundantly clear.
Zippy | Homepage | 09.30.06 - 11:30 am | #

Zippy,

Yes I agree that sleep deprivation 'might' be torture if taken to extreme. Anything taken to extreme can be torture. However, most reasonable people know there are levels that don't rise to torture.

When I was a kid, my parents made me stay up and finish my homework numerous time when I told them I was 'too tired' to do it and wanted to go to bed. Likewise in all sorts of interrogations, the suspect or prisoner will often tell the interrogator that they are too tired to answer questions. If the interrogator persists in asking questions after the prisoner has declared they are fatigued, is that torture?

So here is the issue that I raised. The amount of sleep that a prisoner could be deprived of or the length of questioning sessions has always largely been left to prison guards, interrogators, etc. I think most people generally assumed and are of the opinion that interrogators can be 'tough', but have to be 'humane'.

However, now that this whole 'torture debate' has begun, no one wants to leave it to the police/guards anymore. And, yes, Mark is right that there are extremists that are arguing that tactics like waterboarding should be legal.

However, he ignores the fact that once this debate was raised, it opened a whole can of worms about every single thing that is done to prisoners. Therefore there are now also extremists that argue that any form of sleep depravation (along with most forms of normal incarceration and prisoner treament) are inhumane and torture. Such people are using the forum given them by the excesses of the people advocating waterboarding to advocate extreme delicate handling of prisoners.

That is why, contrary to what Mark says, the long accepted situation of letting the guards and interrogators handle it has broken down. And the only solution I see to placate the extremists on both ends is the define precisely what is allowed and not allowed.
Evan | 09.30.06 - 12:14 pm | #

That is why, contrary to what Mark says, the long accepted situation of letting the guards and interrogators handle it has broken down.

I think one of Mark's points is that this started with those on the Right, and in particular the Administration, who not only wanted to torture prisoners but actually did torture prisoners. The Right has been battling a straw man, as if there was ever any chance of a war crimes prosecution for failing to provide television. If the Right hadn't been torturing prisoners - if the FBI had gotten its way, rather than the CIA getting its way - none of this would ever have become an issue. So the administration should back off, apologize without qualification, and we should go back to our pre-9/11 way of viewing torture. If we have to be extra good to our prisoners because of this, handle them with kid gloves compared to what might otherwise have been, well, that is entirely the doing of the Right. They made the bed, now we've all got to sleep in it.

I detest the Left. I've never voted for a Democrat in my life, and I never will, because a hundred years of penance if it started today would never make up for what they have done. The Democratic Party is the party of the damned.

But this was not a two-sided thing that happened here on torture. This is solely the work of the Right. If leftists have had fodder it is only because the administration handed it to them on a silver platter. The administration served up the fool's stuffing, and now we've all got to eat it. We should go back to our pre-9/11 understanding of how prisoners are to be handled. And if we err on the side of humane treatment, so be it.
Zippy | Homepage | 09.30.06 - 1:35 pm | #

Evan:

You posted in part: “And the only solution I see to placate the extremists on both ends is the define precisely what is allowed and not allowed.”

I know you do not intend this but when I read your post I thought to myself: “This guy wants to compromise and wrap a pair of pliers around only one testicle instead of two”.

This is a morally dangerous area. In my opinion the best way to navigate this dangerous area is to strive to do more good instead of debating about how much evil we can get away with under the present law.

God bless

Richard W. Comerford
Anonymous | 09.30.06 - 2:56 pm | #

Zippy - unfortunately, I don't think you can 'unring' a bell.

I too wish the current admnistration had never raised the issue by pushing and violating the bounds of conduct when they authorized procedures like waterboarding. However, even if they apologized and claimed they were 'going back to 9-10-01 standards', I don't think they can. Because there really never were '9-10-01 standards' to begin with. There was simply a general trust that our interrogators were 'good guys' who were in charge and would never do anything inhumane. How true that was, none of us will ever know. I have my doubts that all these objectionable tactics were only started after 9-11-01, but maybe that's the case.

Irregardless, the trust in our interrogators is now gone, and no apology or committment to go back to 'the way things were' will redeem it. Can you honestly believe that if Bush came out and apologized tomorrow, the left in this country would simply accept his apology and trust him to treat prisoners humanely without specifying precisely what that humane treatment would now be?

Unfortunately our only course is likely going to be what fallen man always has to rely on - a thick book of regulations specifying exactly what interrogators and guards can and can't do.
Evan | 09.30.06 - 6:02 pm | #

...a thick book of regulations specifying exactly what interrogators and guards can and can't do.

It doesn't have to be thick. We can just use the Army Field Manual and Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which applies to all captives (including "illegal" ones) who do not fall under the other articles. The only downside, from the perspective of some, is that because of the Administration's acts we would have to be really sure to treat our captives really well, so that it would be clearly above reproach. Because you are right, all possibility for trust in the integrity of our own people is long gone.

Again, the only people who want lots of byzantine regulations are the people who want to get close to objectionable treatment without crossing the line. Those people can - quite literally - go to Hell.
Zippy | Homepage | 09.30.06 - 8:52 pm | #

"the only people who want lots of byzantine regulations are the people who want to get close to objectionable treatment without crossing the line. Those people can - quite literally - go to Hell."

I actually think that clear and detailed regulations are a good thing. Your right that if we pass detailed regulations, people will go right up to the line. But if we don't pass detailed regulations, people will exploit any possible ambiguity in the law, and will end up going even farther.

Further, detailed regulations also make it harder to hide the true nature of our conduct. Take sleep deprivation. If someone objects to this tactic genreally, they are told, mockingly, that it isn't torture to keep someone up past their bedtime. Alrighty then, how long should we be able to keep a suspect awake? 48 hours? A week? A month? What if we only let him sleep for 2 hours a night indefinately?

If that is the argument, I think we'll do a lot better than if we have to argue generally about whether sleep deprivation or stress positions are legitimate, because it won't be as easy to rationalize what we are really doing.
Josiah | 10.01.06 - 12:19 pm | #

What many people do not seem to understand is that to "weigh" the things many people want to do to prisoners in order to get them to talk is itself to give up the moral ground to consequentialism. There is an interesting entry at the Right Reason blog about the same false notion applied to abortion - the false notion that there is nothing evil in engaging in the sort of "weighing" questioning which is being applied to torture here (e.g. "how much sleep deprivation constitutes torture"). In reality, to merely ask the question is to already do something evil. Civilized men are unconditionally against torture, and to ask the question in earnest "how much sleep deprivation constitutes torture" is to already concede that one is not unconditionally against torture.

In weighing whether or not to abort, one is weighing the life of a particular child against other considerations. In engaging in such weighing, one is acting as if this particular child's life had the kind of value that can be weighed and compared against other considerations (Kant calls this "market value"). Suppose that through the weighing of pros and cons, one chooses not to abort. In that case, one's later relationship with the child causally depends on one's having judged that the child's life outweighs the values implicit in the considerations one had in favor of abortion. This suggests a certain kind of conditionality in the relationship: one's having engaged in weighing implies that one accepted the possibility that something else at least might be more valuable to one than the life of the child.

Furthermore, the idea that "violation of human dignity" is helplessly subjective is postmodern nonsense. What is really going on is that a lot of people want to violate the human dignity of prisoners, and are unwilling to accept the consequences of doing the right thing and not violating the dignity of prisoners.
Zippy | Homepage | 10.01.06 - 3:58 pm | #

I posted more on this here.
Zippy | Homepage | 10.01.06 - 4:37 pm | #

Zippy,

You've hit upon an important point, but it seems to me that you're drawing a faulty inference from it. It is true that the fact that we need detailed regulations about what is and is not allowed in interrogation does indicate a certain wickedness in our culture. It does not follow from this, however, that the regulations themselves are wicked.

If all men were angels, no government would be necessary. If all Americans were unconditionally against torture, detailed regulations of interrogations would not be necessary. Sadly, it isn't so. So the choice is between having detailed regulations that will limit the evil interrogators can do, and general regulations, which won't.
Josiah | 10.01.06 - 9:26 pm | #

So the choice is between having detailed regulations that will limit the evil interrogators can do, and general regulations, which won't.

I don't agree. General principles are far, far better than detailed regulations. Detailed regulations give rise to loopholes, and make a very simple moral issue seem complex, when it in fact is not. General regulations say "mind your P's and Q's or risk a war crimes trial". Detailed regulations say "with the right lawyer you can argue your way out of anything".
Zippy | Homepage | 10.01.06 - 11:12 pm | #

"Detailed regulations give rise to loopholes."

So do general regulations, except that with general regulations, the loopholes are much larger. If you say "there shall be no offenses against human dignity" all someone has to do is say that waterboarding, sleep deprivation et al, aren't offenses against human dignity. If you say "detainees shall be allowed at least 45 hours of sleep a week" it is harder to get around.

"Detailed regulations say 'with the right lawyer you can argue your way out of anything'"

I am a lawyer, and if I had to defend one of these guys, I'd have a much easier time arguing the case under a general "offenses against human dignity" standard than I would under a detailed regulation that my client has violated.
Josiah | 10.02.06 - 9:39 am | #

I am a lawyer, and if I had to defend one of these guys...

What kind of lawyer are you?

I'd have a much easier time arguing the case under a general "offenses against human dignity" standard than I would under a detailed regulation that my client has violated.

Then all the panic on the Right about unfair prosecution of interrogators under pre-9/11 standards is completely wrongheaded, in your view? If so then this really ought to be a win-win for everyone: go back to pre-9/11 standards, before the Administration f**ked it up by claiming that Geneva doesn't apply and torturing prisoners, and everyone will be happy.
Zippy | Homepage | 10.02.06 - 10:45 am | #

"Then all the panic on the Right about unfair prosecution of interrogators under pre-9/11 standards is completely wrongheaded, in your view?"

Pretty much.

Unfortunantly, we can't just go back to the way things were before 9/11. The temptation to be "forward leaning" when it comes to torture is much greater now, and the administration and significantly undercut most of the existing safeguards. To draw a somewhat strained analogy: when your children are acting responsibly, you might not feel the need to set any exact curfew. But if they start to abuse that freedom, it's time to lay down some clear rules.

"What kind of lawyer are you?"

Right now I do mainly civil work, but in school I worked for the U.S. Attorney's office and I've clerked for a federal district judge, so I'm not a stranger to criminal procedure.
Josiah | 10.02.06 - 12:06 pm | #

Mark--Sorry, I probably put it more strongly than warranted. I've asked you the question before and you didn't respond. I concede that that's not the same as refusing to answer.

Zippy--I'm not arguing for torture. My point is, I thought, pretty simple: What's immoral per se about innovations in interrogation techniques? Look, there's a reason the Bush Administration went to waterboarding, etc. and it's not because W is a sadist. The old techniques simply weren't working. The Al Qaeda prisoners knew our approaches, were trained to resist, and they knew precisely where the lines we couldn't cross were. Faced with these facts, and given the stakes, I expect my government to do more than simply shrug and say, "oh well, gotta stick to the field manual." I'm NOT saying that torture or immoral abuse of prisoners therefore is justified. I'm simply saying that the government should be free to try new methods that fall short of torture and immoral abuse of prisoners. And one of your responses suggests a possible example. You argue that sleep deprivation is torture when "taken to an extreme." I think that's correct. But it also seems to me that the government should be able to use sleep deprivation to disorient prisoners under interrogation as long as they do not take it to that extreme. I'm not a medical expert, much less an expert on sleep deprivation, so I don't know when sleep deprivation becomes dangerous or could otherwise be fairly described as torture or an outrageous assault on human dignity, but this is the sort of issue that interests me in this debate: How can we effectively adjust our prosecution of this war without losing our souls?
Ed Graham | 10.02.06 - 12:31 pm | #

The old techniques simply weren't working.

I think you mean that "the old techniques", meaning FBI interrogation techniques, were never tried. The Administration opted for torture instead.

How can we effectively adjust our prosecution of this war without losing our souls?

By refusing to even pose questions like "how much sleep deprivation constitutes torture". By making sure that the answer to that question and others like it are utterly irrelevant to us, because we are men of honor.
Zippy | Homepage | 10.02.06 - 4:10 pm | #

"By refusing to even pose questions like "how much sleep deprivation constitutes torture". By making sure that the answer to that question and others like it are utterly irrelevant to us, because we are men of honor."

The problem is, we are not all men of honor. That is why such a question must be asked. If only to keep the dishonorable in line.
JonathanR. | 10.03.06 - 10:50 pm | #