No.
Quote:
"aggressive interogation techniques"
Heh. The same everywhere.
Torture is the act of intentionally inflicting physical or mental suffering on someone else,
usually for purposes of coercion. (Torture is also practiced by sadists, for personal pleasure.)
It takes innumerable forms, thus they could not all be listed. Beatings; dismemberment; sleep deprivation; deprivation of food, water, or air, even for relatively short periods; the taking of hostages; threats, even if not ultimately carried out; the nonconsensual administration of drugs or alcohol; acts (or threats) of rape; the infliction of physical pain, even without creating marks on or damage to the body (such as with some voltages of electricity); sensory deprivation; humiliation; prolonged situations of discomfort. Others are more imaginative than I am myself in concocting and performing acts of torture, but I could go on.
There are several endemic problems with committing torture.
The first is that it inflicts usually severe and prolonged suffering on other human beings. This is extremely disruptive not only to their life functions, in most cases, but also (always) to their mental state. Not only to do so, but to do so knowing the result, is monstrous.
Second, the information and concessions which might be gained through torture are unreliable. "Waterboarding," for example, was in use during the Salem Witch Trials; the victims of those trials, under coercion and torture, often confessed not only to crimes which they did not commit, but to crimes which were in all likelihood
fundamentally impossible for them to have committed. If I could force a confession to sexual congress with The Judeo-Christian Devil from a prisoner, I could force a confession to
anything from a prisoner - hence, force is not the proper avenue toward extracting confessions. (As a result of this principle, our American intelligence agencies place a very low trust threshold on "HUMINT." Although it is apparently coming into its own as an interrogation technique, these days.)
Perhaps worst of all, to commit acts of torture and to condone them disregards everything we have so far come to believe about our universal human rights. To condone torture in
one situation, we enable its possible use in
any situation, given time and gravity. Suppose; today, this minute, people are turning the switch in their brains which says that to torture a man (in some manner) to
potentially save millions of lives (This is what has been called the "nuclear terrorist" scenario) would be acceptable. Once that switch is turned, not only in the collective unconscious but in the law, the precedent is set for the
other switches being turned. For a hundred thousand lives? For fifty thousand? For
one thousand? It's like that old joke. ("Would you sleep with me if I gave you a million dollars?" "Yes, I suppose that I would." "How about for five dollars?" "What do you think I am, making an offer like that?" "We've already established
what you are, now we're haggling over the
price."
wink
For one? Suppose that a child has gone missing, and we take a man into custody who
we believe might know his location. Should we strap him into a chair with a painful (but not damaging) electric current being fed into his genitals? We could save
a life. He
might know
something, and we're not wringing what he
might know from him like blood from a stone. Is that not a failure? Is not every life precious, and is not every potential innocent
more precious than every potential guilty life?
I say no. There must be other and better ways to save lives, and to condone it once is to condone it again. I cannot and will not stand for torture becoming a means to an end, no matter how noble we may believe that end to be.
SwampRabbit
Torture is inhumane, but in the past it has saved lives as well as claiming them.
When, where? Whose lives are these?
100
200
200
100
50
