Scenario:
You are leading an investigation regarding a potential terrorist plot to set off a bomb in the middle of Manhattan. You have good reason to believe that the bomb is set to go off on the anniversary of 9/11. The date today is September 10.
You have captured a person whom you have verified as being a member of the terrorist group in question. You have reason to believe that this person knows where the bomb will be planted and knows the location of the other members of the terrorist group.
Your intelligence level of reliability and accuracy is based loosely on past experience and the consistent reliability of the same sources. You would rate the accuracy of your “reason to believe” at about 90% (about a 10% possibility of error).
Based on your information, the bomb would kill around one million people. (There are about 1.6 million people living in Manhattan).
You have some educated guesses as to where the bomb may be located, but you lack the resources and time to be able to cover even a small fraction of those locations.
You have approximately 12 hours before you believe the bomb will detonate.
You have been given special permission by the President of the United States to use any means necessary to prevent the bomb from detonating, and assurance that you will be immune from any criminal or civil liability based on your actions. This guarantee is in writing, and you have no reason to believe it is insincere. It also covers any attempt at extradition by any international courts. (Basically, for purposes of the hypothetical, assume that regardless of what you do, you will not be legally liable).
You have unrestricted access to the prisoner (who speaks English), and unrestricted access to any devices that may be acquired and used within a 12-hour period.
Assuming that the prisoner is adamant about trying not to reveal any information regarding the whereabouts of the bomb or the other members of the terrorist organization,
What do you do to try to extract the necessary information from the prisoner?
Options:
1: Use unrestricted torture devices and methods
2: Use torture devices and methods, but limited in a certain way (which you will explain in your comment)
3: Use only methods authorized by the Human Rights Convention and other applicable humanitarian international and domestic law
4: Only interrogate verbally (including any sort of psychological methods)
5: Only interrogate verbally (without resorting to psychological manipulation)
6: Something else
Also, please consider these additional questions:
a. Would you allow the prisoner to have a personal legal representative (attorney) present?
b. Depending on which option you chose, would you perform any of the interrogation/torture personally, or would you delegate that duty?
c. Would you video tape or otherwise record any or all of the interrogation?
d. Would your answer to the original question (level of torture) differ depending on the gender of the prisoner?
e. Would your answer differ if the prisoner were a white, U.S.-born anglo-saxon? Male? Female?
f. Would you use forms of mutilation? Genital mutilation?
g. Would you consider rape (either for a male or female prisoner), or the threat of rape to be an acceptable form of torture in this scenario?
h. If you had access to the prisoner’s 10-year-old daughter, would you consider torturing the daughter in order to extract information from the prisoner? If so, what’s the extent of torture you would use against the daughter (in terms of the options above)?
i. If you had access to two otherwise equal prisoners, would you kill one in order to extract information from the other?
j. If you had not gotten the requisite information by hour 11, what would you do?
Tags: Adam, anniversary, attorney, bomb, criminal, English, genital, human, Law, legal, Logic, Manhattan, mutilation, president, prisoner, rape, rights, terrorism, torture, United States
Honestly? HONESTLY? I have no idea. I can’t imagine being in this situation.
Are there even any people who truly can? If there are, they are VERY FEW, and I guess I’d be interested in their answers. But only barely. And I don’t think answers from people who realistically will never be anywhere close to such a situation are at all enlightening.
I think one of the purposes, though, in asking such an impossible question is to examine the way in which the leaders of the world make such decisions in a regulatory/international law capacity on behalf of those who might actually be the ones performing the torture. In other words, the people deciding whether it’s okay to torture are rarely the ones actually engaged in torture. In a sense, this question is not asking what you’d do in the situation, but what you’d allow — if you could possibly imagine yourself in a situation where it might really matter.
I don’t think those who decide such things ask themselves critical questions like this. Perhaps because they’re afraid of the answers they’d give.
I’d try out drugs that would impair the prisoner’s judgement (LSD? alcohol?) and pretend I’m someone on his side. Hopefully this could get an honest answer slipped out of the prisoner. Given the situation, I’d be crossing my fingers for a pardon afterwards.
I definitely wouldn’t try pain-based torture, which is completely unreliable.
Yoo, you’d not use pain-based torture solely because it’s unreliable? If it were reliable, would you use it?
Its unreliability completely rules out pain-based torture. But if it were among the most reliable methods, I’d use it only after more humane methods of similar reliability were exhausted. Basically reliability is the most important factor, and humaneness is the deciding factor between equally reliable methods.
basically you just want people to say they’d use torture under certain circumstances.
I’m agree with the guy that says to use LSD (or other hallucinogen) you could just trick the answer out of him then
@ Beatski,
It also has to do with semantics. How are we defining “torture,” and do we just shift our definitions when it suits us? It’s similar to calling anything that you don’t like “terrorism” and then using that word as a scare tactic to pass overbearing laws to prevent those things you don’t like. Torture is one of those “hands off” issues that plagues my mores with the thought that the people making decisions about what’s acceptable and not are never the ones who have to dirty their hands with it. Similarly, they’re the ones who send young men and women off to get killed in war and skirmishes, but don’t, themselves, have to worry about getting blown up by a land mine. It’s much different now than it was during the founding of the U.S., when the lawmakers were also almost all involved in the physical fight for such freedoms. Today, it’s CNN and Fox news vicariously telegraphing what’s happening in the world to us, and we never have to get our shoes dirty.
I, therefore, distrust most lawmakers and leaders who make decisions about what constitutes torture, and what’s acceptable.
Yoo & Beatski: LSD would render any answers far less reliable than torture. Some of the things people believe while under the influence of drugs defies even the tenuous grip on reality fundamentalist religious folk have. It’s quite possible that the prisoner, while tripping, would truly believe that the ‘bomb’ is actually an alien death ray and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.
As for what constitutes torture, as someone who’s had some very nasty psychological experiences, manipulating someone under the influence of LSD *definitely* counts. PTSD and psychosis don’t require any inflicting any physical harm and are far less likely to ‘heal’ than any physical wound. It also follows that if severe mental harm can be inflicted *without* causing physical pain, such pain could *also* cause severe mental damage (and it does).
I’m not sure what I’d do in that situation. I suspect it would involve a psychological profile to determine what’s most likely to get the truth out of this particular individual. Ideally the profile would inform a list of options which could be ordered according to the damage each would inflict upon the prisoner, starting with the least harmful. I don’t know how the options on that list would stack up against human rights conventions. Probably not well.