State of Protest

Considering events of late regarding accusations against President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and others, for the essential authorization of torture, I felt it was necessary to revisit a topic I touched on back in August — Whether in extreme circumstances, you would choose to torture someone in the hopes of saving the lives of others.

Here is the question I asked, abridged (please go read the full question if you need clarification):

You are leading an investigation regarding a potential terrorist plot to set off a bomb in the middle of Manhattan. You have good reason (accuracy of 90%) to believe that the bomb is set to go off in approximately 12 hours, and would kill about one million people. You lack the resources or time to successfully search for the bomb.

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. Assume for purposes of this question that you are immune from liability (you’ve been promised a presidential pardon). 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?

Here are the options I originally gave, and beneath each option is the (rounded) percentage of people who chose that option, out of those who chose anything (note: this is not a scientific test)

1: Use unrestricted torture devices and methods
[32%]

2: Use torture devices and methods, but limited in a certain way
[7%]

3: Use only methods authorized by the Human Rights Convention and other applicable humanitarian international and domestic law
[21%]

4: Only interrogate verbally (including any sort of psychological methods)
[18%]

5: Only interrogate verbally (without resorting to psychological manipulation)
[7%]

6: Something else
[14%]

Recently, top torture experts declared that torture is ineffective. Not only that, but it violates international law and human rights laws and doctrines.

Although the situation in Guantanamo, for instance, wasn’t a “24″-esque time bomb scenario, if a person in a superior position did find him or herself in such a situation, considering what’s at stake, would you accept torture as a necessary evil, perhaps as a last resort? And would you forgive those who authorized it and carried it out?

This really isn’t a question about Guantanamo’s conditions, about the lengthy and humiliating torture that those men endured that effectively accomplished nothing except maybe a get-out-of-jail-free card for the most brutally tortured of them (if not all). It’s more about the scenario that those opposing torture often refer to as being incredibly unlikely. But let’s say it did happen, and let’s say you were living in Manhattan at the time. Would you give the thumbs-up?

If not, what are your justifications for opposing it in certain scenarios? If it’s because it’s unreliable or ineffective (according to experts), are those experts basing their opinions on facts derived from only non-situational torture sessions, (i.e., no imminent threat)? And how often did that happen in order to give the experts enough data to make a fully informed opinion about torture in general?

So, in this time bomb test, torture or no?

Tags: Adam, bomb, Bush, Carrie, Cheney, doctrine, English, evil, human, Law, Logic, Manhattan, moral, Morality, president, prisoner, rights, torture

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 8:17 am and is filed under Government, Morality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.