Check out this I excerpted from a supposedly humorous weblog entry, Secret CIA interrogation techniques revealed!:
The Grauniad blows the lid off the mother:
Details emerged yesterday about the seven interrogation techniques the CIA is seeking to be allowed to apply to terror suspects… The techniques sought by the CIA are: induced hypothermia; forcing suspects to stand for prolonged periods; sleep deprivation; a technique called “the attention grab” where a suspect’s shirt is forcefully seized; the “attention slap” or open hand slapping that hurts but does not lead to physical damage; the “belly slap”; and sound and light manipulation.
All you want to do is blow up some infidels for Allah, but these pigs won’t let you sit down or take a nap or put on a sweater. If the blasphemers are feeling particularly American, they might even wrinkle your outfit. Or give you a pinkbelly! AAAAIIIEEEEEEEE!!!
[emphasis mine]
Oh yeah, hypothermia… ha ha ha ha, what a great laugh.
Yes, inducing hypothermia is akin to not letting someone put on a sweater. We Americans don’t torture, it’s only coercive interrogation.
(Hm, now I think I got an idea for satire of my own…)
[Just to be clear, I am being completely sarcastic when I say that hypothermia is funny.]
Torture is wrong. We don’t torture child-rapists and serial killers.
That’s because we don’t need information from them in order to save other lives. If we tortured them, it would be to satisfy someone’s sadism. There would be no purpose to it. So in that case it would definitely be wrong.
Don’t fall into the trap of absolutist morality. It’s tempting to point out something abhorrent and say “that’s always wrong, no matter what,” because in most cases, you’ll be right. But often the choices we have are not between right and wrong but between two evils, and it is our job to discern the lesser of the two.
So which is the lesser of the two? One person experiences a great deal of pain or discomfort or hundreds of people are murdered or maimed?
Notice I didn’t add the terrorists’ evilness into the equation. That’s not relevant.
This, however, is.
Here’s a thought experiment: You are in the hypothetical and admitedly improbable situation wherein allowing yourself to be waterboarded would guarantee the saving of one other life.
Just one. Doesn’t matter who.
Would you do it? Would you undergo some panic to save another’s life?
If the answer is yes, then it’s hard to see why it would be wrong to make these terrorists undergo some panic–and that’s all it is, there’s no physical harm done–to save others from being murdered or maimed.
People say that if we use coersive interrogation techniques we will lose our soul.
But if you have it in your power to save lives and you don’t use it because you don’t want to sully your reputation, I’d say you don’t have much of a soul to lose.
The ‘saving lives’ argument is spurious, because it sees a potential terrorist act as utterly distinct from any other form of murderous or injurious activity. If you believe that torturing suspected terrorists is useful, then why not torture suspected Mafia men, or paedophiles, or even drink-drivers? Don’t tell me that those sick folks don’t know the whereabouts and activites of others of their ilk? Wouldn’t this info save lives too?
It terrifies me that the plotters of 9/11 succeeded in destroying the USA so utterly that I no longer recognise it as the country I looked up to as child. A country where the use of torture is discussed as a matter of obvious necessity, a country that justifies invasion and occupation with lies and then just shrugs when found out? Where did the USA go? Was it really just one day five years ago that wiped out 200 years of a struggle for improvement?
I think people who believe in the ‘torture to save lives’ argument have been watching too much of Kiefer Sutherland in 24…