Did the Bush Administration Perform Unethical Experiments on Terror Detainees?

According to Physicians for Human Rights, yes.

Does the name Joseph Mengele ring a bell, so to speak?

Cheney says he was a big supporter of waterboarding

"When the President Does it, That Means That it is Not Illegal" - Richard Milhous Nixon.

A new book on the torture issue

Apply the golden rule to the treatment of prisoners?

That's what these guys want to do. How naive of them.

I wish I could quit this discussion

But I can't. But I think I'm a little closer to waying my peace here.

Physical pain is only one kind of distressing mental state. While imprisonment can be successfully dealt with by many people, no one who is waterboarded can put up with it for any length of time--supposedly KSM set the record at 2 and a half minutes.

The fact that waterboarding seems to contravene international law (unless you get a international judge who's willing to legislate from the bench and allow it) suggests a strong presumption against using it. I can imagine particular instances in which one can make a utlitarian argument for using it given the kind of information one might get. If we had a waterboarding program, it would be helpful to be reassured that we would only do it to people whom we have good reason to believe are high enough in the counsels of al-Qaeda to know about ongoing terror threats. But then you have to worry about the Potato Chip Effect (you can't eat just one). A waterboarding program that hits only the right people would be better than one that waterboards people who don't fit the category. It doens't look as if our program has done that. You then have to look at the collateral damage caused by the harm to our reputation. Does anyone seriously deny that Abu Ghirab photographs weren't put on al Qaeda recruitment posters? The fact that it would be hypocritical of them to do so is beside the point. You have the fact we could be brought to trial for war crimes for doing this, by people who don't think the Geneva conventions are so "quaint" after all. You have the fact that this requires brutalizing and desensitizing the people who do the waterboarding. When you add everything up (and I haven't begun to add everything up here) it looks as if we are selling our birthright for a mess of pottage.

Even if there is a way to waterboard someone without torturing them (Mike's good question) would we end up with people who do it who get sadistic pleasure out of it. C. S. Lewis has Fairy Hardcastle say that you can't get anyone to do this job (which involved torturing people) who doesn't get some kick out of it.

What happens to our character when preventing an admittedly horrible attack like a repeat 9/11 is so important to us that we treat anybody, even a terror suspect, as a subhuman. As Christians we believe that our character is the only thing that lasts forever, everything else, including lives, come to an end. The Gonzales memo suggesting that the "post 9/11 paradigm" "renders quaint" some of the provisions of the Geneva conventions is a scary statement. It says that because "those people" are the way that are, we shouldn't have to follow the rules we agreed to FOR GOOD REASON (and yes, I am shouting!) I can hear the admistration saying, with Uncle Andrew and the White Witch, "Ours is a high and lonely destiny." When we were attacked, the world sympathized with us, but some probably thought "Welcome to the world, USA." There have been brutal and ruthless enemies before. 9/11 is nowhere near the top of the list of great crimes of the world's history. It's only American conceit that suggests otherwise.

Using the Ring of Power to do good, that will probably help in the short run, but it will destroy us in the long run.

McCain on Torture

Steve Hays has implied that my discussions of torture are out of touch with the reality of war, and in particular interrogation techniques. I wonder if he will make the same charge against this guy, who's must be a bleeding heart liberal, a dove on all matters related to war, and who must have dreamed his "experience" as a POW in Vietnam.

Why does it follow that the fact that some of our military sign up for waterboard training make waterboarding not torture? Why? Why not just say that these guys sign up to learn how to deal with torture by dealing with some of it during training. The fact that they beg for it to stop very quickly once it happens is better evidence that it is torture.

In a traditional understanding of everlasting hellfire a person has a resurrection body which is never consumed by the flames of hell, but the flames inflict pain on that person without any actual organ damage. So, I guess, no one gets tortured in hell. I'm sure that'll be a relief to everyone who goes there.

We have to look at what we ordinarily mean when we use words. Inflicting suffering of any kind on a person so that they will do anything to make it stop is the very essence of torture. The rest is quibbling. My Clinton parallel works like this, in case you couldn't see the logic. Bill Clinton denied that he had had "sexual relations" with Monica Lewinsky by using a technical, legal definition of sexual relations which could be used to exclude oral sex performed on him. But it was still very deceitful because most of his listeners weren't thinking in terms of the technical definition, they were thinking in more common-sense terms.

This is the international legal definition of torture, provided by a commentator on Triablogue:

"any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions."

This makes it clear that by the legal definition, it doesn't matter if the suffering is physical or psychological.

The National Religious Campaign Against Torture

Here's the definition of torture. Next question

From dictionary.com


tor·ture /ˈtɔrtʃər/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[tawr-cher] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation noun, verb, -tured, -tur·ing.

–noun

1.	the act of inflicting excruciating pain, as punishment or revenge, as a means of getting a confession or information, or for sheer cruelty.

Does Waterboarding get bad information?

Reply to Steve on Torture

Steve: I didn't equate morality with legality. I said that if an action is a contravention of international law, then we need strong justification for doing it. It is conceivable, for example, that the right thing to do for me today is to hold up the Bank of America inside Fry's. But I'd need some very strong justification for doing so. You can't say that legality is irrelevant to morality. Romans 13 is sufficient to show that. And yes, the Romans tortured people. Paul wasn't saying that Christians should obey an order to torture. And yes, when the Romans outlawed Christian public worship, Christians had an overriding reason for disobeying the law. What I am saying is that illegality is evidence of illegality that imposes a burden of proof on the lawbreaker to show that lawbreaking is moral. We had that justification in the case of Jim Crow. I don't see anything like it here.

Do you, or do you not, believe that illegality generates a presumption of immorality? I'm not saying a presumption that can't be overridden, I mean a presumption. Or perhaps you don't think international law is real law, that the only "Caesar" that counts is good ole American law.

You know, it might be fun to go smoke a joint right now. There's nothing in the Bible about not smoking pot. But it's against the law, and I don't have a good enough reason to smoke pot to override the moral status the law against pot provides. So I'm going to blog instead.

I don't agree with everything the allies did in WWII, especially the bombing of civilian populations. Neither, by the way, did C. S. Lewis. But we didn't waterboard Nazis when we captured them. So even though we didn't live up to "just war" standards in WWII, we still didn't torture the Nazis or the Japanese. And we convicted someone of war crimes for waterboarding one of us.

MI5 does it, so it must be OK. Two wrongs don't make a right, you need at least three. Is this your argument? Some of us would call this lame.

My focus was on waterboarding, because it seems to me to be a clear case of torture. You want to deny that it is torture? I didn't say all coercive interrogation tactics are torture, I said we had good reason to suppose that we do use tactics like waterboarding that fit within the legal definition of torture.

Does everyone in the Arab world approve of torture, including moderate Arabs? Does the Qu'ran command it? If the Islamic people we are dealing with are total barbarians why in the world are we trying to help set up a democratic government in one of their countries, and spilling all sorts of blood on both sides in doing so?

Does international law count for something? Does the fact that we signed off on the Geneva accords and promised to follow certain rules count for something?

Let's recap my argument:

1. Waterboarding contravenes the Geneva conventions, being thereby defined as torture by international law.

2. Waterboarding also injures our reputation as a civilized nation in the world community.

3. If something is defined as torture by international law, then it should be done only if there is very strong presumptive evidence that much more good than harm, all told, will come from it. For Christians, Romans 13 helps to show this.

4. However, given 2 and other considerations concerning the effectiveness of waterboarding, this seems unlikely in the extreme to be the case.

5. Therefore, our practice of waterboarding is immoral and should be eliminated.

Does this make my reasoning at all clearer?

C. S. Lewis on Torture

Calling the Bush administration:

"The identity, or close connection between the Fairies and the dead
was certainly believed in, for witches confessed to seeing the dead
among the Fairies. Answers to leading questions under torture
naturally tell us nothing about the beliefs of the accused; but they
are good evidence for the beliefs of the accusers."

_The Discarded Image_, p. 137 (near end of chap. 5)

HT: The Cheshire Cat

A virtual ban on torture-redated

This is Bill Vallicella's treatment of the issue of torture. I think that we can justify a virtual, though not absolute, ban on torture by requiring that, if torture is justified, we must have good reason before we do it to suppose that we will get accurate information for the person being tortured the value of which will outweigh any harm we do by torturing, and that there is no other way to get that information. But don't most torture victims just say anything they have to say to get it stopped, accurate or not? (That's what I'd do. I'd tell my captors what I thought they wanted to hear, not the truth). Experts on interrogations say that torture is not effective. And counting the cost is not as easy as it looks either. If we are to defeat terrorism we have to enlist the support of "moderate" Muslims to condemn the terrorists. How does it contribute to that goal if we start acting like the evil people they have always been told we are?

IF we really do have good consequentialist reasons to torture someone, then the deontologist-teleologist battle is joined. But first the above-mentioned epistemic difficulties must be surmounted, and to be honest I do not see how they possibly can be.

Nobody expects the Bush administration

I'm a Democrat. So when Bush got "elected," I expected a lot of bad things to come from his administration. But I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition. But then.....


Really there is just no excuse for this. Absolutely none. Yeah, I've heard the arguments. If you caught the ringleader of a terrorist group who had bombs planted all over New York, and the only way you could find out where they were was to torture the guy, would you do it. I'm enough of a Kantian to say no even in this case. But this assumes something that clearly isn't true--that we could get the information from him by torture and in no other way. Torture victims talk, but they say whatever they think the captor wants to hear in order to get the torture to stop.

Oh, but we're being told that this isn't torture. The last president had an interesting definition of sexual relations. I think this definition is a tad more serious. The people of this country have to insist that this practice be ended permanently, and if that means not approving the attorney general, or impeaching the President, so be it. This isn't a liberal issue, it's not a conservative issue, it's not a Republican or Democrat issue, it's an ethical issue. Pure and simple.