Torture – Should We and Admit It, or Shouldn’t We and Stay Above The Norm?

NPR ran a series on Torture this last June. The following are excerpts from this series that went from legalize it to it’s not very useful. Click on the related link to hear and read more.

Alan Dershowitz, author, lawyer and Harvard law professor had the following to say:

I think torture will be used — and has, in fact, been used — whenever it is felt that by torturing an obviously guilty [terrorism suspect], the lives of multiple innocent people could be saved. The problem is that today, torture is being used promiscuously, and we deny we’re using it.

If the president of the United States thinks it’s absolutely essential to defend the lives of thousands of people, he ought to be on the line. He ought to have to sign a torture warrant in which he says, ‘I’m taking responsibility for breaking the law, for violating treaties, for doing an extraordinary act of necessity.’ That’s a responsibility only the president should be able to take, and only in the most extraordinary situation.

Right now, we have the worst of all possible situations: We deny we’re using torture, we’re using it, everybody can deny they have any role in it. We can’t trace it. So we punish a couple of people at Abu Ghraib … There were low-visibility, low-level people and we used methods that no democracy should ever use and everybody says, ‘Well, it wasn’t my fault, it was some low-level dog handler.’

Dr. Steven Miles is a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and a faculty member of its Center for Bioethics. When Americans were horrified by the pictures of abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, Mr. Miles had just one question: Where were the doctors? He offered these comments:

Doctors and nurses are front-line human rights monitors. They are present in prisons that the Red Cross never gets to and they are there when other human rights monitors are not. And even if they don’t see the abuses themselves, they see the signs of the abuses.

The physicians’ obligation in prison camps is to the health of the prisoners. Prisons are totally different from battlefields. These people are outside of combat. They are disarmed and captive, and in those circumstances, the medical system’s first obligation is to the health of the captives.

Torture has never been confined to narrow channels. You can’t find an instance of the selective use of torture.

Ron Suskind, author of “The One Percent Doctrine” and “The Price of Loyalty”, added the following:

He [President Bush] was interested in a very specific, granular way all the time. He was constantly asking folks inside of CIA, ‘What’s happening with interrogations? Are these techniques working?’ Can we trust what we get? The president … is involved — some people say too involved — in the granular day-to-day grit of this war on terror.

What the evidence shows is that there are cases in which some information that was valuable came from very, very harsh techniques. On balance, what the evidence shows more clearly is that torture creates many, many more problems than it can ever solve. That in some ways, that information is probably costing too much.

Former Army interrogator Tony Lagouranis talks about the tactics he used on Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib (These quotes are out of context, so please listen to the entire interview):

We’d bring the dog into the interrogation both. The prisoner would have a hood over his head or maybe blackout goggles.

At Abu Ghraib, … we had prisoners who wouldn’t see anyone for months.

I didn’t like the abusive aspects of it.

The Chief Warrant Officer in charge there determined to go really hard on these guys [Two brothers for which they had intelligence.]. We ended up not getting any more information than what we already knew ….

… always ramping it [torture options] up.

People were trying to get creative with the interrogation tactics.

Your moral compass starts to shift.

If it’s cold out