It seems to me that we should be like Jesus, and not like the pharisees. That is, we should start with morality and not legality.

regards,
#John

Modeled after the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) – the code that the U.S. military uses to try soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines – the MCA provides unprecedented rights to alien unlawful enemy combatants at trial. The MCA balances U.S. international law obligations and the national security of the U.S. while the conflict continues.

The MCA provides alien unlawful enemy combatants virtually the same due process and rights that are provided by the United Nations in their war crimes tribunals…

“You are thinking that information extracted from a suspect via lawful means and torture are in the same epistemic place. So why is torture necessary at all?”

“Torture” is your tendentious word, not mine. Don’t impute your assumptions to me.

“The argument for torture rests on a dubious premise that it will lead to reliable information, for when the suspect is put under its duress the suspect will be more willing to tell the truth.”

It rests, on part, on the premise that absent an adequate motivation, he may have no incentive to say anything at all.

“Information extracted from a detainee or a suspect via torture is thought to be more reliable, and therefore torture is necessary for the state to do in order to protect its citizens.”

i) There’s no prior assumption regarding its reliability or unreliability. But we can only check out the reliability of what he says, not what he refuses to say.

ii) At the same time, he does have an incentive to tell the truth if he thinks that lying will result in renewed interrogation.

“But you do not think this is the case, for information extracted under lawful methods of interrogation is of the same epistemic quality as that of information extracted via torture.”

i) To the contrary, it could well be the case that more coercive techniques applied to criminal suspects would sometimes yield very useful information.

ii) However, as I pointed out to Joe Carter, there are tradeoffs in dealing with domestic and foreign terrorists.

Citizens have, or ought to have, greater rights because they have greater responsibilities. They buy into the system. There are general benefits for all. But that also comes at a cost.

Take the presumption of innocence in a criminal trial. That’s a classic tradeoff.

It’s justifiable under the terms of a social contract.

iii) That’s quite different than dealing with foreign terrorists.

Assuming that Judas refused to answer uncoerced questioning, what manner of coercive interrogation – compliant with Christian morality/doctrine – would have be permissible to employ on Judas?

Steve: You commit the fallacy of the complex question because you do not understand the context of my remarks at all.

Reflecting on David’s post that contained remarks about cruel and unusual punishments I was reminded of Darrell Cole’s essay about the just and unjust use of the sword. That is the issue, and there is no straw man being made, because there is no argument being made. I am only recalling a point made by a Just War ethicist about the unjust nature of torture.

You are thinking that information extracted from a suspect via lawful means and torture are in the same epistemic place. So why is torture necessary at all? The argument for torture rests on a dubious premise that it will lead to reliable information, for when the suspect is put under its duress the suspect will be more willing to tell the truth. Information extracted from a detainee or a suspect via torture is thought to be more reliable, and therefore torture is necessary for the state to do in order to protect its citizens.

But you do not think this is the case, for information extracted under lawful methods of interrogation is of the same epistemic quality as that of information extracted via torture.

Why torture then? For sadistic pleasure?

“Hardly.”

It’s a straw man argument for you to compare, let us say, a CIA interrogator who uses sleep deprivation on a terrorist to extract information regarding a terrorist plot to a torturer who is takes a butcher knife to a victim for sadistic pleasure. Not only is your comparison grossly inaccurate, but it’s downright defamatory.

Why do you think it’s morally permissible for you, as a professing Christian, to misrepresent the opposing position with scurrlious comparisons?

“Actually, it is very different. A detective ‘grilling’ a suspect is not the same as torturing a suspect. Torture is thought to be an aid to investigating–to getting truth from the detainee–it is not the process of investigation itself.”

You’ve abandoned your own argument. You originally objected to “torture” because it’s ineffective in yielding reliable information.

This assumes that an interrogator (or his superiors) simply takes the information at face value, rather than attempted to do any fact-checking.

To the contrary, information from a terrorist is no different that information from a criminal suspect. In both cases they may feed the interrogator misinformation. In both cases the interrogator will treat that information as a possible lead which may or may not turn out to be a false lead.

Adam: Actually, it is very different. A detective “grilling” a suspect is not the same as torturing a suspect. Torture is thought to be an aid to investigating–to getting truth from the detainee–it is not the process of investigation itself.

Adam Omelianchuk: Hardly.

This is the definition found in the UN Convention:

For the purposes of this Convention, the term “torture” means 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.

It might be good to consider whether this is an appropriate and workable definition, whether it needs to be modified, or whether it should be scrapped altogether.

“The government has the right to bear the sword, but it does not have the right to carve lines into a detainee’s skin for sadistic interrogation purposes.”

A straw man argument.

The question at issue is not to extract a confession under duress, but to extract intelligence under duress. This is about counterespionage, not pretrial discovery.

“Even if the suspect is guilty of harbouring information about fellow conspirators that might be crucial to stopping a terrorist act, he could just as easily give false or misleading information to his interrogators, who would not necessarily know the difference.”

It’s no different than a homicide detective who grills a suspect. He then treats what the suspect tells him as a possible lead which he must follow-up to either confirm or disconfirm. If it turns out to be a false lead, he goes back, armed with that information, to grill the suspect again.

“Any effort to do so will almost inevitably tempt us, in our choice of means, to flirt with the edges of legality and rectitude.”

i) Whether or not we’re skirting the edges of legality begs the question of what laws we should have in place. Do we have good laws? Do our laws protect the innocent, or do our laws protect the assailant?

ii) Should we start with questions of legality or questions of morality?