(05/04/04)
I was checking CNN.com last night and I stumbled across one of their polls: Is torture ever justified? I check the results, expecting to see a 90/10 split against torture. But then apparently I gave the American public too much credit. The results were actually about 55/45 against justifying torture.
This made me think of the extreme example, the hypothetical "ticking bomb" scenario. A terrorist of some sort knows where a bomb is, and the authorities know that they have a limited window of time to find the bomb. The terrorist does not cooperate, and they're running out of time. Is it appropriate to torture the information out of him?
If this were an American terrorist (say, one of those ELF guys) with American authorities on American soil concerning potential American victims, then the clear answer is that torture is wrong. There are just so many applicable rights that would prohibit such treatment. Torture could hardly be called due process, and "cruel and unusual" come to mind, as well as the 5th amendment rights to not self-incriminate.
But let's brush away that pesky Constitution and look at it from a moral perspective. I guess you're gonna be looking at it as a utilitarian, in that wronging the criminal is OK if you're saving many lives. But who's to guarantee that the torture will yield the necessary results? Psychologists will argue that torture leads detainees to give interrogators what they want to hear instead of the truth. What if the authorities are wrong about the bomb in the first place, and the detainee insists that there is no bomb? Either way, I would think that a psychopath that has no problems with killing innocent people wouldn't succumb to torture in the first place.
I supported the war against Iraq ONLY because of my views on torture and human rights. Now that the "liberators" have done some pretty screweded up things, I have finally regretted my original support for the war. This does not mean that I support a pullout, but they've got to clean up the situation over there before I can put my faith in another Bush Administration.
