*Sigh*. Just as he gained a tiny bit of respect by admitting that he was wrong to support Bush in 2004, he then comes out with this.
Now, on the surface, it seems quite right that waterboarding and other practices would be justified if they got information out of people and saved lives.
But there are several problems here:
(1) First, as Farah admits, we are talking about suspected terrorist detainees. However, he quickly changes to "a few hours of degradation for a terrorist." Let's remember that one concern here is that torture might be used against suspects who turn out to be innocent. Apparently Mr. Farah trusts that anyone the government picks up as a suspected terrorist must already be guilty.
(2) Second, as Jim Henley has pointed out, the "ticking time bomb" scenario is the case in which torture is the least likelyto be effective. This scenario is brought up mainly as a foot-in-the-door for more general use of torture.
In particular, I am worried that torture at places like Abu Ghraib is designed not so much to get information, but as a way to intimidate Iraqis into seeing "who's boss."
As Linnet
points out, the old argument "if torture didn't work [at geting information], we wouldn't use it" assumes that getting information is the real goal. Torture works very well at, e.g., intimidating populations, and it is quite possible that people use torture for this purpose under the pretense of getting information. In such a case, people would be likely to use torture "to get information" regardless of how well it achieved the stated goal.
That is all.
No comments:
Post a Comment