Larissa
17th March 2003, 11:37
(Received from a friend)
The New Yorker, March 17, 2003:
'At the present dismal and disorienting moment, everything, as they say in Washington, is on the table. Before September 11, 2001, no one imagined that
a time would come when the permissibility of torture would be an urgent topic of public discussion, let alone something like the official, though of course unacknowledged, policy of the United States.
...
The argument is sometimes made that torture is useless-that it is a bad way to gather intelligence, because people under torture lie. Torture is "a wonderful way of getting false confessions out of innocent people," a human-rights activist said on television the other day, but "a terrible way of getting the truth out of guilty people." If matters were that simple, however, torture would be so rare that covenants abolishing it would be superfluous rather than ineffectual. All intelligence-gathering methods are imperfect; all produce "noise"; all are vulnerable to deceit and subject to verification. Torture, alas, is no worse than many. Over time, it probably ends up augmenting what it seeks to prevent, if what it seeks to prevent is terror. (A case in point is Ayman al-Zawahiri, whom Egyptian torturers made one of the deadliest terrorists on earth.) But, in the short run, torture, sometimes, "works."
War kills, maims, and otherwise destroys many more people than torture does, and most of them are innocent-not only civilians, who become "collateral
damage," but also soldiers, many of whom are either unwilling conscripts or guilty simply of wishing to serve their country. Torture, per se, is not lethal, and its victims can be far from innocent, but the moral revulsion it provokes has a special sharpness, and in this lies the deepest reason to abjure it. In war, valor is possible; comradeship is possible; heroism is possible. Even terrorism and assassination can offer scope for an ugly kind of courage. But, just as the victims of torture are utterly helpless, the perpetrators of it are utterly debased. Like capital punishment, torture is abhorrent not only for what it does to the tortured but for what it makes of the torturer. It is the perfect opposite of what we like to think our country has stood for. It is surely not what we wish to become.'
End quote.
No comment.
Paul
(Edited by Larissa at 8:38 am on Mar. 17, 2003)
The New Yorker, March 17, 2003:
'At the present dismal and disorienting moment, everything, as they say in Washington, is on the table. Before September 11, 2001, no one imagined that
a time would come when the permissibility of torture would be an urgent topic of public discussion, let alone something like the official, though of course unacknowledged, policy of the United States.
...
The argument is sometimes made that torture is useless-that it is a bad way to gather intelligence, because people under torture lie. Torture is "a wonderful way of getting false confessions out of innocent people," a human-rights activist said on television the other day, but "a terrible way of getting the truth out of guilty people." If matters were that simple, however, torture would be so rare that covenants abolishing it would be superfluous rather than ineffectual. All intelligence-gathering methods are imperfect; all produce "noise"; all are vulnerable to deceit and subject to verification. Torture, alas, is no worse than many. Over time, it probably ends up augmenting what it seeks to prevent, if what it seeks to prevent is terror. (A case in point is Ayman al-Zawahiri, whom Egyptian torturers made one of the deadliest terrorists on earth.) But, in the short run, torture, sometimes, "works."
War kills, maims, and otherwise destroys many more people than torture does, and most of them are innocent-not only civilians, who become "collateral
damage," but also soldiers, many of whom are either unwilling conscripts or guilty simply of wishing to serve their country. Torture, per se, is not lethal, and its victims can be far from innocent, but the moral revulsion it provokes has a special sharpness, and in this lies the deepest reason to abjure it. In war, valor is possible; comradeship is possible; heroism is possible. Even terrorism and assassination can offer scope for an ugly kind of courage. But, just as the victims of torture are utterly helpless, the perpetrators of it are utterly debased. Like capital punishment, torture is abhorrent not only for what it does to the tortured but for what it makes of the torturer. It is the perfect opposite of what we like to think our country has stood for. It is surely not what we wish to become.'
End quote.
No comment.
Paul
(Edited by Larissa at 8:38 am on Mar. 17, 2003)