An odd stance, ckroberts. If we only read things posted on this forum that actually matter we would barely spend more than half an hour a month here!

An interesting article. From my perspective it's a something of a statement of the blindingly obvious, but as he says there plenty of crazy people out there who insist that torture produces nothing useful.

As ckroberts points out, morality is not a slave to ecnomical feasibility. Slavery is much mroe cost affordable than even paying a living minimum wage. That's why the sex slave trade is so lucrative. Doesn't make it any less immoral and criminal. In fact, it makes it *more* so in both regards (more immoral and more criminal). Same with torture. It's one thing to deceive a person and trick them into giving away stuff, but quite another to torture it out of them.

@Oct - Sex slavery works, making money for the slavers. Does that mean we should give a pass to those who enslave and sell out women? Just because other coutnries do it, should we do it? Or should we try to keep the moral high ground and respect certain basic human rights as recognized by the civilized first world nations?

@ Draug

Don't quite follow your meaning, Draug. Of course we shouldn't do it, and we should condem states who do (such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, the USA etc etc). The chap doesn't suggest we use torture, but instead asks why so many of us use the insane idea that it doesn't work when clearly it's false.

I haven't read the article, but from your description and the title I assume that it only deals with the question, whether torture "works". As far as I know, this question was last time seriously discussed in the 18th century. If I may summarise the result of the debate (which began around 400 BC in Rome):

- torture may or may not work, there is no reason to believe any statement under torture because it may just have been made in order to end torture. In the end the result is inclusive at best.

- torture used to be part of the regular procedures usually to make a defendant confess IN LIGHT OF EVIDENCE indicating he was guilty. The last part was important, because individual guilt often had implications for family, village, etc.

- in light of these two main lines of justification, reason 2 disappeared from most (European) law tradition, as punishment was now directed only on the individuals involved in a plot, so a confession was not necessary nor the preference to undergo torture in order to save the family or other group. Concerning reason 1, mainstream opted for the precautionary approach: if inconclusive then abstain (eg. from torture).

Additionally there were moral concerns, already voiced here, so I won't repeat them. Interestingly enough is the fact, that torturing countries don't tend to have lower crime or better clear-up rates. Only higher conviction rates, which are better explained by other factors such as low degrees of press freedom, transparency and winning coalition size. No wonder it "works" in the Middle East…

Hmmm, I think we're in danger of putting the term "works" into murky waters. Consider the cheese knife and the nuclear bomb. Both can be used to kill people, yet the cheese knife also cuts cheese, therefore the cheese knife works better.

In terms of regular crime prevention I dare say torture isn't all that amazing. I also suspect that it would fail as a form of children's entertainment (although I could well be wrong). Purely in terms of information gathering, however, it works well.

As I said: it is difficult to judge whether torture "works" for information gathering. The result here is inconclusive. Hence, one should then bring in further considerations, such as moral ones.

" It's still evil, immoral, and as morally destructive to the perpetrator as it is physically to the victim. "

That is wholly a matter of opinion. Morally destructive to the perpetrator? Bahhh....If I could water board you and save a thousand lives, I would walk away with my moral conscience completely free and clear, as, first and foremost, a good so-called "torture" technique such as water boarding will not physically harm the recipient.

That being said, torture works in the Middle East because the victim *knows* with certainty that a throat cutting/beheading is well within the operation parameters of the torturer. Which also is the drawback, because they may lie to attempt to gain release.

For the US, torture is not necessarily effective because there is in fact *not* a certainty that death can occur, and without that actual fear the effectiveness of the torture can be diminished.

Bottom line, though, ckroberts assertion that "torture" must come with diminished morality is simply an opinion, not fact.

Of course, the real question is, "What constitutes torture?"

In the case of "water boarding", there is no physical harm, it is just *extremely* uncomfortable and unpleasant and apparently terrifying. So does discomfort constitute torture?? If so - then there are a lot of prisoners in solitary confinement in the US being "tortured"...

Gentlemen, small intervention by redhouse:

the author does not at all claim that torturing is immoral and in fact, he is a professor of law in NL and a fierce opponent of islamic extremism. I am quite sure that he has written this article to condemn torture and not defend it, and in particular, condemn those who use it.

Please continue :-)

(And thanks to Octavious in particular for keeping a clear head)

Ah, X3n0n, what you said was that old chestnut "torture may or may not work, there is no reason to believe any statement under torture because it may just have been made in order to end torture", which always annoys me a tad. Of course the statement made under torture was made in order to end the torture. That's sort of the point.

The question of how reliable the statement is depends on the methods of the torturer. If we have the bungling Mr Bean as head torturer (which I can only assumed is what is imagined by the "torture doesn't work" brigade) who will poke away with his torturing stick until you tell him Bin Laden's hiding in a bungalow in the outskirts of Dartmoor, after which he lets you go and heads off to look for him, then no... it won't produce anything reliable.

If, however, you have someone who simply asks a long lists of questions that he mostly knows the answer to, and removes a fingernail or occasional eyeball of a loved one for every lie you tell, then it's a pretty safe bet you'll be as honest as the day is long.

krellin, such an opinion would only reflect, I'm afraid, your degenerated status. Even a necessary evil is evil. Soldiers and policemen who have killed report being somehow permanently harmed or damaged by doing so, even in cases when such killings were considered justifiable or even necessary.

Sure, a person could torture somebody and walk away with a clear conscience. People kill and rape and destroy and feel themselves justified. Any number of slaveholders believed their system to be natural and just. That's part of the problem.

Octavious, "matters" in the sense of any meaningful debate/discussion about torture. There's good evidence that torture, generally speaking, isn't itself a terribly effective information-gathering technique. Even if it were, that would not change what its legal or social status should be.

I did go ahead and read the Google translate version of that article, and I was disappointed. He takes the Zero Dark Thirty depiction as true, which has been objected to by dozens of people who know directly that the events in that film have been falsified. Torture didn't bring us bin Laden. [see: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/05/cia-torture-chief-calls-leon-panetta-liar-over-bin-laden-killing]