When is Torture Acceptable?

What prevents terrorism? Information! If a terrorist is captured and he has information about immanent death and destruction pertaining to the military or the civilian population, is torture viable? If it protects my family it is extremely viable!
Here are a few excerpts of respected theorists and their corresponding links if you wish to follow up postulation.
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“Death: Suppose a terrorist has hidden an atomic bomb on Manhattan Island which will detonate at noon on July 4 unless ... here follow the usual demands for money and release of his friends from jail. Suppose, further, that he is caught at 10 a.m on the fateful day, but preferring death to failure, won't disclose where the bomb is. What do we do? If we follow due process, wait for his lawyer, arraign him, millions of people will die. If the only way to save those lives is to subject the terrorist to the most excruciating possible pain, what grounds can there be for not doing so? I suggest there are none. In any case, I ask you to face the question with an open mind.

Torturing the terrorist is unconstitutional? Probably. But millions of lives surely outweigh constitutionality. Torture is barbaric? Mass murder is far more barbaric. Indeed, letting millions of innocents die in deference to one who flaunts his guilt is moral cowardice, an unwillingness to dirty one's hands. If you caught the terrorist, could you sleep nights knowing that millions died because you couldn't bring yourself to apply the electrodes?”

Excerpted from “The Case For Torture,” By Michael Levin Link:
http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/torture.html

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“To understand what difference a ban on torture will make, I spoke this week with British sources about the interrogation techniques used against the Irish Republican Army in the early 1970s. The British were facing a hideous IRA bombing campaign, and to stop the bombers, the British army and police in Northern Ireland tried to squeeze information from their IRA prisoners.

The British recognized what every cop knows -- that interrogation is much easier if the prisoner is disoriented. So the British put hoods on their IRA prisoners, just as U.S. interrogators have done in Iraq. The British approved other, harsher methods: depriving IRA prisoners of sleep, making them lean against a wall for long periods, using "white noise" that would confuse them.

The clincher for British interrogators was mock execution. The preferred method in the mid-1970s was to take hooded IRA prisoners up in helicopters over the lakes near Belfast and threaten to throw them out if they didn't talk. Sometimes, they actually were thrown out. The prisoners didn't know that the helicopter was only a few yards above the water. I'm told that technique nearly always worked. (So, too, with the "waterboarding" that U.S. interrogators used to break al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed.) The British eventually had to give up their extreme techniques because of public outcry, and I'm told they got less information. But they eventually prevailed against the IRA.”

Excerpted from “Stepping Back From Torture,” by David Ignatius December 16, 2005; link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/15/AR2005121501438.html.
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“Banning torture categorically by federal legislation takes on a new dimension in an era of international terrorist networks that may, within the lifetime of this generation, have nuclear weapons.

If a captured terrorist knows where a nuclear bomb has been planted in some American city, and when it is timed to go off, are millions of Americans to be allowed to be incinerated because we have become too squeamish to get that information out of him by whatever means are necessary?

What a price to pay for moral exhibitionism or political grandstanding!
Even in less extreme circumstances, and even if we don't intend to torture the captured terrorist, does that mean that we need to reduce our leverage by informing all terrorists around the world in advance that they can stonewall indefinitely when captured, without fear of that fate?

This is not only an era of international terrorist networks but also an era of runaway litigation and runaway judges. Do we really want a federal law that will enable captured terrorists to be able to take their cases to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals?”

Excerpted from “Tortured reason,” by Thomas Sowell 11/22/05; link: http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/thomassowell/2005/11/22/176427.html. ------------------------------

“The International Committee of the Red Cross has accused the United States of torturing enemy combatant prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to documents leaked to The New York Times this week. Does that mean U.S. interrogators are sticking needles under inmates' fingernails and attaching electrodes to sensitive body parts? Or are they merely beating prisoners senseless? Hardly.

The ICRC report itself hasn't been made public, but a memorandum summarizing its contents describes far less egregious behavior. Among the tactics the ICRC portrayed as "tantamount to torture" were solitary confinement, temperature extremes, and using "forced positions" to obtain information from some of the approximately 500 men held at Guantanamo.

"The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture," the Times quotes the ICRC report as alleging. But is it? And if such methods are "torture," is the United States justified in using them anyway?”
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“McCarthy, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney, led the prosecution of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. As McCarthy makes clear, we are forced into debating the moral parameters of torture because of the very nature of our current enemy. The United States is not at war with a conventional army but with men whose aim is to kill innocent civilians in the most horrific manner possible. When the Geneva Conventions and other international norms prohibiting torture were developed, McCarthy notes, they were designed to promote the humane treatment of captured soldiers who operated on behalf of nation-states or intra-state liberation movements. "They did not contemplate a core methodology -- targeting civilians, randomly torturing and killing prisoners -- that grossly and willfully violates the very premises of humanitarian law," writes McCarthy.

Starting on Sept. 11, 2001, we have witnessed the most heinous acts committed by Islamist fanatics: 3,000 civilians killed when 19 men flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon; some 200 tourists killed when Islamist terrorists bombed a Bali resort; the bombing of train stations in Spain, killing 200 persons; the videotaped beheadings of Nick Berg, Paul Johnson, Kim Sun-il, and others; and countless other acts of violence aimed at terrorizing the civilian population of the West. The only possible way to prevent such horrors is to obtain information that might interrupt future terrorist plots. And some of those who might lead us to other terrorists are now sitting in cells in Guantanamo.”

Excerpted from “Its time for a rational debate,” by Linda Chavez 12/1/04 link: http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/lindachavez/2004/12/01/13816.html.
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“The war by terrorists against democracies has changed all this. Terrorists who do not care about the laws of warfare target innocent noncombatants. Indeed, their goal is to maximize the number of deaths and injuries among the most vulnerable civilians, such as children, women and the elderly. They employ suicide bombers who cannot be deterred by the threat of death or imprisonment because they are brainwashed to believe that their reward awaits them in another world. They have no "return address."
The terrorist leaders -- who do not wear military uniforms -- deliberately hide among noncombatants. They have also used ambulances, women pretending to be sick or pregnant, and even children as carriers of lethal explosives.

By employing these tactics, terrorists put the democracies to difficult choices: Either allow those who plan and coordinate terrorist attacks to escape justice and continue their victimization of civilians, or attack them in their enclaves, thereby risking death or injury to the civilians they are using as human shields.
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The time has come to revisit the laws of war and to make them relevant to new realities. If their ultimate purpose was to serve as a shield to protect innocent civilians, they are failing miserably, since they are being used as a sword by terrorists who target such innocent civilians. Several changes should be considered:

· First, democracies must be legally empowered to attack terrorists who hide among civilians, so long as proportional force is employed. Civilians who are killed while being used as human shields by terrorists must be deemed the victims of the terrorists who have chosen to hide among them, rather than those of the democracies who may have fired the fatal shot.

· Second, a new category of prisoner should be recognized for captured terrorists and those who support them. They are not "prisoners of war," neither are they "ordinary criminals." They are suspected terrorists who operate outside the laws of war, and a new status should be designated for them - a status that affords them certain humanitarian rights, but does not treat them as traditional combatants.

· Third, the law must come to realize that the traditional sharp line between combatants and civilians has been replaced by a continuum of civilian-ness. At the innocent end are those who do not support terrorism in any way. In the middle are those who applaud the terrorism, encourage it, but do not actively facilitate it. At the guilty end are those who help finance it, who make martyrs of the suicide bombers, who help the terrorists hide among them, and who fail to report imminent attacks of which they are aware. The law should recognize this continuum in dealing with those who are complicit, to some degree, in terrorism.

· Fourth, the treaties against all forms of torture must begin to recognize differences in degree among varying forms of rough interrogation, ranging from trickery and humiliation, on the one hand, to lethal torture on the other. They must also recognize that any country faced with a ticking-time-bomb terrorist would resort to some forms of interrogation that are today prohibited by the treaty.”

Excerpted from “Rules of War Enable Terror,” by Alan Dershowitz 12/21/05 link: http://www.aish.com/jewishissues/middleeast/Rules_of_War_Enable_Terror.asp

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“In a summary of Israel's policies, Glenn Frankel of the Washington Post noted that the 1999 Supreme Court ruling struck down secret guidelines established 12 years earlier that allowed interrogators to use the kind of physical and psychological pressure I described in imagining how KSM might be treated in America's "black sites."

‘But after the second Palestinian uprising broke out a year later, and especially after a devastating series of suicide bombings of passenger buses, cafes and other civilian targets," writes Frankel, citing human rights lawyers and detainees, "Israel's internal security service, known as the Shin Bet or the Shabak, returned to physical coercion as a standard practice."
Not only do the techniques used "command widespread support from the Israeli public," but "Israeli prime ministers and justice ministers with a variety of political views," including the most conciliatory and liberal, have defended these techniques "as a last resort in preventing terrorist attacks.’”

Excerpted from “The Truth about Torture,” by Charles Krauthammer 12/5/05 link: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/400rhqav.asp.