"If a CIA team grabbed me?" I've commented in previous posts on what happened to my adopted nephew. He was grabbed by the police, and interrogated for six hours. He was not fed, and the police ate in front of him. Eventually, he confessed to a crime and was arrested.
He held out for six hours. In the same situation, I would hope to hold for longer – at least long enough for my lawyer to get there.
By Terry's standards, this is torture. His complete lack of reaction to this incident speaks volumes to me. He's perfectly willing to scream about theoretical torture in a legal conference, but he has no time for real torture in his back yard. As long as we're throwing hypotheticals around, if an Al Qaeda team grabbed you off a street, blindfolded you, transported you somewhere random, and tortured you in order to get you to tape statements denouncing your country (or just for the hell of it, because you're an infidel), how long do you think you could hold out?
If the CIA were holding the member of the kidnap team who failed to make his escape, what measures would you tolerate being taken in your behalf? There are two major problems I have with this particular one of Terry's "hobby horses". First, his "utilitarian argument" depends on a flat denial that torture is ever effective. There are enough counter-examples to convince me that it is, sometimes, effective. The second is his definition of torture to include anything that's not nice. His definition is sufficiently broad as to make it impossible for everyone in the criminal justice system to do their jobs. Indeed, under his definition of "torture", a parent putting his child on a "time-out" is engaging in torture. (Indeed, his definition is so silly that when I quoted it in another forum – cut and pasted directly from his journal – one of the people who was taking his side in the debate accused me of making it up to discredit him.)
Ultimately, the point is that we need a reasonable definition of "torture", one suitable for use by grown-ups in real-world situations. That means drawing lines and saying "this not-nice thing is within bounds, that one is out of bounds".
What I see instead is lots of argumentum ad hominem. Scalia supports torture for evil motives, as part of his program to shred the Constitution. Scalia is so stupid he thinks a TV series is real life. Anyone who is willing to look at the possibility that torture might be needed in an extreme circumstance is similarly stupid and evil, and that person's views need not be given any consideration.
I also see an attempt to achieve an easy answer by discarding all sense of nuance. Anything not nice is torture, and torture is always wrong. This makes it easy to pass judgment on others, and easy to defend your own moral purity. You don't even need to think. Just emote at that nasty conservative and bask in your moral superiority.
Re: Also shocking...
He held out for six hours. In the same situation, I would hope to hold for longer – at least long enough for my lawyer to get there.
By Terry's standards, this is torture. His complete lack of reaction to this incident speaks volumes to me. He's perfectly willing to scream about theoretical torture in a legal conference, but he has no time for real torture in his back yard.
As long as we're throwing hypotheticals around, if an Al Qaeda team grabbed you off a street, blindfolded you, transported you somewhere random, and tortured you in order to get you to tape statements denouncing your country (or just for the hell of it, because you're an infidel), how long do you think you could hold out?
If the CIA were holding the member of the kidnap team who failed to make his escape, what measures would you tolerate being taken in your behalf?
There are two major problems I have with this particular one of Terry's "hobby horses". First, his "utilitarian argument" depends on a flat denial that torture is ever effective. There are enough counter-examples to convince me that it is, sometimes, effective. The second is his definition of torture to include anything that's not nice. His definition is sufficiently broad as to make it impossible for everyone in the criminal justice system to do their jobs. Indeed, under his definition of "torture", a parent putting his child on a "time-out" is engaging in torture. (Indeed, his definition is so silly that when I quoted it in another forum – cut and pasted directly from his journal – one of the people who was taking his side in the debate accused me of making it up to discredit him.)
Ultimately, the point is that we need a reasonable definition of "torture", one suitable for use by grown-ups in real-world situations. That means drawing lines and saying "this not-nice thing is within bounds, that one is out of bounds".
What I see instead is lots of argumentum ad hominem. Scalia supports torture for evil motives, as part of his program to shred the Constitution. Scalia is so stupid he thinks a TV series is real life. Anyone who is willing to look at the possibility that torture might be needed in an extreme circumstance is similarly stupid and evil, and that person's views need not be given any consideration.
I also see an attempt to achieve an easy answer by discarding all sense of nuance. Anything not nice is torture, and torture is always wrong. This makes it easy to pass judgment on others, and easy to defend your own moral purity. You don't even need to think. Just emote at that nasty conservative and bask in your moral superiority.