Signaleer: 04.09

23.4.09

The Torturous Debate—sort of.

Gary Kamiya does us a favor, sort of. He admits, and offers examples, that torture can be effective, it can glean useful information. He even makes a distinction between torture and abuse, a nuance that the nuance community has not, heretofore, been able to grasp.

But the price for Kamiya abandoning a strawman, is that he erects a new one in it’s place.

I will not argue with Kamiya when ne asserts that torture is wrong. There’s no point and I completely agree. The problem is that he and I cannot agree on what is torture.

For my part, I’m willing to suborn my opinion (that the techniques described in the recently unclassified memos are not torture, at least not in and of themselves) to that of the Congress. If Congress passes, or had ever passed, legislation that said that these were torture, and that they may not be used, I’d go along with that. I’d be unwilling to buck that determination.

But they haven’t. They’ve been completely negligent in this arena. Therefore, I’m free to champion my opinion, as is Kamiya.

Kamiya, however, further undermines his position by appealing to the authority of philosophers Kant and Bentham, as though these were the only two schools of thought that could be applied to the question or represented the only, or even the best, of the prisms through which the issue may be viewed. The result is that he tries to draw a clear cut, bright line, black or white distinction by declaring that the situations that might offer justification for torture acts can never be black or white enough.

If I accept this un-nuanced philosophical framework, I’d have to assert that I too, like Kamiya, am a Kantian (at least as Kamiya presents Kantian thought); torture is not morally justifiable.

But Kamiya, like almost every other commenter, and most importantly Congress, fails to ask the basic question on this issue.

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UPDATE: I’d been asked at the Protein Wisdom Pub to expound on the “Basic Question.” That question is, “what constitutes torture?”

The enhanced interrogation techniques, I find, are not torture because of how they were employed. At the same time, there are methods that are ostensibly okay, that are included in the Army interrogation Field Manual, that can still be torture depending on how they are employed.

Classical examples of torture–those are easy.

I alluded to the distinction between torture and abuse. Perhaps that should be a distinction between interrogation and abuse and that there are methods of both that include torture–and individual techniques can go either way. I come back to intent often when considering this.

In coercive interrogation, torture or not, the subject has complete control over the duration and extent. Brute force torturers use that to push the subject to break–to give up their principles–the only thing that prevents any subject from telling what they know–to make the bad stuff stop. I find that this is universally the view of torture that opponents have.

But real interrogators, even using techniques that could easily cross into the brute force, torture, realm, don’t operate that way. They hammer on that point that the subject is really in control. They use punishment and reward, and good cop / bad cop to develop a rapport of some kind. This kind of interrogator, like their brethren, the polygraph operators, are not practitioners of a science. They deal with human behavior which doesn’t work that way. And like lie detectors, they don’t have to get straight answers to questions to obtain actionable intelligence. They don’t even have to get direct information from the subject at all–sometimes it’s about what’s not said, or the way the answer is phrased.

So that’s a long way to go to not give a very good answer to a good question. But that’s one of the reasons why Congress must set standards and why it’s ludicrous to outlaw something without defining what is being outlawed.

h/t: B. Hard

UPDATE 2: CK MacLeod at the HotAir Greenroom has a great post up on the subject. It’s not much more conclusive than I’ve been but honest reading will make anyone think.