This is just a little thread dedicated to the treatment of prisoners, the actions taken against those who disobey statutes to protect prisoners, and what should and shouldn't be allowed.

Most of us in the USA are (hopefully) aware of the horrible travesties committed by George W. Bush who now has the power todefine torture and who constitutes an enemy combatant. These stipulations allow for torture so long as it passes W.'s inspection as well as the write to be accused of an enemy comatant which in turn allows for the suspension of habeas corpus.

Also there is the matter of the Rulan Gong practicers in China. Reports have been circulating that the Chinese government is systematically arresting members of the organization whose number are estimated to be over seventy million people. While they are incarcerated, prisoners are often surgically operated on for the government to harvest organs which are sold at a huge profit which in turn also feeds the Chinese "organ tourism" economy.

Thoughts?

Well, I think that to condemn torture (which, I'm assuming, we all do) we'd need to first define it somehow. There is a need to be able to put stress on a prisoner if there is reason to believe that doing so will increase the chances that useful information that can be used to save lives can be gathered from the prisoner. Interrogations are used often, and they are usually stressful. The question lies in when does the stress become too much?

There's the trouble though: 'useful information'.

Information acquired under torture doesn't provide reliable information for the interogators, because the victim will generally say anything that they believe will prevent further torture. A retiring general who had been involved with Guantanamo Bay for several years stated that not a single piece of good intelligence had been recovered from the inmates.
That might mean that they are all battle hardened veterans with immense levels of anti-torture training, but more likely it simply means that they don't know anything to begin with.

Torture can be a method of extracting information, certainly, but the point is that you don't have the information to begin with, so when it is said you will have no way of confirming it (otherwise you wouldn't have needed to use torture to begin with). This means that everything retrieved that way should be treated with extreme speculation.

The US government has defined torture as anything that 'does not inflict permanent phyiscal harm', which is frankly despicable. By that definition you have a vast amount of truly inhuman things still available to you, and I suspect that they are being used. Electric shocks, water, psychological abuse...

I agree that Bush's definition is far too dangerous and disrespectful, but I think that there is a need for us to be able to extract any information that they do have. It is possible that someone who is involved with terrorists would know something about them, and be reluctant to say anything about them. I think that there is a need to put pressure on these people, with the hope that the information may save some lives. I do not think that physical pain produces good information. However, I believe that other forms of psychological 'torture', such as sleep deprivation, can break down somebody's will to protect their friends and beliefs and can help aid in useful information gathering. I also think that these things are, in my understanding of torture, not torture. I do not think that they are pleasant, I think that they are rather painful, and may produce long lasting effects, but I think that in a time of war, if another country subjected our soldiers to these abuses I would not feel the kind of outrage I would if I heard about them using electric shocks, or water boarding.

Time of war? Who are the UK or America at war with? You point out the country that we're at war with... Terroristan? I understand your point, but it's important to not buy into the rhetoric that the government uses to support itself.

If you're talking about 'The War On Terror' then you're talking about something that isn't a war at all. It's a large-scale anti-terrorist movement. It's also doing a bloody good job of radicalising many of the people it was supposed to be helping.

Torture in these circumstances is even less justifiable. You do not defeat an ideology with guns. Killing every single currently-existing terrorist in the world instantly would make three spring up for every one you strike down (as Iraq has proven). Against an ideology that justifies attacks through accusing you of barbarism you have to prove that you are the one with superior moral values. By torturing your captives you only justify and strengthen your opposition... Or maybe that's the idea? Maybe Bush and Blair believe that their leadership is stronger for having a nebulous enemy to fight?

Torture can only make the situation worse, upping the stakes and proving the accusations of terrorists about the inhumane Western world. I'm disgusted with the way that US leaders have acted in the past five years and appalled that my own country has coluded in the attrocities towards humanity. What's more astonishing is that the leaders still don't see how they are daily making really obvious mistakes.

Slightly more on topic again, you would think that if torture could produce useful information then after three/four years in Guantanmo we might have got something from it, but we haven't. The beatings and twisting of people's minds for months and years on end has produced nothing. We are measurably less safe as a society because of it, and it hasn't even had any short-term benefits.

I don't know if there have been any short-term benefits from Gitmo, and neither do you. If they're doing their job well, then we wouldn't know. That is not to say that I agree with what is going on there - I don't. I doubt that they have gotten useful information, or that there have been benefits - I merely think that it is something about which I cannot really know.

As for talking about war - I was talking hypothetically more than anything else. I do think that there is something akin to a traditional war going on in Afghanistan, and Iraq, though. And I don't support torture, I merely question what qualifies as torture. When the police interrogate somebody and yell at them, or lie to them and say that their accomplices have already admitted to a crime, is that torture? What do you define as torture? Or is it like obscenity - you know it when you see it?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story...1318702,00.html

That brings new meaning to 'read it and weep'.



Anyway, more on topic:

Defining torture is always going to be tough: it's the Room 101 effect. What's in Room 101? It's the thing that you're most afraid of, and everyone breaks. Torture is something indefinable that oversteps a second boundary of discomfort. The first boundary is detention (the removal of freedoms available to the general population in a reasonably civilised society), but the second one is the use of unnecessary measures and tactics.

Perhaps that is what I would stick with: 'the use of unnecessary measures and tactics'. Can torture be justified to save the lives of thousands? It's a difficult question, but eventually I think the answer may be 'yes'; however, that is the only single circumstance in which it can possibly be justified, where there is a certainty that the benefits of the process will justify the inhumane treatment. Let's call this the 'Jack Bauer situation'. If it is certain that there is an immediate threat and the only method of getting the information necessary is through torture then it could be considered justifiable... But how often does that happen? Once a year? Once a decade? Once a century? How often will the information needed be so time sensitive that it cannot possibly be recovered through the use of drugs and verbal interogation?

Even typing this, I'm wondering though... Could the torture of Osama Bin Laden be justified on the grounds that he must know a few things that on on the go? The capture of Bin Laden would likely result in a significant blow to the structure of Al-Queda, and this could be emphasised by humane treatment, not torture. It would be a more useful tool against terrorism to show that America and its allies value the fair and just treatment of all, even those who are its sworn enemies, than it would to torture him for short-term gains.

Gitmo is an excellent example of a situation where there is no certainty that there is any intelligence to be recovered and so torture can never be justified in those circumstances, but stories of beatings, massively extended periods in stress positions, alternating weeks in hot rooms and cold rooms, extreme noise, and sleep deprivation continue to come from the camp. Are they all true? We can't know for sure, but the resistance of the Bush administration to accept the limitations of the Geneva convention does suggest that there are crimes happening there for which they do not want to be held accountable.