Originally posted by Bobboau
well if you look carefully liborator isn't advocateing violent interogations, he's in favor of more passive pain, like sleep deprovation and chemical inducement, I'm the one sort of defending outright tourchure for information.
killing someone is not acceptable, permenantly mameing them is also not acceptable. asside frome that, *_if_ it produces results* (wich many people clame it doesn't, in wich case I'm against it as being a waist of time) I have no problem with it. so long as those conducting the interogation are absolutely sure that they are correct and are punished if proven wrong.
useing the police example again, if someone is beaten and then later proven innocent, then they would be intitled to major reporations, wich would have to come out of the individuals responcable for makeing the decision. at the very least, I don't think physical evedence gathered as a result of a beating should be tossed out as it is now.
There's no such thing as 'passive pain'.... sleep deprivation, chemical inducement, etc are still torture, still prohibited, and still ****ing evil things to do to people. They're also still dangerous in terms of long term consequences.
It's erasy for people to downplay psychological torture, because they don't have the same mutilated, bloated bodies to look at in the papers the next day, and because mental damage and suffering isn't as easy to capture in a polaroid. These methods aren't used because they're 'kind', they're used because they cause pain in a different way to beatings. It's designed to destroy a human being, to make them completely mallable. And even that doesn't work (and this has been evidenced in many, many cases) in terms of extracting reliable information; even when the guy you torture tells you the truth, how can you extract it from the stuff he says to please the torturer?
(that's a reason why evidence gained from torture is not admissable; another obvious thing is that if someone is willing to beat a confession out a suspect, they're probably also willing to support it by planting or faking evidence against them - it throws the whole legitimacy of the criminal investigation into doubt)
You can only begin to even defend the use of torture in a system where you can prove guilt without a doubt, i.e. to prove that you're not torturing an innocent person. But that some system doesn't exist, and if it did we wouldn't need to use torture for information.
Reparations might sound a good idea, but what amount of money can compensate for being tortured? Even if the victim of torture isn't permanently physically damaged, they'll suffer the psychological consequences of it for years, maybe the rest of their life; how much money could compensate for such permanent trauma? And what of the people who die - even accidentally (from an undiagnosed heart defect, for example) under such interrogation?
I think the most illustrating thing about torture is that it's main uses have been as a form of terrorism by despotic governments. It's a method of inflicting pain, and then justifying it with the coerced information. It means
everyone is guilty (no-one can hold out forever), so the state can repress, beat, imprison etc any and every person.
