re: #13 I’m a Mavrik!

I can imagine certain hypothetical situations where torture can elicit useful information, such as when the aim is to acquire very specific information about events otherwise well-known (e.g. we know that there is someone tied up in some house and she will die within x hours, and we don’t know the exact place… you get the drift). I can imagine that in some of these situations torture can be a lesser evil. Lesser. But evil.

So, at risk of downdings and for the sake of the argument I can admit that in very, very specific (and extremely rare and unlikely) scenarios torture can elicit probably useful information (and I would think none of these scenarios would correspond to the real life stuff these interrogators had to deal with) and could be deemed to be the way to proceed. What it should never be is legal. I.e. even if you use it as a lesser-evil method, you should still go to prison.

The ‘ticking time bomb, and we KNOW this guy knows where it is’ argument is exceedingly popular with people who desperately want to make you admit that torture is maybe sometimes OK. When they know you’re a woman, they usually manage to throw rape or a child who will be killed into the scenario.

However, you’ve managed to anticipate my normal counter-argument, which is that if you should, God forbid, find yourself managing such a situation (which is so extremely rare and bizarre that I can’t, offhand, think of an actual example), of course you must do whatever you can to extract the information, and then, of course, accept the fact that you will now have to explain yourself to the jury, and have hopelessly fucked up the legal proceedings against the guy you tortured.

What I will not accept is the legal protection of torture.