I was reading this article about Hillary Clinton on Common Dreams. According to the article, she told the New York Daily News that the president should have "some lawful authority" to use torture or other "severe" interrogation methods in a so-called ticking-bomb scenario.
The article defines the ticking-bomb scenario, thusly, "You capture the terrorist who has just placed a nuclear bomb somewhere in a major American city. If you can't locate and disarm the bomb, millions of people will die. If the terrorist won't talk, should you torture him until he tells you what you want to know?"
First, let me say that I used to like and respect Hillary Clinton, but lately she has dropped considerably in my estimation. She grows more and more Lieberman-like every day, and I really think that she is too much of a corporate ally to suit me. Despite the fact that I tend to be moderate and somewhat centrist in my own views, I think that the Republicans have taken the country so far to the right, that only a far left thinking individual as president can get us back to middle ground again. Far left is no longer so far left.
That said, the purpose of this essay is to examine the viability of using torture in an unlikely (IMO) "ticking bomb scenario." Many intelligence experts say that torture is an ineffective method of securing information. Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm told Anne Applebaum, a Washington Post reporter (in an article titled, The Torture Myth January 12, 2005) torture is "not a good way to get information." He is not the only one. Simply Google "torture doesn't work" and you will come up with over 8 million references.
Roger Koppl, a tenured FDU economics and finance professor is quoted in a Morris County Daily Record article as saying "If I want to practice sadism, torture is very effective. It is effective for a lot of things. It is not effective for intelligence gathering." He goes on to say, "The problem is that they (the torturers) cannot make a believable promise to stop torture once the victim tells the truth. Victims know this perfectly well and therefore say anything and everything except what the torturers want to know.""
Say that you have a "ticking bomb" scenario and the FBI or the CIA capture someone they believe has knowledge that will prevent the bomb going off. In a case like this, they probably would pick someone up on uncorroborated evidence that wouldn't stand up in court. They would have no time to investigate if they even had the right person. Say they go on to torture this person anyway. If they have the wrong person, he's going to tell them anything just to get them to stop. And if they have the right person, who knows if what he says is the truth.
So they follow the information and go to the wrong city, or the wrong place in that city and the bomb goes off anyway. What have they accomplished? Perhaps, if they had questioned the suspect using proven methods, that questioning might lead to better information. And perhaps continuing with conventional investigation techniques, they would be more likely to uncover the required information faster.
Either way, the bomb goes off, or it doesn't. I don't believe that torture is justified or effective in any case. I was brought up to believe that two wrongs never make a right.
The key to this bogus and trumped up "War on Terror" (see Robert Dreyfuss' Rolling Stone article, The Phony War) is good solid police and investigative work, not attacking countries that had nothing to do with 9/11.
PEACE.