h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As the law lords are debating this at the moment, and this seems the h2g2 place for this discussion, what do people think?

Now, my view is that even considering this is a bloody discrace, but that may not be any suprise to the people here. And though it will not be used in our country (at least not with official approval, or at least not yet), does it send a message to other states that this is acceptable? Is the evidence got from it reliable? Even if it is should it be used in court? Would this effect the extradition of people? Did I dream that the Labour Party said it was going to take the moral highground in its policies? Should we be torturing people for other states? Are there circumstances where it should be allowed?

I am hoping that even the more Alf Garnet of our memebers here will be unable to back the Governments position, however h2g2 is nothing if not unpredicatable So am I being hopelessly niave and optimistic? Do I not have a current grasp of international politics and real politik of the world (am I even using the correct phrases, in the correct way )? Well thank you for letting me ramble on and until later....
BCNU - Crescent

Torture of any kidney was shown to be an unreliable method of getting information hundreds of years ago on account of the fact that the prisoner would often confess simply to make them stop.

So no, evidence gained through torture shouldn't be used.

I have a feeling that they've always done it, and they won't stop unless we, the electorate/population, *make* them stop. Do we have the will and the appetite for it? If not, they'll just carry on.

Much more difficult: what if warning of an imminent terrorist attack comes from some uncivilised country who we *know* got it by torture? Do we maintain a stiff upper lip and pretend we never got the warning...?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

It certainly shouldn't be used in court.
Even legally speaking, it does seem to be hearsay at best: "Someone tells me they heard this bloke admitting to something while under duress..."

However, if someone revealed details of a specific terrorist plot under torture, and that information was passed on to UK authorities, I don't have huge qualms about using the information to stop things happening, if one can come to trust the information before taking drastic action.

Pragmatically speaking, in the latter case it could be difficult to refuse information from a source one thought was reliable. Even if someone took a moral decision to shun *any* information obtained via torture, all a foreign intelligence agency need say is that they have found out information froma source they can't disclose for security reasons.

Morally speaking, the problems with torture as a means of gathering atrocity-prevention information seem to be based around the suffering caused compared to the suffering potentially relieved, with the suffering of the victim being arguably worse if they are not guilty of any terrible crimes, and arguably pointless even if they are guilty if they do not provide useful information.
Much (or all) of the time, it may be considered that the uncertainties involved make a decision to torture unjustifiable.

However, in hindsight, if someone had already been tortured, a decision to use the information or discard it isn't going to change the suffering they underwent.
If it turns out that the information is correct, and it can be checked without endangering other potentially innocent people, such as by phone tapping, or *competent* physical surveillance (Metropolitan Police need not apply), it could be considered that in the particular instance, torture was retrospectively justifiable, if there was no other way the information could have been obtained.

Faced with someone who admitted guilt, and had vital knowledge they were unwilling to reveal, such as the stereotyped "I know where your spouse/child is, and they only have hours to live" kidnapper, I imagine many people with deep reservations about torture would reconsider.


The problem with state-sponsored routine torture is that without very strict controls, which seem unlikely to be in place in the huge majority of circumstances, many innocent people can end up suffering. Due to the nature of torture, innocent people can end up admitting guilt, which can lead the torturers to consider they are torturing justifiably, since most people admit guilt.
Also, given the nature of the work, you might well not end up with the brightest or most reflective people doing it, which rather exacerbates the problems.

Also the problem is that it then becomes very tempting to ship people out to other countries to have them tortured.

There was a recent documentary on this on Arte (French/German cultural TV station). They were looking at cases where people had been picked up in various places (Albania and Rome were two of the examples) by US operatives and then shipped off to Egypt and Afghanistan to be tortured.

In these cases, it seemed to have been concluded that they weren't dangerous, as they were then dumped back into Europe afterwards.

The more we legitimise the results of torture, the more it will be tempting for this kind of thing to happen.

sprout

I think it's ridiculous because as mentioned above, much of the time it's unreliable and an innocent person can be made t say anything, and then punished. And obviously from a human rights point of view it's pretty reprehensible.

On the other hand, if a foreign government has information on say, a dirty bomb, obtained by torture, I have no qualms about taking that information and acting on it. I'd just rather they didn't use torture.

The problem is, should we use torture if we believe that someone has information about a serious attack or similar, but nothing else is persuading them to talk? Greatest good for the greatest number?

Arguably, if one has confidence (or can acquire confidence) in the information (and hence on the guilt of the torture vistim), it could be considered as a form of self-defence.

If it's morally OK to kill someone to prevent them killing innocent people, if there is no other method, then it would be justifiable to torture someone *if one had absolute confidence the person could give the information one needed*.

It's just that in practice, one rarely *does* have justifiable confidence in advance that one will obtain sufficiently useful information to justify the torture.
The kinds of people who one might most wish to be in control of torture if one could be confident it *was* justified (cautious, restrained, proportionate, skeptical of what they find) are probably not the kinds of peopel who would end up doing.

Effectively, my objection to torture is a practical one. I don't see many things classed as torture as being worse than killing someone, or locking them up for life. It's just that torture is highly likely to be applied far too widely, by people who are not sufficiently controlled, and likely without much feedback back to the torturers as to whether they are producing useful information, or nonsense.
In that sense, it may actually be one of the areas of human activity where there may indeed *be* a slippery slope, rather than just the fear of one.

When is the Law Lords' decision expected?

And is that tacit approval of torture? [I'm posing difficult questions, I know, and I don't really have answers for them myself. ]

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

Possibly it depends if one is going to *encourage* a state to carry on torturing people.

However, if a given state finds information about a planned attack in the UK via torture, and passes it on to us, then whether we use it or not may be irrelevant to the providing state.

If the information turns out to be correct, then *even if the UK ignored it*, the fact of its correctness won't go un-noticed by the torturing state, who will presumably consider it a factor in their assesment of the value of torture.
Our expressal of approval or disapproval may make little difference to the torturers, as long as we avoid showering them with rewards for good information.

I think that using evidence obtained by torture is tantamount to supporting torture. As sprout said "it then becomes very tempting to ship people out to other countries to have them tortured."

The general point is about the systematic consequences of accepting evidence obtained by torture. If you use this information just once, you can say "Oh well he'd already been tortured we may as well use it". If you use it again and again and maybe even reward the countries from which this evidence comes when it turns out to be accurate, then you are providing an incentive for them to use torture and you are therefore promoting torture yourself.

To answer Potholer's last point, why would any state that advocated and used torture share that information with us unless they expected some reward if it turned out to be accurate? I expect (but of course I don't know) that such rewards are routinely given, even if we never get to know about it.

Incidentally, I wrote an (unfinished) article about torture a while ago which might be of some interest here. A2613089

Crescent,

"Did I dream that the Labour Party said it was going to take the moral highground in its policies?"

Ha! That was Robin Cook wasn't it? I don't think he really had the backing of the prime minister and his cronies on that one.

There's also an edited entry: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A453296

>>"To answer Potholer's last point, why would any state that advocated and used torture share that information with us unless they expected some reward if it turned out to be accurate?"

For future cooperation?
Because they have common interests in some areas?

If it is the practice to reward countries *in any way* for information obtained by methods *other* than torture, then what does one do with information provided by a country one thinks *might* be using torture, if the country either will not disclose the precise details of its origin, or if the details it does give about how it obtained teh information aren't perfectly verifiable (which may well be the case a great deal of the time)?
What if the information is provided by a third country one suspects of having obtained it from a country that may have used dubious means?

The problem with an absolutist stance is that if a very broad definition of torture is used, and some degree of certainty was required about the methods information has been obtained by, it could result in hardly any intelligence information being exchanged.

Also, in practice, on the issue of intelligence service co-operation, I dare say we have little idea who our own services are talking to, or what criteria they use to judge information. Even if they tell us they don't use information known or strongly suspected to have been obtained via torture, why would anyone believe them?

I do think courts are a different matter, simply because our legal system has standards for the collection of evidence and confessions. It should not be legal to beat a confession out of a suspect outside the UK, and have the confession stand up in court.

<>

Exactly right, quite aside from the moral issues...

I'd certainly agree that evidence obtained using torture should never be used in court. And again, it's fairly obvious that this kind of information will be very unreliable, but that doesn't mean it's useless.

The problem is, that in dealing with intelligence/prevention of terrorism and so on, almost any line of investigation may be better than none. If a message arrives to MI5 or MI6 or whoever that the XXX have reason to believe there's a dirty bomb in the garage of No. 15 Acacia Avenue, Swineford, what have they got to lose by checking up? There's a huge difference between evidence that will stand up in court and evidence that will suggest a new line of enquiry. One reason that standard IRA practice during the Troubles was to say *nothing at all* in answer to questioning is that skilled interrogators can coax a lot of hints out of even the shortest answers.

Azara

If torture is wrong it is wrong....

It isn't wrong under "most" circumstances and okay under others. It isn't wrong if done by one person and "right" if done by someone "properly trained". It isn't wrong if done to one person and right if done to another. It isn't wrong if done to get information and okay to get other information. It isn't wrong if done to children or women but right if done to men or soldiers. It

If it is wrong it is wrong....

If we say it is "okay" for the "good guys" to get information about vertain weapons from a "bad guy" we cannot say that the horrific crimes in Cambodia, the torture and murder of men, women, and children ubder Pinochet are wrong, we cannot condemn Saddam Hussein for the torture of men, women, and children and we cannot condemn the soldiers in Iraq who tortured men, women and children in Abu Graib.

Experts tell us that information gained by torture is worth nothing because anyone will admit to anything if tortured.

There is no "legitimate" reason to torture. None.

You're absolutely correct, Mudhooks.

I said: "To answer Potholer's last point, why would any state that advocated and used torture share that information with us unless they expected some reward if it turned out to be accurate?"

To which Potholer replied:

"For future cooperation?
Because they have common interests in some areas?"

Well, future cooperation is a form of reward (i.e. it's something they want).

"The problem with an absolutist stance is that if a very broad definition of torture is used, and some degree of certainty was required about the methods information has been obtained by, it could result in hardly any intelligence information being exchanged."

Yes, I think we're probably in broad agreement about this. I think it behoves us not to purposefully turn a blind eye to it though. We should oppose it as far as is practicable.

"I do think courts are a different matter, simply because our legal system has standards for the collection of evidence and confessions. It should not be legal to beat a confession out of a suspect outside the UK, and have the confession stand up in court."

Yep, and I think everyone here seems to agree with that.

Mudhooks and Della,

Well, I don't entirely agree that torture is absolutely morally wrong in all circumstances. However, I think we can agree that it should be illegal in all circumstances.

<< However, I think we can agree that it should be illegal in all circumstances.>>

Yes, indeed! That would be a good start (as I still see it as immoral).

No, "evidence" obtained from torture is notoriously unreliable because the victim will confess to anything or claim anything to make the torture stop. The reason the West was so happy to ban it, apart from humanitarian concerns, was that it wasn't considered particularly good for interrogation. Torture tends to be something dictators use to frighten people or extract false "confessions".