Ethics of torture
Another view is deontological, from the Greek word deon (duty), which proposes general rules and values that are to be respected regardless of outcome.
This enables state forces to dispense with ordinary means of establishing innocence or guilt and with the whole legal apparatus altogether.
[9] Utilitarians share the belief that the right and moral thing to do in any given situation is the option that promotes the most happiness, and if torture is only used in order to hurt people with no gain, then it would not justify the action.
[9] Therefore, it is better that a few individuals be killed by bombers than a much greater number – possibly thousands of innocent people – be tortured and murdered and legal and constitutional provisions destroyed.
Historically, torture has been reviled as an idea, yet employed as a tool and defended by its wielders, often in direct contradiction to their own averred beliefs.
In Northern Ireland, where society is more polarised than in the rest of the United Kingdom, which means that allegations of police brutality are perceived by sections of the community to carry more credence, interviews are video taped.
Where there is a time component to a crime, for example in a kidnapping case, there is also a temptation for the police to try to extract information by methods which would make the evidence inadmissible in court.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, in an opinion article[18] published in The Independent on 23 May 2005, wrote: The Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz argues that in extreme situations, in order to prevent a tragedy, a "torture warrant" should be issued by U.S. courts to use hot needles under the nails, for example.
This utilitarian position is both contemptible and persuasive ...Two academics at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia, Professor Mirko Bagaric, a Croatian-born Australian based author and lawyer,[19] who is the head of Deakin University's Law School, and a fellow Deakin law lecturer, Julie Clarke, published a paper in the University of San Francisco Law Review arguing that when many lives are in imminent danger, "all forms of harm" may be inflicted on a suspect, even if this might result in "annihilation".
The reasoning behind the proposal to legalise torture is that:[20] as a society we would accept that one person being killed to save thousands is legitimate.
... no one who doubts that this is the case should be in a position of responsibility.On December 20, 2005, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, addressed the problem of whether torture should be used by American military forces in order to gain important information from terrorist suspects.
Although he spoke out against any form of legal codification, he did state the following:[22] Under certain circumstances, most morally sensitive persons would surely allow interrogators to yell at prisoners and to use psychological intimidation, sleep deprivation, and the removal of creature comforts for purposes of obtaining vital information.
As a result of this, an abnormally large proportion of torture victims are either innocent (apart from membership of target communities), or of mistaken identity.
[23] In response to the article by Professor Bagaric and Mrs Clarke, Amnesty International spokeswoman Nicole Bieske, who is also a lawyer, was stunned by the idea of regulating torture: "It's astonishing and appalling that somebody would hold this opinion in relation to such a fundamental issue as torture, and to be justifying it on moral as well as pragmatic grounds".
[24] Professor Bagaric and Mrs Clarke submitted the paper to an American law journal because of "the kind of emotive comments that I've had here in Australia, saying that this view is horrendous, unthinking, and irresponsible".
[24] Joe Navarro, one of the F.B.I.’s top experts in questioning techniques, told The New Yorker, "Only a psychopath can torture and be unaffected.
[25] Toleration of torture and arbitrary detention has been likened to a "cancer of democracy" in a book of the same title by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, which begins to undermine all other aspects of a state's legitimacy.
[21] In law enforcement, one perceived argument is in favor of the use of force to extract information from a suspect, which is only necessary when regular interrogation yields no results and time is of the essence.
Supporters cite cases where torture has worked: In the case of Magnus Gäfgen, who was suspected of kidnapping 11-year-old Jakob von Metzler and arrested in October 2002 by German police, police surveillance had observed Gäfgen pick up a €1 million ransom demanded from the von Metzler family and proceed to go on a spending spree.
"[26] On the other hand, one argument against torture is that it fails to elicit the expected information because when the subject is in that high pressure situation, they may be saying anything they believe that the interrogators may want to hear in order to keep themself out of danger.
One last possibility is that the detainee is innocent, and no amount of torture or threats of violence will yield the information that the interrogators are searching for.
By adopting a "the ends justifies the means" approach, this would allow nine innocent people to be tortured as long as the tenth offered a full confession.
