Not to again reveal myself as a back-issue blog obsessive (tracking the lives and career paths of certain people as far back as 2002), as well as a total HLS troll, but this (excerpted) June 2005 post by Waddling Thunder really did give me pause, concerning the differences between torture and accepted realities of armed conflict:
I make no claim that torture is ever good - I was as disgusted by Abu Ghraib as
the next person. But if indeed we feel it necessary in some cases to drop
nuclear weapons on people...and if indeed carpet bombing in the worsts of wars is justified...then why is torturing one person for potentially vital information so especially inhuman?
Because I am eager to finish some unrelated reading and also get you the photos I've promised, I am not going to enter into a technical discussion of torture or international humanitarian law (IHL) right now -- I promise to at some point in the future. What I will say is that the use of force, under IHL, must conform to standards of necessity and proportionality in response to a specific threat to peace and security. It is worth noting that there are already international conventions banning the use of chemical and biological weapons, as it was determined that there is no threat to peace and security so great that such weapons could be considered necessary or proportional response options. Responding specifically to the use of nuclear weapons, the ICJ went almost as far as these conventions, when, in its 1996 Opinion on the Legality of the *Threat* or Use of Nuclear Weapons, it finds that ONLY in a hypothetical and near-unimaginable case where the very survival of a nation is at risk could it envision the use of nuclear weapons to be considered a proportional and legal response.
The point, though, is not to argue that the international community has moved to condemn the extreme military options that we are comparing to torture in this case, but is to instead investigate what it is that distinguishes the rarely-justifiable use of such weapons under IHL from the never-justifiable use of torture under international human rights law (IHRL). It really is a fascinating comparison. My initial response was that international law is privileging body counts over information -- that it can understand how corpses, even civilian corpses, can indicate movement back towards peace and security, but that it does not recognize information (ie: that obtained through torture) as being similarly corrective. I realized, though, that what this more fundamentally points towards is the unsurprising reality that international law generally does not support doctrines of pre-emptive action. Torture is, in a sense, comparable to a pre-emptive military strike -- in the same way that pre-emptive military action is aimed at averting a suspected hostile attack, torture (as an interrogation technique) is used to obtain information that, it is argued, can prevent destruction by revealing the sinister plans of the baddies. In the same way that IHL does not generally condone the use of pre-emptive force, IHRL is opposed to torture as a valid means to avoiding further human rights violations -- it does not find torture to be necessary (although proportionality would probably much easier to demonstrate, if IHRL used such tests), and does not consider the pre-emptive violation of a fundamental right to personal integrity a legitimate information-gathering means to prevent further (and perhaps much more grotesque) rights violations.
That's it for now. Would love to know what you think about torture (or cricket -- I still don't understand the scoring!).
VC