Proponents often frame the question in the following manner: "If you knew that terrorists held your family, your loved ones hostage - strapped to a time bomb - wouldn't you torture a terrorist to find out where they were being held so that you could save them before the bomb went off?
None of those scenarios seem to accurately reflect what seems to be happening. Each scenario is based on the assumption that one KNOWS something about the person being held and tortured.
Real-world cases aren’t so clear-cut. Last May, U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan reportedly beat a detainee’s legs so brutally that his pulped tissues resembled those of someone run over by a bus. He died. Those who questioned him now believe that he’d been taken prisoner by mistake and knew nothing.
I think the question we have to ask ourselves - and a question that more accurately reflects what's happening when:
- people are held without being confronted by the charges against them
- people are not extended the right to defend themselves
- the authorities are not required to present the evidence that they have against the person being held in a court of law
- the evidence against those being held is never tested in a court of law
The question we really should be asking ourselves is: "Do we have the right to torture people AT RANDOM in the HOPE of finding someone who knows something about where our loved ones - strapped to a time bomb - are being held?"
If we have, over the years, condemned torture when others engaged in it - (keeping in mind that any totalitarian regime we've ever condemned for torture considered the people they tortured to be terrorists) - why are we suddenly so accepting of it now? What's changed?
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