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December 06, 2005
Torture, the TV Version
Many people would be okay, it seems, with torture under "rare circumstances." And this is not just here:
The polling, in the United States and eight of its closest allies, found that in Canada, Mexico and Germany people are divided on whether torture is ever justified. Most people opposed torture under any circumstances in Spain and Italy.In America, 61 percent of those surveyed agreed torture is justified at least on rare occasions. Almost nine in 10 in South Korea and just over half in France and Britain felt that way.
...
In the poll, about two-thirds of the people living in Canada, Mexico, South Korea and Spain said they would oppose allowing U.S. officials to secretly interrogate terror suspects in their countries. Almost that many in Britain, France, Germany and Italy said they felt the same way. Almost two-thirds in the United States support such interrogations in the U.S. by their own government.
This is because many people have no idea how torture is actually used in practice. Torture is a tool of mass terror, and rarely a means to get specific information out of a subject. Most people, however, have learned of torture from tortured T.V. scenarios where the good white guy or the token-black-guy-standing-in-for-the-good-white-guy is shown as pondering the morality of torturing the olive-skinned man who knows the code to stop the nuclear bomb that is about to explode under Manhattan. It seems to be a relatively easy call under such conditions.
Of course, that scenario is as likely as the scenarios in which the bad guy ties up the hero in an elaborate set-up, proceeds to explain the plot and then leaves him alone to wrestle with the ropes and the weights. (While I would hate the give away the ending to 95 percent of action/suspense movies, suffice it to say that it's not a good idea to unravel *all* your plans to your nemesis and turn your back.)
If it were ever the case that someone got the codes to stop the bomb by torturing someone, that someone was likely a Klingon.
In fact, look at all historical applications of state torture. Torture is not an act against individuals, even though it is an act on individuals. Torture aims to terrorize populations, break the will of groups. Unless that is understood and brought into the debate, I doubt that we will get the "people" on our side because we are not having the same discussion.
Posted by zeynep at December 6, 2005 07:12 PM