As newspapers and documentary films continue to discuss waterboarding and other controversial treatments of suspected terrorists, the debate over torture remains intense. Some insist that desperate times call for desperate measures, but others are baffled that such methods could exist in a civilized society. Is physical persuasion ever an appropriate means of interrogation?
Written on behalf of Amnesty International USA by Travis W. Hall, former Army interrogator.
In discussing torture proponents typically ask, “What if there was a bomb (dirty, nuclear, biological, chemical, et cetera) in a major US city? Would you not do anything possible to save American lives?” Intelligence experts routinely debunk this hypothetical. First, the odds are astronomically remote that (1) there would be such a bomb; (2) that law enforcement or intelligence agents would know of such a bomb; (3) the agents would have someone in custody that knew of the bomb; (4) the agents would know the person in custody knew about the bomb; and, (5) the person in custody would have enough information to allow agents to timely and properly dismantle the bomb. The only manner in which agents could have this information is from other sources. The bottom line is that if law enforcement or intelligence agents had such robust information from other sources, then torture would be unjustified.
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