Via Sullivan, I see that the UK Law Lords have banned the use of evidence gained through torture in court:
Evidence that may have been obtained by torture cannot be used against terror suspects in British courts, the House of Lords ruled today.
A panel of seven Law Lords voted unanimously to allow an appeal by eight detainees who are being held without charge on suspicion of being involved in terrorism, against a controversial Court of Appeal judgment passed in August 2004.The appeal court voted last year that if evidence was obtained under torture by agents of another country with no involvement by the UK, it was usable and there was no obligation by the government to inquire about its origins.
But today’s ruling means such evidence is inadmissible under British law. It also means the home secretary, Charles Clarke, must re-examine all cases where evidence from abroad has been obtained by torture.
Of course, the pro-torture lobby will simply state that this is proof of my Kerryesque Frenchness, because everyone knows that we would only torture to gain information to stop the proverbial ticking time-bomb, and that this is a war and not a police effort. Tell that to Jose Padilla and John Walker Lindh and all the other known and accussed terrorists who have been or will be tried in the future.
yet another jeff
There must be an awful lot of ticking time bombs out there…
Mona
But this is what I do not understand. If, as I have read many places, experts virtually all agree that torture is not efficacious for extracting useful information, why should this measure have been necessary? There would be no evidence obtained under torture to exclude.
Stormy70
I wonder how the courts will treat the ongoing torture of Islamic women in Britain, or is it an acceptable torture since all those Muslim men vote.
What is the definition of torture these British courts will use? Is playing rap music or taking away air conditioning considered torture? One guy said holding anyone incommudicato is also torture. I think torture is being “dumbed” down by groups who hate the US. See that hyper-emotional Andrew Sullivan as a prime example.
Stormy70
Andrew Sullivan is a group all to himself, as he changes his opinion based on how he is “feeling” at a particular time.
Shygetz
Stormy, can you please present some evidence about the state-sponsored (or at least state-condoned) torture of Islamic women in Britain. I haven’t heard about it.
Barry
Mona Says:
“But this is what I do not understand. If, as I have read many places, experts virtually all agree that torture is not efficacious for extracting useful information, why should this measure have been necessary? There would be no evidence obtained under torture to exclude.”
Just in case you were having an ‘oops!’ moment, and are not a troll: if you torture somebody, in general they’ll confess to anything that you want, sooner or later. These confessions are no longer admissable.
Stormy70
I wonder why it was ignored all those years, and only recently addressed by the authorities in Britain? Women voters will trump the Muslim men’s voting block, now that the truth is coming out.
Veeshir
Define “torture”.
Jorge
Um, the US definition of torture is that we anything short of permanent physical damage or death is not torture. So, holding you underwater until you believe that you are going to die is not torture.
Stormy70
Yeah, good luck getting that here, pro-torturer bad person.
I have yet to here what this crowd deems acceptable in interrogations. I just know that if it is done under a Bush administration it is automatically considered torture.
Blue Neponset
This is the definition of torture as per the UN Convention against torture:
yet another jeff
Tortured logic used to support torture. Full story at 11.
Phillip J. Birmingham
Yeah, but that’s the Eeeeeevil Youuuu Ennnnnn!
Mona
Just in case you were having an ‘oops!’ moment, and are not a troll: if you torture somebody, in general they’ll confess to anything that you want, sooner or later. These confessions are no longer admissable.
Just because I raise a valid question you might not like does not render me a troll. If you search my name here, you will see that I have commented in spurts, and am a libertarian hawk who totally agreed with John on the whole Schiavo hysteria.
As it happens, I am deeply, and agonizingly conflicted by most issus raised in the “torture” debate. How it is to be defined, and when, if ever, it could be justified.
An easy out for me has been the oft-trumpeted claim that it is not useful for extracting useful information; thus can one evade a deeply serious moral dilemma. My gut told me this claim cannot be true, but there are “experts” produced to insist it is so.
The UK policy would suggest that what I wanted to beleive, but suspected was false, is, indeed, false.
Steve
Mona, it depends on what you consider “evidence,” or what you consider “useful” information. With torture, you often extract false information or confessions; you get whatever the victim thinks the torturer wants to hear. So it’s “evidence” in the sense that the guy has made a statement and you can seek to introduce it in court; but it’s not admissible evidence because the Law Lords have determined it’s not reliable. Torture is effective in getting someone to talk, sure, just not effective in getting them to talk truthfully.
Let’s be clear about something here: a confession coerced by the police through force has ALWAYS been legally inadmissible in civilized societies. Whether or not the use of force rises to the level of “torture” isn’t really material; you simply can’t beat the suspect until he confesses.
So clever governments found a way around this by the use of “extraordinary rendition” – send the prisoner to be tortured in a different country. Of course, you don’t “know” he’ll be tortured, you just sort of have a sense that this country might use particularly persuasive techniques. And then they give the guy back to you, and tell you that he confessed to such-and-such, and you just conveniently forget to ask how they got him to confess so easily.
So in these cases, there’s no evidence to corroborate the defendant’s claim that his confession was coerced, since you can’t put the interrogators on the stand or investigate what they did – they’re in another country. What the Law Lords ruled is that if a confession comes from a country where torture is known to occur, they’re simply not going to allow the confession to be introduced, whether or not it can be proven that torture occurred in the particular case.
But the basic question of whether a confession induced by torture can be admitted in court has been water under the bridge for a long time. No one in the US or British governments is seriously contending that they could openly admit to torturing someone and still introduce their confession as evidence.
yet another jeff
But the question remains, what is the point of torturing someone if they’re likely to give non-useful information AND it’s now inadmissable?
But, if one uses the “organ failure and/or death” definition, the prisoner won’t live until trial anyway…
srv
As has been said by others, listening to a GW speech ought to be banned itself.
Barry
yet another Jeff, I’ve heard that people who’ve studied the actual use of torture by various countries claim that the really purpose is always to terrorize people. It’s an assertion of power, even beyond killing people – when “you’ll beg for death!” is not an idle claim, people are certainly terrorized.
This fits in well with the administration’s overriding policy, which it to seize as much power as possible, and to run everything like a one-party state with an imperial executive, as much as they can.
Mona
steve writes: So it’s “evidence” in the sense that the guy has made a statement and you can seek to introduce it in court; but it’s not admissible evidence because the Law Lords have determined it’s not reliable. Torture is effective in getting someone to talk, sure, just not effective in getting them to talk truthfully.
The Guardian article does not say that. It doesn’t say the UK Law Lords have ruled that merely confessions obtained via torture are admissible, but simply — and broadly — “evidence” is inadmissible. Unless I misread, the reasonsing was not that such evidence is unreliable, butr rather, that it is unconscionably obtained. If it is the case that torture victims yield the who, what, when, where and how of a terrorist plot, and what they yield is all or mostly accurate, such information still cannot be used to convict, it would seem. (If anyone has more on the details of the ruling, I’d like to see a link.)
I approve of this expansion of long-standing common law doctrine, and find it unexceptionable. But my quandary relates to the use of pain compliance techniques by those who seek it not for prosecution, but for intel and to thwart plans to, say, blow people up. Unless the UK was engaged in a gratuitous exercise in excluding evidence obtained by torture — or if the Law Lords did actually hold that such evidence is necessarily unreliable — it would seem that useful information can be extracted by torture.
Shygetz
When you torture someone, you will always get useful evidence so long as you tell the person why you are torturing them. If you tell them that you are torturing them to get a confession, you will get a confession, and it will be very useful in your attempt to prosecute them. The confession will not necessarily be true, but it will be useful. The Law Lords could reasonably conclude that the evidence was gathered unconscionably AND is unreliable, as it compels the torturee to say whatever the torturer wants to hear.
Blue Neponset
Are you being serious? How can you possibly know that?
What kind of information do you get if you torture someone who doesn’t actually know anything?
Barry
Mona, I apologize for jumping to conclusions.
A moral case for torture is not one to be ashamed of. And the prudential case against government torture, that anybody who asks for the power should definitely not get it, and that it’ll be abused faster than you can imagine, has been reinforced by this administration.
In terms of efficacy, that depends. Every single thing I’ve ever heard about torture is that it’s really good at producing confessions. And skilled torturers can do so without obvious physical damage.
Now, some of those confessions will be valid, some of the names named will be conspirators. So a cycle of “pick up people=>torture for confessions and names=>start over” will probably get some guilty people. Just by luck.
I remember an account from the late 1990’s, when they were excavating a mass grave from the Stalin era, 50 miles from Moscow. One of the bodies brought out was that of a middle-aged woman, wearing a fur coat, with a shopping bag from an elite store in Moscow. One might wonder why was the coat not taken? The investigator explained that, at the end of many months, the police were so desparate to make their quotas of enemies of the state that they just picked people off of the street into trucks, drove them to a killing ground, shot them and dumped the bodies, and filled out the paperwork (like ‘confessions’) later, when time permitted.
Steve
Mona, I was just using confessions as an example of one type of evidence you might get from torture. What I said applies to other sorts of information as well.
You seem to be confused because no one is arguing that torture NEVER results in useful information. If the victim always tells you what you want to hear, sometimes what you want to hear is, in fact, true. But the information you get from torture is unreliable, because it’s true some of the time, and false some of the time, and you have no idea which.
It seems like you are pondering the question “what if torture does result in true information, should the prosecution still be able to use it?” Well, the question you must answer first is, how do we know it’s true? If we have other evidence that shows it to be true, then just bring the prosecution based on that other evidence. If we don’t have other evidence, then we have no way of knowing the information is true, and it remains in the “unreliable” category.
For example, let’s say you’re torturing some guy, and he says “Okay, okay, I give, you capitalist swine! There will be a guy in an orange jacket on the 3:00 train with a bomb.” And you board the 3:00 train, and sure enough, there is a guy with a bomb, and you successfully apprehend him. In this imaginary case, sure, the information you were given was true, but you don’t need that information to make your case, either. You caught a guy with a bomb, that’s evidence enough right there!
Mona
Steve says: It seems like you are pondering the question “what if torture does result in true information, should the prosecution still be able to use it?”
No, no, not at all. I thoroughly support a complete exclusion of evidence obtained under torture at a trial. My dilemma wrt torture is solely related to intel.
If it is true that torture cannot and does not yield information that saves lives, or if it does so with little or no greater efficacy than other interrogation techniques, then the issue is disposed of, for me, without any need to directly confront the moral problem. Pragmatism would settle the issue.
yet another jeff
I think that they are trying to address this pragmatically. If the evidence obtained via torture is not admitted, then any moral concern is moot. The information can’t be used so all arguments for and against are cut off at the knees.
Steve S
Now if we can only ban tortured arguments from American Politics we will have progress!
jg
If a person has the information torture will certainly get in out of him. If he doesn’t have the information torture will certainly get it out of him also. If what you want to know is that for the past 25 years my dad was the leader of an Iranian sleeper cell, thats what I’ll tell you eventually. Doesn’t make it true, it makes the pain stop.
Steve S
You know, I think my old boss was a member of a Soviet sleeper sell and then defected to the Iranian sleeper cell.
Or something like that.
Darrell
Very well said. I feel the same way.. if it’s true that no useful intel can be extracted using torture, then it’s open and shut – no torture period. However, a number of experts in the CIA and elsewhere seem to believe that some forms of what is called torture can be used to gain valuable intel which may not be admissible in court, but could end up saving lives. If that’s true, that’s a big dilemma in my book.
I disagree with the Bush admin trying to give the CIA a carte blanche pass on torture exemptions, which it appears they are trying to do. I don’t want to give that type of power to the govt without checks and balances.
If (a big IF) it could be demonstrated that torture yields valuable intel.. even if it’s not admissible in court (most of these terrorists are illegal combatents, and not citizens of the US anyway, so court trial issues are mute in most instances) but would otherwise be valuable intel.. If that’s the case, those instances in which torture could be considered should be defined, acceptable torture methods should be spelled out, and I think the CIA or military should have to convince a judge instead of deciding on their own who they can and cannot torture without checks.
Darrell
moot, not mute
W.B. Reeves
What’s interesting to me is how the whole torture imbroglio has backfired so astonishingly on the originators of the contraversy. We are now light years away from arguing about the propriety of actions taken by military personel in combat. Instead, the focus has shifted to the propriety of actions taken by the CIA.
In other words, the defense of torture as a necessary innovation in US military doctrine is as dead as the “flag ship” domestic issue of privatizing/reforming Social Security. The ruling political clique now finds itself fending off attempts to ban such practices by the CIA. This is a huge reversal.
Instead of defending a new hardline policy using 9/11 as spurious justification, Condeleeza Rice is reduced to flitting about Europe issuing public denials of any such practice. Everywhere she is greeted with jeering hilarity and general incredulity. Meanwhile, irony is resurrected as the one Government institution that has had its tentacles entangled with torture, practically from its inception, is in danger of being de-beeked.
Interesting times.
Darrell
Polls say very different:
W.B. Reeves
I wonder what “rare instances” means? Perhaps the proverbial “ticking bomb scenario”? Probably not the sort of thing typified by Abu Ghraib. Indiscriminate would seem the more discriptive word in that instance. Certainly the incidence of torture allegations can’t be described as rare. It would be useful to know how the question was formulated as well as the methodology employed.
BTW, the same article cited undermines your presumed point with the following:
So it seems that the torture debate isn’t a debate about torture at all. It’s about stopping short of committing a Federal crime. When everyone from the current occupant of the White House on down is adopting some variation of this line, it seems a bit silly to continue arguing for torture. After all, it puts you in direct opposition to the official position espoused by the Commander In Chief.
If the defense of torture is publically repudiated by the President, whether sincerely or not, I’d say the issue was DOA, except as bar room fodder.
Veeshir
Except that the definition of ‘torture’ is…. tortured.
Is waterboarding torture?
Is a mock execution (once) torture?
Is threatening to send the guy to Saudi Arabia to be tortured, torture?
Is a cold room torture?
A hot room?
Bright lights in the eyes?
Fake menstrual blood?
Scaring with dogs?
Scaring with near nekkid or fully nekkid women?
I’ve seen all of those defined as “torture” and I would disagree.
I saw a guy from the UN claim that repeated mock executions are torture according to his playbook. I agree, but he was silent on one incident.
I can’t find the link, but a Marine colonel knew that a captured terrorist had knowledge about an attack so he discharged his weapon near the guy’s head and told him that the next one was in his head. The terrorist told where the attack was and the colonel was reprimanded.
I would suggest that’s not torture.
Torture is pulling fingernails, breaking bones, slicing skin, repeated mock-executions.
Scaring a terrorist isn’t torture.