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You believe that torture should be legalized to save lives.

Torture is widely practiced all over the world despite international prohibitions against it. Amnesty International states that between 1997 and mid-2000, torture or ill treatment by state officials was reported in more than 150 countries out of the 195 investigated. In more than 70 countries, it was commonly practiced. In more than 80 countries, people reportedly died as a result. The Israeli Landau decision of 1987 allowed "moderate physical pressure" against suspected terrorists in so-called ticking-time-bomb scenarios. In 1999 the Supreme Court of Israel outlawed torture but said that Israeli interrogators who used torture could invoke a legal "defense of necessity" if facing criminal charges; that is, they could claim that any harm they inflicted was minor compared to that which they prevented.

The practice of torture, whether clandestine or not, is justified in part by the belief that it can and has yielded useful information. For instance, in 1995, Philippine intelligence agents tortured Abdul Hakim Murad, who was arrested after blowing up his apartment while making bombs. The agents employed tactics that included throwing chairs at him, breaking his ribs, forcing water into his mouth, and stubbing cigarettes on his genitals. Murad began finally to name his coconspirators. His confession detailed a plan to assassinate John Paul II as well as plots to crash U.S. planes into the ocean and into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Later, his coconspirator Ramzi Yousef was found guilty for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. After Al Qaeda members were tortured in Jordan and Egypt, the CIA was able to uncover the millennium bomb plot of 1999. These cases suggest that to not administer torture where tragedy could be averted would seem to offer greater rights to a terrorist than to the innocent people under threat.

Taking his cue from recent Israeli practice, attorney Alan Dershowitz recommends that nations issue warrants for torture specifically in a ticking-bomb crisis. He argues that legalization of torture would make the act transparent and free from the hypocrisy of clandestine practice. He also adds that it would help regulate something that otherwise occurs commonly, brutally, and without accountability throughout the world.

Read on to learn about the counterarguments to legalizing torture, and how its legalization would threaten humanitarian and democratic principles.>>

References

On the Uses of Torture

If torture is going to be administered as a last resort in the ticking-bomb case, to save enormous numbers of lives, it ought to be done openly, with accountability, with approval by the president of the United States or by a Supreme Court justice. . . . By expressly limiting the use of torture only to the ticking-bomb case and by requiring a highly visible judge to approve, limit, and monitor the torture, it will be far more difficult to justify its extension to other institutions.
—Alan Dershowitz

[A] torture warrant . . . puts a heavy burden on the government to demonstrate by factual evidence the necessity to administer this horrible, horrible technique of torture. I would talk about non-lethal torture, say, a sterilized needle underneath the nail, which would violate the Geneva Accords, but you know, countries all over the world violate the Geneva Accords. . . . If we ever came close to doing it . . . I think we would want to do it with accountability and openly and not adopt the way of the hypocrite.
—Alan Dershowitz

[T]he treaties against all forms of torture must begin to recognize differences in degree among varying forms of rough interrogation, ranging from trickery and humiliation, on the one hand, to lethal torture on the other. They must also recognize that any country faced with a ticking-time-bomb terrorist would resort to some forms of interrogation that are today prohibited by the [Geneva Conventions].
—Alan Dershowitz