"so, the situation presented in the show is possible. granted that information gathered from torture is usually unreliable and the use of the practice does serve to create martyrs however this would be an example of an extreme circumstance and ALL circumstances must be examined. so the question in this example is do you stick to rigidly-defined morals or do situational ethics apply when this is your only option and the consequences of failure are as high as possible?
while you may think you know my answer. really, i dislike conjecturing what i might do in a high pressure situation. im leaning towards psychological interrogation approaches. but i dont know what i would do if there were only 5 minutes left."
This is a scenario I’ve heard posed by a lot of people for pro torture in extreme cases. First, I’d like to say that if you want to use physical torture in an “extreme” case, you should legally allow physical torture where terrorist attacks are concerned, because the extremity of the case may not be immediately clear. Also, from a legal stand point, IF I supported physical torture in terrorist cases, I would want the law to provide the interrogators with enough freedom to use their own judgement.
To back track a little, I am against the use of torture not only because of ethical considerations but because torture is an ineffective method for obtaining information. This has been proved throughout history again and again. In every era, in every location, torture has never proven to extract accurate information with any kind of consistency. You may very well get the suspect to talk if you torture him in the last five minutes, but humans in these circumstances will tell their captors what they think they want to hear in order for the pain to stop. It may be emotionally satisfying to the interrogator to cause physical pain to the suspect when the pressure for results is on, but that is the only thing this method will actually achieve.
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