After reading
the two essays on torturing terrorists, I wanted to take a step back from
the moral and ethical issues—if only momentarily—in order first to outline the
basic definitions of a terrorist. I understand all the red tape around torture,
and I find it all very fascinating, but before we can decide whether torture
should be considered ethical or legal, we should consider who receives the
torture.
Both essays discuss
acts of torture assigned to terrorists. So, this idea—paired with a brief discussion
in class—got me wondering about the ways in which we define a terrorist.
According to
Google’s dictionary a terrorist is, “a person who uses terrorism in the pursuit
of political aims.” In order to diversify my post, I want to include another
dictionary’s definition; this description comes from Dictionary.com: “a person,
usually a member of a group, who uses or advocates terrorism.”
Perhaps a
further definition would aid in finding our so-called terrorists. In order to
understand terrorists, one must understand terrorism, which is defined by
Google as, “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political
aims.”
So, in a more
fluent way, we can deduce that a terrorist is “a person who uses violence and intimidation
in the pursuit of political aims.” I don’t mean to get very finicky with
wording and definition, especially because society’s definition speaks a lot
louder than the definition of any dictionary. However, torture is an extremely
serious topic, and if we ever want to apply it to anybody, we should know exactly to whom it will be applied.
Interestingly, I
think that the definition says it all; a terrorist is somebody who uses violence and intimidation, not
somebody who will use violence and
intimidation. I call this point into attention because I don’t think we can
label somebody as a terrorist until they actually commit an act of terrorism.
With that being said, we should only, according to Dershowitz as cited in Dr. Lauritzen’s
essay, torture a terrorist who is “guilty,” meaning, as far as I take it, that
they have already committed the act of terror. However, in the same breath,
Dershowitz also comments, according to Dr. Lauritzen, that torture “should not
be a means of exacting vengeance.”
My question is
as follows: if we should only torture terrorists who are guilty—which means,
according to definition, they have already used violence and intimidation, not
that they are planning to use it—how is that not seen as an act of vengeance? Would
that not mean that we are punishing the guilty? Or am I confusing Dershowitz
definition of a guilty terrorist?
And if that’s
the case, can we prevent terrorism if a terrorist can only be defined as
somebody who has already committed an act of terror?
And further,
these questions only apply if we use the dictionary definition of terrorism. Do
you think that society defines terrorism in a different way? If so, how do the
two definitions differ?
The issue of defining terrorism is important and has now been raised in a number of different ways. Perhaps we should talk about this in class. Although I disagree with Dershowitz, I think it is possible to torture a convicted terrorist to get information about planned acts of terrorism without torturing out of vengeance. It is at least theoretically possible.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to defining terrorism, we also need to define torture.
I've been wanting to discuss this in class since we read the Power To Kill article from the New York Times. I think that a lot of this discussion will be based on personal ideologies, so I have a feeling that we might not reach a unified answer of what is moral and what is not moral. However, I look forward to hearing all about this topic. I think both essays provide some amount of controversy, and I think we could have a really good discussion as well as reach a very good conclusion.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Bethany that a discussion in class would be very interesting. If people were candid and honest with their beliefs differences in ideology would show. I can remember having a very good conversation in my human rights FYS class with Dr. Spencer. We related the idea to torture to devaluing a human being’s life and discussed if anyone has the power to do. Many hypothetical’s can be drawn from such conversations. In our discussion we used the idea that if a terrorist was in custody and knew the location of a person being held captive, who would die if they were not rescued in time, would torture be an appropriate way to gain the information of the captive’s whereabouts? In the sense of human rights if you tortured the terrorist you are devaluing his life and going against the natural law of humanity. However if you don’t do everything in your power to gain that information are you devaluing the captive’s life? In a sense if torture isn’t used are you choosing the terrorist over the captive? What changes if the captive is a citizen of your own country or not? What changes if the terrorist is a citizen of your own country? What if you had to perform the torture yourself? All of these issues were raised and I think if we had a class discussion and talked about these issues it could become pretty lively.
ReplyDeleteTo Dr. Lauritzen’s point dictionary.com gives the definition of torture as the act of inflicting excruciating pain, as punishment or revenge, as a means of getting a confession or information, or for sheer cruelty. I concur with this definition and for the sake of argument would delineate the difference between sheer cruelty and for a means of getting a confession or information. Some may disagree that there is a difference at all but with the idea of trying to get information there is an ending point, whereas when it is for sheer cruelty there is not.
Well, according to Google, torture is defined as “the action or practice of inflicting severe pain on someone as a punishment or in order to force them to do or say something.” Therefore, I would say that torture could be used in either situation of a terrorist who has used violence and intimidation, and somebody who will use violence and intimidation. In the first case, torture will be used in order to punish the terrorist, while in the second case, torture will be used in order for any would- be terrorist to say something about what they’re planning on doing.
ReplyDeleteIf the case were that we are only punishing guilty terrorists, then I don’t think terrorism could be prevented because we would only be acting upon it after it has been done. I think that if somebody seems suspicious of being a terrorist they should get some sort of torture (that is, according to the definition) in order to find out. But then again, we’d have to have extremely good reasons for suspicion; we don’t want to just torture anybody.
I definitely think that society defines terrorism in a different way. But then again, there are so many different definitions for terrorism out there that I wouldn’t be able to tell you how they differ. Maybe that’s something we can go over.