The Laws of Interrogation (Part II)

As stated before, this post will highlight the legal arguments against torture. First and foremost, there is little international support for an argument in favor of torture. In a time when we need as many allies as we can obtain, alienating them by torturing accused terrorists is not the way to go. Second, the legal ambiguities of the Geneva Convention can be interpreted in two distinctly different ways. The convention prohibits any action that provides “efficacious means” of preventing an imminent threat that has the ability to destroy the state. Legal analysts tend to have three major issues with these guidelines. First is in proving that torture is an effective and efficient means of producing intelligence. In general many combined techniques, none inflicting physical or mental harm, have been more effective than torture. The second clause, preventing an imminent threat, would require that we already possess the knowledge that there is going to be another attack. The source from which we gained this information is likely also to provide the location or the means by which we can stop the attack. The final clause, an attack that has the ability to destroy the state, implies that this single act of terrorism will somehow cripple the government and the nation. Short from a multi-pronged nuclear or biological weapons attack, a single act of terrorism is not likely to fulfill this requirement and if we somehow find out that it does, as in the previous case, we will likely already have a means by which to prevent it.