Don't these two sentences contradict one another? It would seem that USA had a lot more terror problems prior to 9/11/01, rather than after.
A sequel to Section 31?
- Thread starter shanejayell
- Start date
The bestest coolest thing about Section 31 is that they are an uber ultra top secret organization. With cool uniforms.
(Hint: you can use this post to calibrate your sarcasm detectors.)
(Hint: you can use this post to calibrate your sarcasm detectors.)
The previous administration used it as a first resort, actually...
Had. I'm happy to report that that is now a thing of the past. That's the difference between the CIA and Section 31 -- the CIA, even then it does something wrong, takes its orders from the President of the United States, and is therefore democratically accountable via the President. Section 31 is not.
1. Torture is not an effective intelligence-gathering weapon and never has been. Torture has historically always been used as a tool of political terror, not a tool of effective intelligence. Just read The Way of the World by Ron Suskind, or any Human Rights Watch report.
2. The US's problems with terrorism have actually increased since 9/11 and the Iraq War. Like our pre-9/11 terrorist problems, most of them have been abroad. This is not to take away from the severity of 9/11, but it's important to put that one in context. Frankly, it was an outlier. Most terrorist attacks are never that successful, and most of the domestic terrorist plots have been thwarted within the US, both before and after 9/11, through the efforts of law enforcement agencies, not through the use of torture. No one who supports torture has ever been able to show that a credible threat was uncovered from torture. Why? Because the tortured will say anything, even lies, to make it stop.
And a pretty lousy TV show I might add (10 times more naive and less realistic than, say, "Star Wars", "Lost", "Tom & Jerry," etc.), but also pretty fun (I sometimes watch it and laugh at how stupid it is, but I watch it anyway, especially now when our "Enterprise boys" are doing it)
Yeah, but he has a really hot daughter...
Fair enough on that.
I'm not advocating self-censorship. I'm saying that, from the point of vice of a commitment to liberal democracy, there is no real moral ambiguity at all to Section 31, nor to any organization that places itself above the law and above the government. Any such organization, even if all it does is play bingo, is inherently intolerable from the point of view of liberal democracy. In fact, such an organization would be considered a threat to national security, since it's not like they have any actual loyalty to the government.
That's why I say that a division of Starfleet Intelligence would be better-suited to the demands of depicting moral ambiguity: It actually is morally ambiguous to have a division of the democratically-accountable government doing things that are morally questionable.
Nor you, for that matter, since our society has long recognized that even in the worst of wars, there are still rules. The Geneva Conventions were not signed by generations of people who had never known the scourge of warfare or the sting of battle. Yet they were willing to keep their values, unlike some people today.
Nonsense. I'm not a utopian, and I don't think that dealing with terrorism entails anything vaguely related to appeasement. I do, however, strongly believe that the Bush approach to the War on Terror has only made terrorist organizations like al Qaeda stronger -- in particular, the Bush Administration's decision to invade Iraq played right into Osama bin Ladin's hands and gave him a huge propaganda victory.
We will do a better job of fighting terrorism by removing the incentives that terrorist organizations use to convince people to convert to terrorism and join their organizations. That means altering the sociological conditions of foreign countries by building alliances, used in concert with intensive law enforcement activities (as opposed to, say, cutting New York City's anti-terrorism funding while giving much more to Omaha, Nebraska). It would also entail removing bureaucratic barriers to the sharing of information between law enforcement agencies and encouraging greater cooperation between them -- which was one of the key things that prevented 9/11 from being detected before it happened. (Not a lack of torture.)
Jack Bauer is a criminal who deserves to rot in jail for violating basic American principles.
You were obviously nowhere near ex-Yugoslavia in the early nineties (My hometown was never engulfed in war for which I'm very grateful, but only one skim through Wikipedia will show how much those conventions were actually worth.The poster you're replying to lived a little closer to the front lines, BTW).
The fact that many people in the past have chosen to disregard the basic principles of civilized society does not mean it's right to ignore them. One skim through the evening news will show us that many people commit murder, but this does not mean it should not be illegal.
ETA: Nor, for that matter, did I argue that warfare is never necessary. If you're living in a warzone, it is obviously rational and moral to shoot back at the guy shooting at you. But torture? No. Never. Nothing good comes of that. Torture is a tool of political terror and victimization, not intelligence acquisition.
No, as close as I've gotten to Yugoslavia is Scott Simon's novel, Pretty Birds, about the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War.
I realize this thread can get political in the Star Trek Section 31 realm. However discussion of Harry Truman, Hiroshima, 9/11, The Bush Administration, War or Terrorism etc take that to TNZ or if kept civilly to Misc.
Yes, but one would argue that fictional characters can be just as dangerous as real life role models. Even Jack Bauer can inspire some nutcase to go on a violent rampage. Stuff like that happened before, didn't it? I mean, a guy robbed a 7 11 with a bat'leth the other day, for god's sake...
Yes, but one would argue that fictional characters can be just as dangerous as real file role models. Even Jack Bauer can inspire some nutcase to go on a violent rampage. Stuff like that happened before, didn't it?
I agree, we have multiple Trekkie connections, not so violent, but nevertheless...
Yeah, I'm aware of all of that (I'm even peripherally apart of the behind the scenes discussions there). I debated on whether to include that or not in the post above, but decided to because it seems most people aren't for removing the discussions entirely.
"Torture" is relative. I am sure what some people consider torture, I would consider proper interrogation techniques. To me, "torture" is wrong. But I generally only consider an act torture if the goal is only to punish, humiliate, etc. If the goal is to extract useful info that can save lives and safeguard my country, then I can justify pretty much anything. Example: Archer knows that the Zindi superweapon is about to be used. 7 million people have already died. He has the Zindi who knows the self destruct codes to the weapon in front of him. I have no problem with Archer grabbing a laser welder and starting with the Zindi's pinkie and working his way up until he got the codes ("torture" DOES work...no matter what people who object to it will tell you). Now, same situation, but the weapon has already gone off. Earth is gone. The Zindi in front of Archer now has no useful information. Working him over with a laser welder would not be justified (although it would be understandable). Same act. Different motivations. One is justified, the other is not.
^ The problem is, what if the Xindi actually doesn't have the codes, and Archer only thinks he probably does? And he carves the man's body up, the Xindi gives him some fake codes to get him to stop, and Archer goes off on a reckless mission into the weapon with a set of codes that are going to do him squat?
Meanwhile, Earth gets blown up because Archer's codes were useless. Whereas if Archer had tried a non-torturous act -- say, learning about Xindi society, convincing them that Earth posed no threat to them, and then forging an alliance with the Xindi factions that acted out of what they believed to be self-preservation to fight the Xindi factions with imperialistic goals, he might have been a lot more successful. Alternately, a team of law enforcement officers using psychological manipulation such as is generally accepted in civilized countries might well have been able to get the codes -- especially since this is how most crimes are fought.
Of course, if you're going to talk about justifications for torture, it would be a far better argument to cite real instances of torture yielding useful, actionable intelligence when other interrogation methods have failed. And to cite a whole series of them to establish that torture can regularly be relied upon to yield accurate intelligence.
Good luck on that, though. If you look at the history of torture, it tends to be used by governments for the purposes of breaking people's spirits and yielding political submission rather than gaining actual information. The Soviet Union didn't torture people to get info -- it tortured people so that they could have signed confessions of false crimes.
Which is what I was trying (apparently unsuccessfully) to clear up with my last post on it.
Comparisions and contrasts to as related to Section 31 are one thing, but talking solely about current events doesn't have anything to do with Star Trek or Section 31. It's terribly fine line I realize, and perhaps I'm overly sensitive to it due in part to the discussions going on around Misc. My original point was in direct response to the "Harry Truman is a mass murderer" which stuck me as utterly unrelated to S31 than anything else.
Whether torture is effective or not is, I think, irrelevant. It is something one refrains from on the basis that it is unethical, regardless of the results it may or may not yield. If 'effective' is one's only criteria, then pretty much any problem at the international level could be solved by dropping a couple of nukes on the people you don't like (and who have none of their own, of course). That's pretty final.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
