I agree that for the greater good torture should never be used, and regrettably accept that this will lead to some tragic events, hence I believe that any extreme circumstance that you put forward can be dismissed, and other methods should be used to find the information. Also, as I've mentioned several times, when it comes down to it, some people will torture and then cover things up, so I don't think there needs to be any constitutional/law-based acknowledgement as these extreme circumstances will already result in torture behind closed doors and a law change will only serve to lead to exploitation in cases which are not extreme, whatever that means.

 

I totally agree.

I'll be posting my thingy anyway, it's just not in a presentable let alone comprehensible form yet.

I don't think it should ever be allowed.

Quoting Imke: "Hmm, I do see your point, Valerie.

But if we give policemen or government officials the right to decide whether someone deserves his human rights or not,

then how are we supposed to know that they're not gonna take them from us at some point too?"

 

Please try and stick to a specific case, Imke. Because what you say here is generally sound- (I mean...OF COURSE!!!) but rather sweeping.

We also don't rule out trials and court cases, though they sometimes lead to inprisonment (also a grave constraint of human rights) of innocents.

If you or I got arrested under all the given circumstances of this very case, I cannot see how you/me should not

get threatened with getting punched up just exactly by the police or othergovernment force.

 

 

I discussed this topic with at least 10 persons the last days, among them a retired policeman, who has real life experience with interrogations and human beings of all sorts from 40 years of patrolling duty (and isn't a sadistic revanchist)- two of my siblings, who are fully examined jurists, the rest being laypeople (for they often have a healthier common sense than jurists). It's not an easy case.

I had a heated debate with myself, because I wished I was so sure about this as you fundamentally against use of coercion are.

But I'm not any longer, since ever I've heard about this case. And I cannot be sure BECAUSE of grave ethical and moral reasons.

 

 

I'd very much rather take into account that an accomplice (that at least was clear, since he had picked up the ransom and started spending it)/probable abductor in such an extremely rare and extraordinary case gets punched-up unjustified, than accepting the further harm and maybe death of an entirely innocent person, by sticking to strict adherence to the human rights, out of angst that that inevitably will lead to a softening of the general intolerance of torture as a means of interrogation and thus to a police state.

 

 

 

Here are two articles about this specific case from the NYT, which might help the gentle reader to understand, that there are indeed dire situations (and yes, they are very rare) where a sane human conscience is being brought to a point, where he uses a severe threat to an arrested person.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/10/world/kidnapping-has-germans-debating-police-torture.html?scp=3&sq=G%C3%A4fgen&st=cse

This second link leads to an article which comments on the verdict of the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg. The said abductor and murderer who has been sentenced to life imprisonment had filed for a lawsuit there in Strasbourg, because of that threat. Look how they reacted.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/world/europe/30iht-rights.4.14109189.html?scp=1&sq=G%C3%A4fgen&st=cse

 

 

And now, that I've bravely banned any polemic in the above, I need to air the following:

Political correctness sucks so so so so much. :mad: I cannot understand any person who could have leant back in that interrogation. I don't understand any person, who wouldn't at least have the impulse to want to fry this whining ****'s testicles in a long and agonizing process.

A good article to wrap this thread up, imo:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/24/news/24iht-europa_ed3_.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=Daschner&st=cse&scp=9

Just heard about this story on CNN... totally disgusting

 

 

Video of Tortured Boy’s Corpse Deepens Anger in Syria

By LIAM STACK

Published: May 30, 2011

 

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CAIRO — Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, a round-faced 13-year-old boy, was arrested at a protest in Jiza, a southern Syrian village near Dara’a, on April 29. Nothing was known of him for a month before his mutilated corpse was returned to his family on the condition, according to activists, that they never speak of his brutal end.

Related

 

Syrian Forces Struck Northern Villages, Activists Say (May 30, 2011)

 

But the remains themselves testify all too clearly to ghastly torture. Video posted online shows his battered, purple face. His skin is scrawled with cuts, gashes, deep burns and bullet wounds that would probably have injured but not killed. His jaw and kneecaps are shattered, according to an unidentified narrator, and his penis chopped off.

 

“These are the reforms of the treacherous Bashar,” the narrator says. “Where are human rights? Where are the international criminal tribunals?”

 

In Syria and beyond, the youth’s battered body has cast into shocking relief the terrors wielded by the Syrian state against its people.

 

Circulating in various versions, the video has injected new life into a six-week uprising against President Bashar al-Assad that has appeared to settle into a bloody stalemate of protests and violent government responses. In the days since news of the death spread, more than 58,000 people have visited and expressed support for a Facebook page memorializing the boy, Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, as a “child martyr.”

 

Demonstrators in several Syrian cities protested the boy’s death last weekend, weaving chants and banners dedicated to him into the mix of antigovernment slogans that have become staples of the uprisings shaking the Arab world.

 

In a revolutionary season that has seen countless “Fridays of Rage” in half a dozen countries, Syrian activists marched on a day that some dubbed “the Saturday of Hamza.”

 

“People are very upset about the death of the young boy Hamza,” said one man active in protests in Homs, who asked not to be named for fear of the security forces. “He was just a child. It is a crime, a serious crime.”

 

In the Damascus suburb of Douma, protesters marched through the night chanting “Leave! Leave!” to Mr. Assad while holding signs declaring, “We are all Hamza al-Khateeb,” according to a video posted on YouTube. Video from another suburb, Dereya, showed women and children demonstrating, with a chorus of young voices shouting, “The people want the overthrow of the regime.” They held aloft signs that read, “Did Hamza scare you that much?”

 

“Hamza has become a symbol of the Syrian revolution,” said Radwan Ziadeh, an exiled Syrian human rights activist and a visiting scholar at George Washington University. His death, he said, “is a sign of the sadism of the Assad regime and its security forces.”

 

The video pans slowly over the boy’s swollen and disfigured corpse as it lies on a plastic sheet. The narrator’s somber voice intones in formal Arabic that he is “the latest martyr of freedom” and recounts his wounds one by one.

 

Mr. Ziadeh said he had been in touch with the boy’s family. He said they stopped speaking to journalists after their part in producing the video, an act of defiance that may have cost them dearly. Hamza’s father was detained after the release of the video, Mr. Ziadeh said.

 

The full impact of the death is difficult to assess; foreign journalists have been barred from entering Syria since the unrest began in mid-March, and many Syrians live in deep fear of the security apparatus. But many of the recent uprisings across the region have drawn energy and moral power from the violent deaths of young people at the hands of the state.

 

Revolution spread across Tunisia after the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old fruit vendor humiliated by police officers who confiscated his cart. In Egypt, the death last summer of Khaled Said, a 28-year-old man dragged out of an Internet cafe and killed by plainclothes police a block from his home, was a rallying cry for the revolutionaries in Tahrir Square.

 

The Syrian uprising was incited by the arrest in early March of a group of children, aged 8 to 15, caught spraying antigovernment graffiti on the wall of their schoolhouse in the southern town of Dara’a, Mr. Ziadeh said.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/world/middleeast/31syria.html

 

 

 

This is disgusting. If I had any doubts in my mind about being for torture well that has gone out the window. It's disgusting how he was brutalized and tortured. ESPECIALLY being a kid. Torture is definitely not justified.