Unlawful glorification: the trouble with thoughtcrime
Posted on Wednesday 13 January, 2010
Filed Under Civil Liberties
I’VE GOT a mate of Basque extraction who works in London. Behind his desk hangs a flag obviously based on the Union Jack, save that the crosses are white and green and the background red. Just for clarification, all his colleagues know that to refer to him even casually as ‘Spanish’ is making a one big mistake.
And when the story breaks that Euskadi ta Askatasuna tried three times to assassinate Jose Maria Aznar, failing on each occasion, he maintains in conversation that they were right to do so, and wishes them better luck next time.
Alternatively, anyone old enough to remember the days of lock-ins at Irish pubs may have found themselves standing to attention at some point in the small hours, as the show band played a passable version of Amhrán na bhFiann and the buckets started passing round and filling up with cash. If someone told me that whiprounds of this type are to this day routine for the benefit of the Realers or the Contos, I would not be able to profess myself shocked.
We can even take the more recent example of the numerous demonstrations staged by Tamils in Parliament Square last year, in which banners bearing the emblem of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam were in the hands of every other protester.
Overt expressions of sympathy for ETA, the IRA and the LTTE – all of which, whatever one thinks of the causes for which they stand, have indubitably killed many people – are common enough within some communities, and in practice tolerated by the law within certain bounds. Yet all three are on the Home Office list of proscribed organisations under the Terrorism Act 2000.
So, as of tomorrow, will be Islam4UK. The difference is that Amjem Choudary’s outfit firstly does not have any noticeable degree of popular support among Muslims, and secondly has never planted a bomb. To outlaw them is manifestly unjust.
Organisations can fall foul of the Terrorism Act if they ‘commit or participate in acts of terrorism, prepare for, promote or encourage terrorism or are otherwise concerned in terrorism’. It has not been shown conclusively that Islam4UK has done any of these things, within the legal meaning of these terms.
If there is evidence of direct terrorist involvement, then those suspected of it should rightly stand trial. Throw the book at them, I say. But the government appears not to feel that that it has such a case.
The reasoning behind Alan Johnson’s ban is rather that Islam4UK is held to ‘unlawfully glorify the commission or preparation of acts of terrorism’. That is an interesting choice of word. The restriction is not upon advocacy, justification, or even mere apologia, but upon glorification.
Meaning what, exactly? Well, in the words of the legislation, ‘“glorification” includes any form of praise or celebration, and cognate expressions are to be construed accordingly.’
But isn’t there a difference between writing a pornographic novel that glorifies rape, conspiracy to commit rape, and rape itself? If you make a movie that portrays the life of an East End gangster as impossibly glamorous, and may arguably encourage some kid in Bethnal Green to take up a life of crime, that is hardly the same thing as being a diamond blagger. If it was, Guy Ritchie would long ago have been banged up for unlawful glorification.
It boils down to this; to be in a group that takes a positive view of any project deemed terrorist by the government of the day becomes a criminal offence punishable be ten years in prison. That’s a decade behind bars on the say so of the state, for what amounts to nothing more thoughtcrime.
Were New Labour so minded, those strictures could theoretically be applied against much of the existing far left. Come to that, there was a time when the African National Congress enjoyed mainstream support in the Labour Party, even though Thatcher famously branded the ANC as, well, terrorists.
Any notion of ‘unlawful glorification’ as a serious offence is monstrous in its ramifications. In a democracy, it has no place on the statute books.
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Comments
51 Responses to “Unlawful glorification: the trouble with thoughtcrime”
Just as a matter of semantics, ‘unlawful glorification’ is by it’s nature unlawful. I suppose the question would be what would lawful glorification look like?
“unlawfully glorify the commission or preparation of acts of terrorism.”
Everytime a MP speaks of our ‘heroic’ troops they glorify acts of terrorism, the difference is that in the case of many of the MP’s they were the actual authors of the terror and the troops their deluded stooges.
In other words the MP’s are even worse than this albeit, vile group.
Good, thought provoking article. About bloody time!
“The reasoning behind Alan Johnson’s ban is rather that” an election is due!
Solid article Dave. Just one question: did you have to look up the Irish spelling of the anthem, or did you know it by heart?
So, who introduced this legislation, Dave? Wasn’t it Labour?
Now remind me, who are you voting for if the feartie o’ Fife actually manages to scrape together the courage to hold an election?
Tricky stuff, terrorism, all things considered.
If one could rent or borrow the services of some FBI interrogators and perhaps even some Israeki or Egyptian inquisitors, or even a few of Mr Putin’s chaps, one could ask a few questions of people such as, for example, Brownie the Barman Adams and Butcher Boy McGuinness and Slab Murphy – and the rest of the IRA Army Council – and within a week or two one would know the identity of the REAL Birmingham and Guildford bonbers.
Just saying.
Thoughtcrime can sometimes lead to nastier stuff …
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2994497.stm
See? Two British-passport-holders [what a CUTE euphemism that is!] decided to make the Middle East even nastier than it already was!
Why don’t you have a day off from Muslim extremists and talk about something else.
Topics could be How so called ‘efficiency’ savings in the public sector have made the country unprepared for Snowy conditions or Why is Haiti so fucked up when it remains a close ally of the USA, why is Cuba, a country independent of the USA so much better off? Then just for once the pro imperialists would be on the defensive.
And then maybe people like Bill Corr would just fuck off.
Dean, I will not attempt to answer all your questions because time presses and anyway you will learn the answers as you grow up. However, I suspect that “efficiency savings”, if indeed any have ever taken place in the last 12 years, have little to do with the lack of gritting on our snowy roads. Instead, it might have had something to do with the lack of any efficiency, or even ability, on the part of the Met Office and its new zillion pound computer to actually provide an accurate medium-term forecast. In October, they assured us all, including the ‘grit gangers’, that this would be a mild winter – to follow the BBQ Summer we never had, either! This, of course, accords with their silly notions concerning global warming about which they know even less than tomorrow’s weather.
The least you could do as a concerned socialist eager to alleviate the ills of Mankind is to pop down to the coast (never mind the snow and ice!) and fetch the Met Office back a new piece of seaweed.
Did you not notice the recent Extreme Pornography act passed by the government? It should indicate the joined up nature of New Labour thinking on this matter. Even prior to it, the BBFC would not have granted classification to any film which glorified rape. The new laws dodge past the old Obscene Publications Act get out clause of literary, artistic and scientific merit.
We also have the raft of laws passed criminalizing varieties of ‘hate’ speech – any verbalization or writing which may encourage (incite) others to commit criminal acts against disparate groups. Again, it fits the illiberal pattern.
Of course. As Lady Ashton recently put it, circumstances have changed: ‘The situation then is not relevant now’.
Brown is also planning to curtail ‘universal juristiction’ arrest warrants: Which is a fancy way of saying that Israeli generals – and other mass murderers on Labour’s approval list – can visit the UK without fear of arrest or legal impediment.
Universal Juristiction is a key component of the Geneva Conventions, in particular Article 129, which obliges signatories to arrest and prosecute individuals suspected of ‘grave breaches’ of international law.
Brown’s effectively dismantling the international judicial system and univeral values on which ‘humanitarian intervention’ is allegedly premised.
The move must be partly in self-defence. Brown and Blair themselves do not want to find themselves arrested in their dotage.
David Duff,
I don’t accept your criticsm. I know first hand what politicians mean when they say efficiency savings, they mean real cuts to real services.
The grit stock has been significantly reduced over the last decade, partly in response yes to changes brought about by climate change. However, the met office also told councils that we were now in a cycle of cold winters. They said this last year when some climate deniers asked if global warming was a reality considering how cold it was. Councils knew about this (again i have first hand experience) and they did not act, it is far easier to cut than invest.
We need an economy that prioritises on need and not profit, then we can be more prepared for events like this.
But the least we need is for people to understand what politicians mean by efficiency savings, democracy cannot work in a culture of dishonest language.
Now do you want to talk about what a fucked up place Haiti is despite being so closely tied to the US?
“the met office also told councils that we were now in a cycle of cold winters.”
Not so, I’m afraid.
“Three years ago it announced that 2007 would be “the warmest year ever”, just before global temperatures plunged by 0.7 degrees Celsius, more than the world’s entire net warming in the 20th century. Last winter, it forecast, would be “milder and drier than average”, just before we enjoyed one of our coldest and snowiest winters for years. And in 2009 it promised us one of the “five warmest years ever”, complete with that “barbecue summer”, when temperatures have been struggling to reach their average of the past three decades.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6257987/What-makes-Met-Office-long-term-forecasts-so-wrong.html
Now, of all government quangos the Met Office is definitely not short of funds and indeed, their top management have just had pay rises of 25%
http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/media/2010/01/daily-star-met-office-boss-gets-25-pay-rise-after-predicting-mild-winter.html
Bill Corr- you’re assuming that your torturing friends would get to the truth. Very false assumption.
There is indeed, as Dave says,a slippage at work here. The classic defence of free speech by Mill is that all talk should be free unless it is actively inciting other-harming. That is, one can say what one likes in general, but not, for example, stand outside a Pork Butcher’s and scream: death to the polluted seller of swine.
This decision passes these limits.
It is ridiculous.
On a closely related issue Harpy Marx has been going into the way Blogs have got repressed. This affects Coatesy – re getting suspended from the Dole for what I wrote about the YMCA – I am now assigned back to them (reasons too complex to explain). Yesterday I was “strongly advised” not to publish anything on my Blog on the subject.
“Skidmarx” (good joke, that!), the assumption that the use of torture or harsh treatment will produce truth is very definitely not “a false assumption but an accurate one based on excellent historical experience. You need only go back as far as the German successes during WWII in breaking up the ‘Red Orchestra’ and our own resistance groups in occupied Europe. Should you wish to double-check you could do no better than study the record of Sir Francis Walsingham, an excellent public servant who saved this country from numerous Popish plots in 16th century! Of course there was a certain amount of, shall we say, ‘collateral damage’ but, hey, war is hell!
“Sir Francis Walsingham, an excellent public servant who saved this country from numerous Popish plots in 16th century!”
Have you actually studied history at an academic level or not? I have and this is sheer nonsense. Most of these so called plots were nothing of the sort. Often they were hysterical reactions to anti Catholic attidues prevalent at the time, hysteria that the state cynically used to control the population.
Some things never change!
Allin and David Duff are both right, of course. There WERE genuine plots and plotters, would-be assassins and a great many false assumptions and accusations, too.
Dunno about interrogation, Skidmarx.
One’s attitude is and ought to be purely pragmatic and neither Cheneyesquely sadistic nor inappropriately hand-wringingly hyperethical.
If the FBI can’t get the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth out of someone helping the authorities with their enquiries within, say, 72 hours or so the interrogatee could be passed over to the truth drug chappies and / or the hypnotists and eventually along to the Israelis or Egyptians [having the right to choose WHICH would be interesting and amusing touch!]
Here is some good chewy material of interest to readers here, lots and lots of it, too:
http://blog.vdare.com/?s=Muslim+immigration
Enjoy!
And Coatsey might reflect that these days running an eponymous blog, even a blog read only by Trotskite nutters, pro-immigration cranks and swivel-eyed sandal-wearing vegetarians, is the equivalent of standing in the streets of Ipswich handing out smudgy handbills.
Let us imagine a crank with time on his hands standing in the street outside a pork butcher’s shop yelling that all who handle or eat pork, ham or bacon will spend eternity in hell.
Is this permissible to party-line J S Millians or not?
Death, even by slow torture, is a passing inconvenience compared to the prospect of an eternity of torment.
“The homosexual butcher put his meat up a couple of coppers”
Joke heard but incomprehensible at the age of eleven
Walsingham’s talent was to realise that fear of a convenient Other could be used to manipulate the public. He also employed agents to spy on the population in a way that hadn’t really been practised before, and carried out torture in secret to try to glean information (in an era when torture was very deliberately carried out in public as a spectacle [I'd quote Foucault here, but the beer & sandwiches brigade would call me all sorts of names]).
All of which makes him the father (or at least, the grandfather) of today’s surveillance state.
No, ‘McGazz’, it was not “fear of a convenient Other“, if by that you imply that it was some sort of ‘construct’ by Walsingham. The Popish plots were all too real and were designed and operated by enemies of Englan who intended to overthrow the Queen and the Protestant religion.
And of course he spied on the population, that’s what security services do. How else do you suppose they’re going to sniff the rascals out?
And torture worked a treat!
This is a place of civilised exchanges of views on a good day. Over at HP the ordure is flying thick and fast.
Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Life of Edmund Campion’ might be a good useful starting-point for getting a glimpse of the mental atmosphere of Elizabeth’s reign. There are plenty of reputable historians who have written at great length about Walsingham.
Torture and – of course – cash rewards for useful information were commonplace throughout Europe in the era of Walsingham.
To leap forward from Tudor England to the Restoration; I find it interesting that Charles II’s government – at his widowed mother’s insistence – was so thorough at tracking down the Regicides. One of them was abducted in Germany and hauled back to England to be paraded through the streets drawn on a sled and subsequently hanged, drawn and quartered. All this was long before the age of the telegraph.
David Duff – there is a long tradition of torture producing other results:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/14/opinion/14blochemarks.html?_r=1
When the torturers start with an already formed opinion of what the victim should tell them, truth is unlikely to linger in the room.
Thanks for the compliment.
Martin Sullivan. That was an old old joke. This torture thing that humans like to do was summed up by Philip Agee in his exposure of the CIA. You just have to stick someone preferably naked in a very cold cell for a while. Turn on a tape recording of someone in an adjacent cell screaming their heids aff. That seemed to get people to grass on their auld granny. To be fair to the CIA they not invent or introduce torture to the human race. Just perfected it a bit.
On the subject of “glorification” Andy Newman discovers East German nudism and suggests that Scotsman should have lived under Stalinism as he would have got much less hassle.
http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=5130#comment-175879
Oh yeah, and he’s also against people (i.e. the Libdems) “forcing their views on to others” i.e. for Clause 28-style laws in religious schools, i.e. homophobia is fine when it’s for “faith” reasons. Stroppy: when’s wanker of the week due again?
http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=5127
Alas, ‘SkidMarx’, you are shifting the argument and ‘ve haf veys of making you schtik to ze point’! If an interrogator, and the Int people behind him, are bad at their jobs the result will be bad – so true and so trivial. If they’re good, and I suspect most western ones are, then they will get the truth – and the lies – and the lies are sometimes as useful as the truth.
Mr. Glesga, and Mr. Agee whom he quotes, have it about right. Torture, in the sense of inflicting direct physical pain, is rarely necessary. Keep ‘em cold, keep ‘em wet, keep ‘em hungry, keep ‘em thirsty, keep ‘em awake, and you would be amazed at what people do – and I know whereof I speak!
On the other hand, if time is pressing some delicate work with a blow-torch will certainly concentrate a prisoner’s mind! Not that I ever did that, perish the thought.
David Duff. Yes David. Sad HUMANS living in fear of something or other. But we have the next big fitbae match tae look forward tae.
interesting post!!! looking forward to seeing more posts
“Keep ‘em cold, keep ‘em wet, keep ‘em hungry, keep ‘em thirsty, keep ‘em awake, and you would be amazed at what people do – and I know whereof I speak!”
But enough about your Hamster experiments.
And if Jimmy Glegsa is the great hero of the labour movement that he claims to be then I am Butros Butros Gali.
I was watching the Channel 4 news the other night while John Snowd was interviewing an Iran journalist who had been imprisoned for working for Newsweek. He had been accused of being a CIA/Mossad/MI6/Rotarian spy. He told john Snow that his interrogator’s wife used to telephone during the interrogation, so the man would be torturing him while his wife was demanding to knowd if he had bought a present for their wedding anniversary or what time he would be home for dinner. Is this normal practice among torturers, David Duff?
I wouldn’t know, Sue, not being a torturer, myself.
Incidentally, my definition of ‘harsh treatment’ (as opposed to torture) is that after a meal, a shower and a kip, the prisoner should fully recover with no physical damage.
Is this the real Martin Sullivan?
Or, perchance someone not unrelated to Islamphobia Watch? Known better under another name.
Bloody hell – macho trolls extolling insouciant sadism! I don’t envy you your commentators much, Dave.
David Duff – I thought I was sticking to the point, whether torture produces any useful information to the torturers’ employers, and hadn’t sidetracked into questions like whether it degrades society, justifies the use of torture by America’s enemies,makes the victims look like victims and encourages recruitment to their cause etc.
If they’re good, and I suspect most western ones are,
I don’t see why this is a resaonable assumption. More likely it is a shortcut taken by less skilled interrogators.
then they will get the truth – and the lies – and the lies are sometimes as useful as the truth.
How do they tell the difference? What they tend to get to is what they want to hear.
Torture, in the sense of inflicting direct physical pain, is rarely necessary. Keep ‘em cold, keep ‘em wet, keep ‘em hungry, keep ‘em thirsty, keep ‘em awake, and you would be amazed at what people do – and I know whereof I speak!
I learned what torture might consist of many years ago from The Gulag Archipelago:
http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-the-gulag-archipelago-1918-1956/chapanal003.html
I thought it was a good reason to reject Stalinism as incompatible with human dignity.
On the other hand, if time is pressing some delicate work with a blow-torch will certainly concentrate a prisoner’s mind!
But it rarely if ever is. Those who do wish to commit terrorist acts tend to operate in cells to avoid one arrest compromising operations, so the ‘ticking bomb’ excuse for torture is pretty much that, an excuse.
I think torture is used primarily to instil fear among the general population, rather than get any useful information. This is why most dictators use it and why we should stand against it at all times. It is an indicator of a move to totalitarianism.
Also Skid’s human dignity argument is one I agree with.
Surely the point is not about torturing for the pleasurable sake of torturing [as Our Brave Lads seem to have done in Basra] but to get the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth as speedily as possible.
Truman Capote, he who wrote ‘In Cold Blood,’ was of the opinion that prolonged FBI interrogation was what got the truth out of the men who murdered a family of four. He was convinced that to Mirandize suspects – “read him his rights, Chuck” – was to give them an unfair advantage. Even with the Mirada limitations the NYPD extracted confessions of graphic detail in the Central Park jogger case.
In short, one wants the truth and has no compelling desire to be cruel for the sake of cruelty.
Did the ‘White Noise’ in Norn Iron REALLY work? Or would repeated playing of the Queen of the Night aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute have been just as good or better or nowhere near so good?
Does waterboarding work better than the wet bag technique used by the South African police?
What is taught to trainees in the U.K. security services?
Surely the point Brenda was making about the Central Park jogger’s alleged assailants’ lurid and detailed confessions is that they were all false confessions extracted / elicited by supposedly-competent police interrogators in one of the world’s greatest and best-educated cities.
Even if the accused were not tortured, they might as well have been if the only result was to get young males to confess to crime they most certainly did not commit.
Torture me for a minute or two and I’ll readily confess to involvement in both Kennedy assassinations and the Popish Plot.
Brenda, I am, I suppose well past my ‘sell by’ date in that my brief experience in interrogation techniques almost, but not quite, goes back to Walsingham’s time – as mentioned above – so I cannot answer your questions in detail. However, this might amuse:
Noise techniques, the story went, back in my day, that two SAS trainees were put in the sound cell with huge speakers blasting out rock ‘n’ roll and after enough time had elapsed to hopefully scramble their brains the door was opened and they were found jiving together! Don’t know what we would have found if we’d played a love duet from ‘Cosi van Tutti’!
Usually it is not necessary to get too fierce with prisoners, just the opposite with certain psychological types who love to argue and trumpet their cause and whose loquacity is invaluable. Also there are myriad tricks of the trade, none of which involve torture, which can be practiced on prisoners who are tired and hungry and cold and whose brains are therefore not working at full power. In a properly run interrogation centre what you, the prisoner, see and hear is quite often illusory, but you’re too knackered to pick it up.
Also, people should recognise the difference between confessions of guilt to criminal acts which are not usually of interest to security services, and the extraction of titbits of information which are. These titbits are then collated with others before any firm conclusions are drawn and thus their veracity/reliability is either confirmed or not. Of course, all of this is a human activity and therefore subject to occasional error and failure, but believe me (and here I return to the main thrust of some commenters’ doubts) most of the time it works – in fact, it works like a dream!
David Duff said,
“Of course, all of this is a human activity and therefore subject to occasional error and failure, but believe me (and here I return to the main thrust of some commenters’ doubts) most of the time it works – in fact, it works like a dream!”
You’d have to hard wire my nuts to the national grid to get me to believe anything you say you fascist insane nut job.
Your utter ignorance of History is exceptionally amusing though and an embarrassment I am sure for more of your learned political allies.
Brenda Nelson – it has been common in the US for the police to use all sorts of techniques to wrongly convict people, even with Miranda provisions:
http://www.amazon.com/Actual-Innocence-Barry-Scheck/dp/0451203658#reader_0451203658
and the Miranda judgement was made because the police tend to assume guilt in suspects:
To highlight the isolation and unfamiliar surroundings, the manuals instruct the police to display an air of confidence in the suspect’s guilt and from outward appearance to maintain only an interest in confirming certain details. The guilt of the subject is to be posited as a fact… These tactics are designed to put the subject in a psychological state where his story is but an elaboration of what the police purport to know already – that he is guilty. Explanations to the contrary are dismissed and discouraged.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=384&invol=436
When the interrogators are convinced that there is an over-arching conspiracy called al-Qaida behind each jihadi act, and that it is planning ever more outlandish acts, they are likely to receive confessions that cofirm this.
I remember reading a description by someone in Turkey who was tortured of what went on. At one point the chief torturer took a phone call and then told his victim that it was his wife complaining about him not coming home, because he was working on his victim, trying to get a confession etc. It was apparently the victim’s fault for interfering with the torturer’s home life through his stubbornness.
Re Walsingham, he prefigured a lot of modern practices. While there were Catholic plots, they were heavily infiltrated, and the extent to which they were genuine and the extent to which they were directed by informers and agents planted by the English government is still debated. “The Reckoning”, an investigation of the death of Christopher Marlowe by Charles Nichol, gives a good idea of how complex and treacherous this world was.
Mark, your last paragraph is entirely right and what is most important today is that only the names have changed!
Allin, you are, I suspect, young, and you are also rather excitable and combative by nature. It would not be neccesary to “wire your nuts to the national grid”, your type was always fairly easy meat. However, you are right in one respect, I do confess that my knowledge of history is not as detailed or comprehensive as I would like despite the 200+/- history books I am looking at as I write but, alas, earning a living did tend to get in the way of my reading.
For your benefit let me recommend this slim little volume which you will enjoy since it tells the tale of some extraordinarily brave men and women, all of them devoted communists, who gave their lives trying to damage Hitler’s regime. The reason they lost their lives, of course, was because the German security services regularly used torture – and I don’t mean ‘harsh treatment’, I mean the real thing.
“The Red Orchestra” by V. E. Tarrant published in the Cassell Military Classics series. You’ll get a second-hand copy from Abebooks, I’m sure.
JOHNNO. You can be anyone you want to be. You COULD EVEN PRETEND to be a socialist if you wish.
Mark VS – I think there is a case mentioned in Solzhenistsyn of a torturer ringing his wife to say he’ll be home late, then ringing his mistress to say he’ll be finished soon. Not surprising that the same same themes re-appear in a profession with occasional unsocial hours.
David Duff – another example where torture had some apparent success was in apartheid South Africa’s war against the ANC. Though they didn’t come out of it looking too good in the end.
I never said it was a war winner, ‘SkidMarx’, only that it worked and produced intelligence.
Of course, what use leaders make of intelligence might not be very, er, intelligent, ask that chap Chilcott!
It doesn’t work and doesn’t produce intelligence.
If it repeats what is known already, it is superfluous, if new ‘information’ is obtained, there is no way of knowing if it is just to get the torture to stop. It degrades the society that approves of it and profoundly damages those it is used on. Is that what you want, even crazier terrorists?
Oh dear, I feel rather guilty filling up someone else’s comments thread on this somewhat arcane subject but I am only trying to answer questions.
‘SkidMarx’, you must be fairly bright to have thought up that witty ‘nom-de-keybord’ but you are risking your hard-earned reputation!
If it [information received by means of torture] repeats what is already known that is called ‘confirmation’ and is deeply to be desired by the ‘spooks’. If it is new information, indeed, you cannot be sure that it has not been invented in order to get you to turn off the blow-torch, however, what you do then is to turn it onto someone else at which point, hey presto, you might well get a repeat of what the other guy said, or, a ‘confirmation’ – see above!
As to whether or not it degrades a society, well, like so many other difficulties of a political and philsosophical nature, it depends on when and where. For example, Walsingham’s torture did nothing but good for this ‘great country of ours’, however, that does not mean to say it is desirable now. By and large I agree that governments should not be permitted to inflict torture on prisoners lest, as is the tendency with governments, they get around to inflicting it on me! (You will be aware that ‘me’ figures very large in my life!) However, you haven’t forgotten, have you, that there is a difference between torture and ‘harsh treatment’. The latter only requires a shower, a meal and a good kip for instant and complete recovery, er, apart from a sense of guilt for having spilled the beans!
As for even crazier terrorists, somehow I think they have already reached the limits of madness, I mean, pushing explosives down your Y-fronts, how crazy is that?!
The nom de plume was chosen with self-deprecation in mind. As Madonna’s character in Will & Grace would have said, “Cut to me worried sick about the loss of my reputation.”
You assume that vital details are shared by those already in custody. And if your torture produces one false lead, futher torture is likely to produce more.
Prolonged sleep deprivation etc. isn’t recovered from instantly:
http://www.torturecare.org.uk/quicklinks/1840#lasting
This?:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8276016.stm
And on your penultimate paragraph, it would be nice to think we’d left “getting mediaeval on your ass” in the Middle Ages.