5 ms·

Outlawry, Supervillians, and Modern Law (2010)

41 points by Mz 9y ago

joe_the_user 9y ago
Hmm, Ianal but it seems like the controversial opinions of John Yoo [1] written[2] in justification of torture in support of the War on Terror seems like they are referencing the concept of Outlawry[3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_Memos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_Memos [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostis_humani_generis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostis_humani_generis
- QAPereo 9y ago
  The strongest argument against torture is efficacy; torture is a shoddy tool with devastating personal and organizational consequences. You don’t even need to examine the moral or legal framework, it just doesn’t work. Arguing for torture in extreme cases is like arguing for withcraft or prayer in the same circumstances, plus the inhumanity of it.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
    But it does probably work. Even the threat of prison works as an incentive for people to testify against a higher up in the organization. There is no reason to believe that extreme physical pain is a less powerful motivator. Torture does not work where there is not a cheap, fast way to verify information. However, for many cases there is: ie passwords. In those cases, I suspect torture would work extremely well and is the basis for the whole concept of "rubber hose cryptanalysis." Thus, if your strongest argument against torture is efficacy, that is a pretty weak argument, and is just begging someone to test it. If you want to stand against torture, you need some type of moral argument, not a efficacy argument.
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/oct/13/the-scientists-persuading-terrorists-to-spill-their-secrets https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/oct/13/the-scientists-... http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674743908 http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674743908 http://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/20/science-shows-torture-doesnt-work-456854.html http://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/20/science-shows-torture-doe... http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/scientists-trump-torture-doesn-t-work http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/scientists-trump-tort... http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jip.1412/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jip.1412/abstract That is just a smattering of evidence for torture not working, and alternatives working. Can you similarly support your claim that, “...It [torture] probably does work” in the meantime? AFAIK no evidence of the success of torture exists, in the advertised contexts. Now, if you want to put on some show trials and can afford to lose half or more of your potential subjects at random, and you want to break them... sure. The USSR proved that much, but that is not how modern democracies use torture. Torture for the sake of interrogation does not work; the evidence to support that claim does exist. I’d recommmend Torture and Democracy for the bibliography, never mind the excellent book.
      - kemayo 9y ago
        I think you're arguing at cross-purposes, slightly. RcouF1uZ4gsC said torture works in cases where you want to extract information that you can immediately verify, like a password. This seems... plausible, insofar as you can know whether you have obtained true information. Your arguments seem more focused on complex intelligence. If you want to know things like "what's a list of people involved in terrorist-organization-X?" then that's a lot harder to verify immediately, so lying to make the torture stop becomes far more viable as a counter-tactic. I would imagine that the latter case represents far more actual interrogation scenarios. The contrived "I want to know X and immediately verify it" is a very unlikely 24-ish scenario... but it's also the one where the moral argument against it is the better one.
        QAPereo 9y ago
        I understand what you’re saying, however the only justification that is used for torture in modern Weatern states, is the procurement of time sensitive information. The prime example which comes up over and over is the Gestapo interrogating French resistance. The Gestapo realized that they had 24 to 48 hours to get information worth acting on. After that the organization would restructure to accommodate the loss of the member and their information. It does not work. Over and over again people were willing to hold out for as long as it took, or they gave bad information, or they broke but had been given bad information themselves just in case. The result is that the Nazis had to continually treat every break in intelligence as suspect, run down every suspect, and of course that took too much time. You also can’t torture people in some kind of magical and unlimited way, torture takes time too. The result is the torture just doesn’t work as well as the alternatives, some of which can work very quickly. Worst torture makes people lazy and unprofessional that laziness and unprofessional conduct spreads to the organization. The kind of people who could be skilled and practiced torturers make poor policemen, intelligence officers, and soldiers. This argument is much more fully and cogently made in the book Torture and Democracy, and there has the benefit of being fully cited. The bottom line however is that for whatever use you could think to put torture to, they would be another tool with a better success rate. Torture is not a science, and the results are predictably poor compared to scientific approaches to interrogation.
  - ggreer 9y ago
    The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a real-world case that took place in Australia around 30 years ago.[1] Apologies for the length. It's not easy to accurately summarize: > Height of the antipodean summer, Mercury at the century-mark; the noonday sun softened the bitumen beneath the tyres of her little Hyundai sedan to the consistency of putty. Her three year old son, quiet at last, snuffled in his sleep on the back seat. He had a summer cold and wailed like a banshee in the supermarket, forcing her to cut short her shopping. Her car needed petrol. Her tot was asleep on the back seat. She poured twenty litres into the tank; thumbing notes from her purse, harried and distracted, her keys dangled from the ignition. > Whilst she was in the service station a man drove off in her car. Police wound back the service station’s closed-circuit TV camera, saw what appeared to be a heavy set Pacific Islander with a blonde-streaked Afro entering her car. “Don’t panic”, a police constable advised the mother, “as soon as he sees your little boy in the back he will abandon the car.” He did; police arrived at the railway station before the car thief did and arrested him after a struggle when he vaulted over the station barrier. > In the police truck on the way to the police station: “Where did you leave the Hyundai?” Denial instead of dissimulation: “It wasn’t me.” It was – property stolen from the car was found in his pockets. In the detectives’ office: “It’s been twenty minutes since you took the car – little tin box like that car – It will heat up like an oven under this sun. Another twenty minutes and the child’s dead or brain damaged. Where did you dump the car?” Again: “It wasn’t me.” > Appeals to decency, to reason, to self-interest: “It’s not too late; tell us where you left the car and you will only be charged with Take-and-Use. That’s just a six month extension of your recognizance.” Threats: “If the child dies I will charge you with Manslaughter!” Sneering, defiant and belligerent; he made no secret of his contempt for the police. Part-way through his umpteenth, “It wasn’t me”, a questioner clipped him across the ear as if he were a child, an insult calculated to bring the Islander to his feet to fight, there a body-punch elicited a roar of pain, but he fought back until he lapsed into semi-consciousness under a rain of blows. He quite enjoyed handing out a bit of biffo, but now, kneeling on hands and knees in his own urine, in pain he had never known, he finally realised the beating would go on until he told the police where he had abandoned the child and the car. > The police officers’ statements in the prosecution brief made no mention of the beating; the location of the stolen vehicle and the infant inside it was portrayed as having been volunteered by the defendant. The defendant’s counsel availed himself of this falsehood in his plea in mitigation. When found, the stolen child was dehydrated, too weak to cry; there were ice packs and dehydration in the casualty ward but no long-time prognosis on brain damage. I cannot fault the actions of those police. What they did was blatantly illegal, but it was also clearly moral. That crucial distinction is too-often glossed over in these discussions. Torture should be illegal, but there are a few extreme circumstances in which it's moral. This is similar to other crimes: obviously we want to criminalize actions such as theft and trespassing, but we recognize that it is sometimes moral to break those laws in pursuit of a higher good. (Say... you are bitten by a snake while hiking and trespass to get to help faster.) We recognize that no sane prosecutor would ever charge someone in those circumstances, and no sane jury would convict. 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/torture/#CaseStudBeat https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/torture/#CaseStudBeat
  - trhway 9y ago
    >The strongest argument against torture is efficacy; not even close. Efficacy is a very weak argument at best. A torture efficient enough for a given situation easily breaks that argument in that situation. Discussing torture efficiency is basically a torturers' shop talk. That was a masterpiece act of political spin back then decade ago when the societal moral outrage toward torture was basically defused by converting it into a discussion on whether torture is efficient and whether the specific applied torture methods fit legal torture definition. And it basically continues that way since then (with your comment being pretty typical of that). Instead of asserting the morally right choice of non-acceptance of torture, the society has basically walked into the trap of waiting for invention of efficient torture methods.
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      Discussing torture efficiency is basically a torturers' shop talk. In the same way that discussing the total lack of efficacy of magic makes you a sorcerer, sure.
      - trhway 9y ago
        There is no "same way" here. Sorcerers don't exist. Torturers do.
        QAPereo 9y ago
        Sorcerers do exist, it's just that their methodology is based on faulty premises, and what they do doesn't work because magic isn't real. Just like torturers, who do all kinds of things according to supposed art/science, but in reality it's just bullshit for show. Edit: If you're claiming that it works, I'll still keep asking, "Prove it." Cite those many, "Many times in history..."
        trhway 9y ago
        > torturers, who do all kinds of things according to supposed art/science, but in reality it's just bullshit for show. sounds like you flat out dismiss all the human history with myriad of cases where torture (or even just a plausible threat of torture) did work. It may have worked not up to your taste of torture efficiency ... well ... that would be a torturers' shop talk and i'm not interested in it.
adrianratnapala 9y ago
Second, declaring someone to be an outlaw would make it illegal to transact basically any business with them. ... In this sense, outlawry could be considered an absolute economic embargo targeted at a person or persons rather than a state or government. Governments, and even political pressure groups, are re-inventing this aspect of outlawry when they freeze bank accounts and use more informal kinds of pressure to make 3rd parties punish people. Partly they do this for the same reason as medieval courts: it's a work-around for the fact that people are hard to reach because they live overseas. But also note, these new methods can be used without a court order. Which raises the suspicion that the real limitations being worked around are tedious matters like the presumption of innocence and due process of law.
- sandworm101 9y ago
  >> ...tedious matters like the presumption of innocence and due process of law. As the OP states, outlawry was generally used where people refused to submit to a court. They have chosen not to exercise their due process rights and we therefore presume them guilty (the other option being to presume them innocent and therefore encourage everyone to abscond). In the modern context, economic sanctions on individuals or organizations are used where the person is outside the court's jurisdiction but their assets are not.
  - adrianratnapala 9y ago
    AFAIK, you don't have to be outside a courts to have your accounts frozen.

41 points by Mz 9y ago

Hmm, Ianal but it seems like the controversial opinions of John Yoo [1] written[2] in justification of torture in support of the War on Terror seems like they are referencing the concept of Outlawry[3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_Memos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_Memos [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostis_humani_generis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostis_humani_generis

QAPereo 9y ago
The strongest argument against torture is efficacy; torture is a shoddy tool with devastating personal and organizational consequences. You don’t even need to examine the moral or legal framework, it just doesn’t work. Arguing for torture in extreme cases is like arguing for withcraft or prayer in the same circumstances, plus the inhumanity of it.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
  But it does probably work. Even the threat of prison works as an incentive for people to testify against a higher up in the organization. There is no reason to believe that extreme physical pain is a less powerful motivator. Torture does not work where there is not a cheap, fast way to verify information. However, for many cases there is: ie passwords. In those cases, I suspect torture would work extremely well and is the basis for the whole concept of "rubber hose cryptanalysis." Thus, if your strongest argument against torture is efficacy, that is a pretty weak argument, and is just begging someone to test it. If you want to stand against torture, you need some type of moral argument, not a efficacy argument.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/oct/13/the-scientists-persuading-terrorists-to-spill-their-secrets https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/oct/13/the-scientists-... http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674743908 http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674743908 http://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/20/science-shows-torture-doesnt-work-456854.html http://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/20/science-shows-torture-doe... http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/scientists-trump-torture-doesn-t-work http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/scientists-trump-tort... http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jip.1412/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jip.1412/abstract That is just a smattering of evidence for torture not working, and alternatives working. Can you similarly support your claim that, “...It [torture] probably does work” in the meantime? AFAIK no evidence of the success of torture exists, in the advertised contexts. Now, if you want to put on some show trials and can afford to lose half or more of your potential subjects at random, and you want to break them... sure. The USSR proved that much, but that is not how modern democracies use torture. Torture for the sake of interrogation does not work; the evidence to support that claim does exist. I’d recommmend Torture and Democracy for the bibliography, never mind the excellent book.
    - kemayo 9y ago
      I think you're arguing at cross-purposes, slightly. RcouF1uZ4gsC said torture works in cases where you want to extract information that you can immediately verify, like a password. This seems... plausible, insofar as you can know whether you have obtained true information. Your arguments seem more focused on complex intelligence. If you want to know things like "what's a list of people involved in terrorist-organization-X?" then that's a lot harder to verify immediately, so lying to make the torture stop becomes far more viable as a counter-tactic. I would imagine that the latter case represents far more actual interrogation scenarios. The contrived "I want to know X and immediately verify it" is a very unlikely 24-ish scenario... but it's also the one where the moral argument against it is the better one.
      - QAPereo 9y ago
        I understand what you’re saying, however the only justification that is used for torture in modern Weatern states, is the procurement of time sensitive information. The prime example which comes up over and over is the Gestapo interrogating French resistance. The Gestapo realized that they had 24 to 48 hours to get information worth acting on. After that the organization would restructure to accommodate the loss of the member and their information. It does not work. Over and over again people were willing to hold out for as long as it took, or they gave bad information, or they broke but had been given bad information themselves just in case. The result is that the Nazis had to continually treat every break in intelligence as suspect, run down every suspect, and of course that took too much time. You also can’t torture people in some kind of magical and unlimited way, torture takes time too. The result is the torture just doesn’t work as well as the alternatives, some of which can work very quickly. Worst torture makes people lazy and unprofessional that laziness and unprofessional conduct spreads to the organization. The kind of people who could be skilled and practiced torturers make poor policemen, intelligence officers, and soldiers. This argument is much more fully and cogently made in the book Torture and Democracy, and there has the benefit of being fully cited. The bottom line however is that for whatever use you could think to put torture to, they would be another tool with a better success rate. Torture is not a science, and the results are predictably poor compared to scientific approaches to interrogation.
- ggreer 9y ago
  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a real-world case that took place in Australia around 30 years ago.[1] Apologies for the length. It's not easy to accurately summarize: > Height of the antipodean summer, Mercury at the century-mark; the noonday sun softened the bitumen beneath the tyres of her little Hyundai sedan to the consistency of putty. Her three year old son, quiet at last, snuffled in his sleep on the back seat. He had a summer cold and wailed like a banshee in the supermarket, forcing her to cut short her shopping. Her car needed petrol. Her tot was asleep on the back seat. She poured twenty litres into the tank; thumbing notes from her purse, harried and distracted, her keys dangled from the ignition. > Whilst she was in the service station a man drove off in her car. Police wound back the service station’s closed-circuit TV camera, saw what appeared to be a heavy set Pacific Islander with a blonde-streaked Afro entering her car. “Don’t panic”, a police constable advised the mother, “as soon as he sees your little boy in the back he will abandon the car.” He did; police arrived at the railway station before the car thief did and arrested him after a struggle when he vaulted over the station barrier. > In the police truck on the way to the police station: “Where did you leave the Hyundai?” Denial instead of dissimulation: “It wasn’t me.” It was – property stolen from the car was found in his pockets. In the detectives’ office: “It’s been twenty minutes since you took the car – little tin box like that car – It will heat up like an oven under this sun. Another twenty minutes and the child’s dead or brain damaged. Where did you dump the car?” Again: “It wasn’t me.” > Appeals to decency, to reason, to self-interest: “It’s not too late; tell us where you left the car and you will only be charged with Take-and-Use. That’s just a six month extension of your recognizance.” Threats: “If the child dies I will charge you with Manslaughter!” Sneering, defiant and belligerent; he made no secret of his contempt for the police. Part-way through his umpteenth, “It wasn’t me”, a questioner clipped him across the ear as if he were a child, an insult calculated to bring the Islander to his feet to fight, there a body-punch elicited a roar of pain, but he fought back until he lapsed into semi-consciousness under a rain of blows. He quite enjoyed handing out a bit of biffo, but now, kneeling on hands and knees in his own urine, in pain he had never known, he finally realised the beating would go on until he told the police where he had abandoned the child and the car. > The police officers’ statements in the prosecution brief made no mention of the beating; the location of the stolen vehicle and the infant inside it was portrayed as having been volunteered by the defendant. The defendant’s counsel availed himself of this falsehood in his plea in mitigation. When found, the stolen child was dehydrated, too weak to cry; there were ice packs and dehydration in the casualty ward but no long-time prognosis on brain damage. I cannot fault the actions of those police. What they did was blatantly illegal, but it was also clearly moral. That crucial distinction is too-often glossed over in these discussions. Torture should be illegal, but there are a few extreme circumstances in which it's moral. This is similar to other crimes: obviously we want to criminalize actions such as theft and trespassing, but we recognize that it is sometimes moral to break those laws in pursuit of a higher good. (Say... you are bitten by a snake while hiking and trespass to get to help faster.) We recognize that no sane prosecutor would ever charge someone in those circumstances, and no sane jury would convict. 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/torture/#CaseStudBeat https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/torture/#CaseStudBeat
- trhway 9y ago
  >The strongest argument against torture is efficacy; not even close. Efficacy is a very weak argument at best. A torture efficient enough for a given situation easily breaks that argument in that situation. Discussing torture efficiency is basically a torturers' shop talk. That was a masterpiece act of political spin back then decade ago when the societal moral outrage toward torture was basically defused by converting it into a discussion on whether torture is efficient and whether the specific applied torture methods fit legal torture definition. And it basically continues that way since then (with your comment being pretty typical of that). Instead of asserting the morally right choice of non-acceptance of torture, the society has basically walked into the trap of waiting for invention of efficient torture methods.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    Discussing torture efficiency is basically a torturers' shop talk. In the same way that discussing the total lack of efficacy of magic makes you a sorcerer, sure.
    - trhway 9y ago
      There is no "same way" here. Sorcerers don't exist. Torturers do.
      - QAPereo 9y ago
        Sorcerers do exist, it's just that their methodology is based on faulty premises, and what they do doesn't work because magic isn't real. Just like torturers, who do all kinds of things according to supposed art/science, but in reality it's just bullshit for show. Edit: If you're claiming that it works, I'll still keep asking, "Prove it." Cite those many, "Many times in history..."
        trhway 9y ago
        > torturers, who do all kinds of things according to supposed art/science, but in reality it's just bullshit for show. sounds like you flat out dismiss all the human history with myriad of cases where torture (or even just a plausible threat of torture) did work. It may have worked not up to your taste of torture efficiency ... well ... that would be a torturers' shop talk and i'm not interested in it.

adrianratnapala 9y ago

Second, declaring someone to be an outlaw would make it illegal to transact basically any business with them. ... In this sense, outlawry could be considered an absolute economic embargo targeted at a person or persons rather than a state or government. Governments, and even political pressure groups, are re-inventing this aspect of outlawry when they freeze bank accounts and use more informal kinds of pressure to make 3rd parties punish people. Partly they do this for the same reason as medieval courts: it's a work-around for the fact that people are hard to reach because they live overseas. But also note, these new methods can be used without a court order. Which raises the suspicion that the real limitations being worked around are tedious matters like the presumption of innocence and due process of law.

sandworm101 9y ago
>> ...tedious matters like the presumption of innocence and due process of law. As the OP states, outlawry was generally used where people refused to submit to a court. They have chosen not to exercise their due process rights and we therefore presume them guilty (the other option being to presume them innocent and therefore encourage everyone to abscond). In the modern context, economic sanctions on individuals or organizations are used where the person is outside the court's jurisdiction but their assets are not.
- adrianratnapala 9y ago
  AFAIK, you don't have to be outside a courts to have your accounts frozen.