> [This is an excerpt from an article in the March Harper's entitled
> "Liberalism, Torture and the Ticking Bomb," by David Luban, a law
> professor at Georgetown. It was adapted from a Virginia Law Review
> article by the same name which can be found in its entirety here:
> http://www.virginialawreview.org/content/pdfs/91/1425.pdf. The
> longer article also contains full footnotes and citations.]
>
> <begin excerpt>
<snip>
> Of course, the ticking-bomb scenario is not completely unreal. In
> 1995, an Al Qaeda plot to bomb eleven U.S. airliners and
> assassinate the Pope was thwarted by information tortured out of a
> Pakistani bomb maker by the Philippine police. According to
> journalists Marites Danguilan Vitug and Glenda M. Gloria, the
> police had received word of possible threats against the Pope.
> They went to work. "For weeks, agents hit him with a chair and a
> long piece of wood, forced water into his mouth, and crushed
> lighted cigarettes into his private parts. . . . His ribs were
> almost totally broken. . . . His captors were surprised that he
> survived." Grisly, to be sure -- but if they hadn't done it,
> thousand of innocent travelers might have died horrible deaths.
>
> But look at the example one more time. The authorities know there
> may be a bomb plot in the offing, and they have captured a man who
> may know something about it but may not.
<blockquote>In fact, while the plot and the torture were real enough,
the notion that the torture helped save lives is bogus. In an
investigation the Philippines journalists Marites Vitug and Glenda
Gloria found that Yousef was actually caught after he visited his
dentist in Pakistan. He had left his dentist's address in the
conspiratorial flat. As for the aircraft plot, the information came
from a computer found in the same flat.
(James Meek, "'Nobody Is Talking,'" 18 Feb 2005, <http:// www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1417225,00.html>)</ blockquote>
You can read more detail here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Abdul_Hakim_Murad_(terrorist)>.
It's not clear if torture extracted _any_ information that wasn't found in the laptop.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>