The Flawed Calculus of Torture
It is 4:00 AM, and what has propelled me out of a warm bed was an opinion piece on America's National Public Radio. I have heard editorials with which I agree, and those with which I disagree, but never before have I heard one which blatantly supported murder as a policy, and covering it up as the best way of handling the moral aftermath.
Commentator Matt Miller suggested that torture was a method the United States should resort to in order to gain information from high-ranking Taliban prisoners. In support of this violation of American and international law, he cited an incident in Sri Lanka, where three men, suspected of having planted a bomb in Colombo's central train station, refused to tell where it was located. Their interrogator threatened to kill them, but still they would not speak. Then he shot one of them dead, and, immediately, the other two told him where the bomb was. The bomb was defused, and dozens or perhaps hundreds of lives were saved.
In the commentator's calculations he balanced one guilty party killed against hundreds of innocent lives saved. However, that is not the right equation. For each such success, there are thousands who are tortured or murdered on the guess that they will reveal valuable information. More often than not, as history shows, they do not possess the information sought or do not have the power to do what the torturer wishes them to.
But such statistics and the fact that information revealed under torture is often unreliable are only a footnote to the real issue. Once you have condoned torture and murder as tools, they are taken up by those who use them to advance personal, criminal, or sectarian aims. By using torture, a government or organization defines what is moral. People learn more from example than exhortation; using torture gives leave for others to follow suit for what they perceive as their legitimate needs. Officially protected torture offers a field day for sadists. But even this is not the central issue.
The central issue is this: once you turn to torture you have not started down the slippery slope to lawlessness, you have slid down and fallen off. Those living under a regime that uses torture have much to fear. They have no guarantee of due process, no presumption of innocence, no opportunity to present an opposing view to protect themselves. Their torturers believe they will find the justification for their work as the victim is being tortured. First the punishment, then the investigation, and later, the cover-up. Torturers will display dead bodies and tell us what the victims would have revealed, had they not unfortunately died first. Torturers without results will dismiss any suggestion that they have erred, all blame is on the victim: they were tough and didn't talk. Or the information "revealed" is too sensitive to discuss. There are many excuses, but no one can undo the suffering of the innocent.
Torture is inherently out of control. It is the kind of excess that the United States and its Constitution were created to prevent. Every use of torture that goes unpunished, even if it was "effective", is a failure of civilization. Governmental acceptance of torture threatens us all, for who is to determine which persons to torture? What if the neighbor with whom you've had a dispute about the location of a fence for years leads the group who decides?
Matt Miller's editorial was triggered by a longer piece by Bruce Hoffman in the Atlantic Monthly. That article brought up what it called moral ambiguities; situations so desperate that torture seemed justified. I noted that all the cases cited where torture was resorted to by men working for recognized governments -- fighting against terrorists of the FLN in Algeria, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Taliban and Al Quaeda in Afghanistan -- have something in common which, oddly enough, neither Miller nor Hoffman mention. The problems were caused by injustices foisted upon the people who became "terrorists" by those same governments. The French colonized Algeria, the Tamils were discriminated against by the majority Sinhalese who ran the Sri Lankan government, the Taliban were formed largely in reaction to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Because of their historical shortsightedness, the torturers felt justified and even virtuous at their ruthless suppression of the terrorists.
This is no defense of the tactics of the terrorists, but it is an example of how lawlessness breeds lawlessness. Government A oppresses group B, group B-- being militarily inferior -- responds with terrorist tactics (they have no other means of fighting back); A cannot fight B with conventional armies and resorts to torture and other oppressive measures, justifying it by pointing to B's "illegitimate" use of terrorism (forgetting their own illegitimate oppression) and so forth. Oppression creates terrorism. Every injustice increases the legitimacy and fervor of the opposition (there is a lesson here these days for Israel). Without injustice, acts of terror are random and rare. Being unsystematic, they cannot be entirely prevented, but being rare, they are not a major threat either.
The question of torture is not theoretical and the need for clear thinking on the issue is immediate. The United States has captured hundreds of men believed to be part of the group that attacked the Pentagon and destroyed the World Trade Center. We are told that few of them will respond to questions on any topic. Also captured is a man believed to be Abu Zubaydah, alleged to be one of their leaders. He is not expected to divulge information voluntarily.
In the face of their intransigence and because of our pain and our impatience to quell the threat of further attacks, the question of the use of torture on the prisoners has been raised. We must firmly reject it. Our legal system deserves respect because it does not stoop to the tactics of the criminals it judges, no matter how severe the crime or provocation. Torture makes the government the enemy of the people, and threatens us all with the loss of life or liberty. And its use makes impossible -- through perpetual fear -- the pursuit of happiness.
I will not easily get back to sleep.
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