Defending Torture

Defending Torture, Administration Stoops to the Orwellian
Friday, Feb 08, 2008 - 12:09 AM
By A. Barton Hinkle
Times-Dispatch Columnist
http://www.inrich.com/cva/ric/opinion/oped.apx.-content-articles-RTD-2008-02-08-0049.html

Earlier this week the White House called American veterans liars.

The Bush administration didn't say it quite so baldly as that. But after CIA director Michael Hayden acknowledged the use of waterboarding, a White House spokesman said the ad ministration had determined it was a lawful "enhanced interrogation technique" rather than illegal torture.

That's a remarkable shift. During the WWII era the U.S. prosecuted Japanese military leaders for committing torture -- by waterboarding -- in the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. As Charles Nielsen, an Army Air Force lieutenant who was captured by the Japanese, testified then: "I was given several types of torture . . . .I was given what they call the water cure." He described the effect: "I felt more or less like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death." Was Nielsen lying?

Retired Army Gen. Stephen Xenakis says that "our nation has regarded waterboarding as torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment since the late 19th century." Is he a liar?

The U.S. Army field manual prohibits warterboarding. U.S. servicemen were convicted for waterboarding enemy soldiers in both 1901 and 1968. And in congressional testimony last year, Malcolm Wrightson Nance, a counterterrorism specialist and instructor at the Navy's SERE -- Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape -- school, described his own experience with waterboarding: "It is an overwhelming experience that induces horror and triggers frantic survival instincts." Is Nance a liar?

U.S. policy, then, seems to be that waterboarding of Americans is torture, and waterboarding by Americans before 9/11 was torture, but waterboarding by Americans after 9/11 is not. This is known as moral relativism, which conservatives used to abhor.

As David Gushee observed in "Five Reasons Torture Is Always Wrong," a 2006 essay in Christianity Today, people generally "do not want to call torture what it is." The Bush administration has been forced into Orwellian Doublespeak because it wants to pretend an activity that is clearly torturous is not torture. But saying so doesn't make it so. The administration might just as well try to defend the eating of cooked human flesh by saying, "We don't consider that to be cannibalism. It's only cannibalism if you eat it raw." Nope.

BUT STILL -- why not torture alleged enemy combatants? Here, in extremely truncated form, are a number of reasons:

(1) Sometimes we get the wrong guy. See, e.g., the cases of Maher Arar, Khaled el-Masri, and Murat Kurnaz.

(2) Even when we get the right guy, torture isn't likely to produce useful intelligence. As Darius Rejali of Reed College wrote in December: "Between 1500 and 1750, French prosecutors tried to torture confessions out of 785 individuals. Torture was legal back then, and the records document such practices as the bone-crushing use of splints, pumping stomachs with water until they swelled, and pouring boiling oil on the feet. But the number of prisoners who said anything was low, from 3 percent in Paris to 14 percent in Toulouse (an exceptional high). Most of the time, the torturers were unable to get any statement whatsoever."

(3) Statements that can be gotten might be lies. Lies are not only unproductive, they are counterproductive, because authorities have to spend time and investigative resources chasing false leads. The Soviets used to joke about Stalin misplacing his favorite pipe. He ordered an investigation, then called it off when he found his pipe. "But Comrade Stalin," said the head of the secret police, "five suspects have already confessed to stealing it!"

(4) This reduces torture to mere sadism. Sadistic torture of patently guilty terrorists might be cathartic. (In fact it is, which is what makes Fox's "24" so popular.) But catharsis is a poor reason to throw away America's reputation as a shining city on a hill. Terrorists might deserve hellish suffering. Hellish suffering is physically degrading to the victim, but morally degrading to the inflicter.

(5) The only rationale for torture rests upon an extremely thin reed: the highly unlikely ticking-time-bomb scenario the White House trotted out the other day.

IT SEEMS worth asking, then, why nobody proposed torturing Timothy McVeigh to find out whether he knew of any other homegrown terrorist plots. Likewise, the argument for torturing terrorist suspects would apply equally to criminal suspects who might have knowledge of ongoing criminal enterprises. Imagine how much easier it would be -- according to the logic of the pro-torture contingent -- if law-enforcement agencies could subject mafia dons, drug kingpins, or even street-corner dealers to waterboarding, electric shocks, sleep deprivation, and similar torments.

It does no good to respond that torturing American citizens is unlawful or unconstitutional, because the Bush administration's supporters have argued that the war on terror requires changing -- or simply ignoring -- both the law and the Constitution when the president deems it necessary. The entire pro-torture argument rests on the thesis that if the ends justify the means, rules are irrelevant and anything goes.

There are, of course, some individuals who think it is perfectly fitting to torture anybody, citizen or non-, enemy soldier or mere criminal suspect, if there is any chance whatsoever that torture will produce the desired results.

Many of them -- though not all -- have sworn allegiance to al-Qaida.

My thoughts do not aim for your assent -- just place them alongside your own reflections for a while.

--Robert Nozick.
Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or bhinkle@timesdispatch.com.