After reading some of the recent commentary on torture it hit me that there really are two quite different objectives for those using this technique. The first – and the only one that anyone ever will admit to – is to obtain important and accurate information; the second is to break someone so that they’ll confess to something, implicate someone, or just get them to tell you what you want to hear. Note that in this second case truth is completely irrelevant. Both violate any reasonable standard of justice and morality.
The usual argument for the first is that it is necessary to prevent some potential major attack and loss of life. Even if this were true – and in the real world it’s not – the use of torture is still immoral. Actually, it’s been shown quite conclusively that torture is not an effective technique for obtaining information. Lots of info, some good and useful, some bad, and no way to tell the difference; lots of innocent people tortured; lots more people hate you. At one time Israel engaged in torture – but then gave it up as not effective. Israel is pretty efficient in this sort of thing and isn’t particularly concerned with what the rest of the world thinks so this is a pretty good indication of tortures lack of utility.
This of course brings up the question of WHY? Why did Cheney and Bush and the CIA people go this way? The ineffectiveness of torture as a means for gathering information has been widely acknowledged for a good long time so why do it? What do you expect to gain? Are you just looking for statements to justify a course of action that can’t be justified by honest and rational means?
The second use of torture (and some of the specific techniques) has a long history. It seems the Romans had a rule that you couldn’t execute someone for a crime unless they confessed…. Later, during the Inquisition, the church used some very brutal techniques (including a variation on waterboarding) to get confessions from witches and Jews (some history here). In more recent times the Soviets used techniques such as sleep deprivation to get people to confess to “crimes.” With these techniques you can break any person so that they’ll confess to anything – even if they know that their confession is a death sentence; implicate anyone; in the end even believe in their own guilt.
Subtle forms of these techniques are not unknown in our enlightened society. For example, police have been known to make up their mind that a person is guilty of a crime and then work very hard at obtaining a confession. For example, here in Connecticut Richard Lapointe has been in prison since 1989 for a murder he probably did not commit. Lapointe has mental issues, is gullible and wants to please authority; in a 9 hour unrecorded interrogation he gave the police and prosecutors the confession they wanted. Unfortunately, police and prosecutors do not like to admit their mistakes….
If conditions designed to destroy someone mentally break someone’s mind are considered torture then add Supermax prisons to the list of instruments of torture.
What got me thinking about this dismal subject was a depressing piece by David Ignatius, “How Obama’s Decision Hurt the CIA.” The main point seems to be that the poor CIA guys can’t do their job effectively because they’re too busy trying to cover their butts. Stuff like
“One former officer told me he declined the job, not because he thought the program was wrong, but because he knew it would blow up. “We all knew the political wind would change eventually,” he recalled. Other officers who didn’t make that cynical but correct calculation are now “broken and bewildered,” says the former operative.”
Ignatius is even worried that our allies in torture, Egypt and Jordan, won’t want to handle our torture outsourcing anymore,
“risk is too high to do the things with America they’ve done in the past.”
The comments that go along with the piece mostly are as bad or worse.
Depressing. The moral issues seem to be considered too irrelevant to even mention. But morality does matter and it does have some very clear commandments – one of them is thou shalt not torture! International law also is very clear – torture is illegal; the order to torture is an illegal order. Both are subject to prosecution. The Nuremberg Defense – “I was only following orders” – is not a valid defense.
Morality certainly is an issues in the Muslim world and the perceived immorality of the West is a major driving force in Muslim anger. That the US both practiced and outsourced torture is not exactly news to most of the world. The question now is what next? Should there be prosecution – after all serious crimes usually are punished? Or should we just forget the whole thing and promise that we’ll play nice from now on? Perhaps the “truth and reconciliation” approach? However, that requires the admission of guilt and the desire for forgiveness; hard to picture Cheney in that role!
John Robb just posted “TORTURE AND MORAL ISOLATION” on his in Global Guerrillas blog. He makes the point that morality is important for very practical reasons.
“In short, a primary objective of US grand strategy should be to increase its connectivity within the moral sphere. The embrace of torture does exactly the opposite. It self-inflicts moral isolation on the US by violating codes of conduct we profess to uphold. This moral isolation creates an internal dialogue plagued by mistrust, menace, and uncertainty.”
Tags: morality, Nuremberg defense, torture, why torture