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Volume 4 Number 23
September 29, 2006 |
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Torturous rationales All of the arguments in favor of torture that I've seen
are just wrong I was going to write this week about why torture is so wrong and why torture as the official new American policy is so disgusting, but that falls into the same category as explaining why rape is wrong. If you don't know, then you need more than a column of several hundred words to get you back on an ethical track. Besides, your clergy person -- assuming you have one -- should have covered that ground this weekend when you went to church, temple, whatever. And if he/she did talk about it, he/she should have been against it. If he/she didn't talk about it and wasn't against it, then perhaps you need to start looking for a new clergy person, or at least ask the current one why he/she is ducking the most important moral issue of the day and nattering on about something else. I've seen a lot written in defense of our becoming a nation of torturers -- and make no mistake about it, you have become, by proxy at least, a torturer. It's being done in your name, by people who represent you, who operate under the flag that you salute so proudly (or at least used to), and with your tax dollars. You are a torturer, like it or not. File that away under "Why do they hate us?" and pull it out whenever necessary. What I haven’t seen written or broadcast is a defense of torture that withstands any scrutiny at all. The arguments from the paid propagandists and hate mongers -- the Limbaughs, Savages, O'Reillys, etc. -- are as predictable and intellectually flabby as they are hateful. The people who sit slack-jawed in front of the TV and radio and absorb this swill on a daily basis, however, will never be convinced otherwise, and it would be foolish even to try. What I find more disturbing are the people who pose as "reasonable" commentators and write their nonsense in "respectable" publications or broadcast it on "respectable" media outlets. They usually assemble a collection of code words, buzz words, and specious logic, and then try to present that as a coherent argument. And in a population unused to making a critical assessment of arguments, they begin to gain traction. If you accept it, then you become comfortable with your new occupation as a torturer -- if only by proxy. What are some of the arguments and why are they wrong? First there is the Nomenclature Argument. This says that it's really just "aggressive interrogation" and that the whiners are calling it torture to make it sound worse than it is. Really? Tying someone upside down and pouring water over them until they are at the point of drowning is just interrogation? Hmm. Let's counter that with the Seventeen-year-old Defense. What if the local police did this to your 17-year-old daughter? What if they did this repeatedly, along with sleep deprivation and other tactics designed to disorient her, over a period of months? You'd be okay with it? Or would you consider it torture? I'm guessing you -- and your lawyer -- would be screaming "torture." Then there is the Limitation Argument. This states that we are in fact doing something good because the new provisions place limits on what you, as a proxy torturer, can do to people. So far, I've been able to determine that you can do anything short of death or organ failure. Isn't that a wonderful yardstick for ethical behavior? Perhaps we should change the national motto from "In God We Trust" to "No Death or Organ Failure Allowed." This could also be known as the Inquisition Argument. The much maligned Spanish Inquisition, the poster boy for "aggressive interrogation," actually limited torture to 15 minutes. In reality, the Inquisition rarely tortured, and in only a minuscule number of cases was anyone tortured twice. There is no record of anyone being tortured three times. The "land of the free and the home of the brave" is now officially worse than the Spanish Inquisition on the matter of torture. Of course, the Inquisition did have that nasty habit of burning people at the stake, but that was actually done out of great love, believe it or not. The twisted idea was that the heretics were going to go to hell and burn forever. By burning them on earth, you gave them a foretaste of hell, and the hope was they would repent in the flames and thereby go to heaven instead. Granted it was harsh, but generally followed the same reasoning as dropping bunker-buster bombs on innocent civilians as a prelude to bringing our style of democracy -- which now includes torture -- to their neighbors who manage to survive the shock and awe. Along the Inquisition lines, one faux-reasonable commentator argued that it wasn't really torture because we -- you and I through our proxy torturers -- aren't asking people to renounce their faith. Call this the Martyrdom Argument. I'll counter that with the Gestapo Response, since the Gestapo didn't ask people to renounce their faith either. Does this mean the Gestapo didn't torture? Then, there's the Bad Guy argument. The people on the "other side," the argument goes are bad guys who do bad things. Well, duh. The guys on the "other side" have always been bad guys who do bad things. That's why they're on the "other side." There were bad guy on the "other side" in the 1700s, when we decided that torture and imprisonment without trial was something we didn't want to do as a nation. The Mafia are bad guys who do bad things, and we've always dealt them under the law. We also have the Way of Life argument. The bad guys on the other side want to hurt us and destroy our way of life. Again, I'll go back to the Gestapo Defense. The Gestapo could have said the same thing about the French Resistance. The resistance consisted of "insurgent" groups fighting against the occupation of their country by a super power bent on instituting regime change. However, we still count the Gestapo as torturers. Next, we encounter the Pragmatic Argument. If we torture people, we can get valuable information and perhaps even save lives. After all, we are under the constant threat of annihilation from terrorists -- or so we're told. Discounting the fact that the tobacco industry has killed more Americans (for profit) than terrorists could ever dream of, the average American's chance of encountering terrorist violence is pretty far down on the list of relative risks we all face on a daily basis. Even so, the question is whether we are willing to discard deeply held principles to bring about a good result. Suppose there were a serial killer on the loose. He's killed before and we know he's preparing to kill again. No one knows where he is, except his five-year-old daughter, and she's not telling. She's promised him she won't tell and with the stubbornness that only a five year old can muster, she resists all our efforts to pry the information from her. Would you strap her down and burn her with a blow torch to get her to tell? If pragmatism rules, why not? You could possible save a life. Are you anti-life? Some people propose, as sort of a clincher, what could best be termed the Argument from the Extreme Hypothetical. What if, they ask us, there were a nuclear bomb hidden in a large American city and ticking down to a certain Armageddon for hundreds of thousands of people? What if, they continue, there was a terrorist and he knew where the bomb was and how to disarm it? Would we torture him then to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people? Well, this sure is a "gotcha" argument. Any reasonable person would say "Certainly." The "momentary discomfort" (to use one of the current euphemisms for torture) of a mass murderer is nothing compared to the lives of all those people. This argument is what is known in the ethics business as a "lifeboat" argument. Ethicists propound hypothetical situations, which often take place in life boats and which force us to make tough ethical choices. They take place in life boats because it's a situation in which you are forced to act for survival and because you are unimpeded by other options. It tends to isolate the principles you're trying to discuss. In real life, we rarely, if ever, encounter the lifeboat situation. But while lifeboat hypotheticals have their proper place in ethical instruction or ethical reasoning, they are lousy ways to make public policy. We don't choose the most extreme example possible -- especially a hypothetical one -- and then make policy based on that. In the current situation, we don't have a ticking nuclear bomb and we don't have someone who is known -- for certain -- to know the location of the bomb and how to disarm it. Nor are we likely to. What we have are numerous people who are known or, worse still, merely suspected to be members of terrorist organizations, or if not members to be ideologically aligned with such groups. They may or may not know the information we're seeking from them. Some of them, tragically, are innocent of anything, but were merely swept up in an overzealous dragnet. Most torture isn't related to a specific threat, but is more of a fishing expedition. I could go on, but the list would be too long. The bottom line is that torture is wrong, as are those who practice it. Torture damages the torturer as much morally is it does the victim physically. And it seriously damages the country that makes it official policy. You and I have been damaged. We, along with the country, no longer occupy anything resembling a moral high ground. The very fact that I have had to write about this sordid turn of events saddens me beyond description. What saddens me more is not that so many people have spoken out in favor of torture. One would expect this from the neocons, the corporate-owned politicians, and the corporate media propagandists. What disturbs me more is that so few people, including clergy people, have spoken out strongly against it. I used to think this country was better than that. I haven't even mentioned the other half of this week's double whammy: the new policy that the government, or rather the president acting as the government, can detain people indefinitely -- incommunicado, without establishing probable cause and without either arraignment or trial. Over the last few years, our slide toward a dictatorial autocracy has seen the government shred the Constitution under the guise of greater security. We have seen the Declaration of Independence mocked, as the government has embraced the same tyrannical policies that soured us on England 230 years ago. But this week's new policy shift has gone far beyond that and has overturned two of the bedrock principles of Magna Carta: that no one can be imprisoned or harmed by the government without the due process of law, and that the application of that law shall not be denied or delayed. Eight hundred years of western jurisprudence down the toilet. |
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© Copyright 2006 Carlton Vogt |