Torture and American Freedom

Some of the work I’ve been doing in the past few days has brought me back to an exchange we had on this blog several weeks ago on torture and interrogations. I’m a TA for a Human Rights Law course here at the university, and we’ve been preparing material for the upcoming unit on rights issues arising from the war on terror. The professor I work for asked me to take a look at a PBS Frontline special from late 2005 that he’s thinking of showing for the students (you can watch it online here).

The episode shows how torture metastasized from a tactic intended to be used against the most hardened al-Qaida types in the urgent name of national security to a practice used widely at Guantanamo and secret CIA interrogation facilities worldwide, and then finally to an extremely widespread behavior used across the Iraq theater of operations, where the Geneva Conventions very explicitly apply.

In our exchange on this blog earlier (here and here), I think we focused on the purely tactical shortcomings of torture. But while watching the episode, it struck me that what is truly important is to state unequivocally, once again, and on as many fora as is possible, the sheer moral gravity of this issue.

I guess it’s fair to ask why anybody should go around saying something that is pretty much self-evident. Everybody knows the act of torturing another human being is a horrible and egregious crime, right? And yet…

It has been more than a year since this episode was made, and the slowest among us began to put the pieces together and realize that the torture photos from Abu Ghraib were not merely an issue of an out-of-control “night shift,” but were rather the direct outgrowth of a concerted policy that favored intimidation and torture in fighting the war on terror. You can wrap it up in whatever newspeak you like (“coercive interrogations”, “gloves come off,” etc.), but it is clear that the Administration’s legal policy on detainees and interrogations tolerated and even encouraged practice amounting to torture. Yet what has been striking is the lack of reaction from the American people. There was revulsion, sure, when we were confronted with irrefutable photographic evidence of barbarism. By and large, however, we have not raised an outcry, have not sought to force a change in Bush Administration policies on this matter.

Indeed, the common attitude has been one of tacit acceptance. One senses even that in certain circles there is more than that. I hear that “Jack Bauer for President” t-shirts are selling quite briskly back home; if television’s proto-torturer were to emerge from the screen to stake his claim on that office, I have little doubt that he would win a large chunk of the vote from the younger male demographic. Jack Bauer, one could say, is not afraid to “get his hands dirty”, “take the gloves off,” or shoot a dirty terrorist in the kneecap to save American lives and defend American freedoms.

It’s not hard to see where this is coming from. The U.S. was caught off-guard badly on 9/11, and we suffered for it. The Iraq War has just compounded that sense of anger and frustration. With the detainees we think we see the answers we’re looking for, the vital clues we need to win this war; we have them in our power, and we want them to feel our power, to yield to it. Torture has become an expression of that.

In fact, going back to the Jack Bauer example, torture has become shockingly hip, the litmus test for the metaphorical manhood of our political leaders. Do they have what it takes to breach the ultimate taboo to save American lives? Rudy Giuliani (the logic goes)… yeah, he’d have Khaled Sheik Mohammed beaten to a bloody pulp if he thought American lives were at stake. John Edwards… that pretty boy doesn’t have it in him- he’d sissy out, and pretty soon Boston is a radioactive crater. And on and on.

I hope I’m just completely misreading the mood of country. It’s hard to argue, however, that the response to the Bush Administration’s quite wanton use of torture has been muted. I guess I’m just still among those who believe that the use of torture should be anathema in a liberal society, that it is entirely antithetical to the principles that we claim uphold our government and direct our daily lives. I want to quote Andrew Sullivan at length, who in a tremendous article in The New Republic (also in late 2005) answered those who believe the U.S government should in some limited circumstances sanction the use of torture:

“Torture is the polar opposite of freedom. It is the banishment of all freedom from a human body and soul, insofar as that is possible. As human beings, we all inhabit bodies and have minds, souls, and reflexes that are designed in part to protect those bodies: to resist or flinch from pain, to protect the psyche from disintegration, and to maintain a sense of selfhood that is the basis for the concept of personal liberty. What torture does is use these involuntary, self-protective, self-defining resources of human beings against the integrity of the human being himself. It takes what is most involuntary in a person and uses it to break that person's will. It takes what is animal in us and deploys it against what makes us human. As an American commander wrote in an August 2003 e-mail about his instructions to torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib, "The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken."

What does it mean to "break" an individual? As the French essayist Michel de Montaigne once commented, and Shakespeare echoed, even the greatest philosophers have difficulty thinking clearly when they have a toothache. These wise men were describing the inescapable frailty of the human experience, mocking the claims of some seers to be above basic human feelings and bodily needs. If that frailty is exposed by a toothache, it is beyond dispute in the case of torture. The infliction of physical pain on a person with no means of defending himself is designed to render that person completely subservient to his torturers. It is designed to extirpate his autonomy as a human being, to render his control as an individual beyond his own reach. That is why the term "break" is instructive. Something broken can be put back together, but it will never regain the status of being unbroken--of having integrity. When you break a human being, you turn him into something subhuman. You enslave him. This is why the Romans reserved torture for slaves, not citizens, and why slavery and torture were inextricably linked in the antebellum South.

What you see in the relationship between torturer and tortured is the absolute darkness of totalitarianism. You see one individual granted the most complete power he can ever hold over another. Not just confinement of his mobility--the abolition of his very agency. Torture uses a person's body to remove from his own control his conscience, his thoughts, his faith, his selfhood. (TNR subscribers can see the full article here.)

I don’t think you can put it any better than that; and it’s pretty much why, up until the past few years, the idea of the American government sanctioning torture as a deliberate policy would have been completely unthinkable. It is simply stands in complete opposition to the values we purport to defend.

There is, however, and argument to be made that, yes, torture is abhorrent, but under some circumstances it may be justified. What if, to take a common hypothetical, you are dealing with an imminent nuclear explosion, and you have one of the terrorist gang at your mercy. He knows where the bomb is, but he’s not talking. In this situation, millions of innocent lives hang in the balance. You are dealing with a twisted killer who surely deserves nothing better than the most relentless torture until he submits.

I might, I think, personalize this scenario a bit to illustrate further. Let’s say I am the chief interrogator, and I know there is a nuclear device set to explode somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area. I have, oh, say, Khaled Sheik Mohammed, and I know he knows where it is. Am I morally justified in torturing him to extract the necessary information?

First, it’s a bit silly to talk about what KSM “deserves.” I think The Onion got it right on pretty much day one, so no point in pursuing it any further. And frankly, depending on what sort of balance you use, yeah, I probably am morally justified in this imminent nuclear explosion/very evil man hypothetical to use whatever means of torture I can come up with to get him talking.

The problem is, the next time I talk to my parents, my girlfriend, my friends, everybody I care about, I am doing it as somebody who has physically tormented another human being. That is an experience I hope never to have to undergo; no matter how “justifiable” it may be given the circumstances, I do not think the blood washes off.

How, then, can I as a citizen of a democracy ask another man to commit these acts in my name? Not just once, mind you, in the excruciating hypothetical sketched above, but repeatedly, and under circumstances that are far murkier. If our policy in the war against terror is that torture will be an implicit weapon in our arsenal, then that will necessitate the creation of people whose duty it is to carry out that policy. Those people will spend half their time carrying out monstrous acts in the name of freedom, and the other half will struggle to be loving husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers. And if I acquiesce in this, then their burden is mine as well.

As Sullivan puts it, “Any polity that endorses torture has incorporated into its own DNA a totalitarian mutation.” One might add that any state that sanctions its citizens to commit acts of torture has ceased to be free.