Why Torture is Wrong

Never in a million years would I have thought it necessary to write an essay on this subject. Torture being immoral and certainly anti-Christian seems as obvious and fundamental as the sun rising in the East. This is especially true in America, stemming from a proud tradition that began with George Washington’s refusal to allow his troops to torture British and Hessian soldiers.

Practitioners of torture have tossed up all sorts of logically fallacious arguments to justify the inhuman treatment of other human beings. Much of the discussion on the national level boils down to “is not” versus “is too” argumentation that would embarrass a third grader. The following is an examination of points that are being missed, and yet are vital to the discussion.

1) The Ability to Resist: Proponents of torture have suggested that using it is important because Al Qaeda operatives have undergone training to resist interrogation. They use this allegation to suggest a level of sophistication and tradecraft which Al Qaeda operations have failed to reveal in practice. Those pundits who were amazed at the sophistication of the 9/11 operation, for example, have apparently never used Travelocity to book flights from one point to another. Had Al Qaeda been truly sophisticated in that operation, they would have actually had a phone contact system in place that would only allow the operation to go ahead if all jets were, in fact, airborne at the same time. These same terrorists used credit cards in their own names to book rooms the night before they took off. Both of these things clearly indicate a level of sophistication that would make Gomer Pyle look like James Bond.

Regardless, our troops are subjected to SERE training not to become unbreakable, but to hold out for as along as they can. Students are instructed to hold out for 24-72 hours. Their absence for that long will be noted by their handlers, and all operations in which they were involved will be assumed to be compromised. The operations will be scrubbed, assets moved, so that when the operative does break, the information he reveals can do no harm.

All indications are that operational information was obtained through conventional interrogation methods, not torture. Moreover, these results were all obtained well outside the 24-72 hour point after capture. While information has been valuable in locating targets and apprehending suspects, no one has yet pointed to a real-world instance of a “ticking time bomb” scenario akin to those which so often get trotted out as a justification for torture.

For an excellent examination of conventional techniques getting information out of suspects, I heartily recommend How To Break A Terrorist by Matthew Alexander.

The point here is simple: even if torture was a stone-cold lock for getting correct information instantly; the way it was employed here was not timely enough to make it effective to obtain the desired results.

2) Can someone lie under torture? The supposition under which practitioners operate is that they can’t, that eventually they will tell the truth. I emphasize eventually above because only that belief can justify Waterboarding someone over 180 times in a month. It is inconceivable to torture advocates that someone could lie when telling the truth would allow him to save himself.

The trick of it is, however, in how the individual defines saving himself. The backers of torture accept as true, for example, countless stories of Christian saints who underwent torture and hideous deaths when, to save themselves, all they had to do was to recant their Christianity. For those martyrs, however, recantation would be their destruction. Their salvation was to die physically.

And these same individuals remind us how fanatical the Muslims are in their fundamentalist Islam. Why would they suppose these fanatics would be any less strong than other martyrs? (Arguing that Christian martyrs are superior to Muslim martyrs reveals a cultural bias which is dealt-with below.)

To step back from religious contexts, the news is rife with stories of people who do extraordinary things to free themselves from life-threatening situations. We define these stories as heroic, like a mountain climber who amputates his own arm with a Swiss Army Knife. That’s pretty hardcore stuff, and we all admire it. How much harder is resisting torture going to be, especially if you know they won’t kill you until you give up that last nugget of information? It’s not.

One must also factor in just plain contrariness. We all know people who are spiteful and hold a grudge. Under extreme pressure they revert to their core, and if being defiant is how they define self; they will resist until they die physically. To do otherwise would, in effect, be psychic suicide. (Consider that all sorts of people, with lesser provocation than torture, act against what others perceive as their best interest all the time.)

How does an interrogator distinguish between ignorance and defiance? An ignorant person won’t give up the information an interrogator wants because he doesn’t have it. Under torture, he’ll just start making stuff up to survive. It’s a simple mental process: the truth isn’t working, so he will give up a truth the interrogators’ like. Repeated sessions of torture will get a whole new series of truths through that same cycle, and the torturers will deceive themselves into believing they’re making progress. These false positive answers will waste time and energy, and there will be no end to them.

Bad intelligence kills more people than no intelligence at all.

The point here is simple: people lie for all sorts of reasons and under all sorts of circumstances. People are capable of heroic efforts that are inconceivable to the rest of us. There is no mechanism currently available to distinguish between truth and lies, so torture is a wholly unreliable methodology for obtaining valid information.

Pointing out that people lie would seem to undercut cooperative methods of interrogation as well. There is a significant difference, however. When establishing a rapport with a suspect, the interrogator moves away from an adversarial relationship with that individual. They cooperate. They foster an atmosphere of sharing, and offer quid pro quo exchanges where the subject can make his life manifestly better by cooperating. It humanizes both him and the interrogators, so they conduct their relationship in accord with human conventions. This gives the interrogators a chance to get to know the subject and figure out how to unlock his secrets.

Torture just smashes the lock and try and find useful things amid the fragments.

3) Retribution and Racism: These two factors are danced around, and they shouldn’t be. As enlightened as Americans would like to think themselves, we have repeatedly and for many years engaged in a systematic dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims. It’s a natural process. We’ve done it with the Japanese, the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, and anyone else we’ve been at war with. Arabs have been on the hot seat for years because of Middle East unrest, terrorist acts and high gas prices. 9/11 just kicked all of that stereotyping into overdrive, and stories of how culturally different they are just feeds more fuel into the fire.

Part of the reaction to the 9/11 attacks, or the beheadings of kidnap victims, or the dragging of corpses through the streets, can be summed up in statements of outrage: “How dare they? Who do they think they are?” We’ve all felt it. I remember waiting at the Red Cross to give blood on 9/11, watching CNN show some explosions in Kabul and thinking that we were getting some of our own back.

Can anyone look at what happened at Abu Gharib and imagine both factors didn’t play a part? Can any one imagine that forcing prisoners at Gitmo to watch the Koran being used as toilet paper wasn’t meant to punish? Can anyone imagine that it was thought okay to torture suspects because they were animals, since only animals would do the stuff they’d done? And how is Waterboarding less punishment than an interrogation technique?

I’d go so far as to say that if anyone thinks these two motivations were not at play, they’re kidding themselves.

Let’s not forget that huge chunks of the people subjected to harsh treatment and torture were not terrorists. They were innocent individuals snatched up by rival warlords in Afghanistan, or kidnapped by the CIA and sent off to prisons in other nations where views on torture are different than ours. (And if rendition isn’t an indication that the powers that be knew torture was wrong, then OJ Simpson’s flight in the white Bronco was just a joy ride.) Many of these innocent individuals have been released and sent home, despite having lost years of their lives for having done nothing wrong.

The fact is that, like it or not, the people we have tortured are human beings. That their culture may have different values than ours does not exclude them from the human race, nor does it exclude them from any claims of basic human rights. Beware suggesting it does. Once we start deciding eligibility in humanity based on culture, we’re at the top of a very steep and slippery slope. Your iPod playlist—or the very fact you own an iPod—could determine whether or not you can be waterboarded.

And, like it or not, Americans are in no way superior to the Germans, Japanes, Chinese, Arabs, Europeans or any other people who have used torture. We just sink to their level through our actions.

The point here is simple: we’ve used torture and abuse to punish people for being different from us. That’s been done in our name and is completely unacceptable.

4) The Ends Do Not Justify The Means: This brings us back to the most commonly heard argument to justify torture: the vaunted “Ticking Time Bomb” scenario. These postulates a situation where we know that the terrorist has planted a bomb and unless defused, it will cause massive amounts of destruction. In this case, to save lives, it’s suggested that the most extreme methods of torture are justified.

Let’s examine this scenario carefully. It postulates a situation where time is critical. So, from the terrorist’s point of view, he knows one thing: that if he holds out for X amount of time (whatever the delay on the bomb was), his plot will succeed. His motivation to resist is extremely high. What’s a little pain for a fanatic when he’s going to win? Every lie buys him time as it gets checked out. His lies can even have his captors sending their assets in the entirely wrong direction! Better yet, if he’s being interrogated in or around ground zero, not only will he succeed, but he’ll take his torturers with him. Breaking him is not going to be easy, and the chances of doing it (no matter the method) in the ticking time bomb scenario is likely zero.

A longer time horizon actually favors cooperative interrogation techniques. If the event could kill people you’ve befriended, you might act to save them. But a longer time horizon also removes the urgency that justifies the torture.

To fully understand the perniciousness of this scenario, we have to take another step back. This scenario is predicated on the existence of a ticking time bomb. The problem is that no one has ever provided evidence that such a bomb has ever existed. Using this argument, one could say that torture is justified because a suspect has knowledge of an immanent invasion from Mars. It’s a justification based on a hypothetical. The circumstances setting up the argument are nonsense, so the discussion itself isn’t even worth having.

One could argue, of course, that we know of the time bomb from a source, but that intelligence would only be actionable if the source had seen the bomb and had the sort of information that would probably pinpoint it in the first place. (And, the way terrorist apprehensions have been taking place, the source would likely be an undercover Federal officer who sold the terrorist the means of making the bomb.) To date, all plots have been stopped well before they became operational, and usually before they were anything more than pipedreams.

The reason that people trot out this scenario and claim that torture saves lives is because they are unwilling to take responsibility for their actions—actions which they know are morally repugnant and indefensible. Sure, lawyers can slice word definitions until we’re back arguing what “is” means, but the bottom line is that we’ve engaged in the same sort of activity which we used, in part, to justify taking down the Iraqi government.

The key is that anyone who ordered, committed or condoned torture needs to man-up, admit they did it, and face the music for having done it. If you think your actions were defensible, then defend your actions in a court of law, subject to a jury of your peers. That’s how it’s done in America—at least in the America those individual claim to be fighting to preserve.

The sum of it all this simple: torture is wrong because it is ineffective, produces unreliable results, is more about racism and retribution than it is about obtaining information, and denies human rights to those who earned them by dint of their birth. Hypothetical scenarios and fantasies cannot be used to justify evil. Torture’s advocates are ducking responsibility for what they did because they knew it was wrong no matter the thin tissue of legal opinions they used to cover their actions.

Our continued attempts to rationalize away torture serves only to debase America’s image in the world, and to debase our society. It leads some to believe that any action can be justified in the name of an idea or dream—which is exactly what gets pointed to as evil delusions in our enemies. It is part of a malicious illusion that lets us feel superior, while sinking us ever deeper into the barbarism that is consuming civilization.

Torture is wrong. It is evil. The infliction of pain on another human being is indefensible. Torture has no justification, real or fantastic. Silence on torture is complicity in it. Torture tortures America and threatens to destroy our nation more effectively than all the terrorist attacks we could ever imagine.