It's the Torture, Stupid

I responded to a comment posted on "The Fray" at Slate, regarding torture. When I was done I realized I had written a blog entry, so here it is in full. The original post I'm responding to is here.

"I find it next to impossible to make arguments based on morality when it comes to most conservatives, who seem to embrace moral values only when it comes to restricting someone else's right to get married, and not when it comes to conducting wars. It's simply impossible to convince these people that morality extends beyond matters such as marriage, divorce, who you sleep with, etc., etc. So I won't. Instead, let's make an argument about the practicality of utilizing torture.

(Nonetheless, I can't help but say that the argument that torture is no more evil then bombing helpless civilians as some measure of it's justification is a bit disingenuous. Can you really justifiy torture by saying that since you're already committing immoral acts, what's the harm in another immoral act? Can the robber morally justify stealing the family's DVD player since he's already stealing their TV?)

First of all, I'm not going to cheat my way out of the debate by simply opining that torture doesn't work. Clearly it does, otherwise it wouldn't have been utilized in the long history of man's inhumanity to man (or the state's inhumanity to man, depending on who's doing the torturing). It can be iffy; poorly applied torture results in the tortured saying whatever they think they need to say to get the torture to stop. Expertly applied torture can usually find out more useful information then not. Let's accept this as fact.

Secondly, I think it's important to make a distinction between prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers and actual torture. What took place at Abu Ghraib was not necessarily torture. What has happened in U.S. detention centers like Gauntanamo almost certainly is. The abuse of the prisoners is not only wrong, but in addition there's nothing to justify it so one can't even make an argument for it out of practicality. So that's not part of this discussion.

Lastly, we must decide what torture is. If it's not stacking Iraqi prisoners naked and bound in pyramids, what is it? Many on the right seem to agree with the administration's former position, that only pain equivalent to organ failure is torture. This is not supported by history. Torture, quite simply, is the use of duress or physical coercion to gain information. Torture can be the threat to shoot members of the detainee's family in front of him, a la "24". Torture can also be leaving someone bound naked in a "stress-position" for a day so that they urinate and defecate themselves. Torture can be restraining someone and exposing them to music loud enough for a long enough period of time for them to tear their own hair out. Suffice it to say that for most people, left and right, if it looks like torture, and it smells like torture, then it must be torture.

So is actual torture, for the purpose of gaining information, useful?

Clearly we want to know who among the detainees we've captured in our various campaigns may be members of terrorist organizations bent on causing us harm, and if so, what they know of any plans to attack us. Many of them will refuse to talk. Torturing them will probably gain us that information, as well as information about who they've worked with, and what they were up to. This is necessary information, which we need to continue to prosecute our campaign against terrorists organizations, and Al Qaeda in particular.

Unfortunately, there are significantly more downsides to torturing detainees. First of all, of what value is the information that we're getting from the detainees? Without question there is a time frame during which torture is useful. Immediately after capture is when the detainees will have the most useful information to give us. But with time, that information grows more and more stale. After a period of only a few months, we can hope to gain little from any information elicited by torture.

Also, toruture ultimately damages our efforts to figure out what to do with these detainees, other then lock them up extra-judicially for life, and throw away the key. No statements elicited by torture can be used in any court of law in America, so we cannot put tortured detainees on trial for what we know about them from their statements under torture. The Supreme Court seems to be leaning in the direction of intolerance towards simply keeping the the detainees in Cuba there for the rest of their lives, so at some point we'll either have to put them on trial with inadmissable evidence against them, let them go, or odiously "render" them to nations who already have a reputation for making terrorist go away.

Lastly, and most significantly, torture does not comport with our goals and ideals in our campaign against terrorism. This is not squishy liberalism. The American people, by and large, do not like to think of themselves as a nation of people who will lock people up in cells in Cuba with no hope of release and torture them in the process. Moral authority for war not only exists in the eyes of our enemies and allies; it exists in our own eyes. Once we begin to commit acts that the American people find repugnant, we undermine their support for the war, and run the risk of finding ourselves having to abandon it. Dismissing this concerning by saying that we "survived the fire-bombing of Dresden" doesn't cut it; we survived it in large part thanks to the scope of WWII, and it's necessity in the eyes of the American people. If we had been fighting Germany over a trade dispute, such an act would never have been countenanced or tolerated.

More importantly, our campaign against terrorism absolutely requires that we undermine the popular suppor that people like Bin Laden enjoy in the Islamic world. It is not possible to overstate the importance of this. To millions of Muslism, Bin Laden is a hero. Killing him does us no good strategically if it further fuels the anger of the Muslim world against us. The same is true of torture. Yes, the terrorists themselves will not be dissuaded from attacking us we refrain from torture. But we're not interested in the "hearts and minds" of the terrorists. We're interested in the hearts and minds of their supporters. In making it known to the world that we are perfectly willing to carry out the same atrocious tactics that repressive regimes like Egypt and Pakistan do, against innocent Arabs, we've made clear to them that we are not interested in freedom and human rights so much as we are in protecting ourselves, no matter the cost to the Islamic world. We only confirm for many of them that we are their enemies. We can hope for no victory against Al Qaeda or terrorism when for every terrorist we kill or capture, we enrage thousands or millions of Muslims.

In the end I think the utility of torture has been for outweighed by the clumsiness with which we've employed it. If we'd gone about it differently, perhaps we'd be looking at a different situation now. We did not, which is perhaps the only reason we're having this debate now."