Asked in September 2006 whether there was anything wrong with the way US interrogators were handling “high-value” prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, former US president George W. Bush famously responded: “We don’t torture.”
The definition of torture is notoriously slippery, but we have known for some time now that the former president was being, shall we say, economical with the truth. At the very least, US interrogators were in breach of the Geneva Conventions, ratified by the US, against “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
Tying a person to a board and bringing him to the point of drowning, over and over, or forcing a prisoner — stripped naked and covered in his own excrement — to stand with his hands shackled to the ceiling for days, until his legs swell to twice their normal size, may not have constituted torture in memos prepared by government lawyers, but such practices are surely cruel, inhuman and degrading.
Barack Obama’s first act as US president was to ban torture immediately. The question now is how to deal with the past and specifically with the fact that these acts were not just condoned, but ordered by the highest US officials.
Should the responsible officials, including Bush, be prosecuted for breaking the law?
Should all the details of what was done be released and publicized?
Should there be a special commission to investigate?
Or would it be better, in Obama’s words, to “look to the future, not the past?”
In fact, as Obama quickly realized, his preferred response is proving to be impossible, for a refusal to look back will burden the future with greater perils.
Former vice president Dick Cheney has stated on several occasions that he has no regrets about what he likes to call “enhanced interrogation” techniques, such as near-drowning, because they “kept our country safe” from terrorist attacks. Obama’s ban, in his view, leaves the US “vulnerable.”
In short, liberal scruples about morality, legality and international torture conventions are foolish and irresponsible. The implication is clear — if the US were to be attacked by terrorists again, we will know who to blame.
The stakes then, could not be higher in the “torture debate” gripping the US. On one side are Cheney and his allies, who see torture in pragmatic terms — if a severe threat to collective safety is perceived, even a liberal democracy must get its hands dirty. Nobody likes to torture, but security is more important than moral scruples and the laws will simply have to be adjusted or finessed.
On the other side are those who condemn torture as a moral abomination that cannot be allowed under any circumstances. This, in fact, is also the legal position of those who ratified the Geneva Conventions: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”
But these are not the main grounds upon which the torture debate is being fought out in the US today. For understandable reasons, many defenders of Obama’s decision to ban torture are attempting to answer Cheney’s pragmatic view with an equally pragmatic counter-narrative. They argue, contrary to Cheney, that torture is not the best way to keep us safe.
A person in extreme pain will say anything, thus providing unreliable information. They claim that other, more sophisticated, interrogation techniques are not only more humane (and legal), but also more effective.
To drive this point home to the general public, which, in the US is still easily persuaded by Cheney’s point of view that torture is justified if it saves lives, liberal commentators and politicians have called for a special commission to investigate fully the last administration’s record. This, they believe, will clearly show that torturing is counter-productive. Not only does it do great harm to the country’s image and the rule of law, but it is likely to cause more, not less, terrorism.
The intellectual and political merits of such an argument are obvious. The current administration cannot afford to walk into the trap set by Cheney and be held responsible for another possible terrorist attack just because it abolished torture.
But are these really the proper terms on which this debate should be held?
If torture is an absolute wrong, whatever the circumstances, the question of its effectiveness is irrelevant. To hold the debate on those terms threatens to dilute the moral principle.
This leaves the question of why torture should be condemned absolutely, whereas other acts of war, such as bombing, which cause more damage to human life, might be acceptable as inevitable consequences of national defense.
Bombing can, of course, be a war crime if it is used as an act of terror against unarmed people. But military operations that kill or injure civilians often do not automatically qualify as crimes, as long as deliberately inflicting pain or humiliation on a helpless individual — even if he or she is an enemy — is not the aim. In the case of torture, that is the aim, which is why it is different from other acts of war.
A prominent US right-wing commentator recently opined that any attempt to hold the torturers, and their masters in the Bush administration, accountable, would make a mockery “of the efforts of the tough and brave Americans who guard us while we sleep.”
Aside from the fact that torturing people is not the same as combat and requires little bravery, this gets it exactly wrong. After years of torturing people in one of South America’s most savage “dirty wars,” Brazil’s generals decided to stop it because its institutionalized use was undermining the armed forces’ discipline and morale. It was making a mockery of men who should be tough and brave, but instead had become thugs.
Ian Buruma is professor of democracy, human rights and journalism at Bard College, New York.
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