Posted by
Richard Stauch on Monday, January 26, 2009 9:10:49 AM
I, like many of you, am paying attention to all this rhetorical misdirection going on in the media about torture, Guantanamo Bay, and all that. I'm asking myself, "Why don't The Wise address it in its real terms?" I mean, "What is torture?" isn't nearly as important a question as, "Should we use torture, and (if so) under what circumstances?"
Let's think about this.
During World War II, there were a number of people who protected Jews (and others) from the Nazis. They lied to the authorities about knowledge they had about where these poor people were hiding. Now, we teach children that lying is wrong, and that's the correct moral position on lying. But there is a higher moral imperative at issue here, because to tell the truth would have been to participate in the evil that the authorities intended to do.
Evil does not deserve that help.
Fast forward to the battlefield in the War Against Terror. Here is the issue:
Your platoon comes under fire. After a few minutes you're able to capture the bad guy alive. On him you find evidence that he has knowledge of an attack about to take place, in which your friends could die. You need to know what he knows in order to save lives.
You ask him about it. He laughs at you. You insist. He laughs louder.
You strap him to a chair and put a table next to him. On the table you put your Leatherman, opened to the needle-nosed pliers.
He stops laughing.
You tell this guy, "In five minutes I will have either the information I need, or your fingernails."
Page 1
After some defiance, and a little blood, the guy starts talking. As long as he's talking, you stop the pain, and you ask him questions, analyzing his story from every direction, to determine if it seems true. When you conclude he's probably giving you the facts, you tell him, "Alright, we'll check it out. If you're lying, we'll be back and continue right were we left off."
Now, you put the guy on ice, and go check out his story. If you find he's lying, you go to Page 2. Otherwise, it's Page 3.
Page 2
You put the guy back in the same chair, with the same pliers on the same table. You start all over again looking for a new story. You go back to Page 1.
Page 3
Now, you know the guy's story is true. You've saved lives, and stopped the greater evil from happening.
You show the guy some home videos (without any identifying information, of course). You tell him, "Look, that's what life is like in America. We're free, and because of that, we're happy. That's what we are defending.
"You guys strap bombs to yourselves to go murder as many people as you can indiscriminately. We are all about saving lives, so we will stop you. That's what this is all about. That's why we did that to you, to prevent the greater evil. What you had planned was evil, and that evil did not deserve our help.
"Yes, it is wrong to cause someone pain and suffering. But it is a greater evil to allow murder to happen when you have the chance to prevent it."
It is wrong-headed to say that we must never torture, under any circumstances. To say that is to say that victims of terrorism may just as well lay themselves down for it. That's like asking the Jews to walk into the ovens.
There is a moral imperative to take action to prevent terrorism, even when the action entails inflicting pain and suffering on those who have the information we need, but who are unwilling to divulge it. Their continued silence is part of that act of terrorism, and it must be stopped.
We have a duty to stop terrorism, and that duty implies the right to stop terrorism. If that means, under certain well-defined circumstances, that we need to use torture (even as defined in the Geneva Conventions), then it is still our right.
There have to be rules, of course.
- It has to be very likely that the bad guy has the information we need.
- The bad guy has to refuse to divulge the information under normal questioning.
- It has to be probable that he will divulge the information under a certain level of duress.
- All methods of questioning have to be tried before torture can be considered.
- The least physically damaging methods have to be exhausted first.
- The pain and suffering cannot be likely to cause death.
Torture, like war, must be a last resort, but it must remain a resort.