First off, happy 4th of July everyone, even my international readers (I know you’re out there). To celebrate, I figure I’ll rip out a topic I’ve meant to touch on for a while.
As the torture debate rages on, one of the woefully misguided aspects of the discussion is efficacy. If we’re to go by the talking heads, the ethical and moral issues associated with torture aren’t really that important as long as it works. If we can get the information out of the guy, it doesn’t matter if we’re pressing a red-hot metal rod into his orifices. John Yoo famous assertion that the president could authorize the crushing of a suspect’s child’s testicles if he needed to was met with not only outrage at the concept of such cruelty, but an alarming number of people speculating on what good it would do.
To that extent, we’ve seen rationalizations out the wazoo. The most famous is the ill-conceived ticking time bomb. It’s cliche by now, but to review: terrorist knows where a bomb is that will blow up in 24 hours, we need the information out of him period. Do we torture it out of him Jack Bauer-style?
Ignoring the obvious (what if he lies?), let’s just assume that, just like the proponents claim, this example is apt and we would indeed have to torture the guy. Not only that, but having done so, we find the bomb and save the day. Torture can work and now has a proven track record, we’ll say for purposes of the hypothetical.
Now we have to ask ourselves a question: why don’t we do this domestically? It’s apparently so effective, what rationale do we have for not doing it to criminals within our own borders?
An immediate refutation would be that we’re only talking about using it against terrorists, people who aren’t protected by our Constitution. The thing is, if that was true, we wouldn’t have our ticking bomb situation. Obviously people are focused on severity of crime, or we could simply accept that all the foreigners should be tortured if we think we need to. Humanitarianism comes into play; most people don’t want to be torturing petty thieves.
We expert to countries that torture such as Syria, Egypt, and Uzbekistan. Many Iraqi and Middle Eastern suspects have been “rendered” to nations that consider torture a routine police procedure. The United States has no problem with countries that torture their own people, we ask them to torture our detainees, so why not make the leap and just redefine “cruel” and “unusual”?
After all, if the issue is how much they deserve it, why not consider the following. A small girl has been kidnapped, and the kidnappers have sent a picture to the parents of her strapped to a chair, bruised and crying. We have in our custody the best friend of the man who took her, and the kidnapper says if he doesn’t get his ransom within 24 hours she dies. He’ll talk, all we have to do is tear out his fingernails and maybe set some strategic regions of his body on fire.
Or, for that matter, let’s just go with what the CIA does currently. Apparently, as per the arguments, the methods aren’t even that bad. If Gitmo is such a theme park and our detainees get pampered, why not do whatever we do to them on our own guys?
I hope you can see my point. The torture argument hinges on one pathetically flawed assumption: they are them, we are us, and we deserve better treatment than them. Those people are savage primates and it doesn’t REALLY matter if we brutalize them, all that matters is we protect our troops because, hey, them’s OUR boys. You know, Americans. Real people.
Because when you lay it all out on the table, if we accept the torturing of terrorists, we’ve lost any reason to object to it at home from a moral perspective. Saying “but we’re protected by the Constitution” is an argument that masks a concession of defeat. Resorting to that means the person realizes they can’t defend their stance rationally. And in the case of torturing “enemies”, that’s because there isn’t a rational defense.
