Torture is a Moral Issue

This is, of course, a truism.  Not the least less true for that, but it still falls in the realm of, "D'uh".

Torture, and the repudiation of it, is part of how I come to be here.  It's, actually, how I came to be lots of places on the web. I was an interrogator, and interrogation instructor for the US Army for 16 years.   I was enlisted from 1993, to 2009.  Half my service was before, "That Tuesday," in Sept. '01, and half after.

I was in the invasion force in April 2003.  A couple of my friends were on the third vehicle to cross the berm, with the armored column of the 3ID (one of them said, "it was all sand in front of us, and when I turned around, there were all the tanks lined up behind me).

Torture is more than a moral  issue to me.  It's personal.

Funny. I had a "quiet war" (if you have to have one, try for a quiet one, trust me on this).  That is, perhaps, funny sad, more than funny ha-ha, but it's still funny.  Then I was home. Away from the hustle and strife.  I didn't have the sound of semi-distant gunfire in the mornings. I wasn't sleeping with a rifle in arm's reach.  I didn't have to put on armor to go to supper.

But the war wasn't over.  My war, to be clicéd, didn't really start until April, 2004.  Just about the time I was released from Active Duty back to the Calif. Army National Guard, when Abu Ghraib hit the news.

It clobbered me. 

Imagine that you are priest.  A good priest.  You know there are some bad apples. You know there are priests who take advantage of their parishioners.  Not just the usual foibles of being human, and committed to a difficult way of life, but those who take advantage of the peculiar relationship they have to those who are in their care.  But you don't think it's endemic. You trust that in the egregious cases the Church will step in to stop things.

Then the scandal breaks. 

That's a crisis of faith.  So too for me was Abu Ghraib.

I was lucky.  Because I was in the Guard, I could speak pretty freely.  I'd been blogging about the war, and politics; while I was in hospitals recovering, but once I was back in the Reserve Component I wasn't worried about AR 600-200, quite so much.  When I wasn't on orders, I was a private citizen.

Torture doesn't work.  As a means of systematically collecting information it fails.  As means of collecting it, "just this once" it might get valid information, but you will never know, and the odds are so highly stacked against you that it's better not to try.

So I went "to and fro" around the web, making the arguments.  It has gotten to the point I can script the response pattern.  I wish it were boring.  I wish I could stop.  I pray it doesn't become an obsession.  A couple of months ago I was in one of the routine pissing matches, and I stumbled on an article which seemed relevant. It was a journal article, and I didn't have a subscription, nor yet a handy library in which to go and read it.

So I did what one does in such situations...  I sent an e-mail to the author, asking if I could get a copy. What I got, in addition, was in invitation to speak at a conference. Dr. Arrigo refuses to participate in them without an interrogator present; because, she says, there is no way to get it right, without one.  I jumped at the chance.

Why?   Because torture is a moral issue?  If not me, who?  If not now, when?

You can see me speaking here:

If you want to see some of the rest of the conference go here

The torture apologists, and the torture mongers are arguing that torture is, at the very least, the lesser  evil.  They are, at the upper bound arguing it's a moral good; even a moral imperative.  They are wrong.  I am in the position of being able to speak to their error.  So I will.  Here, there and everywhere.

It sounds self-aggrandizing, even melodramatic.  What it is, is sort of tedious, and boring. The same arguments, the same responses, the same foolish stupidity, cupidity, and duplicity.  Evil is banal.  All it takes to flourish is the silence of assent.

Well, the war radicalized me, and I brought it home with me.  Someday I hope it's over.  Someday I want the "debate" to be closed. Until that day... I'll just have to keep on keeping on.

Thank you for your support.

Comments

[squashed]

i keep posting this all over.

1. state backed torture is dangerous. There is a reason why every regime in the world torture and it is so hard to get rid of.

A state action is backed by legal foundation and carried out by state apparatus. There is fundamental different between a government agency torturing than a gang of criminal tormenting a victim. One is legal and backed by state resource, the other are common crime. Torture will ultimately engulf entire citizens.

2. Torture works. (not as tool to collect information and all that nonsense. Those are accidental by product) Torture is an effective instrument of terror. The primary aim is to break a person. Noone can survive against torture backed by state, everybody breaks.

There are tons of reason to break a person. common one: simply shutting him up, scare him and the people around him, making him do something against his will, etc.

[Richard R. Kusaba]

TY for re-posting this.

[Alon Levy]

Not all torture apologists directly argue that torture is a moral good, or a lesser evil. Some, like Dershowitz, weasel out and argue that it's bad in principle, but there should be legal rules expressing what is permissible and what is not (and then they explain that they don't really support the stuff they consider on the good side of the dividing line).

In Dershowitz's case there's also the disturbingly calm description of what he considers good torture, but not all torture apologists are as psychopathic. Some have just learned the wrong lesson from 24, the right lesson being, "If Jack Bauer can prove to a judge that torture helped prevent terrorism, he'll get off under any rules, so you might as well ban it to prevent the incompetents at CTU from trying it."

[Pecunium]

Dershowitz (I read the book. It came out while I was teaching a course at Cp. Parks, in Calif.) is making a moral argument.

He says torture is bad. So bad it must be controlled. But that there are some things (the ticking bomb, the buried baby, etc.) we can't ban that evil, because there are greater evils.

At which point we know what we are (torturers) the only question is when.

If you say "No.. we can never torture!", which is my position, then you are a moral monster/coward, unwilling to adminster some temporary harm to save lives.

It's a forced choice, one in which the emotional burden is heavier, if one refuses to torture; because one can do the thing Dershowitz does, and hedge it with qualifiers, and conditionals; so one can believe it will never be done when there is any doubt, and the wrong person will never be accused, and no one will ever lie to stop it, and, and, and.

[Alon Levy]

It's not just what he says his policy is. It's how he talks about it. He says things like,

I don’t want to be vague. I wanted to come up with a tactic that can’t possibly cause permanent physical harm but is excruciatingly painful. I agree with the reviewer; he’s right when he said, “different strokes for different folks.” For different people, different kinds of nonlethal torture might be more effective. Obviously, to the experts, having seen the movie “Marathon Man,” drilling the tooth might be better than some. But the point I wanted to make is that torture is not being used as a way of producing death. It’s been used as a way of simply causing excruciating pain.

I want more painful. I want maximal pain, minimum lethality. You don’t want it to be permanent, you don’t want someone to be walking with a limp, but you want to cause the most excruciating, intense, immediate pain. Now, I didn’t want to write about testicles, but that’s what a lot of people use. I also wanted to be explicit because I didn’t want to be squeamish about it. People have asked me whether I would do the torturing and my answer is, yes, I would if I thought it could save a city from being blown up.

This is not politics as usual; this is psychopathy. In truth, it's not much different from other disgusting ideas raised as hypotheticals, such as the train tracks problem, or the "what would you do if black people really were genetically stupider than whites?" questions, or any post on Instapundit. When a position is self-evidently monstrous, some apologists always hide behind humor or cold calculations or Socratic questions.

Dershowitz-style rationalizations are still less common than statements like, "I really would like to believe torture doesn't work/black people are equal to whites, but I can't...", but it's still widespread.

[CW]

"There is a reason why every regime in the world torture"

Say what? If Denmark (just for example) is torturing people they're doing it very, very quietly. Likewise Canada, Belgium, Malta...

[minstrel hussain boy]

word bro. fucking word. i've seen torture, up close enough to get shit on me.

it never washes off

glad to hear you got out of your war...i got out of mine, more or less.

[Dave Maier]

Thank you.

[Pecunium]

Alon Levy: Dershowitz argument isn't http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-psychopath-means>psychopathic.

His position is horrid, but it's not about Dershowitz, per se (I won't argue that a more than minor amount of irrational fear is part of his reasoning). He's not even all that mentally deranged. If you divorce the over the top language (with his affect of not caring about the language) from the actual content of his argument the core is in the sentence:

People have asked me whether I would do the torturing and my answer is, yes, I would if I thought it could save a city from being blown up.

The thing is, this isn't uncommon. It's the position they want to force you to take.

"If you don't torture this guy, people will die. Isn't a little pain less bad than death? Isn't saving lives worth torturing a bad guy?"

That's whats Dershowitz enture book is based on. He dresses it up with myths about only torturing the "right" people. The people whom we know have the information.

This, of course, is intellectual dishonesty. His work with the falsely accused should make it plain. Which means there are other things going on; and I am not going to speculate as to what that is.

Those motivations don't really matter. Because the arguments are what we have to deal with.

[Ismone]

Pecunium,

Thanks for posting this. A lot. I was just in the car with someone for a number of hours, who had the same "torture is bad, duh" response that I have, and it was such a fucking relief. Because it is so rare.

[online pharmacy]

We are compelled to speak again because the just-announced Republican "compromise" threatens to compromise the rule of law and the laws of God. Torture is a moral and legal issue; it is also a profoundly religious issue, for it degrades the image of God in the tortured and the torturer alike. Our moral compass is swinging wildly. To tolerate, or worse decriminalize, torture jeopardizes the soul of our nation.

[minstrel hussain boy]

with all due respect to the devout, i am not a torture moralist. i am a torture pragmatist. believe me when i tell you that if torture had been an effective means of obtaining intelligence, or capable of being turned into any kind of battlefield advantage i would have made torquemada look like a pussy.

it doesn't. it not only doesn't do what they want it to do, it is counterproductive. it hardens the enemy resolve to fight to the death, it is a huge tool for recruiting. it is corrosive to unit morale and destroys the soul of battle.

[Pecunium]

mintrel hussain boy: Part of the point I'm making is that the pragmatic argument is an argument about morals. When I enlisted I had to consider the possibility the army thought coercion was a valid means of interrogating.

If it worked, then I had a different moral calculus... how much harm am I willing to inflict (and at what risk to my mental health) to do this job? Can I do this.

But things you are saying about it... those are moral questions. The side effects of torture are questions of both pragmatics, and morality. That it doesn't work makes the question more plain, and easier to answer, but doesn't change the basic nature.

[minstrel hussain boy]

when i found myself on the field of battle i entered into a continuous and ongoing process of evaluating my situation, and my reactions to it. i guess you might call it moralizing. i discovered some pretty harsh truths about myself. i could be easily violent, i even have an innate talent for it. it might be a dna thing, it might be cultural, whatever the foundation, there it was. i could be ruthless, i handled a long rifle to shoot from a place of hiding more than once and did so easily.

i tried, even when i failed at the attempt, to refrain from cruelty. war is cruel enough a business by itself. it needed no assist from me. i participated in operations that were remarkably like the "death squads" that cheney is being accused of using. i am still forbidden to discuss those operations in any kind of detail, but, had things gone wrong, the country of the people who were targeted and the country where the targets were fixed, would have had every legal right to call us murderers. in a moral sense, i guess that's exactly what we were.

having made a shakey peace with myself over things like that, there is some small comfort to what's left of my soul in being able to say that i never willingly or unwillingly was a party to torture. there were times when it went on right in front of me and i was powerless to change the situation. maybe i could have found a way to make a bigger stink about it, i chose not to do so. that's what i get to live with for the rest of my allotted days.

it's looking like the obama focus will be on those "rogue" elements (rogue here is synonymous with scapegoat), some low level schlubs will be fed to the wolves in the hope that they move on after being fed.

this is me, unimpressed.

[pills]

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[Online Pharmacy]

Torture doesn't work. As a means of systematically collecting information it fails. Thanks