Torture By Any Other Name
D.A. Ridgely on Jul 2nd 2008
I strongly encourage you to read Christopher Hitchens’ first-hand account of the experience of waterboarding in Vanity Fair.
When news first broke that U.S. personnel were using this “enhanced interrogation technique,” the ensuing discussions broke into two separate questions: (1) are such techniques torture and (2) regardless, are such techniques ever morally justified.
Much to the dismay of my former co-blogger Thoreau, I have steadfastly remained agnostic on the second question, perhaps to the point where the casual reader might have inferred that I was implicitly sanctioning such behavior in our current, endless War On Terrorism™.
No. I was not. I do not.
Nor have I sanctioned or do I sanction the despicable practice of extraordinary rendition in which the U.S. delivers prisoners into the hands of our less punctilious “allies” to be tortured.
I do not, nonetheless, rule out the occasional, exceptional case where the utilitarian calculus is overwhelmingly in favor of taking the risk torture might work versus the more likely harm to come if it is not attempted. Such scenarios are, ex hypothesi, immune to criticisms that they may not or will not work. Sometimes long shots are all you have.
But, as Thoreau has also pointed out repeatedly, the greatest care must be taken to ensure that the exception does not become the rule, that we do not become beguiled by fear into condoning that which is both rationally and morally beneath us as a people.
Returning to the first point, however, I must confess that in my personal, experiential ignorance of such things I considered it at first an open question whether waterboarding did or should qualify as a torture technique. But whatever initial benefit of the doubt we might once have given officials who either denied waterboarding is torture or attempted to hide behind bureaucratic euphemisms has long since passed. (Such officials, it hardly needs to be added, long ago forfeited any entitlement whatsoever to credibility, anyway.)
I have what I think is, under the circumstances, a modest and reasonable recommendation. Anyone who continues to assert or argue that waterboarding does not constitute torture should immediately be afforded the opportunity to experience it first-hand it as Mr. Hitchens did. If, having done so, he continues to wish to assert that waterboarding is not torture, we should consider his opinion for whatever we believe it is worth.
Otherwise — that is, should he not avail himself of that opportunity — he should politely but firmly be told to shut the f*ck up.
Filed in The Barracks, The Bench, The Bureau
[...] D. A. Ridgely Posted by Thoreau @ 12:29 pm, Filed under: Main « « Argumentum ad 24: Obama [...]
Point well made. A bit of a corollary to the ‘it’s not torture’ types are all the people who say “All our aviators go through this as part of their interrogation-resistance training, so why shouldn’t we do to criminals what we do to our aviators?”
The flaw in this is twofold. First, we train our aviators to go through this in case they get captured by scumbags who will torture them for information. We are preparing them to resist torture. If we’re only training our men to resist techniques that are permissible under the Geneva Conventions, and not giving them any preparation for violations of the Geneva Conventions, we might want to think about improving our training regimen.
Second, the aviators are doing this voluntarily. They know that they are doing this to prepare them for the future, and that the people doing this are their guys. They know that no one is going to get pissed off and just take it that one step further to let you die. This is not true of the detainee who is waterboarded against his will. They know that this is not being done for their good, and that the people administering the waterboarding are the enemy. Their compatriots have killed your compatriots in battle, and you and yours have killed their compatriots. Your life is not their primary concern. That knowledge means that what we do to our aviators is substantially different from performing the same act on a detainee.
Here is a more detailed report on the waterboarding experience, from someone who did it to himself … Scary, scary stuff.
“I do not, nonetheless, rule out the occasional, exceptional case where the utilitarian calculus is overwhelmingly in favor of taking the risk torture might work versus the more likely harm to come if it is not attempted.”
I would argue that if a situation is so extreme that comiting torture is a price worth paying it is also so extreme that going to prison is a price worth paying. So by enforcing strict laws against torture we increase the chance that it will only be used when the utilitarian calculus is truly overwhelming.