Tortue.
It's really a great conversation starter.
I've vacillated on just about every aspect of this issue over the past several years. Is it ever effective? If it is, can it be justified? If/when it's justified, is it then also morally permissible?
I eventually came to the conclusion that, although not being in the industry I could never know for certain, it seemed that enought people believed there to be value to gain from the now euphemistically rephrased "enhanced interrogation techniques" that there were probably times when such action was effective. When that was the case, when lives were on the line, then torturing the one whose knowledge could prevent the coming atrocity was justified. I even came to what I decided was a very mature worldview; that torture was not morally justified, but when it was necessary, men and and women could willingly choose to sacrifice their dignity and morality for the good of the nation, knowing full well the consequences of their actions, and knowing that they should, and would be prosecuted for them. It was all very nice and honorable, with what, in my world view, is the ultimate personal sacrifice thrown in to top everything off. And it was wrong. In every god damned sense, it was wrong.
Over time, I came to revise my belief based on two concurrent but separate tracts of thought. First on the dry and uncontroversial basis of the very effectiveness of physically torturing someone. The more I read, the more I learned, the more I critically thought about the issue, the less compelling the need for torture seemed. As much as I enjoy watching 24 (as does, apparently, Bill Clinton, oddly enough), the series has had one effect on the American political debate that's as unbelievable as it is unjustified. We're now at a point where Republicans try to explain that the Democrats don't understand the real world, and to emphasize their point, they site Jack Bauer. Wha?! When one of the primary pieces of evidence supplied by one side of a debate is a fictional character in a fictional world, I can be pretty confident that something has gone awry in the universe.
Dick Cheney has exemplified this mentality. But the thing is, to get to the point where you have a suspect in custody ready for interrogation, you must already have a very strong handle on the situation. I was never able to articulate this idea very well, but Stratfor put it very effectively earlier this week when they wrote:
"A great deal of tactical information on the individual — what he knows, the organization he works for and that organization’s activities — is all necessary to get to that point. This is rarely the case in either police work or the intelligence community — and if authorities did have that much highly specific intelligence, the time-consuming process of torture is rarely either necessary or an efficient means of gathering further details."
So torture as an effective means of coercion just doesn't seem to pan out. Full stop, right? Wrong. Because the effectiveness is just one aspect of this story, and arguably it's the less important one. Because even if it were justified by the information to be gained from a suspect, the question would still remain: Is this morally right?
The answer shouldn't even be a question. Shephard Smith put voice to what so many people were thinking earlier this week when he exploded on camera in indignation as the two men he was on stage with debated the legality of torture. As he so effectively pointed out, it's not a question of legality. Of Bybee's memos or executive directives. It's a question of who we are. The Right (and I use that term not in its historical context, recent or otherwise, but in the current"Rush Limbaugh-Republicans" sense of the word) claims that, as Americans, we need to fight for American values. This is true, and thirty or forty years ago, is why I would have been a Republican, when the alternative was a wishy-washy cultural relativism. Ronald Reagan, the Right's hero, in championing a treaty banning torture, understood this in a way that is today lost. However, the Right today often seems to be concerned not with defending America the idea, the ideal, but America the place.
Now America is a place; its people and its position in the world has been defined by its geography, but Americans have never been defined by where their fathers and mothers were born and bred. This immigrant society that we have is what sets countries such as the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand apart from almost every other nation on earth. Now this ideal hasn't always been perfectly followed; in the U.S. alone, there's a long litany of resentment and persecution towards the 'other'. Native American genocide and/or forced relocation, Slavery, Jim Crow, NINA, Yellow Peril, the list could go on for another page and a half. But in the end, America has always (and, as time has gone by, more consistently) come back to the belief that being an American isn't about your ethnicity, your creed, your faith. It's about a mentality. A set of principles. It's about an idea.
Being accepted as an American is, in most places, far easier than becoming an American. That's not an oxymoron. Legally becoming a citizen takes many years, cards of various hues, and mounds of paperwork. Being accepted as an American is fairly simple. In this society, people are accepted as Americans simply by wanting to be an American. Though the government aspires otherwise, that is obviously and manifestly not the case in, say, France, or most of the rest of Europe. This cultural trait is one of the great strengths of our country. Nearly as important, the U.S. has an uncanny ability to take in new peoples, add their culture to the American fabric, and create a new and ever evolving culture for all, one that the immigrant's children have historically readily adopted, even if doing so was more difficult for their parents. America is kinda like a good version of the Borg.
So what is America then? America is its people, and those people are, again, defined by a mentality and set of principles. America is an idea. I accept that this makes America an inherently weaker entity than most other nations on Earth. About five years ago, I picked up Samuel Huntington's (of Clash of Civilization's fame) latest work, Who Are We?, due solely to his previous work. The gist of the book's argument is that America has to reembrace Protestantism, or we're headed down a path towards two nation's, one Hispanic and non-aspirational, and the rest of us. His argument is that America, as a nation based on an idea rather than an ethnic history has an inherent long-term weakness. Now I disagree with his assessment on several fronts, but I concede the central concern of a divide opening between people of different backgrounds. I concede his concern, but I reject his central hypothesis.
America is and can a remain a country that exists based on its ideals, on its promise, and on its purpose. I love America, not because I was born here. I love this country because it is a nation that accepts all comers. Because it is a nation that exists not for the sake of existence, but exists to embody and puruse the ideals on which it was founded, and on which we have been raised. Torture in the name of preserving America is not only unjustified. It's an oxymoron.
