The Issue with Torture

There's a surprising number of torture advocates around now; I remember immediately after 9/11 even Alan Dershowitz was making a case for the judicious use of technologies we should have left in the Dark Ages. It's depressing to discover that there are even torture aficianados in the White House, although hardly surprising, given Bush's Texas record and his frog-exploding youth.

But let's think about it. The common argument is that the stakes are so high that a little evil on our side to gain valuable information is that might save thousands of lives is a small price to pay.

The most common rebuttal to the 'torture is sometimes justified' position is that if we allow our own soldiers to abuse prisoners to gain information, we have no beef if an enemy similar treats our POWs. (This sophistry about 'enemy combatants vs prisoners of war' is just that - word-weaselling to justify the unjustifiable.) But let's say we decide the stakes are so enormous that our own warriors are just going to have to take their chances - it's an all-volunteer force after all, and no one is there who didn't choose to be (except now, of course, when you have 'weekend warriors' stuck overseas for months on end when they'd signed up to fight the odd forest fire or defend the 'homeland' from specious invaders.)

The major problem (apart from the loss of the moral high ground, the unbearable humiliation of lowering our national standard to that of the Spanish Inquisition, and turning our formerly-respected country into an international pariah) is that the information extracted by torture is... well, anything you want it to be. That is, you can not depend on the information to bear any resemblance to what's going on in the real world.

This is clearly not an issue if you're John Ashcroft, Donald Rumfeld or Dick Cheney, who know what answers they want to get and don't care how they get them. (I don't include George Bush because I don't think he even understands the issues well enough to care.) But it ought to matter to the rest of us. It would be one thing if you could depend on our leadership to get independent confirmation of the information they torture out of prisoners. (It would be a fairly dire thing, but slightly less unjustifiable.) But let's face it - we can't.

Who are we going to find ourselves at war with next, based only on the sleep-deprived rantings of some poor slob who finally figured out what his 'interrogator' wanted to hear?

Then there's Jose Padilla. I have no idea whether or not this guy is a Richard Jewell, in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the foul villain Ashcroft would have you believe. And you know what? We never will know. Because the only thing they have against him is his 'confession', and they're not going to reveal to us how they obtained it. And this guy is an American citizen.

Which of your neighbors is going to crack under abu-ghraib-style techniques and finger you as the terror-kingpin of the East Coast? And how well do you think you'll withstand telling them exactly what they want to hear?

Paranoia? you can only pray that's all it is.