June 05 , 2008
The Torture Debate
Over the last few weeks there has been an intense debate over torture. Obama has made clear that the US will not engage in torture, and that some members of the Bush Administration did in fact engage in torture, or wrote legal memos justifying it. Some Democrats and liberals commentators have been calling for a Truth Commission or even prosecution of those officials responsible for torture under the previous government. Former Vice-President Dick Cheney has been a vocal advocate of torture, although he calls it by various euphemisms, and claims that torture saved lives, therefore it was justified.
The proponents of torture make the same argument. It is what is known as “the ticking time-bomb” scenario. If you had a terrorist who had planted a time-bomb that was going to kill thousands of people, do you have the right to use torture to get the information needed to find and disable the bomb? Would it be ethical not to use torture in that situation? This argument seems fairly convincing to many people on a superficial level. But when we look deeper, it is in fact a fantasy and not the basis of a real policy on torture.
For the ticking time-bomb scenario to be valid, there needs to be five elements that must be true for torture to be justified by it. First, there must be a real time-bomb that will cause massive casualties unless it is disabled. Second, there must be a person who has the knowledge to find and disable the bomb. Third, this person must be in the custody of the United States. Fourth, the US must know for certain that this is in fact the right person, and that the bomb threat is real. Fifth, there must be no other way besides torture to either disable the bomb directly, or to get the terrorist to provide the information needed without torturing him.
This chain of facts can be broken anywhere along the line, and if so, the use of torture is not justifiable, even by the standards of the conservatives who want to reserve it for these cases. It is possible that there is no actual bomb, or that the bomb is a dud, or that it is only capable of minimal harm. Do we torture people to prevent one death? Or ten deaths? A nuclear weapon is what is usually proposed in these hypotheticals, but no case of nuclear terrorism has ever even been suspected. Short of that, how big a bomb is needed to justify torture? We don’t torture criminal suspects in the US, even if we believe someone’s life is in danger.
Secondly, even if the bomb exists, how do we know the person we are torturing has the knowledge we are seeking? Perhaps, it is the wrong person, or perhaps he doesn’t have the knowledge we are seeking. Torturing him would yield nothing, and maybe lead authorities down a false path at a critical time.
Finally, what if there are equally effective ways to gain the knowledge and disable the bomb without torture? Then how can one ethically claim that the use of torture was absolutely necessary? Several prominent investigators in the CIA and military and FBI have stated that torture does not work, and that good interrogators do not need that to get results. In fact, the intelligence gathered through torture is often flawed and useless.
The victim will make up anything to get the torture to stop.
Although advocates of torture rely on the false “ticking time-bomb” scenario, the reality is that torture was used routinely in the first few years after 9/11, but never for such a scenario. It was used to punish detainees, as they were assumed to be terrorists, and it was used especially to gin up a false case for invading Iraq. When Khalid Sheik Muhammad was water-boarded, he was being asked to provide evidence connecting Saddam Hussein to 9/11. This was purely a political use of torture, to provide justification to the American people for Bush’s adventurous war of choice.
Torture does not work, is not effective, and degrades the moral authority of the United States. It is in total contravention to the basic values of this society, namely, the ban on cruel and unusual punishment enshrined in the Bill of Rights. That ban did not reflect a narrow view that it is wrong to torture your own citizens, but an expansive moral view that it is fundamentally wrong to torture at all.
