Response to Water Boarding

I’m dividing this response into three sections.

1. Discussing the efficacy of torture.
2. Discussing the morality of torture
3. Discussing the pragmatism inherent in the moral position.

Efficacy

The author of the article Ronaldus cited says, “I would have told my interrogator anything they wanted to hear to make it stop.”  I suspect that this is what supporters of the practice find appealing.  After all, we want information from these individuals and torture will make them talk.  The question is, what will they say?  Individuals being tortured are seldom capable of thinking long term.   They want the torture to stop and stop now.  Torture has a nasty way of producing testimony that sounds very important ( the kind that will make the torturers stop), but turns out to be untrue.[3,4,5,6,7,8]  It should be noted that water boarding was pioneered by the Spanish Inquisition [9], who were famous for extracting false confessions from their victims. Acting on false information can be extremely dangerous for our troops and our nation as evidenced by this story from citation 8 :

“I am aware of too many cases where torture – or abuse – backfired. Just to cite one: a previously cooperative and truthful detainee named Al-Libi was taken by the CIA to be tortured in Egypt. Under duress he claimed that there was a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. This information was rushed to Secretary Colin Powell who used it in his speech to the United Nations as a justification to go to war with Iraq. Al-Libi later recanted, and all of his information – both when he was cooperative and later when he was tortured – were deemed tainted. It was determined that he made up the connection in order to make the torture stop.”

To misquote Ronald Reagan, it’s not that the tortured don’t talk, it’s that they say so many things that just aren’t so.

Morality

“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” - Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution

It feels almost like a distopian alternate reality to find myself having to put forth an argument that torture is immoral, but here we are.  I’d ask you to look at citations 1 and 2.  While recognizing that the Huffington Post is hardly a reliable unbiased source, I’d ask you to only pay attention to the factual accounts of George Washington’s abhorrence of the mistreatment of prisoners during the Revolution even when the British were committing horrific crimes against American prisoners.  I’d ask you to note Alexander Hamilton stopping an execution of British soldiers, despite the fact that similar executions of American soldiers were commonplace.

In the original post Ronaldus ends with “I would rather be waterboarded than beheaded.”

We’ve often discussed the concept of personal responsibility.  Is there any greater abdication of personal responsibility than to use the actions of the most barbaric and brutal people to justify your own?  Is there any thing more base than finding the lowest and meanest examples of human behavior and saying, “I merely need to do better than that”?

I have always deeply admired my grandfather who served as an administrator of a prisoner of war camp during WWII.  Even as Allied soldiers in the custody of the Germans and Japanese were subjected to indescribable horrors, our nation remained true to its ideals.  The prisoners we took were treated civilly.  My grandfather learned German so he could speak with his prisoners.  By the end of the war, there were several who he considered friends.

This strikes right at the core of who we are as Americans.  Ronald Reagan famously said, “America is a shining city upon a hill”.  Are we content to let that go and merely be not the worst nation in the world.  Ronaldus and I have often discussed the question of American Exceptionalism. Many a great nation has meteorically risen on virtuous ideology.  Greece and Rome were more democratic in their institutions  and had a greater regard for human rights than most of their contemporaries.  Thomas Paine, even while calling for revolution against Britain, acknowledged it as the best and freest nation then on the earth.  The short lived Napoleonic French Empire rose phoenix-like from the ashes of the French Revolution with “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite” on its lips.  All of these nations rose on idealism, but succumbed to the temptation of might makes right when they had achieved a dominant position in the world.  I’m afraid that the question of whether or not America is exceptional must be answered today at the height of our power.  I believe we have inherited an exceptional nation.  Whether it remains so is entirely in our hands.  I take American Exceptionalism not as an article of faith, but as a duty that I must live up to.  I hope that in the crucible of dominance, America can demonstrate its exceptional nature.  I do not think embracing the methods of the Spanish Inquisition is at all helpful to the case for American Exceptionalism.

Pragmatism

As a father, I must concede that it is difficult to cling to morality in the face of the mortal threat that terrorism poses, but I genuinely believe that remaining true to our ideals will make us and our children safer in the short, medium and long term.

Throughout our history, our commitment to the humane treatment of prisoners has served us well.  In the Revolution, the British populous and parliament was repulsed by accounts of British brutality even while being surprised by the civilisation demonstrated by those who the King was calling barbaric and traitorous.  This helped to weaken the British will to continue to pursue the war [12,13], and even led some of the British and Hessian troops to change sides and support the revolution [11].  After the surrender of Germany and Japan in WWII, we were able to occupy both nations with surprisingly little difficulty.  Again this had a great deal to do with the people of these countries becoming aware of the crimes their nations had committed relative to the honorable behavior of the Allies. [12]  In both of these cases maintaining the moral high ground was crucial to our military success, but in this war on terror, the moral high ground is even more crucial.  Even the Bush administration said that this war must involve winning the hearts and minds of the populous of the terrorist producing countries.  I believe our country is capable of doing so, but only by clinging to the ideals that have served us so well in the past.


1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-horton/a-tale-of-two-georges_1_b_41091.html
2. http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0614/p09s02-coop.html
3. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2302-2005Jan11.html
4. http://www.americanthinker.com/2004/10/torture_as_an_interrogation_te.html
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture
6. http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/educing.pdf
7. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/opinion/23soufan.html?_r=3&partner=rss&emc=rss
8. http://multi-medium.net/2009/02/11/the-effectiveness-of-torture
9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding
10. http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=george_w_and_human_rights
11. http://www.myrevolutionarywar.com/pow.html
12. http://books.google.com/books?id=_90e_nGQrlsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=British+abuse+of+prisoners+American+Revolution&source=bl&ots=XMFOTYvX9o&sig=sAU6KI6Z2mkrtnhzC_FjFzmbpVw&hl=en&ei=DaINTYuJNML6lwfn5oiADA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false
13. http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/2002_summer_fall/pows.htm