The Right Torture Debate

by Tex Norman⁽⁷⁸⁾

When it comes to the issue of torture, until we start debating the right question we will never ferret out the right answer. The politicians, pundits, the media and citizens at various points along the political spectrum continue to debate the issue of torture with inquiries about its effectiveness.

Not long ago, Sean Hannity got all arrogant and macho saying that not only is water boarding NOT torture. Hannity let his mouth get ahead of his brains (what’s new there) and said he would agree to be water boarded as a fund raiser for the families of our troops. Immediately Keith Olbermannof MSNBC offered to contribute to such a charity $1000 for every second Hannity could endure being water boarded. Hannity is, as we all suspected, a spineless blow hole, has not submitted to being water boarded, however, one of Hannity’s good conservative radio pundits did submit to the practice. It was WLS radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller who had the courage to try this water boarding thing, and, 6 seconds later he was convinced that water boarding is indeed torture.

What followed the Mancow demonstration were tons of questions that revolved around things like: Would you have talked? Would the information you would give have been reliable, truthful? Would you have just said whatever you thought your tormentors wanted to hear?

Is torture effective is the wrong question. As long as we argue about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of torture we are missing the point. It does not matter if torture works or does not work. What matters, and the only thing that matters, is this: is it right, or is it wrong, is it moral, or is it immoral.

Even if torture is ineffective, with few exceptions, the torturers use it because they think or hope that it will work. There was a time when you could be arrested, the cops could interrogate you, and that interrogation could include beatings. The cops may have thought they would get the bad guys to confess, and sometimes the probably did get confessions to real crimes committed by the confessors, but history has shown that beating prisoners has brought out false confessions, resulting in innocent people convicted by their own words, words given to make the beatings stop.

Bamboo under the fingernails may or may not get the prisoner to talk, but the right question to ask is this: is it right to drive bamboo shoots under someone’s finger nails, ever? How about cutting fingers off one by one would that be going too far? Perhaps we could dangle a subject out of helicopter, naked and drag him over desert acreage covered with cacti. Would a drag over cacti thorns be moral, or immoral? Maybe we could take a guy’s children into the interrogation room, and start pounding the kid’s fingers with a ball ping hammer until the father confesses. I mean really, where is the line? Isn’t there a line beyond which we, as a nation, will not go?

The answer, of course, is for some, there is no line. Any act, regardless of how cruel it might be, is justifiable IF it gets the information being sought.

Some argue that under normal circumstances we can afford to have morals, but if there is a ticking bomb somewhere, then we have a right, under those conditions to do any damn thing we can think of to get the answers, and there are no limits at all. Now this debate is not talking about what a victim, or a victim’s family, or what some distressed soldier might do when facing some inhumanly stressful situation. What happens in a crisis will be examined later and even in battle some acts are deemed criminal, and others may be found to be justifiable. This debate is talking about what we, the people, through or government will officially sanction, authorize, or allow when we order officials to question prisoners. In a moment of crisis people make split second decisions, and sometimes they go too far, but when we are crafting policy, we do that with calm deliberation, thinking through our choices, assessing the cost/benefit, and drafting policy and law that is not made in the midst of a crisis. We do this so that emotions will not blind us to facts and cause us to ignore our values.

In calm deliberation, thinking things through slowly, weighing our options and measuring the choices against our values, policy makers and law makers decide what is permissible and what is not permissible when questioning our prisoners.

If you have no limits and anything goes then you are taking a position to which most Americans objected. Remember back when some terrorist groups were kidnapping people and after a time cutting their heads off? The new would cut away from the moment of gore. In surfing the internet, around that time, I came across an uncut video of a beheading. It wasn’t like in the movies with a swift downward swing of an ax, or the fall of heavy guillotine blade. It looked like the executioner was using a pocket knife, doing this sawing motion with a short blade as is slowly made its way through the dying man’s neck. The blood was everywhere and the act was slow, and obviously a period of intense fears and pain. One could make the case that this was just a form of torture. It was not torture to illicit answers from the dead man, but perhaps other prisoners, seeing this beheading as an example, will be motivated to sign a confession, or betray their country and peers.

The question we debate should not be over the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of torture. The right debate question is this: Will we be a people who have moral limits, or we are not. Once this issue is settled it will make it much easier for us to make decisions regarding our interrogation methods.

Article submitted Friday, May 29, 2009 & read 790 times.

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