Some Thoughts on Torture

If you're like me, you're disgusted by the fact that Americans routinely read newspapers and watch TV news programs that treat torture as a "debate." What does it say about us that state-sanctioned cruelty and sadism is debatable at all?

It's beyond frustrating to see people playing inane semantic games surrounding the word "torture" - especially when it's often the same people who say they hate political correctness. Simulating drowning... stripping people naked, tying them up and forcing them into stress positions for days at at time... Exposing them to hypothermia... all this stuff is torture (and heaven only knows what they're doing that we aren't being told about).

I'm a fan of a magazine called Tikkun. Today I read an article from that magazine that I think encapsulates what's wrong with the "debate" over torture.

See the article here.

The topic has received a lot of media attention over the last couple of years, especially since the Abu Ghraib scandal. We are often presented with a completely false premise - that torture is about a conflict between individual human rights and gathering intelligence that is necessary for national security. It's made to sound like a difficult moral conundrum.

But there's an enormously obvious problem with that premise. All of the professionally trained interrogators I've ever heard discuss the subject say torture isn't effective in securing good intelligence. Even apart from morality, torture as an intelligence tool just doesn't work.

It makes perfect sense if you think about it. If somebody "water-boards" you - which is to say they make you feel as if you're drowning without actually killing you - telling your torturer the truth is the last thing on your mind. If you "break" at all, you're far more likely to tell your torturers whatever you think they want to hear - so that they stop torturing you. You don't care about the truth. All you care about is escaping the torture.

John McCain sometimes discusses the wild things he told his torturers when he was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. They once tortured him in an effort to get him to reveal the names of other members of his flight squadron. He gave them the names of the Green Bay Packers' offensive line instead, just so the torture would stop. It worked. He escaped a round of torture because they didn't know the difference.

Here's McCain's Newsweek essay about torture.

Well trained interrogators understand that pain and suffering doesn't result in good intelligence. They try to get sources to cooperate rather than beating them into submission. They make sources feel like they have something to gain in helping the interrogator.

But once one understands this, current American policies concerning the use of torture become far more disturbing. I'm sure those that make policy in both civilian government and the military are fully aware of how ineffective torture is for gathering intelligence. So why use it?

As the Tikkun article points out, torture is very useful for other purposes. It's good for intimidating a population and suppressing dissent. It's also good for extra-judicial punishment. Is there someone you don't like who can't be tried in court for lack of evidence? Just lock them in a room for "questioning" for a while and consider justice served. No judges or juries necessary.

Is this what we've come to? Is this what we as a nation stand for?

~Geoffrey Dobbins
Vice President, UCABJ