A Young Person’s Guide To Torture

As most of you will know, I write for young adults. MESSENGER OF FEAR, GONE, BZRK, ANIMORPHS, and so on. I’m uncomfortable taking on philosophical or moral issues outside the confines of my fiction, but a lot of kids will be thinking at least a little about torture, and I’m not sure it’s something that falls neatly within the bounds of social studies classes.

So, what the hell.

Let’s start with the UN Convention on Torture which the United States ratified in 1994:

Article 1

For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

Article 2

Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.
No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

Yesterday’s Senate Intelligence Committee report makes it unambiguously, unarguably clear that we committed torture. Americans tortured. Period. That is settled fact.

Equally clearly the treaty we signed, says we can have no excuse. There is no, “But we’re the good guys!” exemption. There is no, “But it works!” exemption. The fact is that the entire chain of command, from George W. Bush down through the individual torturer is guilty of a war crime. (This is the first-person statement of one of those torturers.)

The tortures we carried out are no better than the tortures for which we executed Japanese officers at the end of World War II. We tried them, and we hanged them, for doing exactly what we were doing 60-odd years later. One of our central complaints about Iran is that they torture. One of our central complaints about Syria is that they torture. One of our central complaints about North Korea is that they torture.

One of our main goals as a nation has been to work for greater human rights all around the world because, We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

You may recognize that sentence. It is the essential statement of the American faith from the Declaration of Independence. You can no more say you’re an American and dismiss that statement than you can be a Christian while saying there is no God. We are not a nation based on a race or a people or a religion or an accident of geography, we are a nation based on an idea. And that right there is the idea: that we all, simply by virtue of being born into this world as human beings, have a right to live and to be free.

Do I mean that Abu Zubaydah, who we tortured to the point where he was a babbling wreck of a human being, should be free? Hell no, f—k that guy. He lost his right to life the minute he went to work for Osama Bin Laden. He’s murdering scum. Abu Zubaydah standing in a corn field in Afghanistan with an AK-47 in his hands? I’d pull the drone’s missile trigger on him myself.

The problem is, he’s not in Afghanistan or Yemen or any other lawless, ungoverned place. He’s in our custody. He is utterly incapable of posing any kind of threat to us. Zero threat. And he was zero threat when we tortured him. And in any case, he is not the point, because we are not Abu Zubaydah, and we do not subscribe to his moral code. This isn’t about him, it’s about us.

The argument is, “Yeah, but we got useful information from him that saved lives.” First of all: no, we didn’t. We got nothing. Nothing is what the Senate report says, and no one has produced a single verifiable case where information extracted by torture saved a single life. The Committee found precisely zero cases of the ticking time bomb scenario.

Second, it wouldn’t matter if they had. Because, as you can see by scrolling up the page, we signed a treaty explicitly saying, No, there is no acceptable justification.

Still, though, let’s get real here. I mean, let’s say you could save the lives of 20 helpless, innocent children, by a single act of torture. Wouldn’t it make sense to do so? Wouldn’t it have been a great idea to grab Adam Lanza the day before he murdered 20 little kids in Newtown and torture him until he admitted his plans?

Wait, what? Weren’t we talking about terrorists? I mean, foreign terrorists?

Well, why? If torture works as a means to save lives, and that justifies using torture, why wouldn’t we use it in cases of planned mass murder? Makes sense. The math of it doesn’t change: Torture = Lives Saved. And let’s face it, Adam Lanza was a weird, suspicious-looking dude, any cop could have seen that he was the kind of kid who would go off some day.

You don’t ever look weird or suspicious, do you?

The argument that torture saves lives is equally strong (or weak) when talking about plain old murder or terrorism. So, that’s a bit of a practical problem. You or I may be comfortable with an argument that Jack Bauer needs to stab some random Pashtun in the leg to save lives, but your local police could apply the identical logic to you. By definition we don’t know what that Pashtun knows, or what you know, and both of you could be hiding something life-saving. Right?

I have a knife, which leg do you favor? Don’t worry, if it turns out you don’t know anything, I have Band-aids. Walk it off. Well. . . hobble it off.

Does torture work? No. Would it be okay to torture if it did work? No. First because we signed a treaty saying we wouldn’t do it, and second, the same logic would argue for generalized torture, and third, because even in war there are limits. We didn’t hang Japanese soldiers because they fought hard at Iwo Jima, we hanged them for war crimes, including torture. That’s three reasons.

So, why is it okay to fire a missile right up Abu Zubaydah’s ass but not shove a “feeding” tube up that same ass?

War is from top to bottom a nasty, despicable business in which even the “good guys” do awful things. Pacifists hold that even self-defense does not justify killing, and I have some affection for their sweetness of spirit. Back in the 60's there was a popular bumper sticker that read, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” Cute but irrelevant: somebody always comes. It only takes one side to start a war.

If you are attacked and do not fight back you reward aggression. You’re empowering the worst people. You’re giving the world to Nazis, Communists and ISIS. Nonviolence only works against people with a conscience. Nonviolence against Nazis? That’s just empowering Nazis.

So, start with this: we have a right to resist being killed. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, right? Life being the initial requirement there. Did Abu Zubaydah intend to kill us? He did so intend, and in fact, he helped kill quite a few of us. So we have a perfect right to kill him. Put Abu Zubaydah back into a position where he is capable of harming us, and where we have no recourse to legal remedies, then as far as I’m concerned, “Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Oh, f—k, it’s a drone!”

All killing is terrible, so any killing must be justified within extremely limited parameters. In war, you can kill the guy who is trying to kill you. And you can kill the guy who is planning ways to kill you. You can’t kill guys who are no longer in the war but sitting in a cell. At that point you have lost your license to kill. And not to repeat myself overly much, but you never did have a license to torture.

So, resolved that we should not torture for the following reasons:

1. It’s against our law and it’s against international law.
2. We lower ourselves to the level of our worst enemies.
3. We risk bring torture home with us.
4. It isn’t necessary even within the broad definitions of war-time necessity.

And reason number five:

For two centuries we Americans have held ourselves out as being better than the old world we originally came from. We were dishonest hypocrites a lot of that time, and we have a very long list of black marks on our national honor, but nevertheless, we could point to the Declaration and the Constitution and say, Yes, we screw up, yes we fail, but we still have our eyes fixed on an ideal. We still believe in something good and just that is not for us alone but for everyone.

Much of the world has come to agree with us. The very same Germany that we helped to destroy in 1945, the Germany of Dachau and the einsatzgruppen, now agrees with us on fundamental matters of liberty and democracy. The Japanese agree with us. The French and the Brits and the Italians, all agree with us. Costa Rica agrees. Brazil agrees. South Africa agrees. They all believe that we are born equal, that we have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To a great extent, we led the world to this point. This is what we stand for, this is what we are about, this is our justification, our glory.

The entire developed world and many nations still struggling, now agree with that revolutionary marker that we laid down 238 years ago. And right now that same world is looking at us in shock, disappointment and contempt.

We are not Iran. We are not Syria. We are not North Korea. We are the United States of America, leader of the Free World, and we need to live that not just talk about it. So, reason number 5: we cannot be a nation that tortures without ceasing to be ourselves.

I’m 60, and the future isn’t mine to inhabit for long, but if you’re 15 or 16 today reading this, you could be around for 100 years. So really, the issue is on you. It’s your country. You have to decide. Does your country torture? Do you?