Pulling Out McCain’s Fingernails
John McCain knows more about torture than Mike Pence
If the fact that the former GOP Presidential nominee knows a lot more about torture than the current GOP Vice President-Elect wasn’t clear to you before, it should be now.
John McCain was captured in Vietnam and suffered through five and half years of torture at the hands of his captors. He was beaten, bayonetted, and subjected to some of the worst treatment humanity has to offer. McCain is a veteran who knows about torture in a terrifying and intimate way, and Mike Pence is a lawyer and a career politician whose embarrassment at the hands of the Hamilton cast has been his closest brush with systematic torment.
Recently, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Mike Pence refused to rule out the Trump administration reintroducing torture.
Rather than conclude that Pence is wrong on this issue due to his lack of familiarity with it, let’s consider the arguments more closely. Why do some Americans think bringing back waterboarding, or torture more generally, is a good idea?
Reason 1: Because it leads to a better outcome: it either saves American lives or produces some other surpassingly desirable good.
This argument is frequently explored in popular fiction — think “24” or “The Siege” — yet there’s a serious philosophical question underneath.
Consider: An atomic weapon is going to be detonated by Soviet Russia, the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or whatever the enemy du jour is and only torture can extract the information needed to save American lives.
This argument upholds American claims to justice under the pretense of what “must be done”. Some see this as a variation of the Trolley Problem, yet under new management. The idea being that we can do wrong to save lives or take the high road and watch thousands upon thousands of people die.
A utilitarian wouldn’t see killing one to save five (as in the Trolley example) as doing wrong, so there’s a disanalogy there. But the overall comparison still stands: one must do what one ordinarily wouldn’t want to do to another, in order to secure some more desirable good.
Yet the hidden issue is this: You can never be certain the victim has access to actionable knowledge, nor can you be certain he is giving reliable data.
American pilots and special forces are trained to strategically give false data when under torture; why shouldn’t we expect the same from the enemy? And if the victim doesn’t have the information we believe they do, then we’re sacrificing the rightness of our cause on a wasted exercise for no benefit.
Reason 2: Because the terrorist deserves it.
This argument claims the “inherently evil” captive deserves torture even if he or she doesn’t end up having any life saving intel. To this I say: It doesn’t matter. I personally have no sympathy to spare on radicalized militants, but I’m not thinking about them. To me the critical link is the American holding the knife, the rope, or the bucket of water.
I don’t care about the terrorist; I care about the man whose soul will forever bear the taint of his actions. I care about the torturer’s mind and his family, and how when he argues with his wife he’ll remember how easily inflicting pain got results after days of talking did not. I care about American policy that will normalize violence on the captured. I care about who we are as Americans; that we claim to stand for what is just and right.
However, if we turn around and applaud torture, what does that say about us and our morality? I don’t care who deserves it, I signed up to defend this nation understanding that killing and dying might be part of the deal, because it was the right thing to do. If we claim to hold the moral high ground, to approve of torture is to cede it. American Just War Theory is a fragile thing cultivated over hundreds of years; I’m not willing to throw it away for a maybe.
Reason 3: It’s not as bad as what they’re doing; chopping off heads, burning people alive, etc.
This is the repurposed school yard excuse, “He did it first!,” or “The terrorist deserves it” response writ large, that is, on a cultural scale. It claims permanent moral high-ground by dint of what your enemies have already done; because of this, they have forfeited any claim to humane treatment. My counterargument is the repurposed schoolmarm response “I don’t care about them, I care about you.”
Morality is not and has never been a permanently achieved cultural condition, it is a status that is renewed every day by actions. We cannot violate our principles in order to protect them.
I reject being told that violence is the only thing these savages understand. If the claimed American worldview of justice and morality is too fragile to function when faced with opposition, and it only works in theory and not in reality, then America is in possession of a failed system.
If we can’t function in the face of adversity without stooping to our enemies’ level, our system is hopelessly flawed and we need to stop reading John Stuart Mill and start reading Machiavelli. America needs to embrace Jus in Bello (Justice in War) in all circumstances, no matter what, or we need to start nuking our rivals’ capitals and be done with it.
Reason 4: Torture is a short-term, necessary evil for extreme situations.
In this last ditch argument for torture, the arguer has ceded that torture is wrong and there is no situation that can make it right, but this is only for the short-term and after the crisis has passed we will stop it. “Only for this crisis” has been the rallying cry of authoritarians going back centuries. Once unchecked power is in the hands of those eager to use it, it rarely goes away — more often a new crisis is found…or invented.
The arguer presents his logic in a manner akin to a culture that wants to do away with slaughterhouses, but still demands cheeseburgers. Yes, it’s certainly distasteful, but it is necessary. If you want a cheeseburger, you need a slaughterhouse, and if you want security, you need torture.
Abu Grahib did not produce any actionable intel whatsoever. How many insurgent recruits did that scandal create? How many Americans died because of the bombs those recruits set off? These are questions we can’t answer, but I know how many American lives that prison saved. None.
Social Security was meant to be a short-term solution. Dissolving the senate and giving power to Julius Caesar was meant to be a short-term solution. Short-term solutions have a historical habit of outstaying their welcome and I urge you to be wary when this argument gets used.
Torture does not produce reliable intelligence, and it does incalculable damage to America’s cause.
The costs and gambles of a sanctioned torture campaign are huge:
-We can’t guarantee that it will save American lives.
-We can’t guarantee that once started it will stop.
-We can’t guarantee that we won’t target innocent people.
However:
-We can guarantee that it will be used by our enemies for propaganda purposes.
-We can guarantee that our enemy will increase its abuses of our prisoners in their care.
-We can guarantee that the confidence in American causes will be weakened, we will lose the confidence of our allies, of our soldiers, and of our people.
In 1775 George Washington, while at camp in Cambridge Massachusetts, wrote to Colonel Benedict Arnold that:
Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . “I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.
One of the darkest times of our nation’s history was at its very founding, and in that moment, our founders refused to torture an enemy who openly tortured and mistreated us. This resolve to do the right thing bound us together and made us stronger as Americans, it helped forge our national identity, and it set an example for the rest of world. This is a tradition we should not give up lightly.
