What Chicken Hawks Don’t Understand About Torture
The case for torture has been supported through many hyperbolic hypothetical scenarios, where torture seems to be the only correct answer. For example, consider this hypothetical situation: one knows an individual has kidnapped one’s family and is holding them hostage. Admittedly, given such knowledge, one would not want to give such an individual a big wet liberal kiss, pat them on the head, and coo about their troubled childhoods.
Obviously one’s actions are not likely to be so socially considerate. Would one not torture them? Well, yes, of course one might very well do so, and in the most horrible of ways if they chose not to cooperate by revealing the information about the captive family members.
The Geneva Convention would not bind such a person. Additionally, in this case, one would have some kind of real proof in their own mind that the individual had the piece of knowledge one needed to free one’s beloved family. Without that, an ordinary person could not summon the necessary ruthlessness. Additionally, if they were wrong, the consequences would be severe and the torturer would bear that price whether their actions were discovered or not.
That is why torture cannot be institutionalized, because torture is a very personal thing, a personal decision, at the moment, in the heat of battle. Without this personal touch, there is born a bureaucracy of torture, disconnecting the personal nature of what is being done. Make no mistake, the torturer is irreparably damaged by their actions just as the victim suffers damage. When that decision is made to cross the line and torture, the psychological impact on the torturer is no small consequence.
Torture should not be something that is ordered by a commander in the “civilized” military of a “civilized” nation. That is why the military establishment of this country wants us to adhere to the Geneva Convention. Let us not forget that our soldiers are ordinary people and would like to stay that way. It will be the soldiers in the field that are ordered to do the dirty deed, while rear echelon officers insulate themselves from the damage.
The granularity of the command structure of the military, echoes the social paradigm and goes down to the individual level. Ultimately, only the individual can handle some decisions in the here and now. If, for example, one can immediately extract information from someone by an “enhanced” interrogation that immediately saves many lives, well, perhaps military brass looks the other way. Maybe they won’t give the interrogator a medal, but they would understand the sacrifice that had been made by the citizen soldier for his country and his buddies. On the other hand, if the brass hears of mistreatment, it must always investigate and punish “enhanced” interrogation tactics. Higher-ups especially must investigate when these actions bear no immediate fruit, or are otherwise unjustified, to prevent the darkest temptations during the hell of war.
It is only in this immediate fog of war, where individuals have to make snap decisions on the value an “enhanced” interrogation might yield toward the immediate salvation of their comrades or civilians. The military institution must always explicitly frown and discourage torture to prevent the moral and ethical destruction of their own soldiers. This is one of the strongest reasons for always adhering to the Geneva Convention officially, while understanding that in the hell of war many things happen.
Official and institutionalized torture destroys the very real and practical benefits that can occasionally come from the horrific practice of torturing a prisoner. To be frank, torture may have its place during life and death decisions that occur on the battlefield in very special circumstances. However, without this type of immediacy, the torture becomes ineffective. Enemy comrades would know that when an individual is captured, they could be tortured. They know what their comrade knows, and they begin to rearrange their strategies, their structures of communication, their locations for hiding, etc.
Guerrilla military units are set-up to be able to fly apart and come back together as if magnetized. When torture is the normal modus operandi of one’s opponents, then military leaders make sure to keep individuals only lightly informed, so that there is little they can reveal. In fact, wily leaders may steep their guerrillas in misinformation to spout during torture. The results of such misinformation would lead to their torturers wasting time chasing the ghosts of the torture interrogation.
The enemies of America now expect to be tortured. Oh, how horrible it is to write, but Americans cannot deny it! Our enemies now EXPECT to be tortured and it is hard to argue that they are wrong to expect it. Even when we deny that we torture, enough evidence has come to light along to make the denials transparent. Our enemies expect to be tortured and train accordingly.
How do we explain to our kids that we are the good guys when our enemies are trained to hold out against American torture interrogation tactics? Since our enemies are likely training their people to expect this treatment, our tactics can rarely if ever uncover anything normal interrogation techniques would not have uncovered. Probably they have two or three layers of lies that they go through to get the torture to stop for that day. After all, our people then have to go out and investigate the veracity of the information. Each day that the tortured stops the torture is a victory for them. Each day that the prisoner buys for his comrades is a victory to a person that is willing to die for the cause, the homeland, the fatherland or whatever it is.
Institutionalized torture simply does not work! There is no real evidence that it works over the long haul. Institutionalized torture by a government or military bureaucracy is ineffective. The aforementioned are the rational, empirical, and logical reasons behind a particular society or nation’s support of the Geneva Convention.
However, torture is not about rational and logical behavior. Passions on this issue run high and to many torture is the vilest of evils, but not all. The passions surrounding torture can be used for political gain. The torturers can use torture as a propaganda tool to elicit positive emotions about the strength and power of the ruling party and the military. The torturers claim to be making the tough decisions necessary to protect America, but this is not clear. There seemed a political smell to the timing of the Bush/Cheney rejection of the Geneva Convention that was meant to appeal to their cowboy narrative. A narrative that was little more than a morality tale of the good guys versus the bad guys that led to the invasions of two countries.
For libertarian-socialists, there is no real moral dilemma here at all. If the enemy is willing to die, then they are willing to be tortured. We have now willingly taken the battle to the darkest of places. By torturing, you lose the high ground in the battle of ideas, in the battle for souls. In the final analysis, torture does not work, but it is also immoral and the latter reason used to prevent us from even debating the former.
During Britain’s darkest hour, as waves Nazi forces lapped at her shores, George Orwell eloquently discounted any talk of stooping to the level of the Third Reich. Few would dispute that the free world was on the brink during World War II, there was certainly no less at stake then than there is now. Nonetheless, when the despicable actions of the Nazis against British POWs agitated the British to the point of forgetting their moral and ethical underpinnings, the following Orwellian essay allowed cooler heads to prevail.
“May I be allowed to offer one or two reflections on the British Governments’ decision to retaliate against German prisoners, which seems so far to have aroused extraordinarily little protest? By chaining up German prisoners in response to similar action by the Germans, we descend, at any rate in the eyes of the ordinary observer, to the level of our enemies. It is unquestionable when one thinks of the history of the past ten years that there is a deep moral difference between democracy and Fascism, but if we go on the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we simply cause that difference to be forgotten. Moreover, in the matter of ruthlessness, we are unlikely to compete successfully with our enemies. As the Italian radio has just proclaimed, the Fascist principle is two eyes for an eye and a whole set of teeth for one tooth. At some point or another, public opinion in England will flinch from the implications of this statement, and it is not very difficult to foresee what will happen. As a result of our action, the Germans will chain up more British prisoners, we shall have to follow suit by chaining up more Axis prisoners, and so it will continue till logically all the prisoners on either side will be in chains. In practice, of course, we shall become disgusted with the process first, and we shall announce that the chaining up will now cease, leaving, almost certainly, more British than Axis prisoners in fetters. We shall have thus acted both barbarously and weakly, damaging our own good name without succeeding in terrorising the enemy. It seems to me that the civilised answer to the German action would be something like this: ‘You proclaim that you are putting thousands of British prisoners in chains because some half-dozen Germans, or thereabouts, were temporarily tied up during the Dieppe raid. This is disgusting hypocrisy, in the first place because of your own record during the past ten years, in the second place because troops who have taken prisoners have got to secure them somehow until they can get them to a place of safety, and to tie men’s hands in such circumstances is totally different from chaining up a helpless prisoner who is already in an internment camp. At this moment, we cannot stop you maltreating our prisoners, though we shall probably remember it at the peace settlement, but don’t fear that we shall retaliate in kind. You are Nazis, we are civilised men. This latest act of yours simply demonstrates the difference.’ At this moment this may not seem a very satisfying reply, but I suggest that to anyone who looks back in three months’ time, it will seem better than what we are doing at present, and it is the duty of those who can keep their heads to protest before the inherently silly process of retaliation against the helpless is carried any further.”
~ George Orwell 1942
Orwell’s eloquent rejection of torture would be criticized as quaint naiveté in the 21st century. The experiences of World War II, and its immediate aftermath, color the American vision of war and this is understandable, but it is no longer related to us first hand. It truly was one of the greatest triumphs of America. It was a shared victory through all levels of society. Certainly, no political party or philosophy was overly represented among the military victors as all stripes of Americans had been drafted or enlisted.
The egalitarian reality of that war and the real military experiences are being lost as most of the soldiers from World War II have now passed on. That loss of the personal experiences of those veterans of the greatest generation prevents Americans from tapping that shared sacrifice experience that used to unite us. An entire generation of men knew the ugly face of war, sought to avoid it if possible and were members of each political party in equal numbers. Torture was never anything these veterans ever believed would be sanctioned by their own government.
Without the wisdom of this generation, Americans now hear an unverified mythology about the Second World War. We suffer as a nation without the personal testimony from trusted relatives that bring insight from WWII. Insights that help us understand how the Geneva Convention is more than a quaint notion and is actually something that is essential for a civilized nation to respect.
