Asked in September 2006 whether there was anything wrong with the way US interrogators were handling “high-value” prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, former US president George W. Bush famously responded: “We don’t torture.”
The definition of torture is notoriously slippery, but we have known for some time now that the former president was being, shall we say, economical with the truth. At the very least, US interrogators were in breach of the Geneva Conventions, ratified by the US, against “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
Tying a person to a board and bringing him to the point of drowning, over and over, or forcing a prisoner — stripped naked and covered in his own excrement — to stand with his hands shackled to the ceiling for days, until his legs swell to twice their normal size, may not have constituted torture in memos prepared by government lawyers, but such practices are surely cruel, inhuman and degrading.
Barack Obama’s first act as US president was to ban torture immediately. The question now is how to deal with the past and specifically with the fact that these acts were not just condoned, but ordered by the highest US officials.
Should the responsible officials, including Bush, be prosecuted for breaking the law?
Should all the details of what was done be released and publicized?
Should there be a special commission to investigate?
Or would it be better, in Obama’s words, to “look to the future, not the past?”
In fact, as Obama quickly realized, his preferred response is proving to be impossible, for a refusal to look back will burden the future with greater perils.
Former vice president Dick Cheney has stated on several occasions that he has no regrets about what he likes to call “enhanced interrogation” techniques, such as near-drowning, because they “kept our country safe” from terrorist attacks. Obama’s ban, in his view, leaves the US “vulnerable.”
In short, liberal scruples about morality, legality and international torture conventions are foolish and irresponsible. The implication is clear — if the US were to be attacked by terrorists again, we will know who to blame.
The stakes then, could not be higher in the “torture debate” gripping the US. On one side are Cheney and his allies, who see torture in pragmatic terms — if a severe threat to collective safety is perceived, even a liberal democracy must get its hands dirty. Nobody likes to torture, but security is more important than moral scruples and the laws will simply have to be adjusted or finessed.
On the other side are those who condemn torture as a moral abomination that cannot be allowed under any circumstances. This, in fact, is also the legal position of those who ratified the Geneva Conventions: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”
But these are not the main grounds upon which the torture debate is being fought out in the US today. For understandable reasons, many defenders of Obama’s decision to ban torture are attempting to answer Cheney’s pragmatic view with an equally pragmatic counter-narrative. They argue, contrary to Cheney, that torture is not the best way to keep us safe.
A person in extreme pain will say anything, thus providing unreliable information. They claim that other, more sophisticated, interrogation techniques are not only more humane (and legal), but also more effective.
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