Torture is wrong; end of discussion. Except that the discussion has been in full swing for several years now. As soon as Americans began to debate the advisability of torturing prisoners in the war against terror, the US had ceded the moral high ground it once occupied, or at least laid claim to.
In Jane Mayer’s angry and important book The Dark Side, the tenacious New Yorker reporter takes us, step by step, through the process by which practices and methods we associate with tyrannies became official US policy.
Those practices include abductions, holding secret prisoners in secret jails, denial of anything resembling due process and an array of “enhanced” interrogation techniques: waterboarding, sleep deprivation, shackling in painful postures, subjection to extremes of temperature and to earsplitting noise, slamming into walls.
Among the many hard-to-believe stories Mayer recounts is the ordeal of Khalid el-Masri, a German traveler who was seized at the Macedonian-Serbian border, apparently because his name resembled that of an al-Qaeda leader. Injected with drugs and flown to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan, he was beaten, thrown into a filthy cell and given putrid water to drink.
Even more amazingly, the CIA quickly recognized its error but held him anyway — for five months. When Masri finally returned home to Germany, the airport authorities didn’t believe he was the man pictured on his passport. He had lost 27kg. His apartment had been ransacked. His wife, thinking he’d abandoned her, had taken their children to live with her family in Lebanon.
TORTURE DOESN��T WORK
Masri’s story isn’t unique, except in its extensive documentation. Many of the prisoners jailed without charges in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and who knows where else appear to lack any connection to terrorism.
And Masri didn’t have it as bad as some of our torture victims. Yet the irony Mayer returns to again and again is that torture doesn’t work. It’s an excellent way of eliciting false confessions, because a torture victim may say anything to make the pain stop. And for precisely that reason it’s an inept way of acquiring information worth acting upon.
We have to be cautious about using this argument, though. The reason not to torture isn’t that it’s inefficient but that it’s morally disgusting.
Still, what about the ticking-bomb scenario — the case in which time is short and a prisoner has potentially life-saving information? Philip Bobbitt addresses this problem in his recent (and brilliant) Terror and Consent, arguing that in such an (unlikely) emergency situation, an interrogator may have to decide to break the laws against torture and seek redress later. But torture must never be legal.
Right now it is, though.
"VICE PRESIDENT FOR TORTURE"
How did this happen? It began at the top, with US Vice President Dick Cheney (“vice president for torture,’’ the Washington Post has called him), US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and two overweening government lawyers, David Addington and John Yoo, who believed that there should be no limits to what a president may order. They oversaw a series of closely held, dubious (to put it kindly) legal opinions creating “an alternative legal system,” as Mayer explains, claiming unheard-of powers for the president — “like Mussolini in 1930,” one observer put it — and endorsing practices Americans had up to then scorned and shunned.
Wrapping themselves in the flag, repeating the mantra “security” and attacking anyone who questioned this insanity as soft on terrorism, they succeeded in disgracing their country before the world, and now they deserve to be called what they are: traitors. In a just world they would be prosecuted and convicted.
UNDOING THE DAMAGE
Mayer’s book has heroes, most of them conservative Republicans who were appalled to be part of a government that was encouraging the commission of atrocities. They lost the battle, and a number of them resigned. There’s hope now, since both presidential candidates show every sign of hating torture. The question is whether either of them can undo the damage.
As I read The Dark Side I thought of Henry James’ great novel The Wings of the Dove, which tells the story of two blameless young lovers who try to procure the money that will allow them to marry. By the time they get it, their decency is in shreds — and so is their love. Now the last line of the novel keeps echoing in my head: “We shall never be again as we were!”
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