Link to original article, “The Truth About Torture.”
Charles Krauthammer, columnist for The Weekly Standard and rather eloquent for a right wingnut, thinks the McCain legislation against torture is bad and that torture is necessary sometimes.
Here, as succinctly as possible, I will counter his major points.
So far so good. CK then goes on to make his arguments in favor of torture:
CK offers here a subtle weave of correctness and incorrectness. He is right that the case of ordinary soldiers in uniform is unambiguous: CK himself doesn’t point this out, but, according to modern rules of war, in an interrogation military personnel are required only to tell their name, rank, and serial number. End of chat.
CK is wrong, however, in asserting that there is an essential category of combatant called “terrorist”; for terrorism, like a frontal battlefield assault or civilian bombing with nuclear weapons, is a technique of war that can be, and has been, practiced by soldiers in uniform. By the same token, we punish soldiers for war crimes; the uniform doesn’t absolve them of those.
Hence, the essence of the issue is that there are combatants out of uniform committing war crimes (or just plain old crimes) who may or may not belong to a regular army. The insurgents in Iraq are not, by dint of the fact that they don’t wear easily recognizable uniforms, terrorists or even illegitimate combatants. Most of them are not even targeting civilians, but rather are engaging in fairly conventional warfare against our troops. At the same time, there are people targeting only civilians and not under the auspices of any state or substantial political entity.
Ultimately, “terrorist” is a political and propagandistic term that doesn’t reflect the political and martial realities out there. Don’t get me wrong: People who wantonly target civilians are completely despicable. And yes, on a strictly semantic level people who employ terrorism are justifiably called “terrorists.” Blanket-labeling Islamists-We-Don’t-Like “terrorists,” however, only obfuscates their true nature; we hurt our chances of winning this conflict if we believe our own propaganda.
CK’s category of “terrorist with information” is doubly incorrect. First, because he employs the non-category “terrorist.” Second, because there are also “soldiers with information” and even “civilians with information,” and CK has already stated that soldiers (and presumably civilians) shouldn’t be tortured. Let’s come back to this after we look at his ethics case:
[quoteA terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. It will go off in one hour. A million people will die. You capture the terrorist. He knows where it is. He’s not talking. […]
Now, on most issues regarding torture, I confess tentativeness and uncertainty. But on this issue, there can be no uncertainty: Not only is it permissible to [torture him]. It is a moral duty.
[/quote]
As I stated above, you could easily make this case about soldiers or civilians:
You are a Japanese general. Hiroshima has just been nuked. You have reason to believe that a second city will be nuked soon. You have downed a plane and captured a US airman who you have reason to believe has knowledge of the second strike. You have a moral duty to torture him to save over a hundred thousand lives.
You are a spy for Japan in deep cover in Nevada. You have got someone in a basement who you have reason to believe is working on a weapon of unbelievable destructiveness. You have a moral duty to torture him to save thousands, perhaps millions of Japanese lives.
If the case is really about saving “millions of lives,” then the moral character or military credentials of the tortured really shouldn’t matter. So the whole “can we torture a terrorist” question is really just a tarp over the essential question: Can we Americans torture someone, anyone, if we have just cause?
I agree, and I think most people would agree, that torture would be permitted to prevent the maximum evil imaginable. Actually, there are many hypothetical cases that put one in such a moral pickle. Could you kill one innocent baby if you knew that you could extract a serum from its blood that could prevent bird flu from wiping out humanity? And so on.
The problems with CK’s particular case, however, are mundane but multiple. First, the case states that you have captured the bomb-planter himself and you know it’s him (“you captured the terrorist”). That’s unrealistic to the point of stupidity. How would you have only thus much information yet have it be credible? Because you’re not going to torture the guy unless you’re sure, but how can you be sure and not simultaneously know where the bomb is? Or, how can you be sure at this point in time, all of a sudden, and not have had any information up to this point?
I suppose that a plausible though absurdly unlikely scenario is this: A lesser member of an al Qaeda cell rats out the bomb-planter. The first guy would have just enough knowledge to implicate the second credibly without knowing himself where the bomb was. You torture the second guy to get the real info (actually, shouldn’t you torture both just to be safe?).
Realistically speaking, the next time something truly awful happens to us, we will be blindsided as we were on 9/11. For all practical purposes, therefore, the question of whether torture could prevent such an event is moot.
But the real problem with the example is that torture is extremely unlikely to be effective. First, the bomb-planter is presumably a suicide unconcerned about, most likely relishing, the fact that he is right on top of ground zero. Second, the torturers themselves might be in mortal danger if they have to work on the guy right after they get him (the clock is ticking, after all); how are they going to do their jobs? But third and most important, this guy is going for Ultimate Terrorist Status, and he only has to last for a few hours of torture–how can he not succeed? He can squirm, he can writhe, he can lie his ass off–then kaboom and martyrdom.
In short, CK has provided the very scenario in which the evildoer is most likely to withstand torture: He is maximally motivated but time is extremely limited. That is not how torture has been used by the US in real life: People like Sheikh Mohammed have been captured and waterboarded without a clock ticking. Have lives been saved? Who knows. But one might also be able to save a few lives by torturing a Saudi prince or a Syrian general. Should we go for it?
In any case, the whole psychological purpose of the example is quite clear: It’s a foot in the door. We concede that torture would be “worth it” to save millions, and then the question later becomes whether it would be worth it to save thousands or only a few. CK states this clearly:
Here is where I can state my own moral principles with confidence. Torture is in itself such a great evil that, though I concede that its use might be permitted (though not plausibly useful) in preventing the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions, it certainly is not permitted to prevent a few hundred or thousands deaths. Torture to prevent 9/11? Uh uh.
Here CK’s logic is truly flawed:
Sorry, CK, I won’t grant you the foot in the door. The situation you gave was speciously plausible and a perfect example of a case in which torture wouldn’t be effective.
The right and practical thing to do is to make a blanket ban on torture, since there will almost never be a case in which it is permitted. And we certainly don’t want military personnel and CIA agents playing it by ear out in the field. Should the improbable case ever come to pass, then the president or whoever is going to do what he has to do anyway and accept the personal consequences.
But CK is soon eagerly traveling down the slippery slope on a Flexible Flyer, sans any self-consciousness whatever:
You hold him, interrogate him reasonably, try him, and then lock him up. The fact that he is a “terrorist” really changes nothing. Again, we could kidnap high-ranking Syrian generals and civilian officials and probably get all kinds of life-saving info out of them with torture. Should we do so?
CK’s essay becomes much more disjointed and less clear after the above, but we eventually learn that one may torture “terrorists” if it will save a single life:
They tortured to save just one guy, who got killed anyway. Great example, Charles!
Krauthammer’s Position in Short
There is a kind of person called “terrorist” who deserves no protection under the rules of war. Since “terrorists” deserve no protection, they may be tortured should the moral calculus call for it.
Concerning that moral calculus, torture is evil but permissible in at least one case (nuke), so the question is where we draw the line. Actually, one should draw the line at saving a single human life. Further, it is permissible to torture, on a generic basis, “terrorists” who have a lot of useful information.
My Position in Short
Terrorism is an evil technique, and those who use it should be punished whether they are in a regular army or not. Whether one uses that technique, however, does not alter the moral calculus of using torture to acquire life-saving information.
As an exercise in casuistry, yes, torture would be permissible to prevent an apocalyptic event, but realistically speaking it is next to impossible that it could be useful in such a case. Torture should not be permitted as a generic means to gain intel from “bad guys” or to save a single life or even quite a large number of lives.
The reasons why it should not be so permitted are several:
- Torture is an absolute evil; it is always evil, even if one is using it to achieve a good end.
- If you use torture in a generic fashion, you will end up torturing innocent people, thereby compounding the evil.
- Although it may be effective against certain people in certain circumstances, in general the information it produces is not of high quality and of disproportionate worth to the evil used to gain it.
- It is a PR goldmine for the enemy.
- No one can practice torture in the short term without a high chance of psychological damage. On the other hand, no one can practice torture on a regular basis who himself is not evil. Do you want CIA torturers free in US society?
- If we torture them, they will torture us.
In conclusion, Charles Krauthammer’s arguments in favor of torture do not hold water, and by the end of the article he, sadly, is revealed to believe its use is justified on a widespread basis. He seems to fall into the common trap of thinking, “We’re the good guys, so we gotta do what we gotta do, and somehow it will all work out.”
It won’t. It hasn’t. We’re the bad guys now.