A Lengthier Torture Session

Here are a few common pro-torture arguments I've heard and my responses:

 

1 "Government inflicts torture for good reasons."

Unfortunately, this concession does not distinguish your position from that of Hitler or Stalin: neither tortured for amusement, but only for defined purposes.

 

2 "Torture is justifiable if there is an imminent threat or a high profile detainee."

There are several problems with this position. First, it cedes the moral high ground in an absolute sense (though not relative to our current enemies): it is in clear violation of the Geneva Convention. Second, lines tend to blur in practice--who is to define what these this imminent threat is and when it is at stake in a given case. This is ultimately a subjective judgment which will be made by men who have a much stronger incentive to err on the side of inflicting a little more torture instead of permitting a little higher risk of terrorism or some other calamity. I do not trust unchecked power; it would be positioned to inflict torture at its discretion upon whomever it considers a suitable information source. Unchecked government power is anathema to Anglo-American political culture--indeed it is anathema to any decent political culture: unchecked executive power is the simplest definition of tyranny. Third, it would be wise to consider whether, given the costs of torture outlined above, the benefits we may reasonably expect to derive from it are commensurate. I am not persuaded that they are. Not only would we in theory use torture rarely, according to your standards, but on those occasions when it might be used there is no guarantee that it would be effective. To my sense, the costs of employing torture against suspected terrorists are so high that it would only be justified if we were threatened with much more dangerous organizations--ones that could mount more sophisticated attacks than training 4 suicide pilots on flight simulators and finding 14 more suicide volunteers to hijack some planes and do a suicide run.

 

3 "We have the right to torture when necessary because our history demonstrates that we have the moral high ground."

Relative to the values of our enemies in the last century, we clearly have the high ground. But, we judge ourselves by our own values, and, to a large extent, are so judged by the rest of the world. It is relative to our own values, not our enemies' values, that we have ceded ground since 9/11. This process, the widening of the gap between our values and our policies, has damaged our image abroad; also, it has eroded the rights of our citizens and the power of the media and of all governmental institutions except the Executive branch of the federal government. Moreover, policies that fall short of our moral standards, if sustained, will noxiously erode our moral nature and slowly undermine our "higher ground."

 

4 "We committed torture in the war against Japan and this was done to save lives--a simple value equation."

In diametric contrast to our current struggle, PR considerations were not immediately relevant to the war in the Pacific Theater. The only two audiences that mattered in the short term were the Japs and us. Neither was likely to falter in its convictions (in the context of such a hot and brief war) due to an occasional war crime. But, whether such torture as occurred benefitted us in the war is another question. Few Japs were captured and most of the torture occurred at the tactical level, which was likely to accrue benefits only at the tactical level, if at all. Given the probable insignificance of any benefits derived from torture, I doubt whether your "value equation" worked to our advantage in the long run. 

 

The most effective foreign policy is one which maximizes the leverage of both our hard power (military, economic) and our soft power (image, culture, PR, values) to achieve strategic objectives. It follows that in determining which of these forms of power to implement in face of a given challenge we must learn to make intelligent trade-offs informed by cost-benefit analysis (and torture may be the most dramatic instance, and one of the most important, of this conflict).