Matt Taibbi makes a valiant effort to explain to the lunatics the reasons why anti-torture people are anti-torture. It’s a very well-written piece, but he does a better job of explaining why lunatics are lunatics than he does in explaining why we should not torture.
Taibbi’s insight is that pro-torture people are engaging in a faulty if/then mentality. If your are critical of how we treat Islamic radicals then you are not critical of how Islamic radicals treat us. If you defend all human beings’ human rights then you are defending what Islamic terrorists do and taking their side. And so on…
Taibbi does make a stab at explaining the anti-torture position.
My group, the anti-torture group, believes that what should make us superior to terrorists is respect for law and due process and civilization, and that when we give in and use these tactics, we forfeit that superiority and actually confer a kind of victory to the al Qaedas of the world, people who should never be allowed any kind of victory in any arena. We furthermore think that the war on terror doesn’t get won with force alone, that it’s a conflict that ultimately has to be won politically, by winning a propaganda battle against these assholes, and we can’t win that battle so easily if people in the Middle East see us openly embrace these tactics.
One of the things I find most frustrating about this debate is that we never talk about the people who created these treaties about the laws of war and human rights. They were all veterans of the worst conflicts on record. Pretty much all the architecture of international human rights was written by veterans of either the First World War or the Second (or both). They saw what happened at the Battle of Verdun and after the bombing of Dresden. They saw the carnage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They lived through the Bataan Death March and they liberated the Nazi Death camps. They had not been engaged in frivolous wars. They knew more (hopefully) than we will ever know about the need for intelligence and the existential threats that exist in the world. They were was no generation of bleeding hearts. But it was that generation that decided that we have to outlaw torture under all circumstances, with no exceptions and no mitigation. They created universal jurisdiction for every nation to prosecute those that torture.
Don’t tell me that we live in a more dangerous world. We have potential dangers; they had actualized ones. We’re worried about Iran getting a bomb that is about as lethal as the ones we dropped on Japan. They were worried about the Soviets getting a hydrogen bomb. So, please…can’t we show some respect and deference to our elders? Maybe they knew what they were talking about?
That’s the first thing. The second thing is that torture, aside from being a moral abomination, is considered a moral abomination by the vast majority of the world. And, that’s a good thing. That’s progress. That’s our safety-net against seeing us all slip back into the barbarism of the two world wars. When a terrorist cuts off an American’s head, we react with revulsion and horror. Trust me when I tell you that the world reacts in a similar manner when they see pictures like those from Abu Ghraib or they read about how we shackled people for weeks and threw their heads into walls. And, contrary to what conservatives assert, our level of security is directly related to how people feel about us.
A video of a beheading makes Americans more likely to support not just going after the perpetrators but invading the Muslim country where the beheading occurred and killing people there indiscriminately. Torture makes enemies. It incites a reaction. And it darkens the hearts of the people who are the recipients of the torture. You can oppose torture on purely practical grounds.
Torture doesn’t keep us safer no matter what information we get out of it. To think it does is strictly delusional.
There are other issues, but they are secondary. Obviously, our troops are more likely to be tortured because we have engaged in torture ourselves. Enforcement of anti-torture laws suffers if America is exempt. And, torture doesn’t provide reliable intelligence but does waste resources by causing false leads. But the real issues are that it is morally wrong and makes us less safe.
To demonstrate my point, the fact that al-Qaeda engages in torture and murder makes them less safe. And that is as it should be.
