Several years ago, a friend and colleague of mine invited me to come speak to his class about torture. The class was a writing seminar organized around the theme of “citizenship” and my colleague was feeling (understandably) frustrated because, in his words, he “just didn’t feel like [he] had the tools or the knowledge to counter arguments by students who want to justify torture on the basis of what they’ve seen in the movies or on 24.” I understood the frustration, and as reluctant as I might have felt about being the local “torture expert,” I agreed to go. I sent the students a short article by Jessica Wolfendale called “Training Torturers: A Critique of the ‘Ticking Bomb’ Argument” in advance, which presses the justification of torture argument to one of its logical consequences, namely, the necessity for trained torturers. I like this article because it forces us to talk about the permissibility or impermissibility of torture in terms other than strictly “moral” terms. Rather, we must consider what sort of polity we are creating (and endorsing) when we say that torture is permissible. It also, importantly, allows me to address some of the most common misperceptions about torture.
Like my colleague, I also find myself frustrated by the flippancy with which most people, including democratically elected statesmen and -women, talk about torture. So, let me clear here at the outset: torture is NOT “discomfort” or “inconvenience” or an “enhanced interrogation technique.” Tortue is a practice that human beings do to other human beings that has one and only one aim: to inflict upon the tortured the most extreme physical or psychological pain that can be suffered without dying. When you say that your committee meeting was torturous, or your drive to work is torture, or your Bikram yoga instructor is a torturer, you are making light of perhaps the most depraved and macabre activity that our species, or any species, has ever devised.
Pew Research Center polls show that Americans’ views on torture have shifted over the last several years, with a narrow majority now believing torture to be “sometimes or often” justified. That shift has occurred since the Bush (43) Administration, that is, during Obama’s years. How quickly we have forgotten that sickening feeling that arrested us in our tracks in 2004 when the Abu Ghraib photos were first released.
I have a hard time talking to defenders of torture. I want to shout: “But it’s just WRONG! Why are we even HAVING this discussion!” And when I’m sitting at home by myself, listening to news reports and commentaries, I often do shout that. I did so as recently as yesterday, when GOP Presidential candidate Donald Trump strutted and swaggered on the stage, declared his enthusiastic willingness to reinstate the torture-technique known as waterboarding, and called his opponent Ted Cruz a “pussy” for having reservations about the same. All of this to resounding cheers and applause.
Waterboarding? No prob! Call of Duty? WHAT ARE YOU SOME KIND OF MONSTER?!?!
Over the years, I’ve done a lot of research on torture. (You can read one of my articles on torture here, published in Philosophy and Social Criticism in 2012.) Human rights violations, including torture, were a central part of my dissertation research and has remained a primary focus of my scholarship since. In the many conversations I’ve had about torture in the last decade, I’ve come to realize that it may be to the advantage of “my” side of the argument (i.e., the torture-is-always-wrong side) to re-frame the discussion as something other than a contest of ethical standards. For one thing, doing so avoids the inevitable ad-hominem-palooza that topics like this invariably induce (“You’re a heartless monster!” “Well, you’re a pussy!” “You don’t care about human rights!” “Well, you’re willing to sacrifice the lives of hundreds/thousands/millions for one criminal!”), which are never very productive and very seldom change anyone’s mind.
These days, I direct my energies toward disabusing defenders of torture of their illusions about it. So, for those of you who, like me, are finding yourself in similarly frustrating conversations these days, here are some valuable nuggets to use in your future tête-à-têtes:
1. Torture doesn’t “work.”
The idea that torture is an effective means of obtaining information is the single most gross falsehood employed by people who want to defend the practice of torture. Their argument will almost always involve some reference to a literary or cinematic use of “effective” torture, or they will refer to the (hypotheticall) ticking time-bomb scenario. If you encounter either of these arguments, you might first point out that both are FICTION! But, if you need something more, try pointing your interlocutor to the study cosponsored by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (full report here), which concluded that torture has NEVER been proven an effective interrogative device. Or you could point out actual examples of bad information produced by coercive interrogations (like the Al Qaeda-Iraq link) that have resulted in thousands of lost lives in a war begun as a result of that bad information. Most veteran CIA operatives and military personnel agree that torture only produces bad information, as torture victims will say anything to make their suffering stop. For the record, torture victims (like Sen. John McCain) have said the same thing. The important point is that none of this information is hard to find, an oft-overlooked fact elaborated by Soviet human rights expert Vladimir Bukovsky, who wrote an op-ed in for the Washington Post showing that even governments that have first-hand knowledge that torture doesn’t work still use it. You may also point out that, even on the television show 24, torture rarely “works.”
2. There is no such thing as a “science” of pain.
When we think of torture, we tend to revert back to the imaginative sci-fi version of it, in which a victim is placed on a table while some torturer stands by a machine with his hand on an ominous-looking numbered dial. As the victim resists, the torturer cranks the dial higher, increasing the suffering bit by numbered-bit. The problem is, pain doesn’t happen that way. The way people experience pain (physical and psychological) is radically, unpredictably idiosyncratic. It doesn’t increase in numbered increments to some pre-designed “breaking point.” Our bodies have all sorts of ways of managing pain; our minds even more. This creates immense problems for the practice of torture. First, there’s no way for the torturer to know what he can do, short of death, to get the information he wants… so he is naturally inclined to go to the furthest extreme that he “guesses” will be effective and to do so as quickly as possible. (Hence, there cannot be a “controlled” or “restrained” practice of torture.) Second, the imagined “breaking point” is different for everyone, which forces torturers to get creative. (Hence, regulatory “codes” for torture are ALWAYS violated.) Third, by the time the torture victim gets to his or her “breaking point,” both the mind and the body have been broken and are at that point entirely unreliable. (Hence, torture produces bad information.) Finally, torture requires that the torturer make himself immune to the suffering of an other and, consequently, requires that he make himself the least qualified person to spot the “truth” or to know when to stop. We’ve got to stop believing what Darius Rejali calls “the folklore of pain.” There are no such things as torture “dials” and, even if there were, there is no number on them that could mean anything definitively knowable. The purpose of torture is to produce pain at the furthest extremes of human tolerance, and that sort of pain is an almost entirely unscientific phenomenon.
3. No, you probably wouldn’t do it.
When discussing torture, you will often hear people say something like: “Well, if I were in a situation where someone was threatening my child/brother/parent/spouse, I would do anything necessary to stop them… even if that meant torture.” The truth is, most of us not only wouldn’t, but couldn’t. Despite the oft-cited phenomena of the Stanford Prison Experiment or the Milgram Experiment, studies show that it’s not so easy for most people to inflict that sort of pain on others. It’s important to remember also that those experiments showed that under certain conditions–primarily conditions that exploited our trust and confidence in authority figures– some people are more inclined to forego their normal, everyday moral standards. The studies did not show that we all could do it, nor did they show that any of us could do it in a situation in which we had to make the independent decision to do so. Further, the majority of Americans know very little about the ugly, messy, protracted, bloody, horrible details of torture. Torture requires that the torturer disengage from almost all of his or her normal (and normative) assumptions about morality, sociality, and humanity. It requires that he or she suppress or ignore most of his or her natural revulsions to horrific sights, sounds, smells and (tactile) feelings. And then there’s the matter of the non-tactile “feelings,” which the torturer must betray or restrain or numb in some (usually pharmaceutical) way. In most cases, the likelihood that your interlocutor possesses the discipline and callousness required for torture is almost nil. My suggestion would be that you encourage them to actually read the accounts of torturers, then to read the accounts of the tortured… and only then to come back and try to make their heroic argument again.
4. It doesn’t matter if torture works (which it doesn’t). It doesn’t matter if you would do it (which you probably wouldn’t). It doesn’t matter if a majority of Americans think it’s okay (which, unfortunately, they do). TORTURE IS ILLEGAL.
I like the argument made by constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley on the Rachel Maddow show way back in 2009, when he said: “It’s obviously disturbing to hear torture still referred to by the President as a “technique.” That’s like saying bank robbery is a “technique” for withdrawing money from a bank. It’s not a “technique”, it’s a crime.” According to Marjorie Cohn, what torture has in common with genocide, slavery and wars of aggression is that they are all matters of peremptory norms or jus cogens (Latin for “higher law” or “compelling law”). That is why no country can ever pass a law that allows for torture, slavery or genocide without violating international law. That is why we have federal laws that criminalize torture, why it is forbidden by our Constitution, why we have signed international agreements like the Geneva Conventions. That is also why, unfortunately, we saw our federal government since 9/11 (not to mention some of our friends) twist themselves into ideological pretzels trying to “redefine” torture or to call forth “exceptional” circumstances justifying it. For all of the arguments in favor of torture, none of them are framed as they should be, which would require FIRST explaining how breaking the law is permissible. And, also unfortunately, none of the arguments for torture follow the logic all the way through, which would require an argument for making torture legal. If you want to really challenge your interlocutor in a debate about torture, ask them to try drafting that law that makes torture legal. In what circumstances? To what extent? Using what “techniques”? For what purposes? Then, ready yourself to grab them as they begin to slip down that very, very slippery slope…
There have been more than a few moments in this Presidential campaign season that have stopped me in my tracks and made me think good God,what have we become?, but when I see one of the leading GOP candidates call another one of the leading GOP candidates a pussy because he won’t declare himself a champion of one of the most wretched and inhumane practices ever… well, I really do wonder: what have we become?