Tortured Reasoning

I haven’t posted much on human rights recently, the primary focus of my research, though I continue to plug away at thinking and writing about it every day. One of the topics that I spend a lot of time with is torture, an issue that I intend to use as the go-to “case study” in my Humanism and Human Rights course next semester. Just a year ago, torture was still a fairly prominent item in the national news, but it’s been (unfortunately) eclipsed by other social and economic concerns since. That is, until just recently, when the tortured reasoning used to justify torture has once again raised its ugly head.

A little background: Just shortly after 9/11, American jurist Alan Dershowitz penned an essay titled “The Case for Torture Warrants” that has since come to represent what many consider to be one of the more “reasoned” and “moderate” pro-torture positions in domestic debates on the issue. The basic argument of Dershowitz’s essay is that federal judges should be empowered to issue warrants authorizing interrogational torture. He concedes from the outset that government interrogators will employ torture, legally or illegally, and subsequently reasons that the requirement to obtain “torture warrants” first will make torture more “visible” to the public, easier to regulate, and will decrease the amount of physical violence directed at suspects. In Dershowitz’s words, “the rights of the suspect would be better protected with a warrant requirement.”

Dershowitz’s argument was unconvincing to many, myself included, although I do have to credit him with strategically obviating the moral dimension of torture by very cleverly appealing to (whatever might be left of) political realists’ respect for the rule of law. The fact that Dershowitz begins with, and accepts, the practice of torture as a “given” makes his appeal to more regulated, more transparent and (allegedly) more humane