Torture isn't just evil, it's stupid.

IN THE NEWS
More on Abu Ghraib...

Just to clarify, I'm definitely not willing to let the Americans--military and mercenaries--running the Abu Ghraib facility off the hook because they were untrained for prison duties, including interrogation. Anyone in this situation should know better, period.

Take any number of the following reasons why torture is a bad idea--or just one--and you have the basis for saying, there was no excuse for this conduct:

• Torture is morally repugnant on the face of it.


• The results are unreliable. since victims will tell you want they think you want to hear, not what they really know.


• Torture eliminates our moral authority. We sorely need to avoid any further erosion of this authority.


• Torture makes us hypocrites. To make an obvious point, after there proved to be no WMDs and no link to al-Qaeda, what made the war necessary, according to the Bush Administration? The removal of a regime that, among other misdeeds, regularly tortured anyone who looked cross-eyed at a picture of Hussein. Imagine, now the recent pictures from Abu Ghraib, with the roles reversed: the prisoners are Americans, and their captors are grinning Iraqis.


• This incident sets a bad precedent for the treatment of American soldiers and civilians in captivity. As we do unto others, so may the same treatment be done unto us.

Comments

[bill jorgensen]

America has always been a country of hypocrites. There is nothing superior about America. America shares position with many evil regimes that have capital punishment, which alone makes it a backward country. America has been invading countries and assassinating opposition for decades and Americans think its okay. America is swamped in firearms making it the worst example of a seriously flawed society. Racism is rife and the place is filthy with chemicals and radioactive waste dumps (try a search on the web you'll be surprised how much known poison is scattered across the country). Celebrities with money avoid all penalty of law up to and including murder. The class society is rotten to the core and is run by the fattest and greediest people ever to have walked the planet.
Personally, I think the world is a better place now that the cat is outa the bag. No-one is ever going to watch American propaganda-centred war movies without seeing right through the whole exercise. John Wayne and a host of others turned majestically in their graves... Such a waste of good celluloid...

[Kingdaddy]

I guess I'm always a bit surprised by people who were taken in by unrealistically bloodless or glorious war movies. If you're interested in military history, you watch war movies; you should then have some sense of what war is really like before you sit through The Sands of Iwo Jima or The Green Berets. Or maybe some people started with the war movies...I dunno. I know it's easy to be hypnotized by the silver screen or the idiot box, but I never believed as a kid that Battle of the Bulge or even Patton was a fair representation of reality.

Though the phenomenon does exist. I remember a story from the PBS series Soldiers in which Marines in the Pacific during WWII had a visit from John Wayne. The veteran relating the story said that all the Marines booed the Duke, much to Wayne's chagrin. They had seen real combat, and you're right, it wasn't like the movies.

When I took my wife to see Glory, she was at first furious at me. As you know if you've seen the film, it was powerfully tragic. Later, she wasn't so much mad at me as angry at the blind, stupid gods of war that sometimes demand the brutal, painful, horrifying sacrifice of noble young men (and now women) to further a good cause. I think if there's a Truth with a capital T about the experience of combat, it's something like that.

Incidentally, I'll put in a good word for John Ford and John Wayne. Fort Apache, in which a martinette officer (Henry Fonda) leads his cavalry into a pointless, bloody confrontation with the Apaches, doesn't fit the stereotypical mold of John Wayne extravaganzas at all.

P.S. I wondered aloud in an earlier post why The Ascent of Man isn't on DVD. Why isn't Soldiers?

[Vik]

I remember that series. William Manchester, the writer,recounted the John Wayne story--he was there. He said the real marines roundly booed the phony "hero" because a lot of them had signed up because they wanted to be just like John Wayne. Then they realized what a mess they were in. Big Duke could do all his heroics on film, and leave them and go back to the safe and comfortable United States. They were stuck there, to bleed and die. "Chicken Hawks," indeed!

[Craig Hubley]

Michael Ignatieff, who could easily end up Prime Minister of Canada soon, has a lot to say on this subject of torture. In fact he's tortured that subject. A Massey Lectures series (5 hours worth) explores the subject of terrorism and torture - it's well worth the time, it's published by anansi.com.

[Matt Schlosser]

Mr. Jorgensen,

Your opinion of America seems to be based on the following:

1. Capital Punishment. Fair enough, everyone has a right to an opinion. And I'm sure that from the perspective of one who opposes the death penalty, that would make America "backward", though "evil" is a stretch, and "hypocritical" would certainly need explaining.

2. Assassination/Invasion. Um...ok. I can't think of anyone the U.S. government has assassinated. Especially in the time period of the last few decades that you refer to. The invasion charge is fair enough. It seems to come from a policy of "do unto others before they do unto you" combined with "the friend of my enemy is my enemy", neither of which is especially progressive...but both of which are quite prudent. But I can see where you would think it's backward, hypocritical (after all, the U.S. did look down on Iraq's invasion of Kuwait...several years before invading Iraq!), and evil.

3. Firearms. This one is the most incomprehensible. Allowing the people to posess firearms makes the U.S. government hypocritical, evil, and backward? Please, explain.

4. Racism. There certainly is racism in America. But no more than in Europe. You can't con a man who spent 12 of his first 17 years in Western Europe. If anything, it's worse in Europe, because the vehement, sometimes violent, backlash against anyone showing the slightest sign of racist thoughts in America is a strong deterrent. Even so, a few bigots running around have little to do with the American state, which seems to be the target of your vitriol.

5. Toxic waste. Um, yeah, there's a bit of it here and there, especially in some really remote wilderness... ~shrug~ But certainly not to the extent that you imply. That's evil in the minds of Greenpeace members, I suppose. Hypocitical...hmmm, in this case, that would be you, for attacking what you personally benefit from. Backwards? Nah...it's the result of yesterday's progress. And your invitation to "search the web" is ridiculous. Are you suggesting that we should believe anything we find online? Plenty has been written in professional peer-reviewed journals about the damage that industrialization has done to the environment. You don't need to stoop so low to find laughable evidence for your position when credible evidence is so easily accessible.

6. Celebrities escaping justice. That's a real problem. But it's not just celebrities. Anyone with money to pay a good lawyer has a good chance of avoiding punishment. In any western country. Personally, I think we should round up the lawyers and ship them to...China. That'll end their economic conquest of the world in a hurry! But that doesn't really support the change of "evil", or "hypocritical"...maybe backward fits, depending on your perspective. Would it be progressive to end the private practice of criminal law?

7. Uh...class society? What's that? I can't begin to address this one because..well, it seems to be a made up term.

As for torture, I find it to be morally repugnant. The first three bullets in the original post are excellent. But I take issue with the last two, for separate reasons. The second-to-last bullet is a little misleading, to say the least. It's true that there was next to nothing in the way of WMD in Iraq after the invasion. But the way that that's presented leaves out two things. First, it's possible that WMD were moved out of the country before or during the invasion, much the same way that the Iraqi Air Force fled to Iran and turned over their airplanes. Second, the vast majority of the world believed that the weapons were there, not just a couple of evil-doers in Washington. And to say that Al Quaeda has nothing to do with Iraq is pretty silly. First, Al Quaeda leaders did have a lot of interaction with the Iraqi government in the 90s and beyond. I doubt that they were just tourists. This also was part of the WMD equation. Iraq wouldn't have been stupid enough to use WMD against America themselves. But through a proxy? Absolutely. And who better than a group with a long history of attacking Americans? Second, Al Quaeda is in Iraq now.

The last bullet is just laughable. The golden rule works quite well when you enemy is a reasonable government of a foreign country that has representation in the UN and has signed the relevant treaties. But a terrorist group or three? "If we're nice to them, maybe they'll be nice to us" is IDIOTIC! There are plenty of great reasons not to use torture, but this isn't one.

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