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The Trouble with Torture

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The Trouble with Torture The Trouble With Torture... A brief introduction to psychological and political arguments against extreme interrogation and indefinite preventive detention Dennis Rivers, MA www.SupportGenevaConventions.info July 2009 Dedicated to Dilawar and Habibullah, and to the memory of Spc. Alyssa Peterson, a US Army interrogator who committed suicide a few days after refusing to participate in torture. She understood things that we are only beginning to understand now, and there was no one there to help her. The Trouble With Torture... by Dennis Rivers – Page 1 of 22 Introduction: so on, the downward spiral turns. Waterboarding is Why Discuss the Torture Issue? only the most well known of a range of brutal techniques. We are all weary of thinking about It is deeply reassuring to imagine that we inherit these things, after eight years, but the challenges our cherished values and traditions of dialogue and presented by torture and indefinite preventive respect for the dignity of each person the way we detention are so serious, and so ongoing in present would inherit a bronze statue. With a very political debates, that I don't see how we can avoid minimum of care on our part, a bronze statue will them. The fact that there are laws against torture and endure for centuries. It is deeply reassuring to think precedents against preventive detention will only be this way about our deepest cultural values, but, meaningful if most citizens know about those laws unfortunately, it is not true. We inherit our and precedents, and actively support them. cherished values and traditions of liberty, self- restraint and reasoned dialogue the way one would The choices over using or not using torture, and inherit a carrot garden. If we do not continue to over imprisoning people based only on the fear that plant carrots, water them well and weed the garden, they might someday do us harm, are not just about whatever we have inherited will gradually be lost. choosing strategies to collect needed information and keep our country safe. They are also very much One of today's major challenge to American choices about the kind of world we want to live in values concerns the deeply interwoven issues of and the kind of world we want to create by our own torture and indefinite preventive detention. actions. To be part of a culture that engages in Although there has been a recent interruption in the torture and fear-based-imprisonment is to choose a practice of torture (we hope) by U.S. agencies and world where creating and inflicting terror is armed forces, the debate about this is hardly over. acceptable, where exerting utter power and control American political life includes many politicians over the minds and bodies of defenseless people is and commentators who support torture or indefinite normalized. It is not only the victim of torture preventive detention or both. According to recent whose sense of connectedness to others and open- polls, somewhere between forty percent and sixty ness to the world is shattered. The torturers and the percent of American adults support the torture of 1 allowers of torture are also shattered, numbed and “terror suspects,” so the problem is not confined disconnected from other people. We all live in the only to policy makers and talk-show hosts. very same world that we ourselves are making more Unfortunately, if enough people support torture brutal by the minute, all the while muttering to and/or fear-based imprisonment, politicians will ourselves, “they started it” and “they do worse” as if surely arise who will play to their fears and find to drown out the knowledge of what we are doing. ways to carry forward their mandates, however confused or misguided those mandates may be. When torture and universal fear of imprisonment This seems evident to me in the current proposals are knit into the way we conduct ourselves with [June 2009] to legalize preventive detention in the others, we fall into a world of good-versus-evil United States. binary oppositions that blind us to our capacity to cause pain and make serious mistakes, on the one These two practices, symbolized by the hand, and also blind us to the humanness and the waterboard and Guantánamo, violate much of what sacred essence of all people, some of whom we have Americans have struggled for since colonial days. now defined as “unlawful enemy combatants.” The And they are linked together in several unhappy rhetoric that justifies these extreme measures ways. Indefinite detention is in itself a form of slow imagines the others as inhuman destroyers of life torture, especially as now practiced in the form of and ourselves as noble warriors. There is also a solitary confinement with sensory deprivation. And very important binary opposition, among ourselves, the practice of interrogation by torture inevitably (I between the saintly but ineffective good guy who will argue below) involves torturing innocent believes all violence is wrong, and the tough, people, who then become sworn enemies who need realistic people, like that TV character, Jack Bauer, to be detained on an indefinite basis to prevent them who do whatever needs to be done to save the day from attacking the country that tortured them.2 And The Trouble With Torture... by Dennis Rivers – Page 2 of 22 and spend no time worrying about the morality of In the Washington Post, a blogger commented in what they have done. May, 2008, that “whether it’s waterboarding or water balloons, I don’t care, as long as it keeps us In several important ways, I see this dichotomiz- safe.” My hope is that we will all think more ing as obscuring our view of what is going on in the carefully than that about these issues. world, including our own actions. And it greatly oversimplifies the conflicts in which we are now caught. By virtue of these oversimplifications, some thoughts become nearly impossible to think. 1. Dictatorship in a locked room: For example, that the use of torture might be bad questions about the reach and power military strategy, like an apparently brilliant chess of the State. move that causes you to lose the game. Or, that our In the United States, we have spent the last two commitment to moral standards of behavior is part centuries struggling to maintain limits on when and of what allows us to hold onto allies and persuade how agents of the state can hurt or imprison a bystanders to either join our side or stay out of the person. Once we start to remove those limits, we conflict. Or that torture may represent a kind of will all be in danger. Torture represents self-inflicted wound upon the soul of America. imprisoning and hurting someone without formal (Once justified as appropriate for some criminal charges, without a trial by jury of one's circumstances, we have no idea where or how far peers, without review by a judge, without a the practice of torture will spread.) The dramatic conviction or a sentence, in cruel and unusual ways, but deceptive contrast between the saintly but all violating our most basic American rules of law ineffective good guy, and the tough but immoral and order, grounded in the U.S. Constitution. protector of the people, who is always in a hurry, Torture and fear-based-imprisonment represent the completely obscures the question of how carefully essence of military dictatorship in a locked room. anyone is thinking about the meaning, implications The apologists for “Enhanced Interrogation and consequences of what we are doing. Procedures” assert the right to imprison and hurt So the rest of this article is my effort to try to people based on mere suspicion or even just on think more clearly about some of the serious issues vague probabilities, if we are at war or if there is in which we are now entangled. For the most part I some giant threat, real or imagined, on the horizon. am going to concentrate on the issue of torture, but Anyone, you or I, could be the object of suspicion many of moral, psychological, legal, and strategic by someone under some circumstances, and if liabilities of torture also apply to indefinite suspicion is all that is required, then you or I could preventive detention. I have also to push out the be tortured or locked up without charges for the rest boundaries of the discussion in ways that some of our lives. If in the process of of being imprisoned readers may find unpleasant. Many public or tortured or both, we become so angry that we commentators on the topic of torture seem, in my want to lash out at the people who have hurt us, then view, reluctant to discuss that fact that torture can we become dangerous enough, in current thinking, and does lead to murder. We know now that since to merit indefinite detention without trial. The 9/11 at least nine detainees held by the United States current justification offered by apologists for torture have been tortured to death in the course of seems to be that desperate fear justifies anything and interrogation (which constitutes a major instance of everything. But truly, one cannot live by fear alone. war crimes). There are another 40 to 80 deaths of The idea that fear for the safety of others justifies all detainees which may turn out to have been the result all manner of cruelty and abuse is a danger to of torture. How we respond to this issue will say a democracy, to morality and even to our own sanity.
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