Torture and values
Toolbox
Published: March 11, 2008
If asked, how would we as Americans define our country's values? While we seem drawn, emotionally, to the patriotic sounds so frequently heard on the Fourth of July, are those red-white-and-blue tones consistent with our president's announced veto of legislation that would ban the use of torture by the CIA?
The United States certainly has enemies that don't and won't always observe the traditional rules of warfare. Any enemy that could conceive of and carry out the dreadful acts of 9/11 does not deserve the kind of respect that traditional wartime enemies have customarily, if unevenly, shown for mutually accepted rules of engagement.
And, sadly, that respect has hardly been universal. In World War II, the Japanese were especially brutal in their treatment of their prisoners, and of course the Germans under Hitler were guilty of terrible atrocities on a massive scale, not so much against their prisoners of war as against Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies and others deemed "undesirable." We don't want to be like them, do we?
Generally speaking, in modern times western nations consider torture an offense against human decency and that's why it is specifically banned by the Geneva Conventions, which the United States has formally embraced (and sometimes informally ignored). Moreover, there's a respectable argument that any information obtained by torture is likely to be unreliable and therefore dangerously misleading.
There's also what may be the single most important negative consequence of torture: If America is known to the rest of the world to be willing to torture its captives, what's to discourage our enemies, present or future, from using that knowledge as justification for torturing our own sons and daughters who fall into their hands?
Bush announced his veto during his weekly radio address Saturday. In his broadcast, the president defended a system of interrogation that has led to accusations that not only has he authorized torture in the past but that he refuses to ban it in the future.
"Because the danger remains, we need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists," Bush said, as if there's no reason at all to label torture a tool that is both unacceptable, for moral reasons, and of dubious value, at best, for practical reasons.
"We have no higher responsibility than stopping terrorist attacks," he continued. "And this is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe."
He argues that these practices, including torture, keep America safe but what proof can he offer and given this administration's record, why should we believe him? Also, do Bush and those who support him truly believe that any who doubt him are, as they so often seem to suggest with their political rhetoric, soft on terrorism? That's insulting.
The CIA, the agency that wants the freedom to use extreme methods of interrogation, is in sharp disagreement with the FBI and other federal agencies. While Gen. Michael Hayden, the CIA director, argues that the Army field manual, for example, does not "exhaust the universe of lawful interrogation techniques" officials of the other agencies have testified to Congress that they believe harsh interrogation methods are either unnecessary or counterproductive.
In recent years, Americans have seen shameful acts committed in our country's name, including the brutal treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq and the endless detainment of those held at Guantanamo.
The United States is either a civilized nation or it's not. We can't have it both ways.
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