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News :: Miscellaneous |
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The Flawed Calculus of Torture |
Current rating: 0 |
by Jef Raskin
(No verified email address) |
11 Apr 2002
Modified: 12 Apr 2002 |
I, too, heard this disturbing piece on NPR. Matt Miller termed the process by which he wanted this accomplished "constructive hypocrisy" i.e. he didn't want to know HOW the military/police got the info, just that they GOT it.
As Mr. Raskin points out, Mr. Miller will get a lot of innocent blood along with his "constructive hypocrisy". The report was one of the most disturbing things I've ever heard on NPR and shows the kind of depravity that has become routinely acceptable within the mentality of the "war on terror". ML |
It is 4 a.m., and what has propelled me out of a warm bed was an opinion piece on America's National Public Radio. I have heard editorials with which I agree, and those with which I disagree, but never before had I heard one that blatantly supported murder as a policy, and covering it up as the best way of handling the moral aftermath.
The commentator, Matt Miller, a U.S. syndicated columnist, was suggesting Tuesday morning that torture was a method the United States should resort to in order to gain information from high-ranking Taliban prisoners. In support of this violation of American and international law, he cited an incident in Sri Lanka, where three men, suspected of having planted a bomb in Colombo's central train station, refused to tell where it was located. Their interrogator threatened to kill them, but still they would not speak. Then he shot one of them dead, and, immediately, the other two told him where the bomb was. The bomb was defused, and dozens or perhaps hundreds of lives were saved.
In the commentator's calculations, he balanced one guilty party killed against hundreds of innocent lives saved. However, that is not the right equation. For each such success, there are thousands who are tortured or murdered on the guess that they will reveal valuable or even vital information. More often than not, as history shows, they do not possess the information sought or do not have the power to do what the torturer wishes them to.
But such statistics and the fact that information revealed under torture is often unreliable are only a footnote to the real issue. Even the fact that once you have condoned torture and murder as tools, they are taken up by those who use them to advance personal, criminal, or sectarian aims is not the central issue.
The central issue is this: Once you legitimize torture, you have not started down the slippery slope to lawlessness, you have slid down and fallen off. Those living under a regime that uses torture have much to fear. They have no due process, no presumption of innocence, no opportunity to present an opposing view to protect themselves. Their torturers will get the justification only after the victim has been tortured. First the punishment, then the investigation, and later, the cover-up.
Torturers will display dead bodies and tell us what the victims would have revealed, had they not unfortunately died first. Torturers without results will dismiss any suggestion that they have erred. All blame is on the victims: They were tough and didn't talk. Or the information "revealed" is too sensitive to discuss. There are many excuses, but no one can undo the suffering of the innocent.
Torture is inherently out of control. It is the kind of excess that the United States and its Constitution were created to prevent. Every use of torture that goes unpunished, even if it was "effective," is a failure of civilization. Governmental acceptance of torture threatens us all, for who is to determine which persons to torture? It may happen that the neighbor with whom you've had a dispute about the location of a fence for years leads the group who decides. Or what if that person is an individual who has the power to torture without fear of sanction?
Mr. Miller's editorial was triggered by a longer piece by Bruce Hoffman in the Atlantic Monthly. That article brought up the notion of moral ambiguities; situations so desperate that torture seemed justified. All the cases cited where torture was resorted to by men working for recognized governments -- fighting against terrorists of the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan -- have something in common that, oddly enough, neither Mr. Miller nor Mr. Hoffman mention. The problems were caused by injustices foisted upon the people who became "terrorists" by those same governments. The French colonized Algeria, the Tamils were discriminated against by the majority Sinhalese who ran the Sri Lankan government, the Taliban were a reaction against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Because of their historical shortsightedness, the torturers felt justified and even virtuous at their ruthless suppression of the terrorists.
This is no defense of the tactics of the terrorists, but it is an example of how lawlessness breeds lawlessness. Government A oppresses group B, group B being militarily inferior responds with terrorist tactics (they have no other means of fighting); A cannot fight B with conventional armies and resorts to torture and other oppressive measures, justifying it by pointing to B's "illegitimate" use of terrorism (forgetting their own illegitimate oppression) and so forth.
Oppression creates terrorism. Every injustice increases the legitimacy and fervor of the opposition. Without injustice, acts of terror are random and very rare. Being unsystematic, they cannot be entirely prevented, but being rare, they are not a major threat, either.
The question of torture is not theoretical and the need for clear thinking on the issue is immediate. The United States has captured hundreds of men believed to be part of the group that attacked the Pentagon and destroyed the World Trade Center. We are told that few of them will respond to questions on any topic. Also captured is a man believed to be Abu Zubaydah, alleged to be one of their leaders. He is not expected to divulge information voluntarily.
In the face of their intransigence and because of our pain and our anxiousness to quell the threat of further attacks, the question of the use of torture on the prisoners has been raised. We must firmly reject it. Our legal system deserves respect because it does not stoop to the tactics of the criminals it judges, no matter how severe the crime or provocation.
Torture makes the government the enemy of the people, and threatens us all with the loss of life or liberty. And its use makes impossible -- through perpetual fear -- the pursuit of happiness.
I will not easily get back to sleep.
Jef Raskin is the author of The Humane Interface and the creator of the Apple Macintosh computer.
© 2002 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc
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torture is a larger issue |
by JF
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
12 Apr 2002
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Does Raskin really believe that we're about to choose between using torture and not using torture? That is naive to say the least.
Torture is not merely used to deny due process; it is also used as punishment. This is routinely done in the U.S. justice system in supermax prisons and by capital punishment no matter how "humane" it purports to be.
It is not enough to object to torture on due process grounds. We should reject torture on any grounds. Unfortunately this issue, unlike the due process issue Raskin brings up for 911 suspects, is not ostensibly on the table. Rather, the issue has been silently decided for us, in favor of torture.
And the rationalizations are much less dramatic and much more insidious than the rationalizations for interrogation-torture. For instance, supermax prisons are said to be more cost-effective and modern; modern captial punishment techniques are said to inflict less pain and result in fewer botched executions. |
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Sharing an echoing quote |
by ---
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
12 Apr 2002
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Whenever anyone talks about torture as a legitimate form of "information gathering"---or whatever euphemisim (?) you use---I always hear the same phrase from a movie.
Nice Guy Eddie:
If you fucking beat this prick long enough, he'll tell you he started the goddamn Chicago fire. Now that don't necessarily make it fucking so! Come on, man, think! All right!
Doesn't really address all the issues on an "intellectual" level, but I think it makes the point in a way that has obviously burned into my saturated brain.
I was horrified as I listened to the piece on NPR. I guess it goes to show NPR really does broaden the voice of debate. Basically he said "Don't tell me how or what you do, just be effective." (i.e., MEMEMEMEMEMEMEMEMEMEME). |
