The Essayist #12: Torture and Reductionism

As our Secretary of State tours Europe and lets the cat out of the bag regarding where our "black sites" are (and, by association, who gave us permission to establish them), the torture debate still hasn't reached anything like a mutual exchange of ideas. The MSM has gone into full eye-rolling mode, blithely skimming by Administration attempts to define "torture". The assumption is made without ever being stated that a) all coercive interrogation is torture, b) all attempts to define it otherwise are non-starters.

Charles Krauthammer, naturally, has a different point of view. First, he makes an important distinction: between a military prisoner of war...

First, there is the ordinary soldier caught on the field of battle. There is no question that he is entitled to humane treatment. Indeed, we have no right to disturb a hair on his head. His detention has but a single purpose: to keep him hors de combat.

...and a terrorist...

A terrorist is by profession, indeed by definition, an unlawful combatant: He lives outside the laws of war because he does not wear a uniform, he hides among civilians, and he deliberately targets innocents. He is entitled to no protections whatsoever. People seem to think that the postwar Geneva Conventions were written only to protect detainees. In fact, their deeper purpose was to provide a deterrent to the kind of barbaric treatment of civilians that had become so horribly apparent during the first half of the 20th century, and in particular, during the Second World War. The idea was to deter the abuse of civilians by promising combatants who treated noncombatants well that they themselves would be treated according to a code of dignity if captured--and, crucially, that they would be denied the protections of that code if they broke the laws of war and abused civilians themselves.

He goes on to describe two circumstances under which terrorists may be subject to coercive interrogation: 1) the oft-repeated Ethics 101 dilemna of a bomb in an urban area and one person who knows where it is and how to disarm it, and 2) a high-level terror commander (Krauthammer uses Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), who can name names and places. He calls for interrogation to be banned by U.S. military personnel and to belong only to, as he puts it, "highly specialized agents who are experts and experienced in interrogation, and who are known not to abuse it." Leaving aside the question who these people are, and how they're going to come by their expertise, this seems to at least be a framework for interrogating an enemy without descending into barbarism.

A DailyKos poster, on the other hand, attacks this with the words of NRO's own John Derbyshire, who is becoming a rather unpredictable chap. The same fellow who once intoned that we would not be able to defeat terror without breaking some heads open has categorically denounced torture of any kind, thusly:

The first thing to be said about torture, as a means of discovering facts, was said by Aristotle in Book 1, Chapter 15 of Rhetorica: torture doesn't work very well. Under physical torture, some people will lie; some will say anything to make the pain stop, even just for a while; and a surprising number will refuse to yield.

A valid point, but one which Krauthammer addresses:

Is one to believe that in the entire history of human warfare, no combatant has ever received useful information by the use of pressure, torture, or any other kind of inhuman treatment? It may indeed be true that torture is not a reliable tool. But that is very different from saying that it is never useful.

The monstrous thing about torture is that sometimes it does work. In 1994, 19-year-old Israeli corporal Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car used in the kidnapping and tortured him in order to find where Waxman was being held. Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister and peacemaker, admitted that they tortured him in a way that went even beyond the '87 guidelines for "coercive interrogation" later struck down by the Israeli Supreme Court as too harsh. The driver talked. His information was accurate. The Israelis found Waxman.

It remains to be seen just how effective our interrogations methods will be, how much information they will yield. Indeed, given the secrecy such operations tend to entail, we may never know. Perhaps, concurrent to a framework of interrogation, we construct a framework of declassification, of public knowledge of success rates, if such can be done without compromising intelligence.

There's a slippery-slope argument to be dealt with as well. More Derbyshire:

Don't let's kid ourselves that we can pick and choose from the menu. "Yes, we'll beat, but we won't pull out fingernails." ... "Yes, OK, we'll pull out fingernails, but we won't rape your children in front of you." Forget it — when you start on the road of torture, there is no end. We beat him: he doesn't talk. We remove his fingernails, and then, for good measure, his toenails: Still he won't talk. That nuke is ticking away in a high building, in some American city. The suspect has a 16-year-old daughter: Do we send for her?

However valid this slope is, the rapidity with which we descend it may well depend on our ability to accept failure. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed may be indeed a treasure trove of information useful and essential to prosecuting the war on Al-Qaeda, but how far are we willing to go to get it? At what point does the image of America-the-torturer become a net minus, inducing ordinary Iraqis and Afghanis to keep us at arm's length rather than inducing terrorist to spill their guts quickly? This is largely a debate we aren't having, because many of us can't accept that there's even a difference between a terrorist and a regular POW.

Thus, the dangers of reductionism, of the refusal to recognize practical and moral distinctions. To many, anyone who is held by the government, be it a U.S. citizen for theft or a foreign national for plotting the mass-murder of Americans, is a defendant, and thus guaranteed the rights of a defendant. That this is legally questionable does not stop them from speaking and behaving as though it were set in stone, and castigating with empty labels ("pro-torture", "medieval," "Grand Inquisitor") those who say otherwise. By the same token, many believe that violence is violence is violence, whether indiscriminate and for its own sake or focused and targeted. They believe this because it has the ring of cosmic truth to it: to a degree, all prisoners share a universal experience, and all violence bears the same marks. But only to a degree.

It's not moral cowardice to point these things out. In many circumstances, it's impossible to make judgements without making distinctions between type and purpose. The Jesuits themselves, not known for being nihilists, have a dictum: "Never deny. Seldom affirm. Always make distinctions."

No one should be called unpatriotic because they blanche at the thought of agents of the U.S. Government depriving captured men of sleep and comfort to make them talk. Such things run against the grain of popular government. And the wartime powers that the Executive branch claims, the wartime plans it creates, indeed the very wars they propose must be subject to scrutiny. Such is what a loyal opposition is for. But scrutiny that does not make room in its rhetoric for the actions and goals of our government as seperate from the actions and goals of our enemies is counterproductive. A significant amount of the Left's criticism of the manner in which the War on Terror is being fought would have, I think, greater resonance if these criticisms were not dismissable as being made in bad faith. We cannot rationally discuss how far we should permit ourselves to go if one side refuses to concede that we should go anywhere.