A Decade Under the Influence

If the last ten years have taught me anything, it’s that everything I thought our society had agreed upon had, in fact, not been accepted by everyone. I thought everyone was onboard with evolution, until George Bush enlightened me to creationsim-lite - “Intelligent Design.” I thought that we’d all acknowledged the importance of limiting pollution and protecting the environment, until I’d heard there were people who not merely denied global warming, but even welcomed it.

I don’t think I ever would have thought, though, that I’d discover so many Americans who supported torture. Let me type that again...Torture. Torture. Remember when we invaded Iraq and we were told it was because Saddam Hussein was a despot who tortured his own citizens and had secret detention facilities with rape rooms? He was evil, we were told, because he was a torturer.
Prisoners of War came back from Korea and Vietnam talking about the harsh treatment they received - people like John McCain - and we were told that those people were evil and we were just because we treated people humanely.

And yet, today, there is actual debate over whether it is okay for Americans to commit acts of torture. We’ll skip past the part where it is already illegal, and where it also violates numerous international treaties and agreements, including ones signed by Republicans like Ronald Reagan. We’ll ignore the fact that torture doesn’t produce accurate intel, and that it in reality creates falsh information that we then waste resources checking. Instead, we’ll focus on the moral problem.

The United States, despite all of it’s inevitable failures of judgement, has long touted itself as the moral center of the world: the inevitable pinnacle of reason and justice. For the last half-century, we’ve ridden the wave of having “saved Democracy” in World War II (after which we tried Germans, Italians, and Japanese for war crimes including torture), and acted often as the World’s police. We decry human rights violations in other countries and demand justice when international laws are violated by other nations.

How can we hold the moral high ground and still reserve the right to torture people? When our own Constitution makes the use of “cruel and unusual punishment” a cardinal sin, how can we justify using cruel and unusual means againgst people who haven’t even been convicted of a crime? What morality, what religion, what belief allows anyone to think that it’s okay to cause suffering just because you are afraid?

It offends me as an American, and as a human being, when people say it’s justified because it saves lives. It doesn’t. The time and energy, resources and personell that must be used in first breaking a person down and then following up any leads would be better spent on the actual detective work that has prevented terrorist attacks all over the world, including here in the United States. Keep in mind that the terrorist attack that began the Bush Administration’s road to 2 wars, a prison in Guantanamo, and a secret program of torture didn’t come out of nowhere. We had intelligence on many of the people involved, knew many of their aliases, and the President himself received briefings about the likelihood of an attack. The intelligence community was even aware of the possibility that airplanes could be hijacked and used as projectiles. None of this intelligence was gathered through torture.

Even if torture could be used to gain accurate information on that proverbial ticking timebomb, what would be the end result? One crisis could be averted, but the person being tortured would forever be an enemy of the United States, so our options would be to kill them, detain them forever, or release them with certainty that they would then join a terrorist network. In any of those cases, their friends and family would become our enemies and more easily recruited to terrorist networks. Countries that support our efforts would turn their back on us. In war, the tactics of torture we use would become fair game for others to use on our own troops when captured. The number of terrorists in the world would grow, as would the threat. A war on terrorism can’t be won through escalation.

But mostly, it’s just wrong. Society must protect itself, and when people are criminally dangerous they are locked away or reformed if possible. But torture goes farther. It doesn’t remove threats, it destroys individuals. It breaks them down, destroys their psyches, takes away their free will. Capital punishment takes away a persons life, but torture takes away their humanity. How can that be just? How can that be right? What is the value in saving American lives at the cost of the American soul?

I hear politicians and pundits say, arrogantly but assuredly, that the United States is the greatest nation on Earth. Well, then, we should act like it.