Tortured to death

Why do we need historians when we have journalists who can tell the same several year-old story as if it were present and alive and today?

Here's a column from the Globe that says not one thing new at all, and hardly anything worth exercising a few brain cells. But... I'll excerpt and respond anyway, because this is the sole defense the right seems to muster, and some unreflective deadline-beaters keep repeating it and the silly counterargument offered up.

It is said, rightly, that torture degrades both its victims and its perpetrators. The debate has also degraded the moral caliber of discourse among supporters of the war on terror. Outrageously, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal has argued that such techniques as exposure to extreme heat or cold, or ''waterboarding" (which induces a drowning sensation) are not torture but merely ''psychological techniques."

A much more thoughtful ''antiantitorture" argument is made by Charles Krauthammer in The Weekly Standard. Krauthammer agrees that torture is ''terrible and monstrous," and he does not deny that such practices as ''waterboarding" are torture. But he also asserts that some forms of this monstrous thing must remain permissible in extreme cases: the ''ticking time bomb" scenario, in which a captured terrorist knows the location of a bomb that could kill thousands; and the high-level terrorist who possesses a treasure trove of information about the terror network and its plots.

Yet the ''ticking time bomb" scenario is not only extremely improbable, it's also one in which torture is most likely to be useless. If the terrorist knows the bomb will go off in two hours, all he has to do is stall by giving false information until it does go off. And with high-level terrorists, psychological manipulation may prove much more effective in extracting accurate information than physical suffering.

Krauthammer has a "much more thoughtful argument" -- the ticking time-bomb scenario? Here's what I wrote in one of the very first Phronesisaical posts, back in July.

First, in the Abu Ghraib case, it's clear that the outcomes of the use of torture have largely been to strengthen the insurgency in Iraq, help to recruit further fighters -- Iraqi and foreign -- to the cause of battling the American occupation, and has demolished respect for the US worldwide, not to mention its moral standing in the international sphere. These all have extremely negative short-term and long-term consequences. Second, torture is famously ineffective. The person who is tortured will say anything to make it stop whether the information is true or not....

...This argument has been used to defend capital punishment: in brief, one gives up one's claim to human dignity when one violates the universal rule that would apply to others whom one has terrorized or tortured or whatever. The penalty aspect then comes from lex talionis -- what to do with this violation? Eye for an eye. But this argument doesn't apply to Abu Ghraib, for example, because, as US generals have admitted, perhaps some 80-90% of "detainees" (itself a consciously chosen term by the administration) were caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time. So, without any guilt in the first instance, a justification for torture based on the Kantian-lex talionis combo claim above has no basis whatsoever. In this instance, in fact, if we assume widespread torture and abuse, most of the victims are innocent. Those who are guilty may be found guilty but only after the fact of torture and not prior, as would be necessary to make the claims above [about torture as punishment]....

The point is twofold: there is no "ticking time bomb" -- this is specious reasoning -- and torture is used by the Americans not to stop the (non-existent) "ticking time bomb" but to extract information or simply to terrorize. They don't know whether that information exists in the first instance, so torture is used on both the innocent and the guilty to find out whether or not they are guilty and only then whether they have information. This is where torture notoriously yields false information, so it fails as a utilitarian instrument. Torture is rather an instrumental self-fulfilling prophecy of universal terrorization in the war on terror.

UPDATE:

See also this post at Obsidian Wings on a Washington Post article describing mistakes that were made....