The politics of torture Tom Smith

   It seems like a good time to link to this piece by Blackhawk Down author Mark Bowden:

The Bush Administration has adopted exactly the right posture on the matter. Candor and consistency are not always public virtues. Torture is a crime against humanity, but coercion is an issue that is rightly handled with a wink, or even a touch of hypocrisy; it should be banned but also quietly practiced. Those who protest coercive methods will exaggerate their horrors, which is good: it generates a useful climate of fear. It is wise of the President to reiterate U.S. support for international agreements banning torture, and it is wise for American interrogators to employ whatever coercive methods work. It is also smart not to discuss the matter with anyone.

If interrogators step over the line from coercion to outright torture, they should be held personally responsible. But no interrogator is ever going to be prosecuted for keeping Khalid Sheikh Mohammed awake, cold, alone, and uncomfortable. Nor should he be.

Comments

[Dan Simon]

Although I appreciate Bowden's attempt to grapple seriously with the issue, I couldn't disagree more with his conclusion. Compared to both alternatives--forbidding coercive interrogation altogether, or permitting it under a strictly regulated regimen--Bowden's approach is a recipe for disaster. It virtually guarantees that interrogations will be carried out incompetently by untrained, undisciplined personnel, using ineffective and probably needlessly brutal methods, for which they will be subject to arbitrary and severe penalties. It will breed cynicism and disrespect for the rules among the lower-level people caught between what's legally required of them and what's tacitly expected of them. And it ensures that who is interrogated, and how harshly, is determined not by whose harsh interrogation is most morally and pragmatically justified, but rather by whose guards happen to be the least scrupulous and least strictly supervised.

Its only attraction, in fact, is that it allows moral cowards to imagine that they can gain the benefits of having their arms-length proxies brutally torture their captives whenever it's convenient, while preening sanctimoniously that their hands are clean.

The prison system has the same problem: moral cowards can't bear to admit that deterring criminals requires making their lives unpleasant if they're caught. So they demand only the most "humane" conditions in prison--and then subcontract the necessary deterrence to prison rapists, who ensure that prison is hell for inmates in the most arbitrary and brutal manner imaginable. This allows them to preen sanctimoniously about their support for humane prisons, while simultaneously joking callously about what awaits criminals in prison--at the hands of someone else, of course, and through no fault of their own.