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I became interested in how we would handle the torture thing after reading a very good article in the Atlantic (Sept '03) by Mark Bowden called 'the dark art of interrogation.' (He wrote Black Hawk Down btw.) It's a difficult issue - what are the differences between 'coercion' and 'torture'? How do we get information that may save lives (either immediately or in the future)? What happens if a government (implicitly or explicitly) condones coercion and/or torture? With whom may coercive tactics be used? What of international agreements?
Bowden talked with CIA and military operatives, human rights activists, and Israeli government officials. Israel has 'officially' dealt with the issue - how do you get information that might save real lives, without heading down the slippery slope of condoning it? They concluded (as have others), that condoning torture leads to its widespread (and uncontrolled) use by everybody in law enforcement - a bad thing.
Bowdens conclusion is sensible, IMO. It has to be illegal. Those who use it must be prepared to be prosecuted; they must have compelling reasons - then the government can choose whether to prosecute them or not, on a case-by-case basis.
Quote:
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/i...2003-09-11.htm
The problem is not that some tortured - it's that no one in the administration seemed surprised (esp Rumsfeld, as Bowden recently noted), and this because (as we now know) it was communicated to everyone involved that the President would excuse them. An idea neither Bush nor his Cabinet had any business promoting.
Quote:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/07/bowden.htm
Bowden talked with CIA and military operatives, human rights activists, and Israeli government officials. Israel has 'officially' dealt with the issue - how do you get information that might save real lives, without heading down the slippery slope of condoning it? They concluded (as have others), that condoning torture leads to its widespread (and uncontrolled) use by everybody in law enforcement - a bad thing.
Bowdens conclusion is sensible, IMO. It has to be illegal. Those who use it must be prepared to be prosecuted; they must have compelling reasons - then the government can choose whether to prosecute them or not, on a case-by-case basis.
Quote:
| If you open that door and as Jessica Montell says, a priori give approval, then there's no stopping it. Because everyone will use torture; everyone will assume that his or her circumstance is justified. As long as torture is banned, you can only employ it at your own risk. And I think that's the only way of controlling the behavior of large numbers of people in a vast organization spread out over the entire world. You can't expect to write a law, or write a regulation that is going to be that subtle in all these circumstances. |
The problem is not that some tortured - it's that no one in the administration seemed surprised (esp Rumsfeld, as Bowden recently noted), and this because (as we now know) it was communicated to everyone involved that the President would excuse them. An idea neither Bush nor his Cabinet had any business promoting.
Quote:
| But when a prison, an army, or a government tacitly approves coercive measures as a matter of course, widespread and indefensible human-rights abuses become inevitable. Such approval unleashes the sadists. It leads to severe physical torture (because there can never be a clear line between coercion and torture), to rape, and to murder. These things may already have happened. The Bush Administration has tried to walk a dangerous line in these matters. The President has spoken out against torture, but his equivocations on the terms of the Geneva Convention suggest that he perceives wiggle room between ideal and practice. There are reports that Administration lawyers quietly drafted a series of secret legal opinions last year that codified the "aggressive" methods of interrogation permitted at U.S. detention facilities-which, if true, effectively authorized in advance the use of coercion. Perhaps the most disturbing evidence of this mindset was Donald Rumsfeld's long initial silence on the Abu Ghraib photos. His failure to alert the President or congressional leaders before the photos became public-and he knew they were going to become public-leads one to conclude that he didn't think they were a very big deal. If so, this reveals him to be astonishingly tone-deaf, or worse. Maybe he simply wasn't shocked. |
