“Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far‑off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?”
-- William James
Amongst all this debate – healthy debate, since in the case of public discourse, more the better – the mere tolerance of torture has me, never the less, amazed. That issues such as the ‘legality’ of torture, the ‘effectiveness’ of it, and even the language of torture can be thrown around so casually while all this time the vastly more important issue remains almost constantly in the background: the ethics of torture. Before asking ourselves whether we’re ‘allowed’ to do something, or whether it would give a good return on investment, or whether it is even possible to find a euphemism that downgrades the severity of our actions, it is vastly more important to ask ourselves whether it is the right thing to do.
My own internal dialogue of the ethics of torture must have been running for a few years before the recent debate began, in relation to the US administered Iraqi Prison of Abugrade, and the military-run Camp Delta detention centre. One piece of literature that probably helped crystallize my opinion on torture would have been The Siege, a film featuring Denzel Washington as an anti-terrorist officer, and Bruce Willis as a Major-General. The film chronicles the imposition of martial law in New York City in response to a series of terrorist attacks. This film was released in 1998 – three years before September-11 – and anticipates the unthinking racism, as well as the war on civil liberties, that occurred after the Twin Towers attack. Washington is committed to justice – to doing his job the right way, not just well. He threatens to sack his best friend after he slaps a suspect – so imagine how he responds when Willis’ character orders the (ultimately fatal) torture of a suspect during martial law.
Anthony 'Hub' Hubbard: Are you people insane? What are you talkin' about?
General William Devereaux: The time has come for one man to suffer in order to save hundreds of lives.
Anthony 'Hub' Hubbard: One Man? What about two, huh? What about six? How about public executions?
General William Devereaux: Feel free to leave whenever you like, Agent Hubbard.
Anthony 'Hub' Hubbard: Come on General, you've lost men, I've lost men, but you - you, you *can't* do this! What, what if they don't even want the sheik, have you considered that? What if what they really want is for us to herd our children into stadiums like we're doing? And put soldiers on the street and have Americans looking over their shoulders? Bend the law, shred the Constitution just a little bit? Because if we torture him, General, we do that and everything we have fought, and bled, and died for is over. And they've won. They've already won!
Here is one of the best – or, I would imagine, for an American audience, convincing – arguments against the stripping of civil liberties out of the attempt to garner greater security: that you may well have played straight into the very hands of the people who threatened your security. You have become your own prison warden. You begin to do their ‘job’ for them – eavesdrop on people’s private lives, abduct your own people, lock up and torture the vulnerable. Of course, all this is presuming a degree of sophistication and long-sightedness that may not have existed in the minds of those who planned the September-11 attacks. Yet, in terms of the ‘imagined enemy’, the boogieman in the centre of this Stand Alone Complex – in terms of our own narrative to give meaning to those attacks, and in terms of what we think we are trying to protect ourselves against, we are in all effect defeating the very purpose of our ‘anti-terror’ campaign. We have become our own terrorist. By abandoning concepts of justice and humanity, in how we treat our friends and our foe, we are our own worst enemy.
That is not to even begin to discuss the historical context of the attacks – which The Siege also touches upon -
Sharon Bridger: I ran the network in Iraq for two years. Samir recruited them from among the Sheik's followers and I trained them in the north. The Sheik was going to help us overthrow Saddam, I mean, he was our ally. We were financing him. Then there was a policy shift. It's not like we sold them out exactly, we just stopped helping them … They were slaughtered … So I uh, quit the operation. I took another assignment.
Anthony 'Hub' Hubbard: But you helped them first.
Sharon Bridger: What do you mean?
Anthony 'Hub' Hubbard: You said they were being slaughtered, they needed to get out, they were on the terrorist watch list, so you got them visas, you and Samir.
Sharon Bridger: I promised them we would take care of them, they were working for us!
Anthony 'Hub' Hubbard: Doing what, exactly?
Sharon Bridger: I told you!
Anthony 'Hub' Hubbard: No you didn't. You told me that you trained them. Tradecrafts, subversion. That's what you said, wasn't it? You're leaving something out, aren't you, Sharon? You taught them how to make bombs. That's why you were looking for the wiring signatures on that blue bus. And now they're here, doing what you taught them how to do. Right?
Sharon Bridger: You've got to let me... make this right! Please?
This highlights one of the other failures in the debate on the legitimacy of torture – to see the events of September 11 as being a ‘world changing’ event. I believe that in many people there is a strong sense of having a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in their personal lives, with which they divide their adult life by – some moment of great flux which helped redefine the sort of person that they saw themselves as, and the world that they inhabited. September 11 gave people a common sense of a flux point – and yet in both the personal, and public contexts, I think that this belief in the ease and usefulness of dividing time is faulty. We have many ‘befores’ and ‘afters’, privately and collectively. Many people have already gone through – and gotten over - the tragedies and triumphs that we clutch close to our hearts and use to tell our own story to ourselves. And this is true in the case of September 11 - in terms of attacks on civil liberties after catastrophes (Chomsky speaks a lot of this), of the widespread use of techniques such as water-boarding that had previously been seen as simply barbaric and their practice inconceivable, of ‘terrorism’ itself. To give some examples – shortly after being liberated from the Nazis after World War II, the French air-force proceeded to bomb villages in their Algerian colony in retaliation for their unpatriotic behaviour during the war.
History repeats itself, and there is nothing but a broadly held mythology, maintained through mantra-like reiteration, which separates the so-called ‘post’ September 11 world from the ‘pre’ September 11. To believe that those morals that we held so dear no longer apply in the face of such indignation as the destruction of the Twin Towers, is self-delusional. For instance, the U.S., in both international accords (Geneva Convention) and its own domestic legislation (Military Code) have long since acknowledged the complete unacceptability of torture and the mistreatment of combatants. The attack on New York was not the first time that the U.S. mainland has been attacked (Imperial Japan started forest fires along the west coast). Finally other countries have handled domestic attacks from an invisible enemy with much greater endurance and discipline then the U.S. (Northern Ireland and the Palestinian territories comes to mind). Remarks such as, “After 9/11 the gloves come off” also demonstrate a convenient amnesia – the U.S. has been underhanded in much of its dealings with the world, during and after the Cold War (if that should be called up as a defence for covert operations), that it need not be elaborated. I argue – nothing has changed. History has provided us with sufficient instances of our race’s capacity to inflict unbelievable suffering on one another. Upon committing to both the tacit and legal understanding that infringing the personal and national sovereignty of others - through either torturing individuals or invading countries – we would really know what we were getting ourselves into when we made the kinds of promises that articles such as the UN Charter or Nuremberg principles entail. Surely, after stumbling out of the newly liberated Auswich, or the Batu Lintang camp, the allies would have known how hellish war could get, and how it was all the more important to maintain standards of conduct – lest, of course, the same be done to us. Of course, one argument put forth against the use of torture is that the moment we have stepped across that line, we have lost the moral high ground and can no longer fairly claim that, when the tables are turned and it is we who are in a position of vulnerability, the same should not be done to us. This is rudimentary, universal morality – do unto others and all that jazz. Yet people are all too eager to abandon this, arguing ‘these are people who chop off heads’, or ‘I’ll start recognizing human rights the moment that they do.’
Yet, once more, I do not believe that even such Categorical Imperative is relevant to the debate. Certainly, one of the things that motivates my absolute stance against state-sanctioned torture is that, like any instance of infringing on another’s rights, there is nothing to say that the injustice will stop there – ‘touch one, touch all’ as the union members’ shirts say. If the police take my neighbour away in the night and beat him up, I might be next. While such sentiment might go a long way to explain the so-called Ethic of Reciprocity, or ‘golden rule’, it still does not touch upon my own moral imperative of why I think torture is wrong. How can ethics get any more basic? - you might ask.
Part of my abhorrence of torture stems from this belief - if people really did give a lot of thought to it, and were willing to face up to the cost of torture in all its bloodiness, they too would see it as completely out of line with the level of civility that we generally like to claim as our own. More basic than the golden rule, then, is a belief in consistency – not, then, ‘treat others as you would like to be treated’, but rather ‘hold others to the standards that they claim to maintain’. Perhaps a series of hypothetical scenarios best demonstrate this–
The common ‘what if’ used to try to win over those who find torture to be unpleasant is that millions can be kept alive on the condition that we are willing to torture, possibly to death, a single individual. I mention this above, in the quote from The Siege, and the counter argument is that once we tolerate the torture of one, there is no end to the number of people whose torture we will condone. Let us say though, for the sake of the hypothetical, that it is only one person’s life, or quality of life, at stake. I believe that much of what has lead to the otherwise self-abasing cruelties of Abugrade and Camp Delta, is a desire for revenge. Someone must pay for September 11. Pretty much any ‘middle-eastern-looking’ person will do. This of course sounds cynical. So let us put it to the test.
A nuclear bomb is somewhere hidden somewhere in downtown New York City. Yet rather then the person being an Arabic male, mid 30s, lying on the torture table in a basement room while the timer counts closer to zero, imagine that it is a young, white, female – and you are the torturer. In addition, she is innocent.
At this point, many would argue – if just silently, and even in not as many words – that she does not deserve to be tortured. This is a very important point – the idea that the guilty deserve to be tortured, while the innocent do not. (For the sake of simplicity, and to avoid cluttering the argument, put aside the issue that those who have are the victims of torture in U.S.-run prisons are suspects held without due process.) Ask yourself whether punishments should be either retributive or rehabilitative – whether punishing people to make ourselves feel better, or in order to make society better sounds more like impartial justice. For if it is the case that we live in a just society, torture should not be confused in any way with justice; even though it may be a necessity, literally no one – neither guilty nor innocent – deserves to be tortured. Therefore, we are back to our young white woman, lying on the torture table.
For realism’s sake, imagine that she believes that if she does anything to thwart the bomb in NYC, such as confessing to its whereabouts, the ‘terrorists’ will destroy her home city, which may or may not be more densely populated. This may be true or it may be false – the important part is that she believes it, and she will commit every ounce of her spirit to keeping silent, or giving misleading information, or biding her time, or facilitating her own death, or trying to bring you around to her position.
If it were the case that her home city had fewer people, we could argue that were she to make a utilitarian decision, she might see the wisdom of sacrificing her home city for the greater good of the more numerous people of New York, and confess. On the other hand, if she comes from a more heavily populated city, and yet overseas, we might argue that she should be patriotic – or that your patriotism as the torturer should guide you to extract the information more enthusiastically. In any case, the mere instance of different scenarios requiring different moral codes to guide us towards torture serves to highlight the irrelevancy of this factor. Therefore, we are back to the choice of whether or not to torture.
You choose to torture her. Imagine that in order to be sure of the quality of her information, the extent of suffering has been beyond quantifying. What you have conducted has, by any definition, been torture. She will be in a state of abject wretchedness for the remainder of her years. Yet, you have your information, saving a city and millions. Moreover, you are a hero – albeit a pitied one.
Yet there is a catch. While society has sanctioned what you have done in its name, society must also continue to live with the act that it has permitted to secure its own, albeit temporary, safety. They must hang giant banners of her brutalized body from every wall; the media must feature advertisements with footage from her interrogation - and they will stay there. Civil servants must expose every child will to her suffering, in the form of re-enactments on the street, to a requirement to repeat the same torture through a simulation, life-like in every regard. She will be the scapegoat, a martyr, a Jesus-figure – yet her passion will be contemporary, not historical, and her torturer will be her schoolmate, not one at the hire or direction of power-tripping tribal elders. In addition, her living remnants will be beyond consolation. She will be psychotic, and acidic - mad in every regard. She will never forgive her punisher, and she will never find solace in knowing that she destroyed her home so that some would live.
My intuition – my hope – is that the inhabitants of the city, including you, would never see that as an acceptable outcome, that this would be a means unjustified by the ends. My belief is that for those shown the price tag in living colour, would consider it too expensive - no matter what is on offer.
© Ashley Hibbert