Dick Misses the Point

Torture remains in the news, and I think the debates we are finally having are healthy although they should have happened a long time ago. However, there is only one right answer - the obvious one: torture is wrong and a moral society should never practice it.

In order to justify what they did, former VP Dick Cheney has been saying recently that the methods worked, which therefore justifies their use.* If we follow that argument to its logical conclusion, all interrogation techniques, whether "enhanced" or ultra-enhanced or downright evil should be employed if they garner results.

However, as a moral society, we don't believe that. Even if the methods could provide more information, we do not condone torture. Which is why Bush made up the phony name for the methods he condoned. So all of Dick Cheney's statements miss the point entirely. What matters is not their effectiveness, but whether the methods were cruel and inhumane treatment.

That answer to that argument is much more clear - it was torture. The methods we are talking about include throwing prisoners against a wall, handcuffing them to a pipe over their head to make them stand for days, and waterboarding. Throwing prisoners against a wall is no different than any other physical punishment. So if we do not condone punching someone in the stomach or face, then we should not condone this.

The handcuffs above the head is less obvious, until you consider what happens after long periods in this position. The body becomes weak and the person hangs from the handcuffs. Now, we would not actually hang a prisoner by the handcuffs, so allowing a procedure that results in that makes no sense.

Finally, waterboarding is no different to me than dunking someone's head under water or strangling them for the same amount of time. In fact, John McCain went so far to compare it to pulling the trigger of an unloaded gun against someone's head.

What is amazing is how the administration used tactics that were similar to ones that are obviously torture, hoping that the unfamiliarity of the procedure would prevent people from seeing what it really is. Further, they created new names for the procedures, knowing that they were not regular interrogation techniques, but also knowing that calling it torture would not fly. So they used the Orwellian phrase "enhanced interrogation techniques" (in Israel they apparently used the term "moderate measure of physical pressure") when in the end, as everyone knows, it was torture.

And when it comes to torture, this quote (by the president of the Israeli Supreme Court when they were having similar debates, Aharon Barak) sums it up: "This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it."

*It will be interesting to see how the debate plays out about whether these methods did result in significant new information. I maintain though that torture doesn't make people tell the truth, but forces the person to say whatever will make the torture stop. Sometimes that is the truth but sometimes it is what they think the torturer wants to hear. If the prisoner doesn't know anything, they then have the incentive to make things up to get the torture to stop.