The Torture Memos

In today’s New York Times op-eds, both Frank Rich and Nicholas Kristoff address the torture issue.  Here’s a link to Frank Rich:  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/opinion/26rich.html?ref=opinion

In addition, Tobin Harshaw addresses it in his blog on the NYT, The Opinionator.  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/weekend-opinionator-a-tortuous-week/  The Opinionator samples opinions from other sources on the Web, so that you get a variety of opinions from both the left and right.  In the case of this particular topic, I don’t think “left” and “right” are the applicable terms.  Neither are “liberal” and “conservative”.  What you have are “anti-torture” and “pro-torture” factions. 

I am pretty much in shock about the whole thing.  I thought I was shocked by the revelations in Frank Rich’s piece concerning the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah (83 times in August 2002) and the memo authorizing it by Jay Bybee (then an assistant attorney general, now a federal judge), but some of the opinions sampled by Harshaw made me feel I was in the Twilight Zone.  As Jon Stewart said in the clip eehard posted this week http://eehard.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/we-dont-torture/, how many times do you think it takes for a water-boarding victim to say, “Hell, they aren’t really going to drown me”.

The pro-torture people always present their case in some sort of variation of this theme:  If you knew for a fact that you could save 100 American lives by engaging in one of these practices, would you do it?  Never mind, let’s say a million American lives.  That reminds me of the classic joke:  A man at a party asks a woman if she’ll sleep with him for a million dollars.  “You bet”, she says eagerly, “Just name the time and place.”  The man then says, “Well, in that case, would you sleep with me for ten dollars?”  The woman (offended) says, “Are you crazy?  What do you take me for?”  The man replies, “We’ve already established that.  Now we’re just negotiating the price.”

In Harshaw’s piece is a quote by Gerald Warner of the London Telegraph: 

“President Pantywaist Obama should have thought twice before sitting down to play poker with Dick Cheney. The former vice president believes documents have been selectively published and that releasing more will prove how effective the interrogation techniques were. Under Dubya’s administration, there was no further atrocity on American soil after 9/11.”

Harshaw drily notes that “President Pantywaist” may pass for civilized discussion in Britain.  But inherent in this quote is the assumption that torture is okay if it “works”.  Which is highly debatable.  That’s the part of the whole discussion that puts me into the Twilight Zone. 

The pro-torture crowd and the torture apologists want to make a big distinction between psychological and physical torture (waterboarding is both).  The idea is that fear, in and of itself, cannot cause physical pain or death.  I beg to differ.  It’s obvious to anybody with a brain that heart attacks and strokes occur every day in response to stress, and that can include fear or relatively minor physical activity like shoveling snow.  How about locking someone who’s afraid of bugs in a box with an insect.  Can you imagine fighting like hell to get away from it?  Perhaps they did physicals first, to make sure the victims were not at risk for heart attack or stroke.  That makes me feel ever so much better.  It reminds me of the bizarre practice of testing people on Death Row to make sure they are well enough to be put to death. 

I think the first question we should always ask ourselves is, would we do this ourselves?  If you can’t answer “yes” to that question, then you shouldn’t be willing to let someone else do it on your behalf, supposedly for your own good.  Do you feel safer because Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in a single month?  I have no doubt that some of the actions undertaken by our government have improved (though not guaranteed) our safety, but that isn’t one of them. 

In closing, the whole issue reminds me of the famous Milgram Experiment from 1961.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment  In this experiment, participants were instructed to teach word pairs to a “learner”.  If the “learner” answered incorrectly, the “teacher” administered an electric shock, beginning with 15 volts and increasing with each wrong answer, ending at 450 volts.  In reality, no shock was being delivered.  But at some point, the “learner” (who was in on the deal) would start screaming and pounding on the wall.  And yet, 65% of the “teachers” continued up to the full 450 volts.  Again, from Harshaw’s piece, 49% of Americans believe that torture against terrorists is justified (15% say often, 24% say sometimes), and those percentages are higher among those who claim to be politically independent.  Welcome to the Twilight Zone.