By ROBYN E. BLUMNER, Times Perspective Columnist
Published December 18, 2005
Those who think the use of torture is a necessary evil to defeat terrorism are not only wrong but are endangering our safety. America's use of brutality has seriously disserved our national security in tangible and intangible ways.
First, the intangible. America once stood as the world's greatest example of a nation founded on the rule of law. Our president was seen as accountable to the other branches of government and constrained by the Constitution. We offered people who lived under the thumb of repression another way, a more advanced and enlightened approach to government, where every individual held inalienable rights, and the government could not simply make you disappear if it wanted information and thought you were dangerous.
But now we are like those we condemn, with a president who exercises the powers of a tyrant - holding prisoners indefinitely, approving warrantless searches of Americans, endorsing secret prisons and countenancing torture. By reducing the daylight between ourselves and our enemies, President Bush has brought moral ambiguity to the U.S. cause, giving Muslims around the world less reason to join us rather than them.
In the administration's logic, torture is justified because the threat America faces is more dangerous than anything confronted before.
This myopic misreading of history gives far more credit to al-Qaida than it deserves. While obviously lethal, the fanatical Islamic terrorist threat is certainly no more grave than that posed by other historical nemeses.
Imagine that the British won the Revolutionary War. Our founders would have been hanged for treason, and the United States would never have been established. Imagine the added civilian (i.e., Jewish) slaughter that would have resulted had Hitler emerged victorious and been allowed to dominate the world; or if the threat posed by the Soviets of our nuclear annihilation been borne out. Yet somehow during these terrifying times, we did not abandon our civilization.
As demonstrated by Condoleezza Rice's European trip talking points, the administration has adopted the strategy of deny, deny, deny to the question of whether it has used torture or exported prisoners for torture. At least this indicates that President Bush recognizes the unreconstructed horror of his actions. But conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer says there is no reason for the administration to be coy or defensive. According to Krauthammer, there are rare times when the use of torture is "morally compelled," and the only thing the administration should be faulted for is failing to establish coherent and stringent rules for its use.
Krauthammer goes beyond the "ticking time bomb" scenario and would authorize torture for the "slow-fuse" terrorist suspect who might have information of some future attack.
The idea is absolutely stomach-turning.
Formally codifying the use of torture, as Vice President Cheney has also implicitly urged, would poison our national character. Even with strict limits, the sadist would be out of the bottle.
Justice Robert Jackson famously wrote, in his dissent against the court's approval of the internment of Japanese during World War II, that once a liberty-destroying idea is officially validated it takes on a life of its own. "The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need. Every repetition imbeds that principle more deeply in our law and thinking and expands it to new purposes," Jackson wrote.
Once torture is approved, its facilitators will press against any limits.
As to the tangible ways the Bush administration's use of coercive interrogation methods has made us less safe, one need only look at the prosecution of Jose Padilla.
When Padilla was designated an enemy combatant in 2002, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft proclaimed that we had captured an al-Qaida operative who was planning to detonate a radiation bomb on U.S. soil. But three years later, the indictment against Padilla doesn't mention a word of this allegation.
Perhaps this is because the only "proof" that Padilla was a truly dangerous terror suspect came from high-level al-Qaida prisoners reportedly subjected to a form of torture known as waterboarding. Even if it is true that Padilla was planning an attack, evidence elicited through torture would never be admitted into American criminal courts (or any credible court proceeding).
Britain's highest court came to the same conclusion earlier this month when it ruled in the case of 10 terror suspects that no evidence obtained through torture, even if the interrogations were conducted by third parties or other governments, would be admissible.
Potential terrorists may soon be allowed to walk free because the Bush administration has dirtied its hands, and by extension, our own.
In a 1980 case involving a former official of Paraguay accused of torture and sued by the victim's brother, a federal appellate court in the United States said, "the torturer has become, like the pirate and the slave trader before him, hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind." Having now joined this club, our enemies are growing by the day. Our only hope is that the administration decides to be true to the letter and spirit of the McCain amendment. Only an honest about-face on torture will save our soul - what's left of it.
