Mark Danner deserves our gratitude. In two articles in The New York Review of Books, "US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites," and "The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means," he has tarried where few of us would care even to glimpse. In careful, thoughtful and measured prose, he has parsed the facts of US government torture - often of innocent people - and the ramifications of these actions.
His conclusion is that:
"The Red Cross Torture Report," p. 54.
With all gratitude to Danner for his work and thought on this most difficult of issues, and with due respect for his conclusions, I have to disagree. Or, rather, I agree that we should have such an investigation, but I believe we can build a consensus - indeed, must build a consensus about torture - irrespective of its practicality.
At the outset, the lessons of history leave no doubt: torture does not produce reliable information. Humans will say anything to stop themselves from suffering pain. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed no more murdered Daniel Pearl than Roxana Saberi was a spy.
But, nonetheless, let us do the failure analysis. Let us examine precisely how useless was the information gathered through the US government's torture of terrorists and innocents alike. Let our harvest be an acute documentation of just how much time the US government wasted, and just how many "false red-alerts" were issued, as a result of the lies extracted under duress from K.S.M. and others. (See Danner, "US Torture.")
But though the failure analysis has its strategic uses, I believe that its role in building public consensus about torture should be minimal. Refusing to engage in torture is a moral imperative, regardless of the number of US lives - or the lives of other humans - at stake. The US needs to make a moral choice - not a pragmatic or strategic choice - not to engage in torture. Nothing short of moral absolutism on this issue will suffice to restore US integrity (to say nothing of its reputation). Curiously, this conviction - indeed, moral dimension - is absent from Danner's analysis.
Dick Cheney likes to assert that bravery is demonstrated by adopting "tough, mean, dirty, nasty" tactics against terrorist, tactics that require "the gloves . . . to come off," and by other such vague and vaguely Hollywood-cowboy-movie-dialogue methods. But Cheney is exactly wrong. When the American people maintain their integrity under fire - and demand that their government do the same - only then will they will have shown courage.
A condemnation of torture because it's useless - as opposed to because it's morally abhorrent - is an empty gesture.
His conclusion is that:
[t]he only way to defuse the political volatility of torture and to remove it from the center of the "politics of fear" is to replace its lingering mystique, owed mostly to secrecy, with authoritative and convincing information about how it was really used and what it really achieved.
. . . .
What is needed is not more disclosures but a broadly persuasive judgment, delivered by people who can look at all the evidence, however highly classified, and can claim bipartisan respect on the order of the Watergate Select Committee or the 9/11 Commission, on whether or not torture made Americans safer.
This is the only way we can begin to come to a true consensus about torture.
"The Red Cross Torture Report," p. 54.
With all gratitude to Danner for his work and thought on this most difficult of issues, and with due respect for his conclusions, I have to disagree. Or, rather, I agree that we should have such an investigation, but I believe we can build a consensus - indeed, must build a consensus about torture - irrespective of its practicality.
At the outset, the lessons of history leave no doubt: torture does not produce reliable information. Humans will say anything to stop themselves from suffering pain. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed no more murdered Daniel Pearl than Roxana Saberi was a spy.
But, nonetheless, let us do the failure analysis. Let us examine precisely how useless was the information gathered through the US government's torture of terrorists and innocents alike. Let our harvest be an acute documentation of just how much time the US government wasted, and just how many "false red-alerts" were issued, as a result of the lies extracted under duress from K.S.M. and others. (See Danner, "US Torture.")
But though the failure analysis has its strategic uses, I believe that its role in building public consensus about torture should be minimal. Refusing to engage in torture is a moral imperative, regardless of the number of US lives - or the lives of other humans - at stake. The US needs to make a moral choice - not a pragmatic or strategic choice - not to engage in torture. Nothing short of moral absolutism on this issue will suffice to restore US integrity (to say nothing of its reputation). Curiously, this conviction - indeed, moral dimension - is absent from Danner's analysis.
Dick Cheney likes to assert that bravery is demonstrated by adopting "tough, mean, dirty, nasty" tactics against terrorist, tactics that require "the gloves . . . to come off," and by other such vague and vaguely Hollywood-cowboy-movie-dialogue methods. But Cheney is exactly wrong. When the American people maintain their integrity under fire - and demand that their government do the same - only then will they will have shown courage.
A condemnation of torture because it's useless - as opposed to because it's morally abhorrent - is an empty gesture.
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