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 Will Americans allow their military and security services
to practice torture? If you asked a mythical representative sampling
of Americans "Should police and national security agencies be allowed
to use torture?" we are confident the answer would be a resounding NO.
If you rephrased the question as "Should police and national security
agencies be given discretion in the use of torture in cases of urgent
national security?" we suspect the answer would be quite different, and
with good reason.
The topic of torture has entered the arena of national
debate, and was all the buzz around the water cooler at work and on the
talk
radio channels we listen to in the White Whale, so as to keep our finger
on the elusive pulse of public opinion.
It seems that, like the Dowbrigade, millions of American
viewers (mostly male demographic) were too lazy to change the channel
after the second NFL playoff game and as a result ended up watching Jack
Bauer on FOX in the season premiere
of "24" pump a high-caliber slug
through the thigh of a terror suspect of Middle Eastern origin in an
effort
to obtain alacritous information. The predominant tone of the reaction,
as far as we could tell, was "Go Jack".
In a real world parallel, Bush nominee for Attorney General
Alberto
Gonzales has been forced to go
on the record as being opposed
to torture. Meanwhile, repeated reports are dragging Americans out of
denial and into reluctant admission that torture has been not only routinely
out-sourced to our less scrupulous allies but practiced by US forces,
both in Guantanamo and in Iraq. It has happened, repeatedly, in the past. Captured
on film and video. Does anyone doubt that it is still happening, in some
dark, secret room, right now, as you read these words?
The questions raised by juxtaposing Jack Bauer
and Alberto Gonzales are many and varied. How do Americans really
feel about torture? Is it’s use absolutely unacceptable, or does it depend
on the situation of each case? Do terrorists (and, by implication, terrorist
suspects) have different rights than conventional enemy combatants or
spies? Don’t we use psychological torture on prisoners all the time?
Pondering torture leads inevitably to the hypothetical:
If we knew a terrorist group had planted a nuclear device in a major
American city, and we had in our custody someone who we believed knew
the location of that device, would we not be criminally negligent to
FAIL to do everything possible to extract that information? Up to using
torture, if we believed it could save hundreds of thousands of innocent
American lives in imminent mortal danger?
And if you accept torture in theory, in such an extreme
case, who should be in charge of deciding what torture methods should
be applied? Is there a more "humane" torture? And who decides which cases
are imminent enough and vital enough to warrant extreme coercion?
Then there is the related question of the reliability of
the information obtained via torture. We have heard that all information
obtained by torture is unreliable because the better the torturer the
more likely the victim is to say whatever he thinks the questioner wants
to hear, whether it is true or not. We have heard that hardened intelligence
operatives and fanatical terrorists are immune to torture, willing to
endure into the afterlife rather than give up their comrades.
Are masochists immune to torture? Have there been any scientific
studies done of the veracity of information extracted by torture? Common
sense tells us that it would be an effective method in cases where short-lapse
verification of the information is possible, like "What is the password
to access the information on this hard disk?" and less effective in cases
where stalling and equivocating is possible, like "Where is the nuclear device set
to go off at midnight."
Another uncomfortable question: What percentage of the
population of this country know we have signed the Geneva Convention
and understand what it says on the subject? More to the point, of those who know, what percentage
care?
The difficulty in talking about these subjects makes it
hard to gauge what Americans really think, but you can be sure policy
makers in and out of government are trying to figure it out. It is not
so much a question of whether some degree of government-sponsored torture
will continue to exist, but rather how extreme it will be, how widely
it will be applied, and how openly it will be discussed, if at all, on
and off the record.
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