Torture and the realities of force as a governing philosophy

Andrew Sullivan alerts me to Taxi to the Dark Side, winner of the Academy Award for the 2008 Best Documentary, that I'll have to see if I can get my hands on it, when I get the chance.



It is very troubling to witness what people will rationalize, foolishly, in the name of fear.

I actually do believe in exceptions on matters of torture. I agree with experts that, typically, winning the confidence and relative trust of captives is more likely to yield more reliable information and that torture tends to yield less reliable information by means that are often very ugly, especially when one considers the innocent people against which torture is too often used.

There are times, though, when I would be willing to make exceptions. They are rare and ones easy to rationalize in uglier directions. But there are times when danger is genuinely imminent, when interrogators are clear, without doubt, that they are dealing with someone who is responsible for and/or has important information about that imminent danger, when time is of the essence and is too short for more decent efforts to yield information, and when more aversive, aggressive methods have a higher likelihood than more trust-building measures to yield information. The least possible necessary aggression and force should be used, generally. But I have a broad tolerance for compromising that principle when lives are on the line and other methods are not likely to save them in time. Such circumstances are rare and generally hypothetical. But I think it is valuable to acknowledge and discuss and debate them, up front, so that interrogators are less likely to rationalize torture.

But, generally, torture is both wrong and counterproductive. The case of Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, cited in this documentary, who was tortured to provide testimony to a connection between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Queda developing chemical and biological weapons capability, is an excellent example of the problem with this tendency when torture is used.

It is a classic and foolhardy human tendency to turn to tough when we are afraid, when deeper, more honest and reflective thinking is what is needed. It is the oldest, most tragic, and most pernicious of mistakes of human history.

The rationalization of force for whatever purposes, even when our purposes are undermined by force, is the oldest, most destructive, most foolish tendency in human history.

In fact, it was because of this tendency, in the religious wars of 16th and 17th century Europe, where millions of people lost their lives over hundreds of years of struggle to forcibly convert Protestants and Catholics and to determine which religious followers would govern nations, that people like Thomas Hobbes, Baron de Montesquieu, Voltaire, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and so many other political thinkers, challenged this notion that force rather than liberty and reason should guide our consciences and the ways we govern.

Modern liberal democracies are so removed from that horrific and tragic legacy, that we have the luxury of forgetting its destruction and its valuable lessons.

Torture is a function of that legacy, not the inevitable villain amongst the heroes of force as a governing philosophy. It is this philosophy and its ugly history that has rationalized torture and its ilk for the long stretch of humanity.

And that is the still tragic history of regressive periods, like our most recent and still historical and political period, when force rather than freedom and reason is rationalized as a means to finally rid the world of its vices, like torture, and their practitioners.

It has never accomplished either. It never will accomplish either. And the illusion that it might has plagued humanity at least since the beginning of civilization.

And today, as then, it has left a wake of human destruction that is undoubtedly unparalleled by any other human vice imaginable.

It is time for that legacy to end.