Torture and war: drawing the line

Torture and War

Drawing the line between what is torture and what is coercion, on one level, is an exercise in semantics. Mark Bowden, in his book, the Art of Interrogation, explores all the various words and their semantic applications at they apply to torture. There is enough material within the discussion of torture - and the people who torture, who have been tortured, human-rights activists, among others - for Bowden to fill a whole book. He says the public has a simplistic understanding of torture, and that may be true but does lack of knowledge on the part of citizens make it okay to torture captured enemy soldiers in any context? And why would the public - especially in the U.S., a democratic nation that has not hitherto been known to torture prisoners - know much at all about torture in the first place?

According to an interview article in the online version of the Atlantic, Bowden is quoted as asking the question, "Is it morally right to protect a terrorist from torture if 'we pay for his silence in blood?" (Dryer, 2003). That sounds like someone from the Bush Administration justifying torture on the basis of the long shot scenario that if that terrorist isn't tortured, an attack may well be launched against the U.S. that we would otherwise have been able to avert.

What is interesting in the interview between reporter Dryer and Bowden is that Bowden not only agrees with the reporter's question as to whether or not September 11 has "...sparked a new interest in finding better techniques" for torture. He in fact answers, "September 11 restored to respectability the practice of coercive methods of interrogation." He uses "respectability" rather loosely here, but that is more a reflection of the times than it is a flaw in Bowden's argument.

Speaking of drawing the line, Bowden draws the line - not just between torture and coercion - between the concepts of art and science.

Interrogation is far more an art than a science," he tells the Atlantic reporter. It boils down to the "skill of an individual interrogator reading the person that he's working on and pushing the buttons that he thinks will produce results." Bowden goes on the insist "ultimately" torture (or "interrogation" or "coercion" or whatever label is put on it) "will remain more of an art than a science." But whether an art or science, the reporter asks Bowden to back up his statement in his book "...coercion should be banned but also quietly practiced." Bowden's response has to be taken in the context that this interview took place in 2003, well before revelations have come out that indeed the Bush Administration authorized the use of torture ("waterboarding") in at least some common forms. And his response was of course well before the gruesome pictorial truth about torture used on prisoners in Abu Ghraib was widely distributed on the Internet.

This is a realm where a certain amount of two-facedness is called for, unfortunately," Bowden replies. He goes on to suggest that it would "be wrong to license all coercion, but by the same token, I believe that it would be wrong not to practice it in certain cases." So he is constantly drawing lines between what the law should require, and what the realities of the given situation should call for. Another line he draws in his book is the conflict between "the civilian sensibility" (which relates to the rule of law) and "the warrior sensibility" (get the mission done for your commanding officer at any price by any means necessary).

Bowden praises the Israelis for banning torture, but at the same time practicing it "in certain selected cases." So in other words, in this world of terrorism, suicide bombers, and seemingly unending violence on television, movies and in video games, the concept of ethics has pretty much gone out the window. There is no drawing the line between entertainment and violence; whatever entertains, and that includes a tremendous amount of violence, is entertainment. A quick look at the Best Picture nominees in this year's Academy Awards ceremonies reveals that four of the five films nominated were exploding with violence, greed, hate, killing, revenge, and even torture. Daniel-Day Lewis won best actor for his gruesome brutal role in "There Will Be Blood," and the Best Picture award went to "No Country for Old Men." The point of bringing this up is, this is an age of violence in the world and throughout the entertainment industry, and so it is not surprising to hear Washington politicians rationalize, backtrack, dip into semantics and find euphemisms that work well when it comes to issues of torture.

A very well-known philosopher - the late Elizabeth Anscombe - stood up and was counted when it came to ethics and human rights. In 1956, Anscombe took offense to the suggestion that Oxford University should bestow an honorary degree on President Harry Truman. She along with others "opposed this because of his responsibility for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (O'Grady 2001). Although Anscombe and her colleagues were voted down by others at Oxford, "they forced a vote, instead of the customary automatic rubber-stamping of the proposal."

Anscombe wrote, "For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends is always murder." It could also be said, for men to torture other men to extract information, and call it "coercion" or "enhanced interrogation," or anything else, is always torture. She also took issue with language that embraced morality but skirted the real moral issues. In the article by O'Grady, Anscombe believed that modern philosophy had misunderstood ethics. She argued that using phrases like "moral duty," "morally right," "morally wrong" and "moral obligation" were "vacuous hangovers from the Judaeo-Christian idea of a law-giving God.

Meanwhile, in the real American world of political drama, if you are supportive of torturing any suspected terrorist but you don't want to appear too bloodthirsty, you say it's just using "coercion" on lawless terrorists in order to protect the U.S. And - as George W. Bush often says - to "...Save American lives." In fact, the operative word used for torture in Washington D.C. lately is "enhanced interrogation," which doesn't sound nearly as bad as "torture." The "dean" of Washington D.C. wire service reporters, Helen Thomas, who is shown great respect by the media and by every president (she gets the first question at all news conferences), writes that Bush drew the line when he stated that "We do not torture."