Torture, Coercion, and Ethics in the War on Terror

Introduction: Drawing the Line Between Torture and Coercion

Drawing the line between what is torture and what is coercion is, on one level, an exercise in semantics. Mark Bowden, in his book The Dark Art of Interrogation, explores the various words and their semantic applications as they relate to torture. There is enough material within the discussion of torture — and the people who torture, who have been tortured, and human rights activists, among others — for Bowden to fill an entire book. He argues that the public has a simplistic understanding of torture, and that may be true. But does a lack of knowledge on the part of citizens make it acceptable to torture captured enemy soldiers in any context? And why would the public — especially in the United States, a democratic nation not historically known for torturing prisoners — know much about torture in the first place?

According to an interview published in the online edition of The Atlantic, Bowden is quoted asking: "Is it morally right to protect a terrorist from torture if we pay for his silence in blood?" (Dryer, 2003). That argument sounds like a justification drawn from the Bush Administration's playbook — rationalizing torture on the basis of the remote scenario that, if a terrorist is not tortured, an attack might be launched against the United States that could otherwise have been averted.

Mark Bowden on Interrogation as Art and Policy

What is particularly notable in the interview between reporter Dryer and Bowden is that Bowden not only agrees with the reporter's suggestion that September 11 "sparked a new interest in finding better techniques" for interrogation — he goes further. "September 11 restored to respectability the practice of coercive methods of interrogation," Bowden states. He uses the word "respectability" loosely, but that choice reflects the climate of the times more than any flaw in his argument.

On the question of where to draw the line, Bowden distinguishes not only between torture and coercion, but also between the concepts of art and science. "Interrogation is far more an art than a science," he tells the Atlantic reporter. It comes 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 insists that "ultimately" torture — or "interrogation," or "coercion," or whatever label is applied — "will remain more of an art than a science."

The reporter then asks Bowden to defend a statement from his book: that coercion "should be banned but also quietly practiced." Bowden's response must be read in context — this interview took place in 2003, well before public revelations that the Bush Administration had authorized waterboarding in at least some circumstances, and well before the photographs documenting torture at Abu Ghraib were widely distributed online. "This is a realm where a certain amount of two-facedness is called for, unfortunately," Bowden replies. He goes on to suggest 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." He is, in other words, constantly negotiating between what the law should require and what real-world circumstances might demand.

Another distinction Bowden draws in his book is the conflict between "the civilian sensibility" — which relates to the rule of law — and "the warrior sensibility," which prioritizes completing the mission at any cost by any means necessary. Bowden praises Israel for formally banning torture while still practicing it "in certain selected cases," a position that reflects the ethical ambiguity he sees as unavoidable in a world defined by terrorism and political violence.

The Bush Administration and Enhanced Interrogation

In a world of terrorism, suicide bombings, and seemingly unending violence in television, film, and video games, the concept of ethics has been increasingly pushed aside. The line between entertainment and violence has blurred considerably: whatever entertains — and that includes a tremendous volume of violent content — is treated as acceptable. A quick look at the Best Picture nominees at a recent Academy Awards ceremony reveals that four of the five nominated films were saturated with violence, greed, hate, killing, revenge, and even torture. Daniel Day-Lewis won Best Actor for his brutal role in There Will Be Blood, and Best Picture went to No Country for Old Men. The relevance of this observation is that we live in an age of normalized violence — in the world and throughout the entertainment industry — and it is therefore unsurprising to find Washington politicians rationalizing, backtracking, and reaching for euphemisms when confronted with questions about torture.

Conclusion: Legacy, Language, and the Truth About Torture

The Bush Administration announced that its internal ethics office "was investigating the department's legal approval for 'waterboarding' of Al-Qaida suspects by the CIA" (Shane, 2008). That disclosure was itself a kind of line-drawing — between the truth and what had been told to the public. The investigation promised to reveal, at least in part, who had issued the legal memoranda authorizing "harsh interrogation methods" since 2002.

When Bush declared "We don't torture," he was drawing a line between the truth and what he wished the public to believe. His administration's conduct in the war on terror — whether or not legally sanctioned by the Constitution, international treaties, or domestic law — reflected the priorities of a government willing to reshape language itself in order to act without accountability. The broader lesson of this debate, from Bowden's nuanced pragmatism to Anscombe's uncompromising moral clarity, is that when language is manipulated to disguise the nature of an act, the ethical stakes do not disappear. They simply become harder for the public to see.

Works Cited

Dryer, Alexander Barnes. "The Truth About Torture." The Atlantic. Retrieved February 25, 2008, at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200309u/int2003-09-11.

O'Grady, Jane. "Elizabeth Anscombe." Guardian. Retrieved February 25, 2008, at http://www.guardian.co.uk.

Shane, Scott. "Torture Justification Memos Under Ethical Review." The Mercury-News. Retrieved February 26, 2008, at http://www.mercurynews.com. (2008).

Thomas, Helen. "Bush Legacy Already Established." Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Retrieved February 24, 2008, at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com.