The Torture Race

The New York Times story on classified Justice Department memos authorizing enhanced interrogation techniques in alleged violation of American laws against torture has some people in a dither. Andrew Sullivan has called the President a war criminal. Sen. Arlen Specter called the memos "shocking." Congress is demanding to see the secret memos, while the Bush Administrations maintains, in the words of press secretary Dana Perino, "It is a policy of the United States that we do not torture, and we do not." But although it may seem like the memos permit torture in defiance of the Geneva Conventions and the law that Congress had just passed banning the use "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" that is not actually the case. In fact, Sullivan and Specter are relying on outmoded definitions of torture that just don't apply to the 21st century War on Terror.

Sullivan has pointed out that many of the enhanced interrogation techniques approved by the CIA appear to be similar to interrogation techniques used by the Nazis. In fact, the Nazis even used the phrase "verschärfte Vernehmung" to describe these techniques, which roughly translates to mean "enhanced interrogation."

Now that sounds pretty bad, seeing how the Nazis were supposed to be so evil, until you look at what those techniques were. They included repeated beatings, long forced-standing, stress positions, withholding of food and medical care, sleep deprivation and other procedures to loosen up prisoners, which really doesn't sound so terrible. When I was a kid I got spanked, was forced to stand in a corner and went to bed without supper and I survived. Little did I know my parents were acting like Nazis! In fact, the Nazis initially banned the use of hypothermia and waterboarding as just too harsh for their delicate sensibilities, though they later discovered, as the CIA apparently did, that these kinds of limits really make life difficult for an interrogator.

Even though the Nazis were supposed to be really evil back in their day, their methods seem almost quaint by today's standards when compared with some of the stuff modern terrorists do. To even call some of these things torture is an insult to torture, according to The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb. "The Times indicts the Bush administration for exposing terrorists captured abroad to 'head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.' Boo hoo," he writes in a piece called "Trivializing Torture."

As Jules Crittenden points out, "Article neglects to mention we are fighting an enemy that considers powerdrills into kneecaps and videotaped beheading of captives business as usual. That in fact, we have yet to face an enemy in the modern era that observes anything approaching the standards we do." The Times, he says, would have us fight the War on Terror with "one hand tied behind back." (Apparently, a malfunction in Mr. Crittenden's word processor rendered him incapable of typing definite articles on the day he wrote this post.)

Mr. Crittenden makes an important point. As long as we can say the terrorists are worse than we are, we have the moral high ground. But we cannot let them get too much worse than us or there will be a morality gap that could be as devastating as the missile gap potentially was during the Cold War. So we need to stay just one small step behind the enemy in the torture race. If they ratchet up their interrogation techniques, we need to ratchet up ours, making sure that they always stay just a little bit more evil than us so that we can retain our moral superiority. If we had remained only not quite as bad as the Nazis, we would have fallen too far behind the terrorists. As the terrorists leave the Nazis in the dust, so must we if we have any hope of defeating them.

Unfortunately, the strict standards of the Geneva Conventions and American laws that incorporate them don't allow for the fact that the definition of torture is a fluid one. These rules seem to be based on an inflexible Platonic ideal of torture. But times change. What seemed like torture back during World War II is like a walk in the park today. The CIA and our armed forces need the flexibility to continually redefine torture and enhance our interrogation techniques as the enemy continually enhances its interrogation techniques. Only by frequently defining torture up -- but not too far up because we never want to be as bad as they are -- can we hope to stay on an almost even playing field with the enemy. As long as there are a few new atrocities that the enemy commits that we can point to as worse than things we do, then we know we are winning the moral battle and we still have a chance to win the military one. The CIA has a tough enough job making sure that their torture is worse than our torture (which can't even really be called torture anymore) but not so much worse that they pull too far ahead of us. They don't need to have their job made even more difficult by meddling politicians whose outdated conceptions of torture and rigid moral standards only strait-jacket our troops.

If we do win this war and Western Civilization survives, no doubt future generations will look back on this debate and wonder what all the fuss was about. "That's not so bad at all," they'll say, "compared with what we do today."

Share This Post



Technorati Tags: Jon Swift, Iraq, War on Terror, Terrorism, Bush, Torture, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Goldfarb, Nazis, Foreign Policy, Politics
Carnivals: This Is Not My Country, Carnival of Principled Government