George Bush and Torture

George Bush’s declamation that the U.S. doesn’t torture is about as convincing as Richard Nixon’s pathetic claim that he wasn’t a crook. The sad truth is that the Bush administration continues to abuse prisoners, the law, and the trust of the American people. Put simply, the coercive interrogation techniques and the culture of lawlessness the Bush administration has fostered are corroding the soul of the United States. Indeed, the Bush administration has managed to virtually destroy America’s good name, a feat no terrorist group could ever hope to accomplish on its own.

After 9/11 the Bush administration made a conscious decision that the gloves were coming off. Ambassador J. Cofer Black, a CIA veteran, who would later go into business with the private security firm Blackwater, promised Bush shortly after 9/11 that he’d have Osama bin Laden’s head on pike for the president. This promise set the tone; the legal niceties against assassination and torture would be suspended. The United States, which ever since its inception had taken a strong stand against torture, would reverse course.

In the aftermath of 9/11 even liberal commentators, most notably Alan Dershowitz, endorsed what is known as the “ticking time bomb” theory, the notion that it is morally acceptable to torture a terrorist if the information we can get from him will help us find and defuse a nuclear device scheduled to blow up a major city. Abstract thought experiments have their utility, no doubt, but reality rarely presents such neat and simple moral dilemmas. Indeed, the ticking time bomb scenario, though improbable in real-life, lends itself to the kind of melodramatic fantasy that passes for entertainment on TV, where good guys can do terrible things (break the law, torture others, etc) and still remain virtuous.

In TV land, torture never dehumanizes the torturer. Likewise, the rouge cop who breaks the law in order to bring the bad guys to justice is vindicated by the time the final credits run. The moral lessons from the typical formulaic TV plot, however, are about as deep as those found in comic books.

The reality, most counterterrorism experts agree, is that individuals being tortured will tell their torturers anything they think they want to hear, thus making it virtually impossible to disentangle solid information from bad. There is evidence that the invasion of Iraq was predicated on false confessions obtained by torture that linked al-Qaeda to Saddam.

The ticking tomb bomb theory is jury rigged in favor of a pro-active course of action. On one side of the scale is enemy combatant whose depravity and guilt are not in doubt, on the other side rests a major metropolitan city with millions of innocent people. But let’s make the scenario more realistic: imagine ten terror suspects, out of which only one holds the crucial information, with the rest of the bunch including at least one completely innocent individual? Would it still be morally acceptable to torture all ten suspects even if we only had 10% percent chance of getting our hands on the right info in time to avert a mushroom cloud?

I assume most of us would find it acceptable to allow a single innocent individual to suffer unjustified torture if in the process we somehow managed to ensure a 10% percent chance of saving millions of people versus a 0% chance if no torture took place. However, modifying the ticking time bomb experiment in this way shows how easy it is to slide down the slippery slope when it comes to torture.

Is it acceptable, for instance, to sacrifice 1,500 Iraqis a month if we stand a fifty-fifty chance of building a better Middle East within the next twenty years, thus reducing the chances of another 9/11? The question seems positively perverse the more you think about it. But the Bush administration has more or less taken a hypothetical query like that and made it official policy. According to the administration’s moral calculus 600,000 dead and 4 million displaced Iraqis are counterbalanced by a hypothetical future where America will be safer because we defused a powder keg in the Middle East. This is a rather messy version of the ticking time bomb experiment. And the line between those we’ve tortured and those we’ve saved is even more convoluted.

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