The Torture Question

The torture question

I was sitting at Coffee Roasters in San Anselmo the other day, having an iced, free-trade, decaf soy mocha, when my old pal Areopagitica Truelove waltzed in. “Buffy,” she squealed when she saw me, and rushed over to my table and kissed my bald spot. “I haven’t seen you in weeks. How are you doing?”

“Not so well,” I responded glumly. “I’m pretty depressed?”

“What are you depressed about, Buff-meister?” she asked.

“Torture,” I said.

“Well, that’s a pretty depressing subject all right. Are you depressed about torture in general, or is there something particular that’s got you down?”

I told her I’d just read an article in the paper about a poll that found that more than 40 percent of Americans say they’d support torture to prevent a terrorist attack. “More than forty percent of our fellow citizens!” I moaned. “What have we become?”

“Well, in the first place, Buffitito, it’s not what have we’ve become, it’s what we’ve always been,” Areopagitica answered.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, my fine young friend, that the history of this country is awash with tales of torture, from the conquistadores to the colonists to the Indian fighters to the slave owners to the lynchers to the CIA and the Phoenix program to police interrogators to prison guards to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. You don’t have to take my word for it, my friend. It’s all public info, available at a library near you.

“OK, OK,” I said, “so maybe there has been a lot of torture, but at least most Americans didn’t approve of it.”

“Au contraire, mon frere,” Areopagitica replied, taking a sip of my mocha. “There’s plenty of well-documented evidence that throughout our history, there has been substantial approval for torture of – quote – ‘the other.’

“But look,” she went on, “about that poll. I’ve gotta tell you, I’m surprised that the number who’d approve of torture to prevent a terrorist attack isn’t higher. Think about it, if you knew that someone was gonna blow up an airplane that your grandkids were on, and you could prevent that from happening by torturing someone, wouldn’t you at least be tempted?”

“Well…” I said, thinking about those four beautiful children.

“And who could blame you if you did?” she said. “Wouldn’t you do anything to save their lives?”

“But… but… torture?” I stuttered as I felt myself sinking deeper into the Slough of Despond.

“Do not despair, Buffarootie,” Areopagitica said, reaching out and giving me a pat on the cheek. “Let’s deconstruct the premise.”

“Deconstruct the premise?” I asked.

“Yup,” she said, “let’s look at the assumptions implicit in the question. Would you condone the use of torture to prevent a terrorist attack? What that question implies is that you know for certain a) that a terrorist attack is imminent, and b) that the person you have in our custody has the information you need to stop the attack. Now, how would you know those two things?”

“Well,” I said, “intelligence…the CIA, FBI, NSA…”

“OK, so let’s look at that. The CIA or whoever has this person in custody, and they have, as you say, intelligence, that this person knows about an imminent attack, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Now,” said Areopagitica, “how likely is that? If they know this person has the crucial information, he or she must be in some kind of terrorist cell inner circle, and they must somehow have access to that inner circle – an informant, a mole. And if they do have access, wouldn’t they know when and where the attack was going to occur without having to get the info from this one bad guy?”

“Well,” I said, “maybe they …”

But Areopagitica didn’t wait for me to finish, which was OK with me, because I didn’t have any idea what I was going to say. “ And if they don’t have access to that inner circle,” she went on, “how can they be sure that the person they have in custody is somebody who can provide that information? Maybe this person’s been set up, or used as some kind of decoy. Or maybe he’s just a guy off the street who knows nothing. How do you find out? Well, our government’s answer is to torture him. If he gives you the crucial information, then sure, he was part of the terrorist cell. If not . . . ?”

“If not,” I said, “he was innocent and shouldn’t have been in custody, much less tortured.”

“Right you are, Buffarooni,” Areopagitica exclaimed. “And if he was in the inner circle, his buddies would likely know he’d been caught, right? So how likely is it that they’d go ahead as planned, knowing that one of their group was in the hands of the enemy? By the time the torturers had extracted information about an imminent attack from him, the information would have changed. So it doesn’t seem very likely even if the guy spilled the beans after waterboarding, that the beans would be worth a lick.”

My head was reeling by this time, and I could have used a little a couple minutes to think about what Areopagitica was saying, but once she gets going, she’s a hard woman to stop.

She plowed ahead, “What it all comes down to is that there’s no certainty that the so-called terrorist you’re about to torture is a terrorist at all, or has the information you’re gonna need to stop an attack. Think about it -- if all our espionagistas are so good at picking out the really bad guys, then pretty much everybody detained and tortured at Guantanamo Bay would be a high value terrorist, right?”

“Yes, I suppose…” I said.

“But in fact,” Areopagitica said, “after torturing them and putting them in cages and isolating them and driving many of them insane, the U.S. has released 500 detainees, and officially charged only six of the ones remaining. So we’re talking about torturing at least 500 humans who were not members of terrorist cells, who did not have any useful information about terrorist attacks, who could not be convicted of any crime … for all intents and purposes, 500 innocent people. Which brings us to the question that the pollsters should have asked: ‘How many innocent people would you be willing to torture on the outside chance that maybe you’d be able to stop a terrorist attack, no guarantees?’

All I could do was gulp as Areopagitica continued.

“Now I read somewhere,” she told me, “that that the saintly Dick Cheney has said that even if there’s only a 1 percent chance that torturing people could lead to uncovering a terrorist plot, it would be worth it. That means that the Vice-President-with-Six-Deferments would be perfectly willing to torture 99 innocent people – people swept up off the streets or fingered by somebody with a personal grudge, people like taxicab drivers, shop owners, school teachers with no radical affiliations – if the hundredth person could provide useful information. And if that information turns out to be useless, blurted out just to stop the pain? Well, too bad.”

Areopagitica swallowed the last of my mocha, leaned back in her chair, and said, “So there you have it Buff-meister. Ask the right question and you might get a less depressing answer.”

“But what if the answer’s the same no matter how the question is worded?” I asked.

“Then the darkness around us is deep,” she sighed.