Why Torture is Evil
posted by Josiah Garber on July 15, 2009
in Politics
by Will Van Wagenen, July 09, 2009
Most defenders of torture rely on the argument that torture saves (American) lives, and that torture is therefore justified and moral. Such defenders often cite fantastic scenarios similar to the following: Imagine a terrorist group is planning to detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of a major US city. Now imagine that one of the terrorists is captured by the CIA. The terrorist won’t reveal the information needed to stop the attack so he must be tortured until he gives up the information, allowing the CIA to stop the attack and save hundreds of thousands of lives. Such defenders then pose the question, “How could it be wrong to torture one evil person in order to save hundreds of thousands of lives?”
In other words such defenders cite as their “proof” that torture is moral an imaginary scenario which has never occurred and which has no basis in reality. In fact, US Supreme court justice Antonin Scalia defended the use of torture at a legal conference in Canada in this way by specifically referencing the popular television drama 24, in which the fictional US special agent Jack Bauer routinely tortures terror suspects to save American lives in situations similar to that described above. Scalia stated:
Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles… . He saved hundreds of thousands of lives… Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?… Say that criminal law is against him? “You have the right to a jury trial?” Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so.
Recently, former Vice President Dick Cheney used essentially this rationale to defend the Bush administration’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and exposure to extreme temperatures, which the International Committee of the Red Cross says constitute torture. Cheney stated that, “I am convinced, absolutely convinced, that we saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of lives,” by using such techniques and called the federal government’s efforts to prevent terror attacks since 2001 “one of the greatest success stories of American intelligence.”
Sadly, Cheney’s claim about the virtues of torture is more no connected to reality than is Scalia’s. Cheney’s defense of torture rests on three false and/or highly questionable assumptions: Firstly, that saving lives was the Bush administration’s primary purpose for introducing the use of torture; secondly that the intelligence gained by torture actually prevented attacks on the American homeland; thirdly, that torture actually saved American lives generally.
Email This Post