By Rob JackmanThe Daily Northwestern
In democracies, torture has allegedly been a non-issue for many years. It is condemned as absolutely wrong, and evidence that the United States still practices torture today is met with near-universal disgust. In cases of prisoner abuse such as Abu Ghraib, European and many American commentators have rightly denounced the United States. Most of the world can agree that torture, by itself, is wrong. But there is a more practical question: Is torture always, in any circumstance, wrong?
Torture is not the only evil in this world. Humans are perpetually faced with choices between two or more moral wrongs, and the nature of life demands that they make a decision. If a person is good, then they must choose the less wrong of two options.
Picture a situation where the United States captures a member of a terrorist organization who has knowledge of an impeding attack on civilians. The suspect won’t divulge vital information. The moral qualm: Do you torture the suspect, possibly saving hundreds or thousands of innocent lives? Or do you maintain that torture is always wrong, and innocents must die for this single moral imperative? A real life example of this situation is the American detention and effective torture of Al Qaeda bigwig Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
There are obvious problems with such a simplistic conundrum. Torture requires clear limits. To avoid a “slippery slope,” where torture is justified on any grounds, Congress could legislate specific bounds on torture – defining legitimate methods (no permanent physical damage) and specifying who can determine who is a legitimate subject (the judiciary). The slippery slope would not end in an abyss. It might even be true that if torture practices were public knowledge, they could be regulated, whereas in today’s opaque, unsanctioned dungeons, they are not.
Whether or not the United States practices torture in any form (it does) does not seem to have an effect on the practice in other nations. After Guantánamo Bay became a detention center for “unlawful enemy combatants,” some of the worst regimes around the world claimed that they were justified by American actions. But these governments did not suddenly start torturing prisoners when American scandals broke. Amnesty International finds that a vast majority of nations, including (gasp) western European nations such as France, practice torture – and this predates Sept. 11. It is doubtful that al-Qaida will reconsider its stance on killing infidels if America ceases its limited use of torture.
It is bizarre to make torture a single absolute moral wrong when society accepts other wrongs, such as civilian death during war, as morally permissible. Sometimes doing wrong is the tragic necessity of a dreadful situation. Torture must have its constraints, and they must be public, but America owes its soldiers the best information to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda. If we do not give them this information, then we are putting their lives at risk. Indeed, not to torture can be the moral wrong.
Weinberg senior Rob Jackman can be reached at [email protected].
