(For previous posts on torture, see here.)

We see that once you allow torture as authorized and official policy, you inevitably widen the circle of people who are involved. In particular, psychologists and doctors have been deeply involved in the process, the former to devise the torture techniques and to measure the effects, and the latter to monitor the extent of the physical harm done to the victims and try and prevent death. After all, the purpose of torture is to create psychological breakdown, to get the person to confess or reveal information. Physical abuse is just a means to achieving that end.
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(For previous posts on torture, see here.)

What has emerged is that research by psychologists on “learned helplessness” has formed the basis of the current torture techniques practiced by the US. The goal is to destroy the victim’s mind until that person feels total dependence on the interrogator. It turns out that this is fairly easy to do. They succeeded with Jose Padilla and with Abu Zubaydah. But destroying a mind is one thing. Getting useful information is another.
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(For previous posts on torture, see here.)

In the previous post, we saw how the US government, over a period of time, studied and refined the techniques of psychological torture practiced by other countries and then outsourced these practices to its client states during the Cold War. With the onset of the ‘war on terror’ following the events of 2001, it started using those techniques directly, leading to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram, and the so-called ‘black sites’ around the world.

Jose Padilla, who was arrested in the US in 2002 at Chicago airport and charged with threatening to explode a so-called radioactive ‘dirty bomb’, was one of the earliest victims of the new policies. Then Attorney General John Ashcroft held a sensational press conference announcing his arrest and George W. Bush then designated him as an ‘illegal enemy combatant’ not entitled to a trial in the regular courts, even though he was an American citizen. The sensational ‘dirty bomb’ charge that was used to terrify people and garner publicity was later quietly dropped and replaced by much vaguer conspiracy charges. The ability of the government to declare a US citizen as an enemy combatant was challenged and went through several court iterations before the government in November 2005, presumably seeking to avoid a US Supreme Court decision against it, decided to charge him in the regular civilian courts in Miami, Florida. He was found guilty in 2007 and sentenced to over 17 years in prison.

This is how the mind of Jose Padilla was destroyed so that he was willing to say anything his torturers wanted him to say. According to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Padilla was originally kept in extreme isolation for three months in something called the ‘brig’ at a naval base in South Carolina: “Padilla’s cell measured nine feet by seven feet. The windows were covered over… He had no pillow. No sheet. No clock. No calendar. No radio. No television. No telephone calls. No visitors. Even Padilla’s lawyer was prevented from seeing him for nearly two years.” Even when in shackles he was taken to see a dentist, he had to wear blacked out goggles to prevent any light from reaching him and headphones to shut out any sound.

Dr. Angela Hegarty, a forensic psychiatrist who examined Padilla, describes in chilling detail how they broke down Padilla and the net result, which was that he identified totally with his interrogators and the Bush government. He did not want to do anything that might result in him being sent back to the brig, and he felt that the best way to do that was to acquiesce in whatever the government wanted, even if it meant turning against his own lawyers. The US government threatened him with further torture if he revealed information about the torture he had already experienced. “According to the Yale Clinic’s suit, the government threatened Padilla that if he told anyone what happened to him while he was an enemy combatant, that he would be re-designated an enemy combatant and taken back into Defense Department custody. The suit alleges, as have his defense attorneys, that Padilla’s lawyers were not able to mount as complete a defense as they could have were Padilla not afraid to talk to them for fear of government retaliation.”

Alfred W. McCoy, who had studies the history of torture in some detail, says that when he saw the now-iconic photo from Abu Ghraib of the black-hooded prisoner standing with outstretched arms and fake electrodes connected, he immediately recognized two classic and key torture features that the CIA had developed: sensory deprivation (in the form of the hood) and stress positions (standing with arms outstretched). This makes implausible the story put out by the Bush-Cheney administration that blamed the lowly soldiers in charge of the prisoners for the torture, by describing them as a few “bad apples”. It is highly unlikely that they could have stumbled upon these highly researched torture techniques on their own.

With the end of the Cold War, the US tried to have it both ways: trying to reach the moral high ground by signing the 1994 Convention Against Torture, while quietly trying to reserve for itself the right to continue the psychological torture practices it had perfected. This was, as is the case with all major pro-war/pro-business actions, a bipartisan effort. As McCoy says:

When the Cold War came to a close, Washington resumed its advocacy of human rights, ratifying the UN Convention Against Torture in 1994 that banned the infliction of ‘severe’ psychological and physical pain. On the surface, the United States had apparently resolved the tension between its anti-torture principles and its torture practices.

Yet when President William Clinton sent this UN Convention to Congress for ratification in 1994, he included language drafted six years earlier by the Reagan administration—with four detailed diplomatic ‘reservations’ focused on just one word in the convention’s 26-printed pages. That word was “mental.”

Significantly, these intricately-constructed diplomatic reservations re-defined torture, as interpreted by the United States, to exclude sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain—the very techniques the CIA had refined at such great cost. Of equal import, this definition was reproduced verbatim in domestic legislation enacted to give legal force to the UN Convention–first in Section 2340 of the US Federal Code and then in the War Crimes Act of 1996.

Remember that obscure number–Section 2340—for, as we will see, it is the key to unlocking the meaning of the controversial Military Commissions Law enacted by the US Congress just last September.

In effect, Washington had split the UN Convention down the middle, banning physical torture but exempting psychological abuse. By failing to repudiate the CIA’s use of torture, while adopting a UN convention that condemned its practice, the United States left this contradiction buried like a political land mine ready to detonate with such phenomenal force, just 10 years later, in the Abu Ghraib scandal.

McCoy’s article sheds light on something that has puzzled me, which was the brazen attempt by Bush/Cheney to deny the obvious, that what they were doing was torture. They were aided in this effort by a compliant media that treated these statements respectfully and which still avoids using the word torture when talking about the treatment of detainees. It becomes clear that Bush/Cheney and all the apologists in their administration who approved and authorized these torture techniques are depending on the above convoluted reasoning to imply that they satisfied the letter of the law and treaties against torture.

POST SCRIPT: Oh, the horror

The Daily Show shows the awful conditions under which the Swedes live because of their socialist policies.

Part 1:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M – Th 11p / 10c
The Stockholm Syndrome
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Part 2:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M – Th 11p / 10c
The Stockholm Syndrome Pt. 2
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

(For previous posts on torture, see here.)

I began the series of posts on torture with a partial hypothetical based on the true story of two American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling arrested by North Korea. I said that if those journalists were convicted on the basis of confessions obtained using torture, we would be up in arms, even though torture is exactly what the US has been doing to the detainees it has held.

Those two journalists have now been found guilty by a North Korean High Court after a five-day trial and sentenced to 12 years hard labor. The US government and media assumes that the two are innocent (Hillary Clinton describes the charges as “baseless”), except perhaps for accidentally crossing the border into North Korea, and that the sentence was unduly harsh, and that the North Koreans did this just to force the US into some kind of negotiations.

Earlier we had the media spotlight on another American journalist Roxana Saberi who was tried in Iran for espionage and convicted before being released later by an Iranian appeals court. Again, the US government and media saw this trial as purely political, and Saberi received a huge amount of publicity.

Many readers may be surprised to learn that these are not the only recent cases of journalists being arrested by governments. There are others who have been held without charge or trial for much longer periods under much worse conditions, whose plight has been largely ignored by the US media, although they have been publicized elsewhere. The reason is, of course, that these hapless journalists are being held by the US government and this means, of course, they are presumed to be guilty and dangerous and their indefinite detention is to be excused or even justified.

Glenn Greenwald describes some of the cases.

• Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj was held in the back hole of Guantanamo for six years without trial, beginning in 2001, before being finally released. Even more disgraceful, even after the American interrogators realized that al-Haj was just a journalist, they then tried to coerce him to spy on Al Jazeera for them.
• The AP photographer Bilal Hussein was detained by the US for two years without any charges brought against him, after his photographs contradicted US claims.
• Ibrahim Jassam, a freelance photographer for Reuters, was detained by the US in September 2008.

That’s not all. The Committee to Protect Journalists says:

Hussein’s detention is not an isolated incident. Over the last three years, dozens of journalists—mostly Iraqis—have been detained by U.S. troops, according to CPJ research. While most have been released after short periods, in at least eight cases documented by CPJ Iraqi journalists have been held by U.S. forces for weeks or months without charge or conviction. In one highly publicized case, Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, a freelance cameraman working for CBS, was detained after being wounded by U.S. military fire as he filmed clashes in Mosul in northern Iraq on April 5, 2005. U.S. military officials claimed footage in his camera led them to suspect Hussein had prior knowledge of attacks on coalition forces. In April 2006, a year after his arrest, Hussein was freed after an Iraqi criminal court, citing a lack of evidence, acquitted him of collaborating with insurgents. (my italics)

As Greenwald says:

In Iran, at least Saberi received the pretense of an actual trial and appeal (one that resulted in her rather rapid release, a mere three weeks after she was convicted), as compared to the journalists put in cages for years by the U.S. Government with no charges of any kind, or as compared to the individuals whom we continue to abduct, transport to Bagram, and insist on the right to imprison indefinitely with no charges of any kind. Who was treated better and more consistently with ostensible Western precepts of justice and press freedoms: Roxana Saberi or Sami al-Haj? Saberi or Bilal Hussein? Saberi or Ibrahim Jassam? Saberi or the Bagram detainees shipped to Afghanistan and held in a dank prison, away from the sight of the entire world, without even a pretense of judicial review, a power the Obama administration continues to insist it possesses?

The London Independent reports on the reason that Saberi was convicted of espionage.

A joyful Roxana Saberi yesterday thanked those who helped win her release as her lawyer revealed his client had been convicted of spying in part because she had a copy of a confidential Iranian report on the war in Iraq.

Ms Saberi, a freelance journalist who was freed on Monday after four months in prison in Tehran, had copied the report “out of curiosity” while she worked as a freelance translator for a powerful body connected to Iran’s ruling clerics, said the lawyer, Saleh Nikbakht.

In fact, when we compare the case of Saberi in Iran with the way the US treats the journalists it arrests, Iran comes out much better. Robert Dreyfuss notes that what Saberi did to get herself arrested was more serious than what was done by many of the journalists under US custody and yet she got a quick trial and was released after a quick appeal. As Dreyfuss says:

Here’s what I wonder: If an Iranian journalist came to the United States, deliberately let his reporter’s credentials expire, took a job working for an important US agency that handles confidential or classified material, and then secretly copied one of those documents out of “curiosity,” do you think he would have been released by an appeals court? Or do you think that he might have received, say, eight years in prison for espionage?

Saberi had confessed to being a US spy while serving 100 days in prison. After her release, she said she made a false confession out of fear. She describes her treatment:

In Evin, the jail in the Tehran suburbs where many political prisoners are held, Saberi endured “severe psychological and mental pressure, although I was not physically tortured.

“The first few days, I was interrogated for several hours, from morning until evening, blindfolded, facing a wall, by up to four men, and threatened … I was in solitary confinement for several days,” Saberi said.

I can well imagine that Saberi was frightened and that her confession was not freely given, even though the conditions she describes pale in comparison to the kinds of torture practices the US is guilty of.

The US government and those in the media who cheer on policies of “preventive detention” and condone and excuse torture have absolutely no standing to complain when other governments do similar things.

POST SCRIPT: A real ticking time bomb

Scott Roeder, the person who has been arrested and charged with killing Dr. George Tiller, told the Associated Press that similar violence has been planned against other abortion providers but refused to provide further details. The news report continues, “It wasn’t clear whether Roeder knew of any impending violence or whether he was simply seeking publicity for his cause. Law enforcement authorities including the Justice Department said they didn’t know whether the threat was credible.”

But there’s a way to find out, isn’t there? We could simply torture him because what we have here is a ‘ticking time bomb’ scenario so beloved by those who use it in hypothetical situations to justify torture.

John Cole who, like me, opposes torture in all circumstances, issues a challenge to evangelical Christians who are more supportive of torture than nonbelievers or mainstream Protestants.

Since there is no doubt that we have a history of anti-abortion domestic terrorism, and since we know that evangelicals already support torture for everyone, when do we get to start waterboarding this guy? Does he have any children whose testicles can be crushed? Will we keep him up for weeks on end in stress positions in extremely cold rooms to get him to break? Beat him? All the right made a very good show of how shocked and appalled they were when this man killed Dr. Tiller, so surely they will not object. So when do we get to start torturing this guy?

This same challenge can be posed to anyone who thinks that torture works and uses the ticking time bomb hypothetical to justify torture. Shouldn’t they be calling for Roeder to be tortured?

(For previous posts on torture, see here.)

The corrupting effect of condoning torture can be seen in the way that Obama is now advancing the appalling policy of “preventive detention”, allowing the government to hold prisoners without trial indefinitely. This means that the fundamental constitutional protection of habeas corpus has been abandoned by Obama as well, making a mockery of his claim to be teacher and scholar of constitutional law,.

What the Obama administration is doing is trying to create a range of ‘trials’, all designed to keep some people incarcerated forever, even if they cannot be proven guilty. Those whom they think they can prove to be guilty by normal rules of evidence they will try in the regular legal system. Those for whom the evidence may not be sufficient or not normally allowable (because, say, the information was obtained by torture or is hearsay or otherwise inadequate) will be tried in ‘tribunals’ where rules designed to protect the rights of defendants are relaxed and convictions easier to obtain. Those people for whom there is no real evidence or whose torture they do not want revealed to the world will be held indefinitely without trial.

That this is a gross perversion of what we think of as justice should be apparent to anyone. Gone is the quaint presumption that people are innocent until they are proven guilty. Replacing it is a medieval system where the ruler decides peremptorily whether you are guilty or not. Basically, what Obama is creating is a system where his administration first decides whether people are guilty, and then constructs a “legal” system that allows them to create a forum which will ensure that the detainees they have already decided is guilty will be found guilty. There is no other description for this than a ‘show trial’. It is nothing less than the worst kind of legal sham practiced by authoritarian governments. If such trials were conducted by (say) Iran or North Korea or Russia, they would be denounced by the American media as a mockery of justice. But when practiced by the US government, the media actually goes along with it, treating the whole charade as a sensible practice.

Will Bunch points to the really disturbing part of Obama’s recent speech where he outlined this policy of creating parallel trial systems and preventive detention. After first boasting about his familiarity with the principles of the US constitution acquired as both a student and teacher of it, Obama then proceeds to rip that venerable document to shreds:

Now, finally, there remains the question of detainees at Guantanamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people. And I have to be honest here — this is the toughest single issue that we will face. We’re going to exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at Guantanamo who pose a danger to our country. But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States.
…
Let me repeat: I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture — like other prisoners of war — must be prevented from attacking us again. Having said that, we must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded. They can’t be based simply on what I or the executive branch decide alone. That’s why my administration has begun to reshape the standards that apply to ensure that they are in line with the rule of law.
…
But I want to be very clear that our goal is to construct a legitimate legal framework for the remaining Guantanamo detainees that cannot be transferred. Our goal is not to avoid a legitimate legal framework. In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. (my italics)

When Obama uses the royal “we” in the past paragraph, he is reserving to himself what should be the prerogative of the courts, the right to determine guilt or innocence. So it is clear: the Obama administration will first decide who is guilty and dangerous and then find a way to keep them in prison forever, a policy he describes using the Orwellian phrase “preventive detention”. As Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights says:

[Obama] said some people are just too dangerous to let go and that we have to keep them…Though we’d do it differently then Bush. We will set up rules. Well no matter how you repackage Guantanamo, with all kinds of rules on top of it — that is what he is doing, he is re-wrapping a preventive detention scheme and giving it some more due process. In the end, it still comes down to holding people — much like Minority Report or pre-crime stuff — for being dangerous, and that is not something that I think is constitutional or this country should be engaged in.

Obama’s actions in creating this framework of show trials is all of a piece with his backtracking on his promises to quickly close Guantanamo, to quickly end the war in Iraq, and his reluctance to prosecute the war crimes of the Bush administration. While he drags his feet on his promise to close Guantanamo, yet another detainee, a 31-year old man, has committed suicide after being detained without charge or trial since February 2002.

William Blum sums up the problem with Obama:

The problem, I’m increasingly afraid, is that the man doesn’t really believe strongly in anything, certainly not in controversial areas. He learned a long time ago how to take positions that avoid controversy, how to express opinions without clearly and firmly taking sides, how to talk eloquently without actually saying anything, how to leave his listeners’ heads filled with stirring clichés, platitudes, and slogans. And it worked. Oh how it worked! What could happen now, as President of the United States, to induce him to change his style?
…
I could really feel sorry for Barack Obama — for his administration is plagued and handicapped by a major recession not of his making — if he had a vision that was thus being thwarted. But he has no vision — not any kind of systemic remaking of the economy, producing a more equitable and more honest society; nor a world at peace, beginning with ending America’s perennial wars; no vision of the fantastic things that could be done with the trillions of dollars that would be saved by putting an end to war without end; nor a vision of a world totally rid of torture; nor an America with national health insurance; nor an environment free of capitalist subversion; nor a campaign to control world population … he just looks for what will offend the fewest people. He’s a “whatever works” kind of guy.

I think Blum’s assessment of Obama is largely correct, though I would welcome being proved wrong. Being able to make stirring speeches is a valuable skill. It can make people rise to their better selves and to forget petty concerns. But it can never be a substitute for principled actions. If not backed up by concrete actions, the words will rapidly ring hollow and become a target of ridicule.

POST SCRIPT: Torture excuse chart

In this series of posts, I have painstakingly addressed all the excuses offered by torture apologists. I discovered that someone has organized many of them into a handy chart.

(For previous posts on torture, see here.)

One of the best ways to ensure good government is to have as much transparency as possible. When people are allowed to work behind closed doors with the promise of secrecy, abuses inevitably occur. The Bush/Cheney administration was highly secretive and unfortunately, when it comes to things like torture, the “extraordinary renditions” of prisoners (i.e., sending them to other countries that practice torture), and illegal wiretapping, the Obama administration seems to be also trying to keep as many things secret as possible. In fact, on some matters such as illegal wiretapping, Obama is making even more sweeping claims of presidential authority to keep secrets than Bush/Cheney did.
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(For previous posts on torture, see here.)

It is not that torture never works but the history of torture suggests that in order to get a few bits of useful information, you have to throw a wide net for torture victims. In the cover story of the October 2006 issue of The Progressive magazine, Alfred W. McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror dissects The Myth of the Ticking Time Bomb and points to a few cases in Vietnam and Algeria where mass torturing has worked. “Major success from limited, surgical torture is a fable, a fiction. But mass torture of thousands of suspects, some guilty, most innocent, can produce some useful intelligence.”

But indiscriminate and widespread torturing of people is presumably not where any civilized society wants to go, though given how easily Americans can be frightened by vague threats, it would not surprise me if people were willing to countenance even that.

Once torturers have brutally treated someone, they become reluctant to let the victims freely speak about their treatment since such revelations rebounds badly on them. You cannot bring them to an open trial where they can tell the judge and the public how they were treated. Torture inevitably leads to excessive secrecy or even the killing of victims so they can never speak about their treatment. So secrecy and torture practices go hand in hand and the promise of secrecy creates the temptation for perpetrating even greater abuses.

Glenn Greenwald points out how the Bush administration tried to make a deal with two Gunantanamo detainees (British resident Binyam Mohamed and Australian citizen David Hicks) that they would release them only if they kept secret about the treatment they had received. Mohamed refused the deal and his detention was continued. So the US government was essentially using torture and detention as weapons, not to gain information but to gag their prisoners to prevent them speaking about their torture and detention.

Binyam Mohammed’s story gets even worse. He was eventually sent back to England in February after the charge that he aided Jose Padilla fell apart. Mohammed had spent six years in US custody and claimed he was tortured at the hands of the US in Pakistan, Morocco, and Afghanistan, the countries being ones that he had been ‘renditioned” to. After his release, a British High Court initially ruled that there was sufficient evidence that he had been tortured and that he was entitled to seek documentary evidence that the British government had in its possession about his treatment. But it later reversed itself because the Obama administration had threatened to withhold security cooperation with the UK if the documents were released.

As Glenn Greenwald says:

Just think how despicable that threat is: if your court describes the torture to which one of your residents was subjected while in U.S. custody, we will withhold information from you that could enable you to break up terrorist plots aimed at your citizens.
…
The principal issue here is that the Obama administration is not merely failing to investigate (let alone prosecute) acts of high-level criminality by U.S. government officials. Far worse, ever since he was inaugurated, Obama has engaged in one extraordinary legal maneuver after the next to block American courts from ruling on the legality of those actions. He has now extended his Bush-protecting conduct to the international realm, as he re-iterates Bush’s threats that we will purposely leave British citizens more vulnerable to terrorist attacks if their courts rule that, under their laws, their citizens are entitled to know what was done to Binyam Mohamed.

Clive Stafford Smith, an attorney for Mr. Mohamed, said that he was disappointed with what Obama had done.

“What they are doing is twisting the arm of the British to keep evidence of torture committed by American officials secret,” said Mr. Smith, a U.S. citizen. “I had high hopes for the Obama administration. I voted for the guy, and one hopes the new administration would not continue to cover up evidence of criminal activity.”

The Metropolitan Police of London is investigating whether Mr. Mohamed was tortured when he was in American custody.

Mr. Smith said that by attempting to keep evidence of Mr. Mohamed’s “abuse” secret, the U.S. official who communicated the threats to the British Foreign Office was in breach of British law, specifically the International Criminal Court Act of 2001.

“The U.S. is committing a criminal offense in Britain by seeking to conceal this information. What the Obama administration did is not just ill-advised, it is illegal,” he said.

But despite these attempts at suppression of his torture, truly gruesome details are emerging about some of the methods used on Binyam Mohamed that make even waterboarding look tame by comparison, “very far down the list of things they did.” These include such things as the slicing of his genitals with a scalpel,

This is what allowing torture under any circumstances leads to. It is the slipperiest of slippery slopes. One step on it, and you rapidly end up in a cesspool, committing the most odious of acts.

POST SCRIPT: Gay marriage loophole

New Hampshire yesterday became the sixth and latest state to pass a law allowing gay marriage, continuing the inevitable march towards full equality. But from the Onion News Network we learn that gays are willing do anything to get married.

Conservatives Warn Quick Sex Change Only Barrier Between Gays, Marriage

(For previous posts on torture, see here.)

Let me finally address the question raised by the final excuse on the list put out by torture apologists, that if our own loved ones could only be saved by torture, wouldn’t we approve of it?

I have said that I oppose torture on the principle that I cannot condone any practice that I would not accept if it were to be applied to my own loved ones. But what if the tables were turned and my own loved ones were under threat of harm and the security forces had captured someone who might have information that might save them? Wouldn’t I want the security forces to do whatever it takes, even if it includes torture, if that might save their lives?

The answer is yes, I probably would want them to do whatever it takes to save my loved ones. I might even be willing to do it myself. There is no saying what we might do when we are placed in extreme situations far removed from our normal experience. But the fact that we might wish suspects to be tortured if it might save our own loved ones is not an argument for torture. It is instead a sign of our human weakness, an indication of how strong emotions can override our better nature. It is an argument for why people with a deep personal and emotional investment in a case should not be involved in any way with such investigations or interrogations, because their passions can cause them to commit atrocities that are beyond the pale of civilized behavior.

There is a reason why we do not allow vigilante justice. There is a reason why, if we report to the police that someone has killed or otherwise brutalized our loved ones, the police do not give us a gun and tell us to take care of it ourselves. There is a reason why in trials, any person who has any links to the case or has had a past involvement in a similar situation, is eliminated from the jury pool. It is because such people are too likely to be inflamed by our emotions to think rationally about evidence and proof and justice and law and principles.

The impersonal institutions of society, such as the police and the courts, are there to provide the dispassionate buffer that prevents us from committing atrocities arising out of our personal passions and grievances. The collective principles of morality and humanity and justice enshrined in those institutions are meant to save us from ourselves.

People are capable of advocating, let alone committing and condoning, all kinds of appalling acts when their own personal safety and well-being or that of their loved ones are at stake. A reliable staple of Hollywood films is where an enraged private individual takes the law into his or her own hands to avenge some personal wrong that the authorities cannot or do not want to deal with, and the audience invariably cheers the successful elimination of the evildoer at the end, however questionable the means used. Filmmakers are taking advantage of our natural empathetic feelings towards the victims of injustice. We are manipulated by the filmmakers into accepting torture and killing because they make sure that we, the audience, know for certain that the villain brutalized at the end is truly guilty, is really evil, and has no redeeming qualities. It would be interesting to see what would be the reaction if at the end of the film or in the pro-torture TV series 24, the righteous avenger finds that he or she has made a mistake and tortured an innocent person and we, the audience, find that we had been manipulated into cheering on a monstrous injustice.

This is what is being exploited by those who justify torture by asking us to imagine ourselves as the victims of a crime that might be prevented by torture. Notice that the people who are supporting torture repeatedly make the sweeping assumption that all the people in US custody at Guantanamo and elsewhere are horrible and dangerous people who are guilty of unspecified but presumably appalling crimes, the kind who would kill their own grandmothers for pleasure, even though this has not been established to be the case.

If we allow actions to be justified on the basis of the passions of the victims, then we are but a short step from barbarity. Take for example, Eugene Volokh, a professor of constitutional law. He cites a case where a criminal was publicly executed in Iran before a large crowd of spectators in a event that was made into a sordid spectacle, where he “was flogged 100 times before being hanged. A brother of one of his young victims stabbed him as he was being punished. The mother of another victim was asked to put the noose around his neck.”

Volokh puts himself in the position of the victims’ families and heartily approves of the barbaric way the execution was carried out, saying:

I particularly like the involvement of the victims’ relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he’d killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing – and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act – was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging. The one thing that troubles me (besides the fact that the murderer could only be killed once) is that the accomplice was sentenced to only 15 years in prison, but perhaps there’s a good explanation.

I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way.

The disturbing tone of Volokh’s comments (remember that he is a professor of constitutional law and is presumably well aware of why we have laws and constitutions) perfectly illustrates why we should keep victims of crimes out of the investigation and punishment of crimes.

Those with a strong personal and emotional stake in it are capable of the most appalling things, which is why the hypothetical of whether we might be willing to commit torture if we could save our own loved ones should not be used as a justification for the practice.

POST SCRIPT: Wretched excess

Stephen Colbert visits three restaurants where a single item on the menu costs $1,000.

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Colbert Platinum – $1,000 Dishes
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Gay Marriage

(For previous posts on torture, see here.)

Let me continue the look at the final excuse on the list put out by torture apologists, that if our own loved ones could only be saved by torture, wouldn’t we approve of it?
[Read more…]