Others have written about the fact that Lindsay Graham has his facts wrong about the efficacy of torture, relying as he has on since recanted claims by a person who did not even witness the torture.
In the same exchange with the man who actually interrogated Abu Zubaydah-the guy who got valuable information without torture- Graham asserted that torture must be effective because it’s worked for 500 years. Actually, of course it has “worked” for thousands of years, in the sense that it has elicited false confessions since the dawn of time, or at least the dawn of “civilization”. Did you ever think that a U.S. Senator would be justifying U.S. policy by implicitly citing the Spanish Inquisition? No one could have expected that. Parenthetically, by Graham’s logic, bleeding and blistering must be effective medical procedures.
Graham routinely makes much of the fact that he is a former JAG lawyer, and as a lawyer he should know that you are not supposed to make assertions without evidence. But let’s concede that torture works, if we define “working” as eliciting responses to questions. Usually those responses are the answers the interrogator wants to hear, with the truth content being entirely irrelevant. In the case of our torture, it appears that the whole point was to get just that sort of bogus information. All Cheney wanted was for one of these guys to tell him that Sadaam and Osama were in cahoots. It speaks volumes that they were obviously going to use that information to push that meme, knowing the unreliability of the source. Torture for propaganda, pure and simple.
But isn’t it about time this talk about the efficacy of torture ended? This justification is bottomed on the idea of American exceptionalism, that somehow it is okay when we do it-that we and only we are capable of making these fine moral distinctions. The law against torture presupposes that it may “work” on some occasions. Nonetheless, there are no exceptions in the law for Jack Bauer, or for anyone else.
But let’s go a step further. We’ve heard a lot about the ticking time bomb scenario-the scenario that never happens. You can come up with all kinds of scenarios that pose moral quandaries. The right insists that there may be situations in which morally dubious actions may be justified, even if those actions are illegal. (Odd how a group of people who otherwise deal in absolutes, see. e.g., abortion, stem cell, etc., get all relativistic when the subject is torture) In that case, a morally informed perpetrator should be more than willing to let his or her actions be judged by a fully informed jury of his or her peers.
There was a time when military men of honor demanded courts martial when their actions were questioned. Cheney has half stepped forward. He has insisted that he has done nothing wrong. Indeed, he has insisted that what he did was the only morally correct thing to do. But he hasn’t gone the distance. He should be demanding a court martial or its equivalent. He should be telling the absolute truth about what he did, instead of dealing in half truths and obfuscations. If he feels he can justify his criminal behavior, a courtroom is the place to do it, so long as all the evidence is available to the jury.
One Comment