dailogue on torture
as i’ve mentioned, one of my favorite people to debate hot-button topics with is my friend curtis, who recently wrote a guest post for me on limited government from a more conservative perspective. curtis and i went to high school together, and to the same college for undergrad, but thanks to facebook (what else?!) we have re-connected and begun sharing our opinions (as i’ll do with most anyone who will listen :-).
curtis recently posted this article from one of the former heads of the CIA on the recent publication of the “torture memos.” naturally, it touches on the usual issues - national security, what constitutes torture, privacy, accountability, etc. and naturally it sparked an exchange. i’ve been planning on posting some thoughts on torture and these memos, and i thought publishing our dailogue might be an interesting and more well-rounded way to do so. i would LOVE to hear other thoughts and opinions in the comments.
me:
whew! good article. but … i don’t think that we are necessarily safer now that torture methods have been forced more into a public domain. and i don’t think that was the point. imo, the point is to enforce accountability.
i go back and forth on this. i don’t think we will - or possibly SHOULD - ever know the lengths these agencies must go to. but authorizations of torture are serious, and undercut some of our - and humanity’s - most basic principles.
this is especially hard for me as i’m sure some of my family’s friends and my dad’s colleagues were quite up close and personal with these issues. hell, my dad probably knows much more about this than i will ever know. it hits close to home. but if it’s wrong, it’s wrong - right? isn’t that the point of trying to expose certain truths? people should not be immune from the the governing principles we as a country trust them to keep.…
i don’t think that’s politics, i think that’s an attempt to restore some morality and justice.
curtis:
Well, I think that one of the big questions here is whether or not the techniques in question qualify as torture. I don’t think that they do, ethically or (and especially) legally. As such, I think that releasing the memos amounts not to accountability, but to the compromise of national security.
There are a wide variety of opinions on the techniques in the memos, and I understand that they make many people uncomfortable and infuriated, but the real question is whether they are legal. Laws are the ways we reconcile our subjective feelings on these things, and I think that the legality of them under international and U.S. law is clear. I respect people who disagree with me on that, but I think the debate should be there, and not based on the prior assumption that the tactics were torture…
I talked with my dad (who was also in the AF, though obviously not to the high-level that yours is), and one of the things that came up in the conversation was the fact that he had been waterboarded as part of his SERE training– most all military personnel are. I asked him whether he thought the technique constituted torture to see if, from a subjective opinion, someone who had endured it believed it to be torture. He categorically said “no”. Now, I’m sure many other people disagree with that opinion, but the point is, again, that we use the law to arbitrate these disagreements, and so if we want to call all of these techniques torture then we need to explain why they fit the legal definition thereof.
In some ways, my posting of the article was a response to the side of this debate who has refused to make arguments about why the memo’s tactics torture– after all, the article was written from the prior assumption that the tactics clearly *weren’t* torture.
Even granting that there should be debate on the matter, however, doesn’t get Obama off the hook, as this is definitively *not* how we should be having it. This debate should be between the lawyers in the Obama Justice Department and the Bush Justice Department. That process and the justice system *are* accountability, and what’s more important, they are the *right kind* of accountability. We need not inform potential enemies to our tactics in order to have accountability.
me:
i haven’t talked to my dad about this issue mostly because, well, i’m sure he CAN’T, but i’m pretty sure his response would be similar to your dad’s. on the other hand, i have a friend who was a former navy seal, who was waterboarded who DOES classify it as torture.
but - more importantly - waterboarding is classified as torture under the geneva conventions, right, so we WERE breaking regulations AND torturing - to my understanding. doesn’t seem like much in that department is up for debate (although obviously this goes beyond waterboarding, that is the got-to terminology.) you can’t simply get a lawyer (or whoever) to justify breaking the law when you’ve ALREADY broken the law. ok - you SHOULDN’T be able to do that …
i agree that we should first decide if these methods ARE torture (although the conclusion there seems pretty obvious to me …) and if they are - like i said - i agree the people involved should be held accountable yes, by the justice departments, but i’m not entirely sure it shouldn’t be put before the american people. as this article states, it was something our representatives voted on and if we lose access to what these so-called representatives are representing us on, how will THEY be held accountable?
i know this argument is flawed, and as someone immersed in military culture for nearly all my life, i KNOW there’s no good answer (ARGH!!), but this is the conclusion i’ve come to, and i’ll admit, somewhat tentatively.
imo, we have used “national security” as an excuse for FAR too many atrocities, for FAR too long. that’s not to say there aren’t legitimate reasons to use it, but i’m not convinced this is one of them.
curtis:
As I understand it, the Geneva conventions only ban waterboarding and the like for high parties, which are intrinsically defined as nation-state actors. Al-Qaeda is an irregular army that specifically gives up its right to high-party protections by acting outside the Geneva conventions. Still, there are other laws governing what techniques intelligence service can use for non-state actors. Now, that doesn’t get the CIA off the hook at all (in fact, many believe that it makes them more guilty), but the legal arguments in support of “enhanced interrogation techniques” use the Geneva convention laws regarding non-state actors and U.S. law (which are deliberately mirrored by Congressional decree).
anyone else wanna jump in?! i’d love to know your opinions and thoughts …
May 01 2009 07:06 am | military and politics
September 18th, 2009 at 9:17 am
[...] of why i support closing gitmo or how i feel about torture. i’ve already explained all that here and elsewhere. i do wish to point out how absurd and offensive this conclusion is in general, and [...]