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January 10, 2005

Torture: Words Have Meaning

With the nomination of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General comes a new excuse to talk about everyone’s favorite subject: torture. Gonzales wrote some memos arguing that the President had the right to order the use of torture against terrorists, and the Democrats are attempting to use that advice as a reason to scuttle his nomination and deal the President a political setback. It’s an easy target: in the abstract, who wants to defend torture? It’s an abhorrent practice that yields information of questionable value, since a man in pain is likely to say whatever he must in order to get the pain to stop.

Against that abstract stand questions that are just a bit more complex. At least according to this article, the techniques authorized by the administration to extract information from terrorists sound a very long ways away from torture. When I hear someone talk about torture, I think of someone inflicting physical damage on a captive to extract information. I suspect I’m not alone in that. And if it was known the Bush administration had authorized such techniques, I suspect we wouldn’t even be having this conversation, because Kerry would have crushed him in November and President Bush might well be facing criminal charges. But that isn’t what was authorized, as Ms. Mac Donald documents.

As is so often the case, imprecise use of terminology is leading to the devaluing of language. Democrats rail against President Bush authorizing torture and it gains traction because the average person doesn’t condone torture. But when you actually look at the minor moves the administration did make towards harsher interrogation techniques (steps that have not only been cancelled, but wholly reversed to a point where we are gaining little to no actionable intelligence from captives now), many people are going to come to the conclusion that this isn’t torture. This undermines the credibility of the Democrats, and it creates the risk of failing to find real problems that may not yet have been uncovered.

I am not aware of any evidence to date that the Bush administration condoned any real torture. That does not mean that such evidence does not exist, nor that the administration did not, in fact, condone torture that has yet to be exposed. If we assume that such evidence does exist, let’s consider what may happen if the current debate plays out before the real evidence surfaces: the Democrats will lose this debate, because what they can prove was authorized by the administration fails to rise to the threshold of torture for a majority of Americans. Now they come across real evidence of torture a few months later and try to bring it to light. How much more difficult will it be for them to bring out evidence of real torture when they so debased the term earlier in hopes of gaining political advantage? I would hope that such evidence would eventually be allowed to stand on its own, but it’s possible the Democrats could be placing themselves in a position akin to that of Chicken Little, unable to get out a real warning thanks to too many false alarms.

Torture is too vile a practice to be debased for political advantage. If the Democrats want to bring down Gonzales’ nomination, better for them to focus on his legal advice claiming the President wasn’t bound by laws against torture: if that’s not true, Gonzales isn’t a good choice to be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. If it is true (and I certainly hope that it isn’t), then this would be an excellent opportunity to fix that problem.