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« For Your Entertainment | Main | Battlestar Galactica Revisited » January 14, 2005Fixing the Torture MessThe longer I look at the circumstances surrounding whether or not the United States now has an official government policy regarding the use of torture to elicit information, the less I like it. There appears to be no really good answer to the question, despite the claims of both sides. Emotionally, I'd like the President to follow Andrew Sullivan's advice and fire the supervisors of the people who committed horrors like Abu Ghraib and then forcefully renounce all forms of torture. While that would in no way resolve the problems we have now, at least we could head off additional problems and prevent the situation from getting any worse. Not to mention the personal relief I'd feel from knowing that at least the President understands the problem and is working to fix it. I don't expect him to get down in the weeds and resolve the issue directly, but I do expect him to set the tone, and in this area he seems sorely lacking to me. Intellectually I know that we do capture some people who hold information that could save lives. The limits we set down for interrogation cost the lives of American soldiers and Iraqis. Conversely, as I've expressed several times, I dislike the idea of giving the government the power to torture (torture referring to physical abuse of detainees) both on ethical grounds and on restricting government power grounds. I would like to believe those who claim that torture never results in useful information, but that argument strikes me as inconsistent with what we know of the facts. Following Abu Ghraib, the government shut down many types of interrogation, and our intelligence dried up. This is probably because we clamped down on non-torture-related interrogation techniques, but if not, then if those who claim we've been systemically torturing suspects can't reasonably also claim that torture isn't effective. That doesn't mean we should use it, only that we need to understand that shutting that door has costs. I'm also curious whether or not the uncertainty over whether or not we're using torture can be used to our advantage, as I noted a few days ago. Given that we do know that if our limits are clearly laid out the enemy will use those limits to ensure we can't get information out of them, is there a way to keep the question open? Sadly, I don't believe that there is. I didn't buy into the 'Bush lied' claims and I don't know whether or not President Bush bears proximate responsibility for the abuses of captives that have surfaced since the war began. But I do know that I am not comfortable simply trusting anyone in government to be given carte blanche to not come clean about these issues. The people at the top levels of government simply have access to too much power to be trusted to use it wisely. Not because they're all bad people, but because the damage they can cause if they do abuse the power is so great. Given that, I see little choice but to continue to press the White House to come completely clean on this issue: not only what happened, but what the policies are going to be in the future.Posted at January 14, 2005 12:35 PM
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