When We Torture, We Stoop into Weakness — Effective Torture Is beside the Point — an Example Demonstrating Why, Using Saddam Hussein as a Hypothetical

© 2014 Peter Free

 

10 December 2014

 

 

Self-righteous Americans like to pretend that we are equipped to mete murder and torture out, based on our allegedly near holy instincts

 

With the release of Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program (03 December 2014) — the United States’ political right wing predictably is screaming about:

 

 

(a) the report’s alleged negative effect on national security

 

and

 

(b) the fact that torture worked, which by implication means that it was justified.

 

 

Both arguments are foolishly specious

 

The first is easy to counter by concluding that adversaries — who are already foaming at the mouth and pursuing murder as an avenue of self-expression — are unlikely to generate even more effective rabidity by being informed of something that they already knew about.

 

The second argument, about torture’s utility in our pursuing national self-defense, is equally dumb. But it takes someone capable of logical thought and geopolitical foresight to see why.

 

 

When one has to stoop to utilitarian philosophy to legitimate murder and torture . . .

 

. . . one opens oneself to opponents’ justifications for doing both on identical grounds.

 

 

To illustrate — consider a hypothetical using Saddam Hussein

 

In historical retrospect, Saddam Hussein could easily claim that many tens of thousands of Iraqi and Syrian deaths could have been avoided, and the current chaos prevented, had the United States not toppled him from power. Iraq, under his control, was a stabilizing influence in the Middle East.

 

Today, the United States is faced with apparently uncontrolled tumult in the very region that it had (stupidly) hoped to calm with our implicitly Christian and “morally superior” Iraq invasion. The resulting boil is not only likely to continue for years, but it is also almost certainly going to further exacerbate the murderous sectarian and cultural divisions that the region’s strongmen have all been suppressing. ISIL is, in large part, a creature of America’s own making.

 

Today, the United States is in the fundamentally ironic position of having to flirt under the table with our self-proclaimed enemies — Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Iran — just to keep the situation from getting even more out of hand.

 

A hypothetically resurrected Saddam Hussein could easily now argue that:

 

 

had he figured out a way to torture the right people (Americans),

 

in ways that would produce information with which to defend his stabilizing regime against being toppled,

 

he would have been morally correct to do so,

 

based on the utilitarian grounds that America’s apologists now propose.

 

“See,” he would say:

 

 

“I could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives,

 

prevented many more from being taken by Al Qaeda and ISIL,

 

partially reduced the threat of rampant terrorism to American interests,

 

and

 

my continuation in power would have prevented the same institutionalized chaos that America now feels compelled to spend ridiculous amounts of money and unnecessary blood on.”

 

 

Our American Right’s counterargument to hypothetical Saddam?

 

“He was a bad guy, and we’re not.”

 

Any ethicist will tell you that this does not qualify as a logically or morally valid rebuttal.

 

Anyone can say that their means are justified by their righteousness. Which is exactly why the Middle East is the death-dealing mess that it is, thanks primarily to the foolishly inspired American meddling that armed and let these fools loose.

 

Ergo, the formerly tortured Senator John McCain and Chairperson Senator Dianne Feinstein take the only correct position on the question of of immoral and unlawful prisoner abuse:

 

Torture is a moral abomination.

 

Engaging in torture demeans American honor.

 

Defending or hypocritically hiding past torture weakens us morally and geopolitically.

 

 

The point? — Only someone incapable of reasoned ethical thought and sound geopolitical strategy can defend the American use of torture

 

This is not a complicated intellectual or moral conundrum.

 

When we torture, we stoop into weakness. Disreputability on all counts.

 

Release of the Senate Committee’s report is the first partially decent thing that we have done on this issue. In quasi-religious terms:

 

 

Sinners cover their sins.

 

Repentants move closer to the Light, when they reveal their transgressions and resolve to control the fleshy lusts that led them there.

 

One cannot be a Christian torturer.

 

One cannot be an ethically legitimate or strategically sound American one, either.