Friday, November 02, 2007
Chuck Schumer on Torture
As seen on Instapundit:
There are times when we all get in high dudgeon. We ought to be reasonable about this... I think there are probably very few people in this room -- or in America -- who would say that torture should never, ever be used, particularly if thousands of lives are at stake.Audio clips here and here.
Take the hypothetical: if we knew that there was a nuclear bomb, hidden in an American city, and we believed that some kind of torture -- fairly severe, maybe -- would give us a chance of finding that bomb before it went off -- my guess is, most Americans and most Senators -- maybe all -- would say, "do what you have to do".
So it's easy to sit back in the armchair and say that torture can never be used. But when you're in the foxhole, it's a very different deal. And I respect, I think we all respect, the fact that the President's in the foxhole every day, so he can hardly be blamed for asking you, or his White House counsel, or the Department of Defense, to figure out when it comes to torture, what the law allows and when the law allows it, and what there is permission to do.
[. . .]
We certainly don't want torture to be used willy-nilly, we don't... [at the] whim of a lieutenant to say, 'Hey, there's security at stake here'... we should use it, but we also don't want the situation like I mentioned in Chicago to preclude it.
But it's gotta be done carefully. And if it's public -- and if there's debate -- you can be sure it'll be careful. That's what the founding fathers in their wisdom said.
According to the Drudge Report, this was recorded during the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Terror Policy: Tuesday, June 8, 2004.
Perhaps Sen. Schumer has seen fit to change his mind since then. But perhaps not -- the issue today, of course, is the confirmation of Michael Mukasey as Attorney General, in spite of his refusal (thus far) to condemn the practice of 'waterboarding'. And, according to MSNBC, "Sen. Schumer has been uncharacteristically quiet on this issue, refusing to comment on Mukasey's answer on waterboarding."
(For the record: my military background does not include any experience with waterboarding. I know about it only what I read in the newspapers. I welcome comments from those with more experience, if either of my readers have it.)
I've written about torture before (here and here, for example), and my opinions have not changed. Yes, torture is abhorrent, and must never be used casually. Any soldier, or policeman, or intelligence operative, who feels that torture is absolutely necessary to get the job done, should know that he or she will have to answer for it -- and that unnecessary torture will be punished, harshly, by the law.
But that is not to say that necessary torture does not exist. Nor is it reasonable to declare, in hearing of our enemies, that we will never torture them. (What have they to fear from interrogation, in that case? Why should anyone ever tell us anything?)
My hat's off to Sen. Schumer for having the guts to tell it like it is, bluntly, without mincing words. (Note that he did not speak of waterboarding specifically; he spoke of torture, in general. I'll leave for another day the question of whether or not waterboarding constitutes torture or not; others can discuss this far better than I can.)
That a Democratic Senator said this, about an unpopular Republican President, in an election year, is all the more to be commended.
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Dean Barnett on Torture
Dean Barnett, once known primarily for Soxblog and now a regular guest-blogger at HughHewitt.com, has published a folksy FAQ on the subject of "torture", a topic that's gotten a lot of press lately.
I read it with interest... and found very little to disagree with:
Let me say what I do support: When it comes to high value targets in the war on terror, wannabe evil-doers who possess or might possess important information, I support any measures necessary to extract that information.Indeed.
It seems to me that there are two primary kinds of objections to this that we hear these days. One: aren't you afraid that such evil techniques might be used against American citizens, for trivial reasons or no reasons whatsoever? (Yes, I do worry about that. But I worry more about terrorists with immediate plans to kill large numbers of people. It's a long-standing dilemma for intelligence personnel, and it comes up a lot more often than you might think: you have a captive, and he knows something about an attack that hasn't happened yet. He doesn't want to talk about it -- but if he can be persuaded to talk, a great many lives may be saved. Given that the captive is, at minimum, a terror sympathizer and abetter, if not an actual perpetrator, I don't have many qualms about getting him to talk -- particularly if it can be done without inflicting serious damage. More on that in a minute.)
The second objection to this sort of thing rests on what the guys at Power Line have been calling "terrorist's rights". And, as I indicated above, I'm not a big fan of terrorist's rights. Terrorists, remember, are the people who assert the "right" to blow up airliners full of people; who hide in civilian populations, callously risking civilian casualties so that their victims can be made to feel guilty for fighting back; who boast about violating every rule of civilized behavior known. And yet, when they are arrested or detained, they scream loudly about the violation of their civil liberties -- or get others to scream loudly on their behalf.
No, I don't like torture; who does? But I believe there are things worse than torture... and sometimes, a person has to make a choice, and take responsibility for the consequences of that choice.
I don't want hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands, to die in a terrorist attack, when we could have prevented it using information within our grasp. On the other hand, I also don't want our troops to torture prisoners routinely; or, perhaps more importantly, I don't want our troops -- or anyone! -- to be immune from the consequences of what they do.
Labels: ethics, military matters, torture
Friday, January 07, 2005
On Terror and Torture
There seems to be a lot of discussion on these two topics these days, and on the connection between them.
I'm not referring to terrorists who use torture; that gets almost no press at all. But a lot of people are concerned about Western powers, particularly the United States, using torture when dealing with terrorists. This is as it should be -- torture is loathsome to all civilized human beings, and with troops in the field and interrogations taking place, it's certainly pertinent to discuss it.
On the other hand, many loathsome things can occasionally be necessary. (Is a surgeon ever happy when a limb must be amputated?) The true question, to my mind, is not whether torture is, or is not, A Bad Thing; we seem to be in agreement on that. Rather, we should be asking if torture is warranted, on an extremely unusual basis, under current circumstances.
Of course, that's exactly what Alberto Gonzales was driving at, in the now-infamous consultations with the Justice Department over torture.
Personally, my opinions on the matter of torture are complicated (and apparently, I'm not alone in this). I recognize that torture is occasionally necessary, or is perceived as necessary by people on the spot, in the interests of protecting innocent lives. (This is what the Israelis call the "ticking bomb" scenario: we have unspecific intelligence about a major terrorist attack being planned, we have someone in our hands who should be able to tell us a lot more about the attack, and he's not talking. With dozens or hundreds of innocent lives at stake, how far are we willing to go, with one decidedly not-innocent person, to stop that attack?) At the same time, torture should never be the standard policy of the United States; that's not who we are, and that's not who we want to be.
My feeling is that definitions of torture should be left deliberately non-specific. (Some people have gone to absurd lengths, defining almost anything as torture; I'd prefer the opposite tack.) Soldiers in the field should be made to understand that, no, torture is not condoned as a policy... but that, if it achieves definite results, specific instances can be ignored. (Cross the line, on the other hand, and expect the military legal system to land on you like a ton of bricks.)
Where should that line be? As a first approximation, I'd suggest that torture by American troops, when absolutely necessary, should cause no permanent damage. I have no problem with terrorists being led to believe that they're about to die, slowly and painfully, if it will get them to talk. (I would hope that we never follow through with that.)
Of course, if we make it a stated policy that we will threaten prisoners with death, but never actually execute them, then the policy makes no sense. Prisoners will know that they have nothing to fear. Steven den Beste had a lot to say on this subject. (He takes the point further, and argues that, in terms of what we tell the world we're willing and unwilling to do, nothing should be beyond the pale. Yes, we might consider beheading one of your sheiks, if you keep beheading our civilians. Yes, we might just nuke Teheran, or even Mecca, if you set off a nuke in one of our cities. That's called "deterrent", and goes to the heart of threatening to do things that you don't actually want to do.)
Would I want to suffer through "water-boarding", in which a person is made to believe that he will drown? Certainly not. But I don't see how this causes permanent damage, regardless of what Ted Kennedy says; ditto for sleep deprivation, bad food, loud music, and so forth. All of these things hurt, and for all of them, the hurt will go away.
Bottom line: under extreme circumstances, you sometimes have to do things that you wouldn't dream of doing every day. You must fight hard against the extreme circumstances setting a precedent -- but fear of a precedent should not prevent you from doing what must be done, when the crisis is upon you.
As you might expect, Instapundit (aka The Blogfather) has an excellent round-up on the subject.
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
UPDATE: A comment, left on a post about torture at the Belmont Club, seems to me worth preserving:
I'll give an analogy-- there's assisted suicide in the United States, but because it's illegal in almost every State, it's secret, limited, and reserved mostly for the most extreme cases where the doctor has to weigh many factors including that of losing his license and perhaps going to jail.'Hypocrisy is sometimes the best of bad choices'. I'm going to have to remember that.
On the other hand, you have the Netherlands, where assisted suicide is completely legal, it has moved on to euthanasia, and the numbers keep going up and you have a coarsening of spirit where economic reasons are motivating suggestions that patients take the easy way out -- easy for their families and for the health-care system.
I see torture in a similar context. If it's legal, it will get used more and more, but just because it's illegal doesn't mean that it should go away. Sometimes laws shouldn't reach certain places and hypocrisy is the best of bad choices. The 'Rule of Reason,' which cops use to not ticket speeders who are going 56 mph in a 55 mph zone, should work with torture laws as well.
Labels: torture
