It is widely accepted that "a fate worse than death" exists. Indeed, people suffering from painful terminal illness regularly beg to be "put out of their misery" and commit suicide. Questions of "Did she suffer?" attend normal deaths, and we are comforted to hear that a person died peacefully.
What is this fate worse than death, and why is our government in the business of inflicting it on people?
To be tortured is almost by definition the worst fate that can befall a person. This view permeates literature: look at Dante's circles of hell in the Inferno, where spirits are given infinitely creative tortures to suffer. It also permeates the popular imagination in America, where serial killers are looked upon with a mixture of awe and revulsion, and the more disgusting their methods of torture or depravity, the more popular their stories become. The last decade has seen a rise in movies depicting gruesome scenes of torture, from Pulp Fiction to Sin City to Saw. It seems safe to say that America views torture with a mixture of revulsion and fascination.
This mixed reaction to torture probably has paved the way for the condoning of torture as officially-sanctioned practice. From beatings, to suffocation and waterboarding, to restraint in painful positions, to sleep deprivation, to ice-cold water, to force-feeding, to sexual abuse, to religious and psychological abuse, to sensory deprivation -- the array of methods of torture used by American officials has become wide. (See this torture manual allegedly used by the CIA).
It is my opinion that the open practice of torture by the American government is the most serious political development in the last decade, and that the American public's acceptance of it demonstrates a profound shift in morality.
Let me restate: torture is the worst fate that can befall a human being (or animal for that matter). Children who inflict pain on animals are viewed as psychopaths. People who inflict pain on others are viewed as sadists. Serial killers who torture their victims are viewed as demonic.
Yet our government tortures people, and the American public accepts it. Torture has even made its way as an acceptable practice into mainstream television and cinema. Witness the television show 24, in which, in the first season, the hero Jack Bauer threatens to torture a suspect by shoving a towel down his throat. He also handcuffs a double agent to a desk, and while threatening to hurt her, threatens to bring her young son in. It is left opaque what his intention is, and later it is revealed that he simply wishes to shame her, to expose her in this arrested, humiliated position to her formerly admiring son. But until this is revealed, my impression was that he was going to torture the son in front of the mother. (For more on 24's glorification of torture, see this Progressive article, this Ethics Scoreboard article, and this In These Times article).
Just fiction? This has already been done at Abu Ghraib, that torture chamber used by Saddam and then used by the Americans. The same prison in which Saddam allegedly fed his political opponents into tree shredders was later used by American soldiers to rape and torture children in front of their parents. Prisoners were beaten to death. Photographic, video, and sound recording evidence exists for those Republicans or members of the American military who are too stubborn to accept reality and make excuses for every new abuse that comes to light (I know people like this personally).
That this worst of all actions, this most Satanic of all deeds, can be official American government policy is, to me, the worst atrocity in our nation's history. While our country has lived through many dark hours, through many horrible, seemingly endless misdeeds, from the extermination of the Native Americans to slavery to lynching and persecution, at least through the 230 years of our nation's existence we have held up human rights -- the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- as our creed, our motto, our reason for being. The right to habeus corpus, in existence since at least 1215, is now gone. The right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, if that phrase has any meaning, is now gone as well. Our government openly practices torture, and the American public supports it.
People who support torture would argue that torture has realistic goals in mind. The "ticking time bomb" scenario says that a person is known, without doubt, to possess a secret that will save a million people from imminent death and destruction. The utilitarian argument is that harming one person pales in comparison to watching a million people die. To make it even clearer, what if the "death and destruction" were not just death, but torture? What if the million people were to be tortured as badly as possible if the single person, the possessor of the secret, were not tortured? In this case, I still do not think that I personally would torture the person, or even that I would order the person to be tortured. I do not view things in a strictly utilitarian way; I have some absolutes, and one of them is that torture is forbidden.
However, those people who would be swayed by such an extreme example seem to use that extreme example to justify many less extreme, more realistic scenarios. For instance, the inmates in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib seem to be tortured as a matter of course, simply in an attempt to extract as much information as possible from them. No "ticking time bomb" scenario exists in this case -- it is simply preventive maintenance, a "fishing expedition" to see if there are any ticking time bombs the torturers did not know about. If we allow such fishing expeditions, then how is it that torture is not a more institutionalized practice in America? Should we not torture all criminals to extract as much information about future crimes as possible? The police could extract confessions and gather names of further suspects to interrogate.
Torture is a perfect example of a slippery slope: once we admit it as an acceptable practice, it becomes difficult to delineate its acceptable bounds of practice. Should we only use it when we are absolutely certain that the person to be tortured has the information we require? How can we be absolutely certain? It seems that we never can, and thus we are always dealing with less than perfect certainty. It seems to be a judgement call on the part of the authorities. However, the difference is that no fair trial occurs, so there is no opportunity for the defendant to hear the evidence against him and respond to it. By allowing authorities to bypass the entire judicial process, we are ensuring that many innocent people are tortured.
If we think this is evil, then it is up to us to do something about it. We are the sovereign citizens of the democracy. With photographic evidence, with repeated stories coming to light, with internal documentation coming to light through the efforts of Seymour Hersch, we cannot plead ignorance. The torture is ongoing. Guantanamo Bay just enjoyed its fifth anniversary today, and on Democracy Now it was reported that 92% of the inmates there are thought to be completely innocent. Not a single conviction has been reached; little if any motion toward trial is evident. Some inmates are widely known to be completely innocent, yet nothing is done. It reminds me of the Dreyfus affair portrayed in the biographic film Zola, about the author Emile Zola's public protest of the French government's wrongful imprisonment of a political prisoner in a penal colony.
To change America's policy on torture, we must change Americans' attitudes toward torture. We must publicize what it means to torture somebody and compare our government's actions behind closed doors to the actions of a serial killer, a sadist, a child torturing animals (like George W. Bush did as a child). We must ask, publicly, how this evil behavior upholds human rights, basic human decency, and the rule of law we are supposedly trying to spread. Saddam Hussein was recently hung for ordering the murder of political opponents. The world hates him for these and many other murders, but the world is probably more horrified of him for the torture he inflicted upon his victims. The sad fact is that America has adopted the same tactics in opposing its political opponents. As citizens in a democracy, if we condone this, then we are just as guilty as Saddam Hussein of crimes against humanity.
As Henry David Thoreau said, "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." Let us act, then, in civil disobedience; let us not fear prison; let us wake our country to the evil it has become.