Always Say Never: Torture

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“They [al Qaeda] cut off our heads. We put water on their face.”—Erich “Mancow” Muller

“I was . . . ready to prove that this [waterboarding] was a joke, and I was wrong.”—Erich “Mancow” Muller (after seven seconds of waterboarding)

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—7/4/11—In February of 2008, The Greenville News ran an op-ed piece by Carlos Luria, a retired CIA officer, who called for an unequivocal ban on torture “in all its euphemistic and sugar-coated forms.” Perhaps I had seen too many Jack Bauer episodes, but I wrote the officer at his e-mail address. “I very much enjoyed your editorial . . . . . Reading it I was reminded of a Humanities class in which I offered to play the devil’s advocate after a discussion of Machiavelli’s The Prince. I told the class to imagine that Dietrich Bonhöffer’s housekeeper in 1944 had discovered some suspicious letters and taken them to the Gestapo. Then imagine Bonhöffer under torture naming Gen. Claus von Stauffenburg as a co-conspirator. Of course, the Gestapo would have arrested the general and searched his home and, in doing so, the near-successful plot on Hitler’s life likely would have been thwarted . . . .  My question to the class was, can any regime, good or bad, ever absolutely rule out torture, abhorrent as it is? Hopeful that we can,” I signed myself, “but not certain . . . .”

Later the same day, the officer wrote back with an “unequivocal yes,” despite the “irresistible” logic of my oddly backward scenario. We can and we should ban torture, he said, and he offered the noble example of George Washington forbidding his troops from torturing British prisoners despite the redcoats’ slaughter of colonial prisoners. “There are more important things in the world than life,” the officer added. “It’s called honor; it still exists on an individual scale, but we have abandoned it as a nation.”

Realizing at last the limitations of my Nazi-Bonhöffer analogy, I replied a few days later. “I would agree with Thomas Jefferson,” I wrote: “‘It is the melancholy law of human societies to be compelled sometimes to choose great evil in order to ward off a greater evil.’” With that as my guiding principle and assuming that Jefferson would have included torture in his notion of “great evil,” I offered another scenario.

“The year is 1943, and I am a Jewish member of the French underground. We know that Hitler is coming to Paris but when and exactly how is unknown. As luck would have it, we capture a German officer who appears from his papers to be one of Hitler’s top aides. (That will teach the Schweinhund to frequent Pigalle.) Naturally, he refuses to talk, but waterboarding produces some times and places that sound plausible. Hoping he isn’t lying, we plant some bombs in the sewers of the Rue de _____ after warning the local residents. ‘Surely,’ I thought, ‘God isn’t a Nazi sympathizer.’ We guerillas could have treated the aide well and hoped for good intelligence, but meanwhile Hitler would have come and gone. Knowing that my family and friends have already gone to Auschwitz, I don’t think I can do any less to level a playing field that others have made uneven. As Frederick Buechner wrote, ‘A Christian pacifist must be willing to pick up a baseball bat if there is no other way to stop a man from savagely beating a child.’ You [Mr. Luria] state that there is nothing more important than honor, but I would urge you to think of the honor-bound young men in Syria whose parents place them in the position of killing their sisters because they have been raped and inadvertently brought dishonor to their families. I’m not advocating torture to get a confession or a recantation; this extreme measure is only justified with authority from the very highest levels in the attempt to save lives . . . .”

A day later, Mr. Luria exploded my ticking time bomb scenario and noted that al Qaeda has a “hard, fast rule: if a senior member is captured, any plans which he may have been privy to are instantly terminated.” There went my dreams of killing der Führer.

Sheepishly, I wrote back that all I wanted to say was that there are times, especially in a war, when one must put principle aside and do what’s right because there is always an exception, and this is absolute. The highest-minded policies and positions (like “no torture” and “free speech”) inevitably erode.

To my surprise, Luria agreed: “I think we must always begin with absolutes, Skip, and leave it to a neutral third party (usually the courts) to authorize rare exceptions.”

About that time, I was scheduled to teach The Prince again, and I concocted one more scenario. “A single mother puts her infant down for a nap in an urban apartment building. While the child sleeps, her mother decides to do a load of laundry and does not hear a kidnapper who picks the lock and steals her child. In a panic, the mother notifies the police who, after reviewing security film, develop multiple pictures of the kidnapper, including his car and license-plate number. A few days later, the suspect is arrested, but he refuses to tell authorities where the child is or whether the child is alive.” My question to the class was, “Would you as the parent ‘authorize’ torture in this case?”

Virtually every student in a class of 30 admitted that they would bend, fold, and mutilate this suspect to the brink of death if they could get their hands on him. I was about to join the attack when I realized that most American investigators would never let a victim join the interrogation. Instead, they would be searching the suspect’s home, car, and place of business, and examining those muddy boots, for example, with the straw stuck to the soles. Then the good cop trained in forensics would say, “Isn’t there a barn across the road from the suspect’s home, and didn’t it rain the other day? I think I hear that starving babe crying.”

I know, I watch too many CSI episodes, but had the police or the parent tortured the suspect, the child might very well be dead.

So, there are no rare exceptions after all—when it comes to torture, always say never.