October 22, 2007
Moral Compasses, Then and Now II Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:30 AM EST Thanks to Fred Smoler for his thoughtful response to my post on torture. Mr. Smoler presents his point as though we have some serious disagreement, but I’m not sure that we actually disagree about much. We do, however, appear to be talking past each other a little bit. Mr. Smoler writes, in response to my suggestion that institutionalized torture shows “some kind of decay in the moral compass of the American government”: “The Bush administration’s insistence on loosening the definition of torture has shocked and disgusted many Americans, but I am no means certain that we nowadays wage war with much less tenderness and restraint than the World War II generation did.” That’s a fine and reasonable point, and one that I partially agree with, but I didn’t argue that our military apparatus has undergone a process of total moral degradation. My suggestion, as I quoted above, was that our greatly increased willingness to torture shows a loss of certain moral values. Mr. Smoler describes a few instances of World War II–era torture and torture-like behavior. I will note, though, that in all these examples, soldiers were acting on their own, in the field, under the stress of combat, without any evident institutional endorsement of their behavior. Are our soldiers today less ethical people than their grandparents were? I doubt it. But I think it’s obvious that the government they work for permits and encourages practices that would have been unacceptable six decades ago. A Dutch interrogator’s rough treatment of a 17-year-old German boy is distasteful, if arguably necessary. There’s a giant moral gap between his actions and those of a state that systematically tortures its prisoners. This week our President’s nominee for attorney general declined to say whether he believed waterboarding, one of the Khmer Rouge’s choice interrogation methods, constitutes torture. Last spring, a Republican candidate for President, Tom Tancredo, was asked what methods he would use to extract information about imminent terror attacks on American soil. His answer, delivered to thunderous applause, was, “I’m looking for Jack Bauer at that time, let me tell you.” Tancredo is a bit of a nut, to put it mildly, but he is not the only Jack Bauer groupie in government; Justice Scalia has also cited 24 as an inspiration for his thinking about counterterrorism law. For readers who are not 24 watchers, I’ll note that Mr. Bauer’s interrogation methods have included cutting off a diplomat’s fingers, shooting an innocent bystander in the leg, and suffocating his own brother with a plastic bag. My argument here is not that 24 is a pretty gross show. My point is that a significant and powerful portion of the American government believes the best way to question a prisoner is to assume that at any given second there may an atomic bomb counting down to detonation. This strikes me as a basically insane approach to the ethics of interrogation. In 1944 our government didn’t think every interrogation had the Battle of the Bulge riding on it. That would have been a recipe for random and pointless cruelty. Does our government’s altered reasoning constitute moral decay? I guess readers can decide for themselves. My answer is, unreservedly, yes.
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