March 18, 2007
Torture, in the Sixteenth Century and Today Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:00 PM EST John Steele Gordon suspects that “everyone talks when tortured. . . . If it’s a confession to a heinous crime that’s wanted, regardless of the truth, then confession is what is produced. If it’s truth that’s wanted, however, then truth is what is forthcoming. So torture is worthless as an instrument of justice, but very efficacious when it comes to intelligence gathering. Certainly Sir Francis Walsingham found it useful in protecting Queen Elizabeth from Catholic conspirators. And the Elizabethan Jesuits, et al., were a bunch of boy scouts compared to our enemies today, as revealed in the blood-chilling statements made the other day by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. I hate to put in a good word for torture, but if the torture of someone who is proud to have held Daniel Pearl’s severed head in his hands can save a planeload or a city of innocents, then, alas, so be it.” I am not sure that Sir Francis Walsingham’s methods are necessarily the best ones for us. For example, the regime he successfully defended had priests drawn and quartered; the naval expansion that preserved Protestantism and liberty was in part financed through the slave trade; and the regime executed, generally under torture, some 300 Catholics. Scaling this up, the equivalent would be Bush and Cheney killing something like 25,000 American Muslim citizens, on the grounds that their religious convictions were sufficient proxy for a propensity to commit treason. In the case of torture, one of my difficulties with John Steele Gordon’s position is that while many people are willing to countenance the torture of a sadistic murderer to save a city, we very rarely if ever know in advance that the person about to be tortured is such a person, in possession of such knowledge. In the case of the people who have to date been tortured in the course of the War or Terror, it is not clear that any would have met this test. Some may have been sadistic murderers, but to the best of my knowledge none have met the ticking-bomb test, i.e., been in possession of knowledge of an imminent planned mass killing of innocents, one that could only be averted via the extraction of information through torture. In terms of what measures may be necessary to avert catastrophic outcomes, it is worth noting that the British did not torture German spies caught during the Second World War. The British were not, at that time, particularly squeamish—those were the days when the Royal Air Force launched area attacks on German civilians—but they did draw the line at torture.
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