Clarifying Torture

There is a lot of debate in the media and in our hallowed halls about torture. Unfortunately nobody is taking the time to carefully consider what they mean by that phrase. I previously observed that there is a cultural, perhaps personal, referent to which torture must be measured. What I might find to be called torture with respect to physical beatings, might just be a day in the office for an NFL lineman. Sleep deprivation for many is just punching the clock for a some of our medical students, interns, or engineers working at a startup company or project go-live. Degrading living conditions, food, and personal cleanliness standards for a North American middle class person might describe as unacceptable and torturous conditions which would have been described as 1^st class accommodations on a trans-oceanic 16^th or 17^th century person of noble birth.

So what does torture mean? What is torture? Jim Anderson, over at Decorabilia interprets my prior post as one evincing moral relativism, but I don’t think that gets it right. For it is clear, I think, from my examples above that what is defined as torture varies in reference to the person to whom the treatment is applied. This isn’t to say that torture … when defined … is right. Just that one cannot say treatment “X” is torture in all cases without reservation. Also, I think there should be a distinction made between abuse of prisoners in detention, interrogation, inflicting pain for terror, and torture. Into this mix, confusing the situation as it were, is the fact that many if not most of those we have detained are “illegal combatants” under the terms of the Geneva Convention and as such no international law of which I am aware applies.

Abuse of prisoners, again has cultural referents in that what meets standards of in western prisons may be seen as a “good living” in some parts of the world (or in historical perspective). However, there certainly are instances of clear cut abuse which surpass these questions. In all cases, I would propose that abuse of prisoners is never justified and always wrong. However, prisoner abuse is not torture, in as far as I understand the term torture. Bringing those cases into a discussion of torture, is akin to bringing up bank robbery as a crime in a discussion defining rape. Prisoner abuse is never ethical.

Torture also refers, historically, to inflicting pain (for example by Stalin and Hussein) to intimidate and terrorize. In this mode, people are beaten, abused, and worse not to interrogate (although that is often a pretext) but to terrorize. These individuals are released back into the general population as an example used to convince the “rest” to toe the line. Again, like prisoner abuse, this mode of behavior is I believe never justifiable or ethical. In the past, and in the short term, alas it is effective and is a common method employed by a states which lacks authority. They use methods of fear, torture, and intimidation to replace authority. The use of torture in this way is never ethical.

Interrogation is the application of psychological, pharmacological, and physical techniques to extract information which the subject wishes to withhold. Philosophers and others point out that there are times, to save the life of many and so on, that extreme techniques arguably are warranted. Others argue to the contrary, that such behaviour is never justified. Generally people call “torture” the point at which, for them, a line has been crossed between acceptable levels of persuasion into unacceptable. Most people it seems use their own personal perspective when defining the line crossed but not that of the subject. The discussions of torture in the halls of our government go under this category. In this definition of torture, that of crossing the line to unacceptable levels of persuasion in interrogation, we can all agree that torture is always wrong. That is obvious because it is inherent in the definition, i.e., torture is unacceptable methods of persuasion used during interrogation. The sticky point is the word “unacceptable”. Two errors are made by people trying to find the line of unacceptable. The first is that many make the mistake of interpreting the line in the context of what they would find unacceptable not the subject. The second is that none of us, not I nor any other, have set down any metric for measuring the line to place that line between unacceptable and acceptable and how close or far one is from that line.

There is confusion or perhaps intentional obfuscation, with respect to whose job it is to set the line and the acts of setting that line. The Gonzales memo was in response to an Administration query into what the law was. This in itself is value neutral. If in fact, the memo reports that the law crosses the line into what you perceive that all people might call unacceptable, then it is the role of the Legislature to change those laws … not the Administration. So, if you find the legal definition of acceptable interrogation crosses into what you would call torture … that blame should not be laid at the Administration but the Legislature. At the same time, irrespective of the law, the Administration can set guidelines for interrogation (within what the law prescribes) as it pleases. Where that level is set, or if it not set, by the Administration that is what can be laid to blame at the feet of the Executive. added I think it is entirely reasonable to ask that the Administration (and our Legislators) take a leading role in setting these guidelines or making our guidelines clear. For thinking clearly about these matters, and making our position firm is clearly a priority for the US on the world stage. However, partisan polemics may make that difficult at best, if possible at all.

Finally, Mr Anderson points out that there can and will be no peer reviewed articles studying torture. I disagree on that point. First, one can submit to peer reviewed philosophical journals discussions of metrics of measuring and determining where one is on the “axis” of discomfort that ones treatment exists. There can be discussions of methods of deciding how to determine a personal or cultural “zero” on that axis. Finally, from an the perspective of an anthropological study there is alas no shortage of abuse and torture in the broken world in which we live. A study, medical or anthropological, could certainly be done in a serious journal. What cannot be done, quite obviously, is experimentation into methods of torture in the western world with willing (paid?) subjects in a laboratory setting. However, that is obviously not the only way of coming at these questions.

Update: By the very definition of torture as I stated it … it seems very reasonable that the Administration can without equivicating state they haven’t engaged in torture. However for an opposing viewpoint, see Obsidian Wings (HT: Jason Kuznicki of Positive Liberty)