Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Are Americans Indifferent to Torture?
The protests and condemnations of the political Left and mainstream media following the election of Donald Trump have been deafening. To a great extent, many of us may have resorted to simply rolling our eyes and shrugging our shoulders since the complaints and accusations are non-stop.
But lately I’ve noticed a more insidious activity that is intended to influence the public consciousness. Although it is promoted with a veneer of truth, it is intended to continue to tarnish America’s reputation and character. In this case, the vehicle is “proving” that Americans are becoming complacent about torture. Let me show you how subtle and sinister these accusations have become.
Last week the MSM published articles on the 2016 report of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In particular the report highlights the American people as one group that has become inured to torture. They state,
“Forty-six percent of Americans surveyed think that captured enemy combatants may be tortured to obtained important military information, and thirty-three percent think torture is part of war,” according to the ICRC poll, said Heritage fellow Cully Stimson in a statement Monday. “These are disturbing numbers because torture is a crime, and banned under domestic and international law.”
There are a couple of noteworthy points that could lead us to question the report’s validity. The countries at the top of the list that find “torture” 100 percent unacceptable are Yemen and Colombia; since both of these countries have experienced their share of torture, we can consider those experiences drive their views. It’s also interesting to note that “Palestine” is listed as a country in the report. That insertion, I believe, also suggests an inappropriate bias of the Left. To date, I have seen the MSM publish articles on this report, but without any assessment of it. This omission of reviewing the report further contributes to the defamation of the United States.
President-elect Trump’s selection of General Mattis as Defense secretary has indirectly contributed to this negative view of the US with his comments on waterboarding. As James Mitchell, a retired Air Force officer and former CIA contractor reported in his op-ed piece in the WSJ, the general reportedly advised, “Give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I do better with that.” James Mitchell doesn’t agree.
James Mitchell was contracted by the CIA in 2002 to “help put together what became its enhanced-interrogation program. He spent six years at “black sites” around the world “trying to extract lifesaving information from some of the worst people on the planet.” He also points out, “It is understandable that Gen. Mattis would say he never found waterboarding useful, because no one in the military has been authorized to waterboard a detainee … I respect Gen. Mattis, but he has never employed enhanced-interrogation techniques. I have.”
Mitchell doesn’t support the use of waterboarding except with the most hardened of criminals, especially when a planned terrorist act appears imminent. And yet we have had multiple reports and individuals condemning the use of waterboarding. Mitchell says,
Critics will point to the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report that declared enhanced interrogation didn’t work. The investigation cost $40 million and took five years, yet investigators didn’t even speak to anyone involved in the program. Anyway, a report produced by an extremely partisan congressional committee deserves skepticism to begin with.
Although I respect General Mattis and what he will bring to the Trump White House, I don’t think he realizes that he has been influenced by the mainstream media rather than relying on his own direct experience. He unintentionally has validated the ICRC report, essentially confirming their conclusions — that Americans who support waterboarding are unnecessarily supporting torture.
Most of the leaders of the Congressional armed services or intelligence committees declined to comment on the ICRC report. House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Adam Schiff, D-Calif., however, spoke out:
The United States will never go back to waterboarding or any form of torture, something I believe the vast majority of the military, intelligence community and American public would never condone,” Schiff said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “Not only is it immoral, but it is also unconstitutional, ineffective and violative of both U.S. and international law.
At a time when we will need every resource available more than ever to protect our country, government officials are determined to tie our hands by eliminating a rarely used but effective tool in information gathering. And when President-elect Trump is trying to restore America’s image and leadership in the world, these types of unchallenged smears, that make no effort to study the nuanced approaches to America’s safety and security, will not be helpful.
We will need to be vigilant concerning these kinds of distortions about the United States and its people. Those who try to undermine our reputation must be called to task. Promoting the assumption that Americans are indifferent to torture is only one way to attack this country; ruling out a reconsideration of waterboarding is foolhardy and shortsighted. My hope is that President-elect Trump will use his platform to continue to call out those who misrepresent the character and values of this country, and who also put us at risk.
Published in Politics
Many leftists would call this torture.
I do not. I call it good quick thinking.
I agree the definition IS the issue.
To me, asking “Are Americans indifferent to Torture” implies that some Americans don’t see anything wrong with beating the soles of someone’s feet so they can’t walk for a few days, hooking someone up to a car battery or using a pair of pliers or metal snips on someone. I find that implication very hard to believe and have not seen or heard of any proof that the US is doing that sort of thing or that Americans are okay with it. I have no trouble believing far too many people in Yemen and Columbia know someone who either lived through or died after such horrors and so the population is quick to respond against them.
To ask “Are Americans indifferent to people deemed high value threats being waterboarded under medical supervision, denied sleep, and subjected to loud music” generates a much less heated response. If this started happening at all to people in our circles we would be less sanguine, I’m sure, but that is just not the American experience. We do not have “enhanced interrogation” – much less a police state, radical terrorists, or revenge minded drug lords – spreading misery far and wide across the land.
I guess I just can’t shake the belief that we are basically a good people and we are doing a far better job of conducting ourselves responsibly than the vast majority of those governments who have come before. And I bet most Americans feel roughly the same.
Let me say first that I didn’t intend for this to be a long discussion on torture, on what it is or isn’t; instead, I’d hoped that we would discuss how to identify messages from the media that intentionally discredit this country, especially when it’s done subtly. I’d also hoped that we would discuss steps that could be taken that would project the image of character and leadership that the world would honor. (In a sense, I don’t care what others think of us, but if it despises us, it is difficult to build relationships.)
All that said, I’m perfectly willing to follow your direction. A number of people have asked for a definition of torture. I have read parts of John Yoo’s Memorandum (see comment#18) and agree with the sections I read. I would like to suggest a place to start for a definition, copying here parts from his 50-page memorandum:
I want to emphasize that I think waterboarding in particular should be used when #3 above is the issue. I hope this helps, or at least contributes to the discussion.
I agree, Chris. I hope you gathered that the report referenced in the OP essentially said we are indifferent to torture, and I haven’t read anyone in the MSM challenging that implication.
Regarding Susan’s original point – that anti-American elements are accusing America of becoming indifferent to torture – I’d agree that they’re trying to project that criticism, but I don’t think it’ll be successful. If anything, the American forces who are actually doing the interrogations have become more sophisticated about it.
But I think there’s a larger concern here. The interrogation of prisoners has become one flash point in the larger discussion about how we engage an enemy. We have frequently heard about the rules of engagement, and how such rules seem to defeat our soldiers more than the enemy does.
So I refer back to the story of Marcus Luttrell and Mike Murphy as an example of how American soldiers actually do carry out their missions. That squad was wiped out precisely because they refused to torture or to kill lawlessly. I mean, the speculation of what soldiers might do ought to be compared against what they actually do – and on that score, I think the American military bends over backwards.
Which other country has had a national debate about torture, and legal exploration comparable to 15th century monks teasing out some theological obscurity. This is all insane and a product of our left and their preening self righteous useful idiots. Of course we don’t like torture nor believe it effective, but why on earth would we tell the world what we will or will not do, nor tie our hands in every instance, just to convince some meaningless abstract notion of “public opinion” that we’re really good people? We’re human so the wrong people always find their way into the wrong place and professional intelligence and military folks have to ferret them out outside of public scrutiny. The risk of sadism and stupidity in the age of cell phone cameras has to be take seriously. It’s not easy but neither should the NYT have a seat at that table
I think that there is an awful lot of good and ethical discussions, but ultimately raw utilitarianism is always inescapable and must be confronted eventually.
I think the thoughtful accept that, I think the unthoughtful try to wish it away. It may not be the only dimension to the conversation, but it is the one that is always there waiting to crash the party like Reality.
This problem isn’t isolated to just difficult public policies, but to any ethical dilemma. It wouldn’t be a dilemma otherwise.
When it comes time to stack bodies like wood, we all have to be prepared to answer exactly how high we are willing to stack them in the name of this principle.
Even Jesus himself could not escape it:
There was this interesting place in the bible where Jesus is being run through the ringer over taking some grain and eating it on the Sabbath. This is pure utilitarianism. Just how many lives or even discomfort was this rule/principle worth? He answered it: Not one. The rule exists for the benefit of all of us to take a moment and reflect, not to starve.
It is a mistake to apply Geneva protections to the undeserving, to name anything uncomfortable as torture, and to confuse warfighting with law enforcement. Unless “the West” is at war with fellow western countries, Geneva does nothing to help your own soldiers. Too often, this is just moral preening by noncombatants.
Here you are wrong, and have succumbed to the propaganda. We know it is effective, else there would be no debate over discarding any semblance of it.
We discredit misinformation about Americans simply by interacting with the world. Seeing is believing.
It also helps to get off defense, as with domestic politics. Constantly rebutting accusations makes one look like a criminal on trial. Reagan and Bush took the right approach in speeches, ignoring accusations to instead praise our values and history.
It seems I disagree with most of you regarding the definition of torture, though I’m not sure most Americans would disagree with me. We should distinguish between the legal term in treaties and the vernacular word, if assessing popular opinion among voters is our goal.
My definition is that limited to means only: deliberate infliction of severe pain or distress.
By such a definition, torture can be used either cruelly or responsibly and sympathetically. It can kill, leave scars, or it can be restricted to temporary pains. It can be physical or psychological.
By this definition, waterboarding is torture… but it is a relatively humane form used precisely because it does not threaten injury or scars, and only used as a last resort to save lives in imminent danger. Like defensive war, it is a brutal option to combat evils which cannot be conquered any other way.
In other words, unlike many people, I do not assume before defining the term that all torture is necessarily evil and distinct from interrogation. It is simply the harshest class of methods and one that can be moderated.
By that definition, I think most people I know would not condemn soldiers or operatives who employ techniques like waterboarding in rare circumstances and with restraint.
Heaven forbid, but if I ever found myself in a situation where I had a kidnapper or someone with knowledge, and someone in my family’s life on the line, I would not stop at holding a gun to the person’s head. I would engage the most painful torture I could concoct.
Thing is, so would any leftist (who could work up the nerve). The problem with this talk of “torture,” is that it is almost purely political. It is used to score points and to claim a false moral high-ground. Literally none of these leftists has been in a situation where anything close to what they call torture would be necessary, nor can they even imagine it.
The reason this is a bad definition is that it attempts to use a single word to describe anything from slow removal of fingernails or bamboo growing through your backside to waterboarding or sleep deprivation. At that point, the word is no longer useful. Especially when it is being used dishonestly. A survey asks specifically about waterboarding, and someone writes an article that doesn’t mention waterboarding but includes a picture of the brazen bull… Unfortunately, this is standard operating procedure, a la Katie Curic’s anti-gun documentary.
For that reason, the right needs to be careful about precision with language.
Yup, that’s pretty much it—here’s the policy, and then there’s the ticking time bomb. And it has to be a real bomb, actually ticking.
In the case of the cop shooting, I doubt the sergeant even stopped to consider whether holding a gun to his suspect’s head would get him into trouble. If it had thought about it, he probably would’ve considered the chance of saving his friend worth the risk to his career and his case. I know I would.
Obviously, there is no policy on the books that says “in X circumstance, hold your gun to the suspect’s head and then interrogate him…” nor (IMHO) should there be. Knowing that you are violating policy is, in a way, the test—is doing this worth losing my job/career/case over?
You are absolutely right, Aaron. Talk is cheap. How we act in the world will say more about who we are–unless we have Obama representing us.
A thoughtful reflection, Aaron. In his memorandum, Yoo also made a distinction between intention and outcomes, that is, if your intention is to be cruel, that is torture; if your intention is to elicit information through severe practices, it is not. I think I have that right.
“We do this to our own troops” isn’t as helpful a measure as one might think. As Aaron points out, context matters. At the academy, they pepper-spray recruits in the eyes. It hurts like stink. The recruits aren’t being tortured.
My daughter volunteered to be Tased at the academy. She said it was the worst pain she could imagine. Tasing someone repeatedly (hooking them up to a car battery?) would definitely be torture. She wasn’t be tortured by the instructor who tased her.
If an enemy inflicted upon me the same level of pain that I experienced in childbirth, he’d definitely be torturing me. I hope it is, and shall remain, illegal to subject anyone to that deliberately…But nobody was torturing me in the labor-and-delivery room.
In all of the above cases, trust was present, and a sense of safety, choice, control and at least some predictability. Yes, my labor could’ve gone on even longer, but eventually, it would end—in a baby!—and some sort of reward awaits the recruits being pepper-sprayed or Tased, if only the relief of having survived a rite of passage plus, in my daughter’s case, bragging rights.
Thanks for verifying, Kate.
There are some intersections between how I see torture and other marginally-moral acts—the execution of criminals, for instance. It’s not that I feel particularly sentimental about the criminal (or the terrorist). If, in my cop story, the perpetrator had resisted arrest or otherwise justified lethal force, I would have shed no tears. I am glad the killer of the cops in Dallas got blown up.
But I do care a lot about the souls of cops (including prison guards) and American service members. I don’t mean their immortal souls, but the ones they have to carry around with them through life. Inflicting pain on someone in cold blood, or killing a helpless person—these are hard things to bear. And we’re talking about guys (mostly guys) who have to bear quite a lot as it is.
I would also be far more convinced that waterboarding is torture if so many reporters (including Christopher Hitchens) hadn’t undergone the process so they could declare that it is torture. There’s no physical harm inflicted; waterboarding deceives the nervous system into making a very scary perceptual error. It would be akin to someone who didn’t know what a roller coaster was riding on one blindfolded for the first time.
If 46% of Americans say they are in favor of torture then they’re in favor of torture. This isn’t some obscure medieval discussion–you just have to look at it in broad, obvious strokes and plain language. The guys who ran the Spanish Inquisition regarded water boarding as torture, as did our government until the Bush 43 administration went the Full Orwell.
It’s absurd to say that this is some kind of sneaky trick the Left is up to, conflating the noble practice of water boarding with torture. Water boarding is torture. Some people here are ready to own that, others will tell you it isn’t because “we only do it to obtain compliance”.
I’m fine with people jumping right into a cold-blooded utilitarian argument in favor of torture. What I don’t understand is all the bellyaching about December 7th and September 11th. These were not atrocities. They were merely attempts at adjusting American foreign policy.
So we use modifiers. Rather than simply “interrogation” for both interrogation by conversation alone and interrogation by painful methods like waterboarding, our officials use “enhanced interrogation” to identify the latter. It would be just as easy and accurate to distinguish between malicious torture and interrogative torture.
It’s just a word game… and it can’t be won. Like the endless replacement of terms meaning retarded or handicapped to counteract misuse, there is no way to restrict how people use words due to confusion or political manipulation. “Enhanced interrogation” techniques will be labeled differently soon enough because of the subject’s inherent controversy.
I prefer qualifying the word “torture” to “enhanced interrogation” because the latter is deliberately circumspect while the former is brutally honest. If we are going to inflict severe pain and terror in rare circumstances to save lives, then let’s plainly acknowledge it and not hide behind pleasant words like “enhanced” anything.
I agree that if Americans were asked plainly if waterboarding specifically — rather than “torture” generally — can ever be justified, many more would approve.
Are you out of your mind? Beyond good and evil? Or just trying to be sharp and provocative while making an ass of yourself?
Did your leftist America hating college kid get hold of your password or is this still in the realm of “center-right” opinion?
This is always going to be the key problem with this debate: the conflict between a legal definition versus subjective and individualized reaction to the conduct in question. Having made the decision to have an actionable criminal offense for something called “torture”, that means you need to define the elements of the crime and set the line you must cross in order to commit the crime. John Yoo’s job was to define when that line is crossed and the conduct becomes actionable. The problem is that you are necessarily going to allow other behavior that goes right up to that line, which may be shocking but not actionable.
First, I don’t feel any need to be bound by some definition of “center-right”. That term has been completely trampled over the last year anyway.
Second, you either think the laws of war should restrain us or you don’t. If you want to deal out total war, you should expect total war. And the other side’s fig leafs aren’t any less legitimate than yours.
Could you clarify this comment, Jason? Not disagreeing–just don’t understand.
I agree with this, Aaron.
Strangely enough, I would prefer “malicious torture” and “interrogative torture” to be used. Part of John Yoo’s memo explained that the purpose of waterboarding, which does not cause physical damage and the psychological trauma is short-term, is to gain information. It is not done out of a sick, psychotic need or desire to cause harm. In all this discussion, I think that difference is important.
Let’s keep it balanced, Christian. You’re welcome to disagree, but please refrain from name-calling on this site. I wasn’t even sure what Jason was saying, so I asked him to clarify. Let’s assume you might not have either.
Still don’t know what you’re saying, Jason. Could you try again?