Road to Hell Is Paved With Legalized Torture

Re “Painful Moral Questions,” Commentary, April 17: Alan Dershowitz again attempts to launch a national debate on the “justified” use of torture, using a recent German kidnapping case as an example. The Frankfurt chief of police formally authorized the torture of the suspect to locate the victim. The threat of pain the kidnapper “had never before experienced” prompted a confession and directions to the victim, who was found dead.

Aside from the egregious breach of ethics -- bad methods used to achieve good ends -- the principal flaws in the argument are the fantasies that the authorities will always torture the right person, that mistakes will never be made and that the tortured individual will always be in possession of the desired information that sufficient “persuasion” will extract. History shows none of these assumptions to be reliable.

There are many good reasons why we, as a culture, have decided that institutionalized torture will not be used to elicit confessions and information, not the least being that torture as a device for eliciting truth does not work. Too often the “pressure” continues until the authorities hear what they want to hear, which is not necessarily the truth. That torture is being applied to supposed “terrorists” in the name of freedom, under the supervision and direction of American authorities, is more evidence that we are sliding down the slippery slope toward fascism. Truly, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

David Alexander

Garden Grove

*

Is Dershowitz really suggesting that Americans hold a “debate” over whether state-sponsored torture has a place in our society? Our government has already compromised the ideals of this great nation by transporting suspects to other countries for the sole purpose of extracting information through torture.

That these actions have occurred without public outcry just reflects how far we have fallen from our moral high ground since 9/11. Wasn’t torture one of the accusations made against Saddam Hussein to justify this war?

Some say Americans haven’t been asked to make any sacrifices in response to the “war on terror.” Sadly, we seem to be sacrificing more than we ever thought possible.

Nancy Elam Squires

Pasadena