Torture, handled lightly

Whether the United States goes to war with Iraq this month or next, whether Osama bin Laden is run to ground today or next year, the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks already have won a significant victory -- in the American news media.

Today, in a fashion unthinkable before the atrocities in New York and at the Pentagon, leading U.S. news organizations routinely report the torture of captured terrorists by U.S. authorities and dispassionately weigh the pros and cons of still more savage forms of coercion. Suddenly, it’s as if the rack -- or its postindustrial equivalent -- were just another policy option, rather like loosening clean water standards or easing the tax on dividends.

In the days since the March 1 capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader who allegedly directed the Sept. 11 conspiracy and other terrorist attacks on U.S. citizens, this new hard-eyed, tough-guy journalism has crested like a foul wave.

CNN and AOL even polled their audiences on whether they believed that Mohammed should be tortured into telling whatever he knows. More than half the respondents agreed that his interrogators ought to get out the thumbscrews. That’s up from about a third who approved torture in the immediate aftermath of Sept.11.

It might be useful to ask what role the major media’s matter-of-fact reporting on this question has played in this coarsening of the civic conversation and the concurrent deadening of the popular conscience.

In the days after Mohammed’s apprehension, for example, the Wall Street Journal quoted a “senior” federal law enforcement official who smugly observed, “There’s a reason why [Mohammed] isn’t going to be near a place where he has Miranda rights or the equivalent. You go to some other country that’ll let you pistol-whip this guy.”

Really?

Putting aside the fact that the United States signed an international convention barring such transfers, might someone ask: When these terrorists are dealt with -- as they will be --which other potentially dangerous or merely inconvenient bad guys (like Latin American drug kingpins) will be dealt with out of sight, beyond the reach of such irksome impediments as moral or legal rights?

The Washington Times didn’t have to rely on an unnamed source. It published an op-ed piece by Jack Wheeler, president of the Freedom Research Institute, that approvingly recalled how, in 1995, state police in the Philippines tortured a captured Al Qaeda agent “the old-fashioned way, right out of the movies with putting out cigarettes on his testicles, breaking his ribs, the whole brutal nine yards. It took two weeks and finally he broke, revealing a plot to hijack 11 airliners.... The ethics of torturing [Mohammed] should not be an issue. As a practical matter, the question is: How to torture him in such a way that it takes hours, not days or weeks, for him to break.”

Last Sunday, a New York Times story adjudged that Mohammed’s “detention also presents a tactical and moral challenge when it comes to the interrogation techniques used to obtain vital information.” The story quoted another of these “senior administration officials” as saying that while Mohammed would not be physically tortured, he would be deprived of sleep, light, food, water, clothing and medical attention. U.S. officials, the Times reported, “acknowledged that such techniques were recently applied as part of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the highest-ranking Qaeda operative in custody until the capture of Mohammed. Painkillers were withheld from Zubaydah, who was shot several times during his capture in Pakistan.”

This sophist’s distinction between “hard torture” and what has come to be called “torture lite” is but one of the moral contortions required to pursue this line of thinking.

In such a context, it seems somehow tiresome to remind people that both variants of coercion are forbidden not only by decency, but also by international treaties and conventions to which the United State is a signatory. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that questioning continuously conducted for 36 hours is inherently coercive.

But nowhere does the news media’s new willingness to mainstream torture become more chilling than when it ventures into the legal realm. Take this exchange between CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer and Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz immediately after Mohammed’s capture:

Blitzer: “Alan Dershowitz, a lot of our viewers will be surprised to hear that you think there are right times for torture. Is this one of those moments?”

Dershowitz: “I don’t think so. This is not the ticking-bomb terrorist case.... Of course, the difficult question is the chicken-egg question: We won’t know if he is a ticking-bomb terrorist unless he provides us information, and he’s not likely to provide information unless we use certain extreme measures. My basic point, though, is we should never under any circumstances allow low-level people to administer torture. If torture is going to be administered as a last resort in the ticking-bomb case, to save enormous numbers of lives, it ought to be done openly, with accountability, with approval by the president of the United States or by a Supreme Court justice.”

Blitzer: “Alan, how do you know he doesn’t have that kind of ticking-bomb information right now, that there’s some plot against New York or Washington that he was involved in and there’s a time sensitivity? If you knew that, if you suspected that, you would say, ‘Get the president to authorize torture.’ ”

Dershowitz: “We, we don’t know, and that’s why [we could use] a torture warrant, which puts a heavy burden on the government to demonstrate by factual evidence the necessity to administer this horrible, horrible technique of torture. I would talk about nonlethal torture, say a sterilized needle underneath the nail.... I think we would want to do it with accountability and openly and not adopt the way of the hypocrite.”

Perish the thought! The only thing worse than hypocritical torture would be a nasty infection from an unsterilized needle.

As we have been endlessly reminded by all sorts of tough-minded commentators since Sept. 11, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. Even Aquinas, as subtle and nuanced a moral reasoner as the Western tradition has produced, reluctantly admitted that “necessity knows no law.”

But the standard proposed in the Blitzer-Dershowitz dialogue reflects the kind of thinking C. Wright Mills called “crackpot realism.” The notion of due process it proposes is precisely that of the Inquisition, where the prisoner always was shown the instruments of torture and given every opportunity to recant the errors before “certain extreme measures” were reluctantly applied for the common good.

And what sort of judge might decide whether the government had met the evidentiary test for one of Dershowitz’s torture warrants? Last fall, the New Republic published a piece on the topic by Richard Posner, who sits on the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. “If the stakes are high enough, torture is permissible,” Posner wrote. “No one who doubts that this is the case should be in a position of responsibility.” As the recent record shows, Judge Posner’s standard already prevails in much of the American press, which -- like the terrorists -- is now free of doubts.