Temporizing on Torture

In an article in the NYTimes that follows the same tenor as thousands of articles and other kinds of statements on the same subject, we find the following conjecture:

Even the most exacting truth commission may have a hard time determing for certain whether brutal interrogations conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency helped keep the country safe.

That's a great way to open your essay when you''re trying to sound reasonable and responsible, especially when your piece is going to appear in an organ as prestigious as the NY Times.  The trouble, though, is that the sentiment expressed is actually an extremely moot point, and trying to be sweetly reasonable and "balanced" on this subject actually does a big disservice to all. 

 The plain fact is that here there is no balance, and torture is such a hideous and unspeakable act that there is never a good reason -- never, ever! --to resort to it.  And that holds true even for the often nebulous business of "keeping the country safe," and regardless of what the results of questioning by means of torture may or may not be.

How can it really be known how effective the results were?  It's on the bogus side to accept as certainties events that haven't happened.  The hopeful terrorists prefer to follow their own timetables, not those that interrogators might presume to set up for them,  and the terrorists are still around, and will always be around, because to act in that manner is an integral part of the fanatic area in the human  genome. 

The article speaks of setting up "truth commissions" to get to the bottom of what the CIA did.

That sounds like just the sort of thing that governments routinely resort to when they really don't have the heart or the resolve to do something decisive.

All that needs to be known is something that ought already to have been known to every American citizen, and that is that torture is outright WRONG, period, and on numerous levels, and the only reliable information it provides is that humans really are a supremely despicable species whenever they can't resist the temptation to reduce other beings -- human and otherwise -- to so much helplessness and to inflict such unbearable pain on them, for little more reason than that they simply can.

People who would excuse the use of torture must not have nearly enough mental power -- or are too inexcusably slothful -- to be able to imagine how it must feel to be tortured.  Or maybe it's because they see  cases of people who have been tortured yet are apparently still walking around and talking as well as those who have never been so unlucky.  It's like cities like Hiroshima, Dresden, Tokyo, and many others that have been bombed almost to oblivion and yet today they're functioning as if nothing terrible had happened there at all, right?  

But that's no sort of a justification.   The point is that the act of torturing is so grossly wrong in and of itself that it ought to be excised from the whole range of human behavior, if that is at all possible. It is so thoroughly wrong, in fact, that, unlike most issues, it doesn't even have two sides that make it worthy of debate.  Yet the fact that people can look on the subject with so much detachment and look for reasons to justify it strikes me as showing that more damage has occurred to our inner fiber than any terrorist strike, by itself, could possibly have accomplished. 

  It follows then, as unacceptable as it sounds, that we are much better off taking our chances on being hit by terrorists than by we are by choosing torture to try to root them out. 

Besides, people look in all the wrong places for true terror.

For real terror, for instance, take any of the thousands of different kinds of physical illnesses waiting to impair the lives and the comfort of us all, or take any badly led police force, or take any regressive politician whose main platform is bias and ignorance, or take those real tigers that everybody is busy swinging by their tails while being careful  to think about the eventual consequences as little as possible, nuclear power plants.