Des Moines Register
12-16-07
Doak: Torture is ineffective, wrong, beneath us
Richard Doak
Every once in a while a scripture reading in church can jar a half-listener to
attention. So it was on a recent Sunday when the grisly text from a 2,160-yearold story touched on a topic in today's news: torture.
Second Maccabees tells of seven brothers and their mother who were tortured to
death, one by one, for refusing to renounce their faith.
Near death, the fourth brother told his tormentor, "It is my choice to die at the
hands of men with the God-given hope of being restored to life by him; but for
you, there will be no resurrection to life."
The fourth brother seems to be saying that torturers cannot go to heaven.
That thought, along with an instinctive repugnance of torture, ought to give
Americans pause, but it doesn't seem to.
President Bush and others who have authorized or carried out torture think what
they did is good because they were fighting evil. It's a classic case of believing
the end justifies the means.
Yet if the scripture passage is interpreted literally, then the president has
sacrificed more than we know in an effort to keep the country safe. As torturer in
chief, he has forfeited his immortal soul.
Of course, the state of the president's soul is not a fit topic for public speculation.
It's nobody's business but the president's.
As a people, though, Americans should think about the state of our national soul.
By officially sanctioning torture, we risk losing it - not because the Bible says so,
but because torture betrays our fundamental values.
It is dismaying that the outcry against torture from the public has not been
stronger. It's disgusting that most of the Republican candidates for president do
not denounce torture and get cute with words in excusing it. The notable
exception is John McCain, who actually knows something about it.
Torture can probably never be eliminated. It has been the fate of captured
enemies since hunter-gather days. Brutalities will occur on and near the
battlefield amid the rage, terror and urgency of combat. But torture can and must
be renounced as an instrument of national policy - cold, calculated torture carried
out at leisure on the whim of faceless bureaucrats.
That kind of torture is the favored instrument of regimes the United States has
spent its entire history opposing.
The founders rejected torture with a constitutional ban on cruel and unusual
punishment. A nation that believed in limited government never embraced the
idea that government should have the power to torture people - not even
enemies. By tradition and law, torture was anathema to America - until the Bush
administration panicked. Having failed to prevent 9/11, the administration was so
afraid of failing again that it decided to employ torture.
Defenders of torture claim that information obtained has saved lives, but they say
they can't reveal the details, which makes their claims suspect.
Some opponents of torture, including military experts, argue that torture is
useless because victims simply tell their torturers anything they want to hear. The
torture of some 9/11 suspects is said to have produced many false leads that
sent U.S. agents on wild goose chases.
In any case, the efficacy of torture is irrelevant. The practice should be opposed
not because it is ineffective because it is wrong.
America has always stood for something better. Indeed, America's strength
derives from being better, from being special.
When America adopts the methods of its enemies, it stops being special. It
becomes just another country, its government just another regime.
Once that happens, America ceases to set the example that has inspired
oppressed people around the globe. It no longer offers a hopeful alternative to
the extremists.
America cannot win the war on terror if it allows its government to spy on its own
citizens, to snatch people off the streets and hold them without charge or trial,
and to practice torture. If we allow those things, we will have already lost.
We will have lost our national soul.
RICHARD DOAK is a retired Register editor and columnist and a lecturer in
journalism at Iowa State University.