killing dragons, torturing terrorists (revised)

A simple yet fundamental question presents itself under the rubric of “rules of war.” Can it ever be morally rightful, can it ever be accepted as legitimate, to execute a dragon on sight, without first attempting to inquire as to whether its intentions toward humans are peaceful; whether it means no harm; or at least whether it can be captured and caged without posing an unacceptably grave threat?

The question surely answers itself. We know, all of us, that there is no such thing as a peaceful or well-intentioned or harmless dragon; such exists only in the fantasies of pacifists and other hopeless idealists, who always wind up doing more harm than good in the name of their “principles.” Dragons are, without exception, mortal enemies of humankind; anyone who attempted to “establish communication” with one would be incinerated before the first word was out of her mouth. Only nervous nellies and girlie-boys refuse to face this simple truth.

There is, to be sure, one problem with the argument I have just made. There are no dragons; never have been. Ils n’existent pas. But then why, an impatient reader might be demanding, have I just been arguing about non-existent dragons in an essay that is supposed to be about torture. What can the two things possibly have to do with each other?

Actually, everything.

Let us consider three putative “enemies:” dragons, aliens who abduct humans into their spaceships, and terrorists who will cause massive destruction if they are not tortured into a timely revelation of their nefarious schemes. These all have one crucial thing in common: never in recorded history has any one of them been known to exist.

To be fair, historically torturers are not totally without their accomplishments. In perhaps the most well-known instance, the Gestapo captured two ill-trained British spies and tortured them into revealing their network, which it then rolled up. And there may have been other instances in occupied Europe in which the Gestapo successfully tortured spies and resistants at some cost to their colleagues.

And because of these signal successes, Nazi Germany was finally able to...destroy the French Resistance; repel the Normandy landings; win World War II...
...well, no. Maybe kill a few dozen more people than it would have killed anyway.

Wow! Glory be. Praise Allah.

The intellectual handmaidens of torture–John Yoo, Alan Dershowitz, the cynical utilitarian Judge Richard Posner–will instantly spot the flaw in this argument and leap into the breach: they only mean to justify torture that will prevent “mass murder,” not be its accomplice. Except, unfortunately, that is not what they are about. Can they really believe, e.g., that Mohammed Atta, had he been picked up in New Hampshire and tortured (in the real Gestapo way, not the timid water-boarding and fingernail-pulling that our heroes advocate), would have revealed the destination at which he fully intended to blow himself to bits an hour later? That a suicide bomber is afraid of pain? That a fanatical terrorist who intends, say, to detonate a nuclear weapon in New York City will be sitting peacefully in Philadelphia waiting to make this happen? After having sent a detailed map of his plans, complete with maps and time-tables, to his colleagues in Afghanistan just in case they are captured, perhaps? This is all the most total nonsense, of course. The discourse of torture has nothing to do with Judge Posner’s ridiculous calculations of cost and benefit. There is something much larger at stake: an attempt to destroy moral limits in the name of naked (American) power. Nothing less.

And the attempt is succeeding. Critics of the torture complex, ignored by the mainstream mass media, play catch-up with the fait accompli and its spokesmen. At best, we get “both sides of the debate" (see, e.g., Sanford Levinson’s Torture: a Collection), letting us know that we're already living in a morally degenerate society. It might as well be a place where Holocaust deniers are not only granted equal time and a polite hearing, but set the tone of the discussion. There is no “other side.” (I remember being told of a Rotary Club meeting at which, having listened to a presentation about the nature and extent of wife-beating, a man in the audience asked if they were going “to hear the other side.”) The argument “for” torture illustrates only the depths to which persons of higher than average accomplishments–not just professors, judges, and legal bureaucrats, but also their post-deserting, draft-dodging bosses in the White House and its vicinity–can sink in the pursuit of their private fantasies of unrealized masculinity. The minor accomplishments of the Gestapo aside, in real life no one tortures to find out something they didn’t already know, since nothing the torturer finds out can be trusted as evidence, as the history of coerced confessions in police stations endlessly testifies. And of course if there were a single case in the history of warfare where torture had enabled the pursuers of a just cause to ward off a supposedly greater evil, we would certainly have heard of it, instead of all the invented stories of ticking bombs and hidden terrorists in which the Dershowitzes and Posners of the torture discourse traffic.

There is none and there won’t be, not simply because torture can’t procure reliable information but because that’s not its purpose. The true aim of the Inquisition was inquisition; the purpose of torture, whatever its fellow travelers argue, is to satiate the lust for sex or power of the torturers; none other. And the purpose of the argument “for” torture in, remember now, “only a few extreme instances”...is to justify torture in any instance. As with any other inhibition, break it down once and away it goes–and then we can get on with the real business of being tough and winning. The point is, after all, that once the utilitarian calculus gets under way the benefit–let’s say, to save the life of one soldier “on our side”–always, always exceeds the cost of doing what is necessary “just this once.” How could it not? Come on, Judge Posner: you mean we would torture in the name of defusing a nuclear weapon but, hey, if it’s only a mortar round that’s going to kill a platoon of our heroic men and women, let it come down!

The people who write this crap can’t possibly believe it themselves, although perhaps the intellectual fellow travelers of American Caesarism really fall for their own ideological siren song. Practical men of affairs suffer from no such illusions. Witness the enthusiastic endorsement by the Justice Department’s torture brigade–Albert Gonzalez, David Addington, Jay Bybee–of all torture, all the time, anywhere, under the guise of “necessity” and “self-defense;” not to mention the welcoming embrace of the War-Criminal-in-Chief and his Vice-Criminal. And why not? Other than hard-core sadistic psychopaths, who ever commits an act of brutal violence that isn’t either “necessary” or in “self-defense?”The academic purveyors of the lust to inflict pain are simply men who can only satisfy that lust in their brains, and who can only prove their masculinity by winning on paper battles that they have never won in life. Never fired on a man who aimed a loaded weapon at them; never entered a burning building to save a trapped child; never won a fistfight against a truly tough guy. Like that purveyor of fantasized masculinity Harvey Mansfield, Jr., they can only show their manhood to a skeptical world by imagining it. Some of those imaginaries may be relatively harmless; but the imagination of torture enables–encourages--true evil, the repressed voice that longs for realization, to bubble up from the depths and present itself as good; and in that it is one of the worst evils of all. The apologists for torture should be shunned as one would shun an advocate of child molestation in the name of "love"–they are at the same ethical level, not one whit higher. Not one.