On Torture, Briefly*

The U.S. has routinely tortured enemy combatants since we began fighting the War on Terror (I thought we would have won that thing by now, kind of like our stunning success in the War on Drugs; ambiguous wars are always a great idea). Some captives have been high level targets with intimate knowledge of future plans, probably, though we have no clear picture on what if any potential attacks have been stopped because of torture. For anyone who has seen Zero Dark Thirty you will know that even waterboarding, which is variously labeled "stress positions" or "enhanced interrogation techniques" is flat out torture. If you dispute that I question your logic and your humanity as well as assume you simply enjoy nice Orwellian phrases like "enhanced interrogation techniques."

I am not writing now to debate whether or not we have tortured enemy combatants and others unlucky enough to get caught in the intervening years of the conflicts in the wake of 9/11. I am writing to address a two-pronged comment I have heard from torture defenders, which has always struck me as falling well short of any American ideal I hold: war is hell, and they torture our captives so there is reciprocity there.

First of all, I am not sure I have heard the war is hell defense being used by anyone who has fought in a war. Moreover, torture isn't taking place on a battlefield but in a black site prison camp hundreds of miles from the conflict. It is not a question of someone snapping under the strain of battle and collecting scalps like Brad Pitt's character in Legends of the Fall. This is cold, calculated torture of a defenseless combatant. So war is hell is a true sentiment in the abstract but doesn't really play any part in justifying the torture of prisoners by people not even in the military to begin with.

Second, as to the question of reciprocity, this one holds even less weight for me than the war is hell obstruction. Isn't the very point of America that we are different, morally and ethically, than those we oppose? That we hold ourselves to a higher moral standard than our enemies. Hitler tortures American GIs, we treat German prisoners humanely. We don't respond in kind, because our moral calculus isn't that of the people we fight. We do not play down to their level. For people who believe in American exceptionalism to argue that we should be just as brutal to our enemies as they are to us is an argument that collapses on itself. What makes us exceptional if we do that?

What prompted me to write this post was an excerpt I read in Chernow's George Washington biography I am working my way through. The British were brutal with American captives, the mercenary Hessians even worse, decapitating soldiers, quartering them, hanging them and not letting them die. Brutal, nasty stuff. When the colonials win their first victory and capture hundreds of Hessian and British troops Washington makes the decision to treat them humanely, personally escorting two injured officers to quarter in a house and directing his surgeon to perform life-saving amputations.

When asked why he was refusing to respond in kind to the British and Hessian provocations, Washington told a fellow officer that "British captives should have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren" (282). That is how our nation started, that is what we used to be about. Do we have more to fear from the specter of Islamic terrorism than Washington did from British and Hessian brutality? If he was to be captured, he would have been one to be hung, brought down from the noose, gutted while still alive, then drawn and quartered with his body parts sent throughout the colonies and his head mounted on a spike in front of some commandeered colonial mansion. Yet he refused to descend to the level of his enemy.

Proverbs 25:21-22 tells us "If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he is thirsty give him water to drink, for you will heap burning coals on his head, and the LORD will reward you." The British wanted to paint the colonial insurgents as a mass of uncivilized and barbaric insurrectionists, but Washington refused to allow his army to be portrayed thus. His sterling conduct won our fledgling nation the admiration of the world. Can we say the same about our prisoner policies today?

*I wrote this post over the weekend and automatically set it to post today. I wondered as I wrote if it was still relevant. I mean, how much do we talk about torture these days? But I decided to go ahead with it and lo and behold Sarah Palin dropped this bomb at a recent NRA convention. Now even if you concede that in some situations torture is warranted (which I don't), to flippantly compare it to one of the most sacred sacraments of the church can only be considered massively disrespectful. Yet people in the audience ate it up. Disgusting. I have never been a Palin fan, having always felt her aw-shucks, down-home conservative Christian bit was an act, and this confirms it for me. How can one claim Jesus as Lord and gleefully defile the image of God in another human being (yes, terrorists are also made in the image of God in the same way as an American) and at the same time jokingly compare it to the very symbol of our new life in Christ. Despicable.