Democrats in the U.S. Senate have just issued a report equating the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT) with torture.
The report states water boarding resulted in physical harm, including vomiting and seizures to at least some of the prisoners, and in one instance, death. It asserts that the CIA mismanaged the operation, kept poor records, and gave inadequate and inaccurate information to the Bush administration, to Congress and to the press.
The report claims that the information given by the terrorists under the EIT was inaccurate and worthless, and that the program has damaged the reputation of the U.S.
Those who minimize the findings, claim Democrat Senate staffers who prepared it spoke only to the attorneys representing the Gitmo detainees, and not to the the CIA agents involved. I do not intend to address that issue.
For me, the real question is whether the U.S. is ever justified in using EIT.
Many who oppose enhanced interrogation, like Sen. John McCain, label it torture. But the intent is different. There is no claim the CIA used EIT with intent to punish or to wantonly inflict pain -- that is “to torture.” Clearly the goal was to extract information to prevent a second 9/11 and save American lives.
Additionally, EIT can take many forms. At one end of the spectrum, enhanced interrogation includes sleep deprivation, irksome music, putting the prisoner in a cramped box, or a chilly or hot room, etc. At the other end -- the torture end -- EIT would include the ripping out of fingernails, the rack, cutting off fingers, toes, arms and legs, roasting over hot coals, etc. Some forms of enhanced interrogation do not kill or maim the prisoner; others do.
Would it ever be right for the U.S. to engage in the more brutal forms of enhanced interrogation? If we can cut off a prisoner’s fingers, arms and legs, and roast him over hot coals, it would seem to follow bugging him with gangster-rap music would also be permissible.
The question is not as easy to answer as you might first believe. There are three good main reasons most reasonable Americans oppose torture.
-- First, a person being tortured might lie and say whatever his interrogator wants him to say to avoid further torture.
-- Second, America does not torture its prisoners of war because it hopes the enemy will act accordingly.
-- Finally, America doesn’t torture out of respect for the human person.
That being said, the question remains, why is it worse to torture a prisoner than to kill him with a drone strike? To fire bomb his cities? To kill his countrymen with nuclear bombs?
The CIA’s enhanced interrogation all occurred after the 9/11 attacks on our country to forestall subsequent attacks. But would the CIA have been justified in using torture in its most rigorous form in the hours before the 9/11 attacks occurred to prevent those attacks?
You will recall that on Sept. 11, 2001, 19 al-Qaida Islamic terrorists hijacked four civilian airliners. Two were flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. A third was flown into the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
All the civilians aboard the four airliners were murdered in the crashes or resulting fires. At the Pentagon, 125 military and civilian personnel were murdered. At the Trade Center and in the nearby vicinity, nearly 3, 000 people were brutally murdered; including 343 firefighters and paramedics, and 23 police officers. Only six people in the towers at the time of their collapse survived. Some 10,000 were injured; many severely. Others contracted cancer from what they inhaled that day.
So, what if 24 hours before the 9/11 attacks our CIA had captured a major al-Qaida operative, who boasted, “Twenty-four hours from now, we will teach America a lesson it will never forget!”? And what if in response to CIA normal interrogation, the operative had told his interrogators, “You’ll find out soon enough!”?
Would the CIA have been justified in water-boarding him? Ripping out his nails to force him to talk? Or would it had been better to terminate the interrogation, and wait 24 hours until the planes had destroyed the towers and wantonly murdered more than 3,000 Americans?
What if my hypothetical al-Qaida operative under torture had talked and the attacks had been thwarted? Would the Iraq war have been avoided? The Afghan war? How many American soldiers would be alive today? How many would have avoided wounds that have destroyed their quality of life, and crushed their families.
I don’t like torture. But I have always felt that the assassination of Adolf Hitler would have been justified to prevent World War II, and the millions of deaths caused by Hitler and his war.
Similarly, if the Iraq and Afghan wars would have been avoided by preventing 9/11, torturing my hypothetical operative would have been morally justified. (Self-defense does not always require that the assailant be killed!)
To paraphrase the Catechism of the Catholic Church: The legitimate defense of societies is not an exception to the prohibition against the murder of the innocent that constitutes intentional killing. The act of self-defense, including non-lethal forms of self-defense, can have a double effect: the preservation of one’s nation; and the killing or extracting information from of the aggressor. “The one is intended, the other is not.”
Homicide can be murder or self-defense. It depends upon the intent.
Enhanced interrogation can be torture or a legitimate act of self-defense.
Again, it depends upon the intent.
Posted Online: Dec, 20, 2014 12:00 am - Quad-Cities Online
by John Donald O'Shea
Copyright 2014
John Donald O'Shea
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