This post is a “guest post” written by my father, who shares my name. It is an insightful critique of torture and our modern understanding of warfare. Enjoy.
We live in perilous times made more so by our increasingly naïve perception of the world we live in. Today, we are consumed by a discussion of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” which some have described as torture. “Torture” is a loaded word in this context. Take a survey asking if “torture” should be allowed in the interrogation of prisoners and the answer would probably be an overwhelming “NO”.
The problem is, torture escapes easy definition. Example: Put someone in a safety harness, attach them to a safety cable and put them on a narrow walkway 1500 ft in the air. Then ask questions about something they want to keep secret. For some, this would simply be high adventure. They would assess the cables and harnesses and determine that there was nothing to fear. They would laugh at attempts to scare them into revealing anything. For others, they would be babbling uncontrollably before they got to the top of the platform. They would terrorized by the situation. “Torture?”
For the second group yes, for the first group, no.
Torture is also a comparative word. Is waterboarding on the same level as hanging someone by their thumbs? Is it on the same level as sleep deprivation? How about bamboo shoots under the fingernails? Beating the bottoms of their feet with a rod?
I would be uncomfortable with all of these. I would make a poor torturer. I don’t have the stomach for it. At least not sitting at my desk typing this. However, kidnap my daughter, son, wife etc. and then give me access to someone who may have important information as to their whereabouts, and none of the above methods would seem too extreme. As John McCain said, “you do what you have to do.”
This was the situation shortly after 9/11/2001. We were in the dark as to the capability, the plan, or the likelihood of another attack. People charged with the welfare of the nation, having failed to prevent one horrific attack did what they had to do. Not because they enjoyed it or wanted to do it but because of fear of another attack and more American deaths. Denying that this is sometimes reasonable and necessary is to deny the reality of the world we live in. How did we come to this mindset?
If we go back to World War II, “The Good War”, as it has been called, as a starting point, though certainly not “THE” starting point, we can see a steady progression of good intentions but unfortunately muddled thinking. WWII was unique in many ways, not the least of which was the near unanimity about who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. Of course, this is a generality, but a useful one. The Geneva Convention had provided a frame work for the treatment of prisoners which was followed at some level by the Allies (though it would be naïve to assume complete and universal adherence), to a lesser degree by Germany, and almost not at all by Japan. Again, we are speaking in general characterizations. It was based on the notion of civilized nations behaving somewhat like teams in a sporting event. When a prisoner was taken, he was effectively removed from the playing field, so to speak, and therefore to be treated humanely and decently until the end of the conflict. The prisoner had an assumed duty to try to escape if he could do so: it was part of the game. It points out the naïve nature of the system. While on the battlefield kill and kill alike, but once a prisoner, you are out of the game and receive a special status. Is it any wonder that some nations disregarded this idea completely? In fact, the bigger wonder is that it was adhered to so well by so many.
Meanwhile, the powers on all sides were engaged in the indiscriminate bombing of civilians. Millions upon millions died. Toward the end of the war, Churchill made the decision to fire bomb the city of Dresden. Was it necessary to win the war? Doubtful. Truman made the calculation that utterly destroying both Nagasaki and Hiroshima was in the best interest of saving the lives of American military personnel, after bloody pitched battles to secure various islands on the path to the mainland. The cost of an invasion of the Japanese mainland was unimaginable, yet ending the war without the complete surrender of Japan was unacceptable.
The one constant here was that wars were between countries, not just governments and their militaries. Civilians were part of the war. One hears very little of a counter insurgency in Germany after the surrender. Was there one? Not so you’d notice. Why? The country was utterly and totally exhausted and devastated. There was no appetite for a continued struggle. There was no question in anybody’s mind as to the extent and totality of the defeat. The same was generally true of Japan as well.
In the wars since, there has been a very “enlightened” approach to military conflict. We have somehow reached the conclusion that wars are between governments and militaries and not civilians. Thus we go to tremendous extremes to avoid the killing of civilians. When civilians are accidentally killed, we cry “foul!”, as though killing and dying are not part of the process of war. This is totally nonsensical. This is muddle headed thinking.
One can debate endlessly the reasoning and wisdom of invading Iraq but it is a pointless debate. It has been done, and we must figure a way to end it in the best interest of our country. What are not debatable are the consequences of trying so desperately to shield the Iraqi people from the effects of the war. To name just a few:
- The Iraqi insurgency quickly realized that operating from among the civilian population was an effective shield from the US military.
- The Iraqi insurgency quickly realized that mosques and religious sites were safe zones.
- By shielding the civilian population we also shielded and indeed, purposefully spared the infrastructure – result detonating bombs by cell phone. Why should a defeated people enjoy a cell phone network?
- Most of the Iraqi people, even today, do not consider themselves to have been defeated.
There are more, and all of them have resulted in increased casualties for the US.
This is not a call for the wanton killing of civilians. It is a clarion call to understand war for what it is. If, in the lead up to the current Iraq conflict, the war had been calculated as to what it would take to totally defeat (as in Germany or Japan) the country of Iraq, one has to wonder if we would have fought the war at all. By realizing that wars are between countries and not just governments and militaries, and that winning will require civilian casualties (lots of them) and an utterly devastated infrastructure and lead to decades of future suffering for those left behind, one can then make a clear assessment of the risks and rewards for starting a war.
Recognizing war for what it is forces a realistic assessment of its consequences. Put in this perspective, how many conflicts since WWII would we have waged?
- Korea?
- Vietnam?
- Gulf War?
- Iraq War?
There are others.
To bring this full circle, we do ourselves and the country a disservice if we continue to see the world, not as it is but as we wish it to be. As Machiavelli said, “Many men have imagined republics and principalities that never really existed at all. Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what is for what should be pursues his downfall rather than his preservation; for a man who strives after goodness in all his acts is sure to come to ruin, since there are so many men who are not good.” And again, he said, ”The answer is of course, that it would be best to be both loved and feared. But since the two rarely come together, anyone compelled to choose will find greater security in being feared than in being loved.”
Disallowing the use of “torture” in all circumstances may make us feel good about our selves and our principles but it will undermine the healthy fear that serves to dampen the enthusiasm of our enemies and it will do nothing to earn their love. They have already determined that we have irreconcilable differences and are willing, no matter the cost, to pursue their objectives.
It’s time to get our head out of the sand. It is time to stop the muddle-headed thinking.
#1 by Jared Spurbeck at May 25th, 2009
Sir,
The purpose of being good is not to “feel good about ourselves,” while at the same time hindering our own progress. The reason to be a good person is because it’s objectively right. As in, nobody’s making this up; Jesus, Gandhi, the founding fathers and Martin Luther King, Jr. all endorsed good behavior because it was really the best way of doing things.
It’s never right to do evil … it only feels right in the heat of the moment. “Enhanced interrogation techniques” are an example. You say that they would start to sound pretty good to you if somebody were to threaten your loved ones. So where would you stop? Would you gouge out somebody’s eye with your fingers? Would you invent “cruel and unusual punishments” for them? What limit is there to the pain and depravity you would invent, and where would that limit come from?
The founders of the United States forbid those things in the Bill of Rights, and they did so under the understanding that these rights weren’t granted by that document. They did so knowing that all human beings everywhere had the right to be free of such treatment, by virtue of being human. And they wrote that passage to guarantee that freedom, for the few people whose safety they were sworn to uphold. So when we torture people on the soil of another country, not only are we insulting that country but we’re also violating the principles our country was founded on. And everyone in the world can sense our hypocrisy.
Your essay is a repudiation of those founders and everything that they stood for. But why? What on earth gives you the moral authority to question those principles? How in the name of all that is good can you invoke Machiavelli, whose very name is synonymous with betrayal and manipulation, to challenge the people who brought us those freedoms? Are you even aware that The Prince was a work of satire?
Of course, you do so because you believe the words that he wrote in jest; because you honestly think that expediency trumps high-minded principle. Because you feel that the founding Americans lived in a different world, in one that’s so far removed from your reality that they couldn’t possibly understand it. They couldn’t possibly know that one day, evil men would want to take away your freedoms. They couldn’t possibly understand that. Could they?
But they understood that better than you ever will. Because they fought evil men to secure your freedoms, not only on the battlefield but in courtrooms and parliament halls. They’ve seen terrorism and tyranny both at their worst, and they knew what people were capable of. And they didn’t give you those rules to keep you from fighting the terrorists; they gave them to you to keep you from becoming the terrorists. They gave them to you to keep you from becoming the kind of person that they’d want to fight.
What is the worst thing that the Islamic militants could do to us? They could destroy America, certainly, if they’re as powerful as the people in charge make them out to be. But how? By attacking our cities? That only brought us together, and earned sympathy for us worldwide. By poisoning our steams, defiling our lands, infecting us with diseases? There’d still be Americans in this country, and they’d be American no matter what.
But what is it that makes them American? The accident of their birth? The general awesomeness of this patch of land in North America? How about the United States’ military? It certainly seems awesome. But if you take away the land, the parentage and the instruments of destruction, you still have an American. No matter where she is or what country she was born in, so long as her heart longs for freedom — for herself and for every human being on earth — that person is an American, and nothing you do could ever take it away from her.
That’s why your depriving other people of basic human rights, subjecting them to torture, considering their deaths an acceptable part of wartime conduct and denouncing their freedoms as worthless is the worst thing you could possibly do. Because that is destroying America. Not the country, the land or the people, but America the ideal; the one that everyone from Washington to Martin Luther King, Jr. has fought for.
That is the ideal you are setting aside, and the sacrifice you deem acceptable. You are destroying America, because in the heat of the moment when you had to choose between honor and temptation you gave in to the latter. And you don’t even know if it’s doing you any good.
You have no idea if the information you’ve extracted under torture is reliable. You have no idea how many people are suffering, how many people’s rights are being violated even in your own country, or just what happens in those interrogation rooms … the ones you’re so happy to send people inside to do your bidding in, so long as you don’t have to watch.
You don’t even know what kind of a return on your investment of one trillion United States dollars you’ve gotten. If the recession and the devaluation, to the point where there’s talk of adopting the Euro as our United States’ currency, was worth it. Or if, setting principles aside again, you could’ve been safer spending those dollars to do something other than wreak havoc in an Arab nation — one that was only tenuously connected to the very terrorists your leaders claim to be fighting.
You don’t even know where that money went or who has it now, do you?
Was it worth it?
Evil men are destroying America, sir, and you’re one of them. I don’t care how you see yourself, you just wrote an essay that justifies evil and condemns good as naive. And that is the kind of evil that let Hitler get away with everything, Godwin’s Law be hanged.
May God watch over this country, and its hundreds of thousands of victims.
#2 by Jared Spurbeck at May 25th, 2009
And may he watch over the people who died to bring us the freedoms you so liberally trod over, too.
Happy Memorial Day.
#3 by Clifton Griffin (the author) at May 29th, 2009
Jared Spurbeck,
No doubt you are the people and wisdom will die with you. You have probed the depths of my soul and now are able to judge not only my essay, but my thoughts and motivations as well. But then, of course, you missed the entire point of the essay to begin with.
First, you are not the first to be confused by the interesting and difficult-to-define relationship between individual conduct (i.e. my responsibility before God before whom I will one day stand to be judged) and the conduct of countries. It is a tricky area and I don’t claim to know exactly how to strike the balance. You would probably agree that “turn the other cheek” is a valid philosophy for an individual seeking to remain at peace with all men. I wonder if you think that would be good practice for a country. Imagine had France adopted a “turn the other cheek” philosophy in WW2 (Oh, but they did – JOKE :^) ). Perhaps you have a clearly thought out position on this. Most are fairly muddle headed on this subject. Clearly, applying standards of individual conduct to countries and their governments would lead to an ever changing geopolitical landscape, unless of course, you believe that ALL countries could be persuaded to go along, in which case you are among those that Machievelli says are imagining a world that does not exist.
Secondly, you take for granted that your definitions of torture, good, evil, patriotism, etc. are THE definitions. You seem to give not one shred of possibility that perhaps the methods used by our government were anything other than what YOU conclude them to be. Your essay assumes from the beginning that your positions are unassailable.
Thirdly, you conclude that I don’t understand Machievelli, that I have no understanding of The Prince, and further, that by using quotes from him, my essay is a “repudiation” of the “founders and everything they stood for”. I recognize the moral failings of Machievelli, but I also know truth when I see it. The two quotes were carefully chosen. I nowhere in the essay advocate an “end justifies the means” mentality. What I do advocate is assessing the world and humanity in a realistic way. To quote a famous philosopher “People are no darned good” – Okay, that’s my quote. It is my version of Romans 3:23 which says, “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” If you insist on seeing the world as full of good people just longing to do good, you will be forever disappointed. This is not to say that men aren’t sometimes self sacrificing and capable of tremendous acts of kindness and generosity. It is simply an acknowledgement that depending on the goodness of man is like “a broken tooth or a foot out of joint”.
Also, Machievelli is correct in assessing for the Prince that it would be nice to loved and feared but since men love at their own free will and fear at the will of the Prince, it is best to choose the one he can control. He further admonishes the Prince to avoid being hated. I use this as an analogy of the US’s place in the community of nations. A lot of people spend a great deal of time and energy worrying about whether the US is loved by the rest of the world. To this I say that Machievelli has good advice. Better that we enjoy a healthy fear from other nations than to waste time trying to be loved. It’s a fruitless and thankless task.
“Evil men are destroying America, sir, and you’re one of them.” Wow! Why use the word “Sir” in this sentence. Certainly, I don’t conclude any massive respect here. Substantive debate is always welcome. Demagoguery based on emotion is never a way to win a debate.
You also fail to understand the overall point. To repeat:
This is not a call for the wanton killing of civilians. It is a clarion call to understand war for what it is. If, in the lead up to the current Iraq conflict, the war had been calculated as to what it would take to totally defeat (as in Germany or Japan) the country of Iraq, one has to wonder if we would have fought the war at all. By realizing that wars are between countries and not just governments and militaries, and that winning will require civilian casualties (lots of them) and an utterly devastated infrastructure and lead to decades of future suffering for those left behind, one can then make a clear assessment of the risks and rewards for starting a war.
Recognizing war for what it is forces a realistic assessment of its consequences. Put in this perspective, how many conflicts since WWII would we have waged?
• Korea?
• Vietnam?
• Gulf War?
• Iraq War?
I won’t make any pronouncements here regarding you motives, your intellect or your sincerity. I only question your reasoning. It is surface and has not considered the full ramifications its implementation would have on the US.
A final word about “Torture”:
The purpose of the Justice Departments renderings on Torture (now called the “Torture” memos – so named by an unbiased press simply trying to give the facts – JOKE :^) ) was not to reign in an overzealous bunch of CIA and FBI operatives chomping at the bit to “have at” those guys. The purpose was to give clear guidance to a group of men and women who were paralyzed by a lack of definition and a fear of going beyond what was allowed by law because the status of the individuals did not lend itself to easy definition. A careful reading of the Geneva Convention, for instance, clearly indicates that it does not apply to these people – they don’t meet the qualifications. Therefore guidance was needed before any action could be taken.
Of course, Torture, in and of itself is difficult to define. If it was easy to define, things would be simple. Just make a law that reads, “Thou shalt not torture.” You say that the Founding Fathers, whom you rightly revere, wrote the Bill of Rights, etc. to guarantee certain inalienable rights, and so they did. They also wrote an injunction preventing “cruel and unusual” punishment. What are the chances, do you suppose, that we have the same definition for this phrase that they had when it was written? Or even a hundred years ago? We know that this is not the case.
Which of the following are “Torture”?
• Imprisonment
• Solitary confinement
• Hard labor (breaking rocks with sledge hammer 10 hrs/day)
• Being forced to stand for 24 hrs straight
• Being forced to remain awake continuously for days at a time
• Being subjected to loud rock music for days at a time
• Not being able to observe your preferred religious practice
• Desecrating your revered Holy objects
• Being yelled and screamed at
• Waterboarding as carefully defined by the Justice depart rules
• Having your fingernails pulled out
• Electric shock
• Burned with a hot iron
• Beatings
• Reading this Essay
There is a line somewhere isn’t there? Would everyone in every circumstance draw the line at the same place.?
Obama made a huge mistake when he flatly declared that Waterboarding was torture. There are as many ways to waterboard as there are people to imagine it. He now finds himself in a box he cannot get out of.
I’m simply saying that he should have stayed out of the box.
#4 by Jared Spurbeck at May 29th, 2009
Sir;
You are correct to accuse me of demagoguery, and I’m sorry for it. I let my own emotions get carried away, and I should not have said what I did.
We have very different perspectives on things, and while I disagree with you completely I respect you for trying your best to protect that which you hold dear. I think that you’ve been misled, and are not seeing the real human cost of your actions. But I guess you could say the same for me.
I hope things go well for you, sir, and I wish you a happy Father’s Day in advance.
#5 by Clifton Griffin at May 30th, 2009
Jared,
At least we can agree to disagree on the substance of the debate. Most people rarely reach the substance of a debate and are satisfied to discuss the sound bites and talking points fed to them by an untrustworthy press.
These really are not easy issues under the surfaace and I congratulate you for probing them.
I believe I will have a good Father’s Day and thanks for the sentiment.
I welcome further responses on this or other subjects, because in the end, I can’t resist a good discussion.
Thanks