Perhaps distance brings perspective but as a U.S. citizen watching the torture debate from outside the United States I can’t help but feel that there is a disingenuous tone to the ongoing debate.

While it is good that policymakers and the public are debating this publicly it can’t come as a surprise to anyone but the most willfully ignorant that the United States has been torturing prisoners, including those who definitely are guilty of nothing, in its custody for years.

If the actor Claude Rains were alive today he would instantly recognize this hypocrisy for what it is. After all it was his words in the classic film Casablanca which has since served as the signature line for all those who feign indignation over something they have long known is going on.

Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?

Captain Renault: I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]

Croupier: Your winnings, sir.

Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
[aloud]
Captain Renault: Everybody out at once!

I hate to say it but too many Americans resemble the “Good Germans” who at the end of WWII claimed they hadn’t a clue that a Holocaust had been taking place. We have consciously and for many, willingly, turned a blind eye and ear to what has been done in our names. Some people are so morally and ethically debased that they trivialized torture as just high spirited roughhousing. Just remember when in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib revelations maniacs like Rush Limbaugh or even as recently as last year a Congressman like Dana Rohrbacher dismissed torture as fraternity pranks.

It also bears note that in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib we have yet to do anything to the military and civilian officials at the highest levels of the national security bureaucracy who authorized this. Instead, we prosecuted a few lowly enlisted men for doing what they were told. There was a time when America did not accept “just following orders” as an excuse, either for those who followed them or for those who issued them.

One hardly needed to read the memos from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that the Obama Administration released to know that torture was going on. It has been the subject of analysis and debate in law journals for years. All anyone had to do was type “torture” into the Lexis-Nexis legal database and you would get thousands of results. Note that these aren’t the result of searching for “abuse” or “enhanced interrogation techniques” but just plain “torture.”

Here is one excerpt from the article “Torture and Justification: Defending the Indefensible” in the fall, 2004 George Mason Law Review:

The abuses in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal fail every standard offered in this Article. They were conducted in secret, and could easily have remained so if not for some small number of whistle-blowers. In addition, there appears to be little if any evidence that any of the abuses were (or were reasonably believed to be) connected with any efforts to stop imminent terrorist attacks. Likewise, the infamous memoranda of the law on torture, prepared by Justice Department attorneys for Defense Department General Counsel William Haynes II, were aimed at shielding interrogators from even potential legal repercussions by arguing that Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees captured in Afghanistan were not covered by the Geneva Convention. They also invoked hair-splitting definitions of “torture” to argue that for mental pain to qualify as torture, it had to involve threats of imminent death; threats of infliction of the kind of pain that would amount to physical torture; infliction of such physical pain as a means of psychological torture; use of drugs or other procedures designed to deeply disrupt the senses, or fundamentally alter an individual’s personality; or threatening to do any of these things to a third party.

Even more absurdly, they argued that torture only occurs when the interrogator’s purpose is to inflict pain rather than to extract information. Thus, only a pure sadist with no desire to get information can be guilty of torture. What our government has repeatedly failed to do — in these memos and everywhere else — is set forth a proper legal mechanism for systematically and accurately determining which extreme interrogations are justified and advisable and which are not.

Or consider this excerpt, from an article in a 2005 issue of the American University International Law Review, particularly relevant in light of recent remarks by former Vice President Richard Cheney:

Those who support the use of torture – or even the use of physical or psychological pressure that falls just short of torture – in order to guarantee the security of the State, reason that persons who aim to destroy civil society and democratic values do so because their sense of value is warped and they lack respect for others’ human rights. They presume that the perpetrators’ “evilness” is purely circumstantial and is so ingrained as to be incurable. As a result, proponents of torture argue, these persons abdicate the respect owed to their own human rights. But this argument fails to consider that each action denying the humanity of the other denies, in fact, one’s own entitlement to human rights. Their logic would thus unravel the very civil society they purport to protect and undermine the very democratic values they swear to uphold.

The very source of this misguided argument – the Supreme Court of Israel – understands that it is only by applying our ideals that we preserve them, and that double standards destroy the very things we most want to preserve. We need only refer to the closing words in Public Committee Against Torture in Israel to learn how the court that is most experienced in confronting terrorism views the delicate balance between security and liberty:

This is the destiny of a democracy – it does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of its enemies are not always open before it. A democracy must sometimes fight with one hand tied behind its back. Even so, a democracy has the upper hand. The rule of law and the liberty of an individual constitute important components in its understanding of security. At the end of the day, they strengthen its spirit and this strength allows it to overcome its difficulties.

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