Last night, while driving home, I heard a radio program called "Interrogating Torture" (sorry, no audio) looking at "harsh interrogation techniques" in Israel and Great Britain in light of the memos recently released by Obama's administration.
Somewhat to my surprise, I discovered that both Israel and Great Britain abandoned such techniques years ago, while being reluctant to name them "torture", for a variety of reasons. The primary reason, in both nations, was that abusive interrogations of prisoners and suspects, over time, added fuel to the fires of hatred among their enemies. (All the pro-torture interviewee could say in response was that torture is only one reason among many that radical Islam and other terrorists hate us.) Even facing the same threats of terrorism they have faced before along with new threats from al-Qaeda, neither is interested in returning to a policy of "extreme" measures in their treatment of prisoners.
A professor at Georgetown (whose name I forget) added that there are some depths no civilized society should stoop to. He gave the analogy of slavery: how would we respond if, in order to combat global terrorism and protect our population, we began to enslave people again. It would only be a small number of slaves, of course. We might pay them $0.02 per day, so that technically it would not be slavery. And by gum it would work! Productivity would increase and we'd show those enemies of freedom what for!
I thought his analogy apt. At this point in history, thank God, I hope we would rather suffer military defeat or terrorist attack than resort to enslaving human beings. But, I had also hoped that we would rather suffer than resort to torturing prisoners.
I can only return to the ancient maxim: it is always better to suffer evil than to commit evil.
14 July 2009
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1 comboxers:
"I can only return to the ancient maxim: it is always better to suffer evil than to commit evil."
No, it's better to stay the hell away from evil and don't commit it yourself. No need to suffer it. The world is very rarely either or. :)
Also, I have to say I don't get at all what the Georgetown Prof's slave's analogy is all about. However, you probably shouldn't be surprised because I soured on academia a while ago.
I do get that torture is generally ineffective and for that reason alone we shouldn't be doing it. We can be tough on terriosm without stooping to their techniques.
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