This passage from Dershowitz's article stuck with me. What did the General mean when he said Italy cannot survive the introduction of torture? My mind immediately jumped to the United States War on Terror...let me explain.
After 9/11, the US declared a War on Terror. At first, the concept seemed simple enough. We had been attacked by "terrorists," namely Osama Bin Laden and Al-Queda, and we were waging a war against those same terrorists who attacked us. We waged this war by gathering intelligence on high-level Al-Queda operatives, and conducting nighttime raids into villages where we believed those terrorists to be. We had a "kill list," a list of terrorist targets who had to be killed before America was safe again. As the US military conducted more and more raids, killing more and more people, the war on terror became a self fulfilling prophecy.
US Army Officer Andrew Exum illustrates how this happened: Exum draws on an incident where his unit was fired upon by two Iraqis. Exum's unit returned fire and killed the Iraqis, only to discover later that the two were civilians guarding the town generator. "From a strategic perspective," reflects Exum, "that's a loss."
"If you see a fledgling insurgency start to develop, then it doesn't take a genius to realize that by dragging people out of their homes in the middle of the night, by doing so in a way that you are not communicating to the neighbors why this person is being dragged out in the middle of the night... how this could inflame tensions, how this could actually exacerbate drivers of conflict." One might start with a "target list" of 50-200 people, but by the time those targets had been apprehended or neutralized, there would be a new list of 3,000 targets.
While we have been conducting night-time raids all over the Middle East (over 1,700 during a 3 month period during 2010!!!), we have also been torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. This War on Terror is costly- not just in money, but in American lives, the lives of innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire, and because it creates an ever stronger anti-American sentiment. On 9/11, Al-Queda had only a handful of members, who were in hiding and controlled virtually no territory. Now it has thousands of members and controls territory in Somalia, other parts of Africa, and Yemen.
Is the War on Terror the same thing as torture? Not exactly, but I hope you can see the comparisons that I'm trying to draw. It all leads me to wonder if when General Carlo Della Chiesa said Italy could not survive the introduction of torture, he was not speaking figuratively but literally...
Your thoughts allude to what I brought up in our discussion on torture - the idea that human knowledge has intrinsic limits; we have little information on the efficacy of our decisions. Given the ticking-time bomb scenario, most people will tend to take a consequentialist approach. Given the knowledge that they have of the situation, the decision-maker believes that torture will produce a relatively better result than condemning thousands to an avoidable death. However, the decision-maker has no grounds for certainty that the value of the lives saved will outweigh either a.) the value of the lives lost because of subsequent disorder, or the opposite b.) the value of the lives saved because of subsequent restructuring.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of the "War on Terror", every unethical decision that we make is used as propaganda to recruit adolescents into terrorist ranks. If we refer back to the case of the ticking-bomb, it is completely plausible to believe that, if the accused was in fact innocent (a culpable bystander as opposed to a culpable aggressor per say) then that case would draw thousands of young teenagers into terrorism. ISIL (more commonly known as ISIS) is using this very tactic today - they are effectively using the Senate Torture Report as one of many things to drastically increase their numbers.
In the case of P.M. Aldo Moro, General Chiesa was speaking in a literal sense. However, new evidence suggests that the case is not one primarily of ethics but one substantially of politics. Following Moro's kidnapping, the government led by Giulio Andreotti, rather than try to negotiate with the Red Brigade (terrorist group), seemed to be condemning Aldo Moro to death; they refused Moro's letters for political reform on the grounds of "insanity, truth-drugs, etc". Moro, as described by Red Brigade members, was "a political genius, a man with naked power bared in all it's entirety fighting for his country". This seems odd, doesn't it? The Prime Minister of a country, captured by terrorists, writing letters for political reform to a parliament who wouldn't raise a finger in support of their leader. This isn't a simple case, and there is a lot to read about it, but the general idea is that the political corruption and reform that Moro threatened to expose and create (and the Red Brigades did, in fact, offer the release of Moro - Moro declined) would shake the country through its core.
I really like the last sentence in the first paragraph of your response. I think it basically highlights the main issue with the ticking time-bomb case, which is just that, how do we know what we are doing is beneficial?
DeleteI wonder though are all torturing cases like this? Or are there certain cases where we can just flat out say that it's right or wrong? Tough to say for sure...
ReplyDeleteI believe General Carlo Della Chiesa was speaking literally when stating that Italy could not survive the introduction of torture. Torture, when introduced to the masses, can create a rippling effect throughout society. It is also a difficult ideology or methodology to succinctly define. What is torture and who is to define it? What a certain civilization or cultural group may deem to be torture, another group may find perfectly acceptable.
I think that torture or anything that resembles it should be saved as a last resort. Della Chiesa’s warning is very accurate. Once one side introduces any form of torture, the opposing side is then left to react in similar or even more detrimental strikes that push our societal boundaries on torture. For instance, the War on Terror is often seen as an “arms race” for who can be the most torturous. We have seen and heard of US military prisons and we have also seen radical Islamist organizations respond with what they deem to be equally as bad acts i.e beheading members of foreign media on live video. Both sides are dedicated to their cause and view torture as a necessary act in winning the war. And that poses the biggest problem, I think, with torture. The notion that once we introduce torture, it becomes very difficult to put an end to it, and begins harming the fiber of our society.
But do we think that there is a way to make torture more legitimate AND less harmful overall? If we had torture warrants I think there is a possibility that there would be less retaliation from other countries in response to our forms of torture because there would be transparency in the types of torture we would perform. Maybe I'm wrong, I just think its easier to justify horrific types of torture when it is unclear what type of torture your perceived enemies are performing. The guesswork gets taken out with torture warrants, so it could be a possible solution.
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