Positive Liberty

For the last several days, certain voices have warned us against drawing any hasty moral equivalence between the American torture at Abu Ghraib and that of Saddam Hussein. Hussein’s torture was undeniably worse, they like to point out, and it has been complained more than once that while Abu Ghraib makes the national headlines, Saddam Hussein’s tortures have not. If, they suggest, we have mistreated or abused a few prisoners–the hawks are squeamish about the word “torture”–still, there can’t be any moral equivalence between him and us.

Such fine moralists, these warhawks.

And yet it’s hard not to see an equivalence between this and this. If there is any meaningful difference between these photos, then it would seem to rest on one of three excuses.

Excuse #1: Nick Berg’s death was premeditated; the Americans killed these three Iraqis by accident. Perhaps, although I understand it takes a fair amount of force to beat someone to death, and that MPs are all trained in how to subdue a captive without killing him. And if these deaths were accidental, then why are the soldiers in the pictures gloating about them? Why are they so happy about what is supposedly an awful mistake?

Excuse #2: American are supposed to be democratic, peaceful, and respecting of individual rights. The Americans who killed the Iraqis in those pictures represent a horrible exception. By contrast, Nick Berg’s death was a matter of routine policy for al Qaeda. Again, all of this is true, but it’s still no excuse for the people who did it. Indeed, since these people were Americans, raised–one hopes–to uphold our values, then they certainly ought to have known better. To be sure, this “excuse” lets America off the hook in the abstract, but it does nothing at all to mitigate the actions of the killers.

Excuse #3: The dead Iraqis were terrorists anyway. They got what they deserved. This is by far the weakest of the three excuses. Under both American and international law, detainees are innocent until proven guilty. Perhaps the victims’ guilt was manifestly obvious to the perpetrators of these killings, but that in now way empowers them to serve a sentence before a trial. Excuse #3 is nothing more than a betrayal of the rule of law. Even if the dead man in that photo were guilty of a capital crime, since when do we beat the guilty to death with a blunt object? Since when do we desecrate their bodies? We didn’t even do that to the Nazi war criminals.

Some have suggested that our small-scale, limited tortures were a good thing, and that the perpetrators’ only mistake was in getting caught. I have to ask, though, how can a country with a zero-tolerance policy for marijuana have a smidgen-of-tolerance policy for torture? Surely torture is a lot worse than smoking weed.

But no, even Donald Rumsfeld himself gives torture that smidgen of tolerance, making ugly, shameful excuses about why the Geneva Conventions don’t apply. Let’s not forget, we’re still better than Saddam Hussein.

Perhaps we should quantify this new policy, as I suggested a while ago in a comment at Crooked Timber: Let’s survey exactly how much torture Saddam Hussein carried out–and do 20% less per capita. Then we can look smugly down upon the complainers. Hey, we’ve produced a marked decline in the torture of innocents.

Don’t like it? Well that’s tough. It’s a damn good thing we’re here, and you ought to be grateful that we aren’t any worse. Now smile, and if you don’t wave that stupid flag we gave you, we’re going to start the beatings all over again.

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I don’t think I’ve ever been more disgusted with the conduct of those individuals who are supposedly the agents of my country. I have never subscribed to the idea of “my country, right or wrong,” and now I can say for certain that I never will. A country, if it’s to be anything worth fighting for at all, is simply an idea. They are not America. The grinning soldiers in those awful pictures–They are the enemy.

America was founded to embody idea that some things are more important than blood or nationality or even loyalty to one’s country. It was founded on the idea that justice transcends all of these, and that all people–not merely all Americans, not merely all citizens–but all people have certain basic rights. That’s my country, anyway, and America, its current embodiment, can be the greatest nation on earth–but only when it lives up to that idea. To the extent that it fails, America is a sham, and no amount of loyalty can make up for it.

The excuses, though, love to hover about anything that’s both wrong and hard to concede. In desperate times, the use of torture seems to offer a win-win proposal: It lets us learn what we need to know while punishing the enemy. Sometimes that deal seems too good to resist, even for Americans. And so the excuses will continue. Soldiers will protest that they were just following orders. Senators will complain that the prisoners just got what they deserved. Pundits will wonder why we can’t just forget about it all.

And yet there is a poetic justice to the human psyche, because torture very often misleads the torturer. When questioners use pain and humiliation to get a confession, they often elicit only the very things they expect to hear. They can be true, false, or completely absurd. The torturer, though, decides the lines of questioning, and the prisoner learns soon enough what makes him happy.

Do they want to hear about foreign fighters in Fallujah? –Then that’s exactly what they’ll get. In a more creative era, torturers wanted to hear about naked women flying through the air. They, too, found what they wanted.

Torture doesn’t produce reliable information, and while it may punish the enemy, it also hardens his resolve over the long term. Torture creates the most enduring and visible martyrs in the world; it covers even worthless terrorists with a mantle of sainthood that should never be allowed to them. Heaven only help us when we torture the innocent. But there is another and even more serious reason why torture is so abominable, stated eloquently this week by Orson Scott Card:

Isn’t maintaining our own decency as a nation, even in time of war, also worth risking the lives of American soldiers? Isn’t maintaining America as America also a cause worth dying for?

Then, when you consider that the value of the intelligence gathered from these prisoners has been characterized as trivial, chances are that we lost some of our honor in those prisons in exchange for nothing.

Not fifty lives. Not ten lives. Not five.

Nothing…

Getting information from these prisoners is not worth losing our national soul.

And it is our national soul that’s on the line.

We are in Iraq to prove that American values are worth the risk of American lives themselves. Becoming un-American–to save a few American lives–is the antithesis of the mission itself.

Contrary to what one obnoxious talking head recently suggested, we don’t need a national conversation about our use of torture. Even suggesting it gives torture an undeserved moral legitimacy. What we need are fair trials for all, fair punishments for the guilty, and a swift withdrawal from Iraq. If at one time there were good reasons to invade Iraq, then these reasons do not matter anymore or else they have ceased to exist. The invasion is morally bankrupt, the Iraqis have every reason to despise us, and until we leave it’s just going to be more of the same–on our side and on theirs.

Am I celebrating America’s failure or wishing that America would lose? No. I am lamenting America’s failure, because in the war of ideas, we’ve already lost.