http://www.chowk.com/show_article.cgi?aid=00006277&channel=civic%20center&start=0&end=9&chapter=1&page=1
Tortured Justification of Torture
Rafi Aamer
February 9, 2006 |
|
|
| |
Ever since the “war on terrorism”
began, the issue of torturing prisoners to obtain information
has been under an almost perpetual discussion. To some people,
it may come as a surprise (at least it did to me) that there are
people out there who actually advocate torturing suspected
terrorists. Recently a new voice has joined the pro-torture
chorus.
Sam Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University
and he is currently completing his doctorate in studying the
neural basis of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty with
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). He is the author
of the book “The End of Faith” which was the winner of 2005 PEN
award for nonfiction. Through this book, Harris has managed to
upset both the faithful and the faithless. While religious
people get agitated reading his strong criticism of religion,
the hard-core atheists get turned-off by Harris’ invitation to
meditation. The book is a strong polemic against religion and,
in my opinion, Harris should have confined it to that.
Unfortunately, the author has ventured into other territories in
the book, largely hurting his own theses that he presents while
criticizing religious dogma.
In the chapter titled “A science of good and evil”, Sam Harris
tries to ethically justify the use of torture on the prisoners
of war, and by war he means “war on terrorism”. His case for
allowing torture to be dispensed to accused terrorists begins
with the example of the paradigmatic ticking bomb as presented
by Alan Dershowitz on CBS’s 60 minutes.
Harris invites us to imagine that, “your seven-year-old daughter
being slowly asphyxiated in a warehouse just five minutes away,
while the man in your custody holds the key to her release. If
your daughter won’t tip the scales, then add the daughters of
every couple for a thousand miles—millions of little girls have,
by some perverse negligence on the part of our government, come
under the control of an evil genius who now sits before you in
shackles.”
If you don’t like Harris’ imagined scenario, you can cook up
your own. For example, a nuclear bomb about to go off in a major
city, killing thousands of people in mere seconds, and you
having the person who knows the location of the bomb in your
custody. The very need for imagining these scenarios is the fact
that there hasn’t been a single such case in real life,
otherwise Harris would have referred to that instead of
appealing to our imaginations. While these imaginary scenarios
have been the theme of many a successful movies, TV series and
thriller novels, the chances of such a thing happening in real
life are extremely low. Deriving moral principles from such a
rare occurrence and then applying the principle on all
situations seems nonsense to me.
Sam Harris is not ignorant about the fact that there have been
several studies that indicate that torture doesn’t work. There
have been credible reports that US government has either been
actively involved in torturing prisoners captured in
Afghanistan, Iraq and other places or it has been shipping them
to countries like Egypt whose governments have no moral scruples
when it comes to torturing people even for political reasons.
However, that did not stop the Madrid and London bombings.
Harris knows all this and to remove this wrinkle, he presents
another angle to defend the morality of torture.
The larger case that Harris builds for moral justification of
torture is based on the comparison of torture with collateral
damage. Harris says that collateral damage is far more
deplorable than the torture. Nobody willingly tortures innocent
kids but innocent kids die as the consequence of bombings. The
collateral damage, Harris maintains, is a necessary consequence
of the modern war. So, he says, people who allow their
governments to wage war on another country must know that
innocent people are going to be killed and maimed as collateral
damage. Thus, he concludes, these people who have agreed to
collateral damage have no moral right to object to torture
because torture is much more discriminatory than collateral
damage. In other words, if you have signed off on a bigger evil,
you shouldn’t now object to the lesser one.
Collateral damage is always considered an unintended consequence
of war. Nobody, at least in theory, intentionally perpetrates
collateral damage. It is frequently said that all efforts should
be made to minimize collateral damage or eliminate it if
possible. Harris himself, in another chapter of the book (“The
problem with Islam”) asserts that if George W. Bush had at his
disposal a perfect weapon, a hypothetical device that only kills
the people that you intend to kill, “there is no reason to think
that he would have sanctioned the injury or death of a single
innocent person.” While collateral damage is unintentional in
theory, torture is definitely not. Despite all the imaginary
scenarios, it remains a fact that torture doesn’t always get
dispensed only to gain information. In many cases it is used to
determine the person’s guilt and at many other times, the line
between the two, gaining information and determining guilt,
becomes too blurred. There can be no moral equivalence that can
be established between unintentional consequences of collateral
damage and torture.
Sam Harris loves to put things in perspective. Knowing that the
information obtained through torture is notoriously unreliable,
Harris offers us the following argument on the same lines on
comparing collateral damage and torture, “Given the damage we
were willing to cause to the bodies and minds of innocent
children in Afghanistan and Iraq, our disavowal of the torture
in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed seems perverse. If there
is even one chance in a million that he will tell us something
under torture that will lead to the further dismantling of Al
Qaeda, it seems that we should use every means at our disposal
to get him talking.”
Let’s play along with Sam Harris and add another perspective.
The biggest terrorist attack by Al Qaeda to date was 9/11 when
about 3,000 people were killed. According to the US Department
of Justice statistics, more than 10,000 people are murdered
every year in USA as a result of gun crimes. Many of the guns
involved in these incidents are illegally obtained. Since Sam
Harris is all in favor of torturing accused Al-Qaeda members to
stop another 9/11 from happening, would he be open to torturing
suspected illegal gun sellers in USA to know the names of the
buyers?
One of the main themes of Harris’ book is how religion
contemptuously ignores the life on earth in favor of the
hereafter. Harris must realize that while it is true that many
human rights have been and still being trampled on by religious
zealots, an equal amount, if not more, has been sacrificed on
the altar of political expedience. The ticking bomb scenario
that has been presented as somewhat of a conclusive argument
only shows that Harris thinks that principles only need to be
stood by when its convenient to stand by them. Things like
civilization, democracy, liberty that Harris and others like him
are advocating to save by sacrificing moral principles are,
arguably, the products of those very principles.
What kind of future civilization are we trying to engineer by
sacrificing the principles of the current one? If we agree to
what Harris is proposing, what would he be advocating next? He
might be saying next that all Muslims living in USA should wear
a visibly identifiable sign, maybe a green crescent, on their
dresses because, let’s admit it, if we can agree to the prospect
of collateral damage, we should care least about such things
because wearing a sign doesn’t kill innocent human beings. The
game of justifying immoral brutal acts in the name of so-called
ground realities has been played to its fullest potential by
religious and secular entities alike without causing any
improvement in human conditions and it must stop now.
In his article titled “In Defense of Torture” that appeared in
The Huffington Post in October 2005, Sam Harris argues that he
is advocating torture to be used in “rare circumstances” I find
it hard to believe that Sam Harris is naive enough to think that
once given the permission to use torture, any government in the
world will restrict itself to use torture only in the scenarios
dreamt up by Harris. Once given this license, any administration
in the world can make every case a ticking bomb scenario. You
can easily imagine the explanations; “we had so-and-so in our
custody and we strongly suspected that he had the knowledge of
an impending terrorist attack. To save innocent human lives, we
decided to adopt extreme measures to extract information.
Whatever we did, it was done with the best of intentions. For
moral justification of our acts, please read Sam Harris”
In the chapter titled “In the shadow of God”, Sam Harris has
taken the medieval institution of Inquisition to task. Harris
has described the harrowing details of the misery that the
accused heretics had to go thru at the hands of the church
during various Inquisitions. Torture was Inquisition’s main
weapon and Harris, naturally, offers no moral justification for
church in that instance. The church used torture not just to
make accused heretics confess of their heresy but also to obtain
information about their accomplices. The Inquisition was
initially aimed, as Harris reports, at the movement of Catharism.
The Cathars’ beliefs were considered heretic by the church and
to save the souls of people who had become Cathars and who were
not Cathars yet but faced the risk of becoming one and thus
losing their souls to the devil, the church decided to act
against Cathars.
The Inquisition didn’t start with the torture. Harris quotes
Saint Dominic announcing to Cathars, “For many years I have
exhorted you in vain, with gentleness, preaching, praying,
weeping. But according to the proverb of my country, ‘Where
blessing can accomplish nothing, blows may avail’” That sums up
the thought behind the torturing of accused heretics. How did
these people who represented the loving and merciful God resort
to crushing people’s toes and burning them on stake? Harris
tells us, “The justification of this behavior came straight from
Saint Augustine who reasoned that if torture was appropriate for
those who broke the laws of men, it was even more fitting for
those who broke the law of God”
Harris may not realize that but the justification offered by
Saint Augustine is eerily similar to his own. In both cases, the
situation in which torture is being sought is being compared to
a direr situation providing the justification for torture. One
can even argue that Saint Augustine’s justification carries more
weight than Harris’ if we compare them within the perspectives
they are offered in. Harris is concerned with the loss of life
in a terrorist attack while Saint Augustine’s concern is with
the eternal life hereafter. While Saint Augustine’s case for
torture is based on pure faith, Harris’ case is speculative and
based on some twisted logic. In absence of any conclusive
evidence, Harris is displaying as much faith in his assertions
as the church and that is an unfortunate fact considering that
the title of his book is “The end of faith”.
|
Sohail
Feb 2006
|
|
