Does terror justify terror?

I’m sure this will seem like a really weird way of introducing the topic of torture, but bear with me for a minute. A while ago, I was reading an interview with some celebrity—I don’t remember which one—about marriage. This individual had been married for many years and, with divorce rates so high among celebrities, the interviewer was wondering what this person’s secret was for making his marriage work. He said that he and his wife decided to not let divorce be an option. His rationale was that if you have something good enough, in order to keep it, you sometimes must make a commitment to yourself to simply not let it go, no matter what.

To the celebrity this thing was his marriage. To our nation it should be human rights and human dignity. If we utilize pain, degradation, and fear in any of our interrogation techniques—whether we call this torture, coercion, or enhanced interrogation—we are violating those very values that our country should be defending. And if we justify our actions by finding loopholes in the semantics of international agreements, we encourage other nations to do the same. According to Bowden, “September 11 restored to respectability the practice of coercive methods of interrogation” (The Truth About Torture, page 2). He also apparently supports, in certain cases, the use of fear—which he identifies as more effective than actual pain—to aid in the interrogation of ‘enemy combatants.’ Let’s be clear: Bowden considers the war against terror to be sufficient justification for terrorizing vulnerable prisoners who do not have the benefit of presumed innocence. Does he not see the irony, the hypocrisy?

I am by no means an expert on interrogation, and I do not have Bowden’s insight on which techniques are successful in eliciting information. However, I would argue that, regardless of the effectiveness of techniques intended to gain information by inducing pain, fear, or degradation, we need to set our nation’s moral standards much higher than this. Even if we were to completely renounce the human dignity of the detainees—which I certainly do not condone—we should think of the impact this will have on the world, as well as its implications for our own troops. According to Patrick Leahy, when talking about captured Americans in Iraq, Bush said “We expect them to be treated humanely, just like we’ll treat any prisoner of theirs that we capture humanely. If not, the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals” (Gutman and Thompson, page 68). In order for a demand like this to hold any merit, we must truly follow through on our promises. We have enough reason to fear when our troops get captured without promoting the use of cruel, dehumanizing methods as acceptable interrogation techniques.