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 here is a
little discussion rumbling on here and there in newspapers and magazines,
and very likely in your local bar, about torture. As far as I can
tell, it seems to have started with a piece by Walter Pincus in
the Washington Post of October 21: "Silence of 4 Terror
Probe Suspects Poses Dilemma for FBI." Of all the hundreds
of people rounded up since September 11th, there are apparently
four who are of very particular interest to investigators. And guess
what: These four aren't saying a word. Bearing in mind the kind
of things they might know — another September 11-type
attack, or something even worse — should we torture them?
Here's a real moral dilemma, of a kind we haven't had to think
about for... well, several decades. It is not surprising that very
few of our opinion-mongers have been willing to commit themselves
firmly on it. Jonathan Alter did a good piece in Newsweek
(11/5/01). He came down against physical torture, but in favor of
certain kinds of psychological torture. The Jordanians, he points
out, broke Abu Nidal, the most notorious terrorist of the 1980s,
by threatening his family. Someone told me that Alan Dershowitz
has done a piece somewhere making some similar argument (if you
know the piece, please send it to me). Well, here's my two cents'
worth.
I'm against torture. Like Alter, I'll go along with some clever
manipulation of a suspect's hopes and fears: But rubber truncheons?
Electrodes? Pliers? Razor blades? Blocks of ice? Not in my name,
no. Am I an absolutist on this? Yes, I am. Let's say we know, beyond
reasonable doubt, that a large thermonuclear bomb, disguised as
a refrigerator, has been installed on a high floor in a high building
in a U.S. city. We don't know anything else — not even which
city — but we have a guy in custody who could probably tell
us all about it if he chose to. Why would we not use "extraordinary
measures" to make him sing? On one side of the scales: a few
hours of intense physical pain for a very evil person. On the other:
millions of American lives. Why would we not torture the
guy? Why is this not, for me, a no-brainer?
The first thing to be said about torture, as a means of discovering
facts, was said by Aristotle in Book 1, Chapter 15 of Rhetorica:
torture doesn't work very well. Under physical torture, some people
will lie; some will say anything to make the pain stop, even just
for a while; and a surprising number will refuse to yield. Robert
Conquest, in The
Great Terror, gives a figure of "one in a hundred"
for those who failed to confess under the methods used by Stalin's
secret police. However, most of those pulled in by the NKVD were
ordinary people guilty of nothing at all. Dedicated resistance workers,
fanatical terrorists, or revolutionaries would show better stats.
In his memoir Nothing
to Declare, Taki Theodoracopulos tells the story of a young
WWII Greek resistance fighter named Perrikos, who blew up the German
HQ building in Athens on orders from Taki's father. Arrested and
tortured to death by the Nazis, Perrikos revealed nothing, claiming
to the end that he had acted alone, under no one's orders. There
were many such cases.
There is a certain type of personality that nothing can break.
Arthur Koestler gave the following sketch of his friend Alexander
Weissberg, one of that "one in a hundred" who survived
the NKVD cellars:
What enabled him to hold out where others broke down was a special
mixture of just those character traits which survival in such
a situation requires. A great physical and mental resilience —
that jack-in-the-box quality which allows quick recuperation and
apparently endless comebacks, both physical and mental. An extraordinary
presence of mind... A certain thick-skinnedness and good-natured
insensitivity, coupled with an almost entirely extroverted disposition
— notice the absence in Dr. Weissberg's book of any contemplative
passage, of any trace of religious or mystic experience which
is otherwise almost inevitably present in solitary confinement.
An irresponsible optimism and smug complacency in hair-raising
situations; that "it can't happen to me" attitude, which
is the most reliable source of courage; and an inexhaustible sense
of humor. Finally, that relentless manner of persisting in an
argument and continuing it for hours, days or weeks... It drove
his inquisitors nuts, as it sometimes had his friends.
Ian Buruma gives some similar pen-portraits in his
new book about Chinese dissidents. Chia Thye Poh, for example,
was kept in solitary confinement for twenty-six years by
the Singapore* authorities for having resigned his seat in parliament
to protest the policies of Lee Kuan Yew. In their attempts to get
him to sign a confession that he was a Communist, which he wasn't,
Chia's jailers inflicted on him such peculiarly modern tortures
as forcing him to stand naked in a freezing room with the air-conditioning
going full blast, and piping loud Muzak into his cell day and night.
Chia never cracked. Why not? asked Buruma, at a meeting with Chia.
"He was much too polite to say so, but it was clear my question
had baffled him. I wished I hadn't asked. 'How could I have signed?'
he said, very softly. 'It wasn't true.'"
When you read about what people have endured under torture, you
stand amazed at those who can hold out. Mainland-Chinese dissident
Liu Qing, jailed for having published transcripts of the "trial"
of his friend Wei Jingsheng, was forced to spend four years sitting
absolutely still on a tiny stool made of hard rope that cut into
his skin. No books, no exercise, no conversation. Four years!
Criminal inmates were stationed around him in shifts, to beat
him if he moved. Reading this kind of thing, you also find yourself
wondering how you yourself would hold up under torture. In a rather
sheltered life, I have had only one experience of really intense
physical pain, and the memory of it suggests to me that I would
probably sing like a canary as soon as they brought the razor blades
out. But of course, this is one of those things you cannot know
until it happens.
Mere physical pain is, of course, only one weapon in the torturer's
armory. A skilful torturer knows how to use the entire range of
human responses to stimuli. Disgust, for example: Prisoners at the
Khmer Rouge facility known as "S-21" were given a spoonful
of excrement to eat at suitable points in their interrogation. (Around
14,000 persons went into S-21;
just twelve came out alive.) Despair is another ally of the torturer.
"Do you think anyone cares you're in here?" he sneers
at his victim. "Do you think anyone even knows? The
world has forgotten about you!" This is one reason why the
work of keeping track of political prisoners and making their cases
known is so important — Amnesty International, for all its
many faults, has been superb at this. It is also a reason why dictatorships
that routinely practice torture should never, never be given any
mark of international approval. When Communist China was awarded
the 2008 Summer Olympics this past July, I could hear, in imagination,
the triumphant shouts of the Chinese torturer as his boots went
into the prisoner's ribs: "See? They gave us the Olympics!
So much they care about you and your kind!"
And then there is love. Above and beyond anything the torturer
can inflict on your own poor body and mind, there are the things
he can do to people you care about. That was the threat hung over
Abu Nidal by the Jordanians. This kind of thing doesn't necessarily
stop at threats, though. Roy
Medvedev tells us that the Old Bolshevik S. V. Kossior stood
up under everything Stalin's men could do to him, but was broken
at last when his 16-year-old daughter was brought in and raped in
front of him. In another case of that time, a mother and son were
separately interrogated and tortured. The son confessed, but the
mother did not. She was then confronted with her broken son in a
joint interrogation. (She still held out.)
This, gentle reader, is torture. Don't let's kid ourselves that
we can pick and choose from the menu. "Yes, we'll beat, but
we won't pull out fingernails." ... "Yes, OK, we'll pull
out fingernails, but we won't rape your children in front of you."
Forget it — when you start on the road of torture, there is
no end. We beat him: he doesn't talk. We remove his fingernails,
and then, for good measure, his toenails: Still he won't talk. That
nuke is ticking away in a high building, in some American city.
The suspect has a 16-year-old daughter: Do we send for her?
My answer would be "No!" but I'm under no illusions that
this is an easy call. A whole city — perhaps my city
— full of American men, women and children, might be saved
by one single act of barbarism by a salaried employee of the federal
government. Why won't I endorse this? I am willing to see the U.S.
do things that, in the scale of human suffering, far exceed a rape
— the bombing of enemy cities, for example. A U.S. bomber pilot
is also a salaried employee of Uncle Sam — of me, as
a taxpayer — isn't he? If I am willing (and I am) to let him
incinerate the helpless citizens of Baghdad or Kabul with bombs,
why do I balk at letting FBI agents apply electrodes to a terrorist's
eyeballs? Is it because the one thing is done at a distance, while
the other is personal? Not at all: I am quite happy for an allied
soldier to personally cut the throat of an enemy sentry. Is it because
the one thing has some direct and obvious effect, while the other
may not have? No: While a prisoner might stay mum under anything
I throw at him, surely the chance that he will talk is worth pursuing,
in an extreme case like the one I have posed. So... why? Why won't
I sanction these extreme methods? Is it because I cling to some
quaint vestige of medieval chivalry — "it's not fair"?
I don't think so. What's fair or chivalrous about dropping bombs
on the schoolchildren of Baghdad?
I'm afraid I'm going to bail out right here. I don't know the answers
to the questions I've been posing, though if they come to me I'll
write a column about them. I know very well how I feel: Aerial
bombing? — Yes, even if not very accurate. Torture of prisoners?
— No, not even to save a million lives. Some things are just
wrong, and the deliberate torture of suspects is wrong, wrong, wrong,
in some way that the dropping of bombs on cities is not. (George
Orwell: "When someone has dropped a bomb on your mother, there
is nothing for it but to go and drop two bombs on his mother.")
Look: We shall all die sooner or later. A man is dying in a house
across the street from me — in a room I can see from my window
as I type. His wife, who he adored, died two years ago. "Golden
lads and girls all must, like chimney sweepers, come to dust."
While we live, let's live like human beings, with some dignity,
some humanity, some pride, some things we will not do.
* A lot of people will tell you that Singapore is a model of "Asian
values," an island of civilization and sanity in the Far East.
Many people in mainland China say: "Our aim is to become just
like Singapore!" In fact, as Buruma's book makes abundantly
clear, Singapore is a vicious little dictatorship run by robbers,
thugs and psychopaths.
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