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July 28, 2005
On Torture
I grew up on the far left. My mother was a schoolteacher, my father a professor. My sister gave me The Communist Manifesto when I was 12. I publicly professed to being a communist in the 8th Grade (and was shouted down by my fellow 8th graders for it). As such I was deeply suspicious of America and of American power. I groveled before European Self-Righteousness and shook my head in disapproval at anyone professing the virtue of military force.
Then, two things happened; I moved to Germany and I began to give politics more than a passing, apathetic glance. After doing this, I found myself pulled to right, farther and farther. My friends and family are still a little stunned by this. I did this in the midst of one of the farthest left cities in that bastion of leftist pacifism, Germany. Slowly a feeling grew in me, in the midst of the pre-War 
The turmoil that pacifist, protest obsessed Germany must inevitably produce, the belief in the superiority of the American idea, American Patriotism. This was and is new to me, and I don’t take it for granted. I, admittedly, express it clumsily but with sincerity.
cold war taught us that Human nature is not the stainless ivory edifice that we hoped it was (at least some of us did), that we are still, at the end of the day, animals. But, paradoxically, the triumph of America and of the American idea proves that, while we are still base wretched, brutish tings, we can be more, we can be something better than animals, that we have something to strive for; transcending our animalism. As TNR put it:
Indeed, the American revolution in human affairs was owed to the intuition, the illumination even, that in this nasty terrestrial life possibility is a greater gift than paradise.
This idea is the American idea and has sustained America through the great conflicts we have endured. We are not always true to it, to be sure, but it is never forgotten. So too, we should not forget that, what America means (if not always what America is) is the horizon for mankind, America included.
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their CREATOR, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
This fundamental principle to the American idea is difficult and often impossible to hold to in practice. But it is nonetheless a noble principle that we, as Americans, are privileged to serve and propagate. Only when absolutely necessary should we abandon this, only when we must.
When one talks about those who have given their lives for the American idea, one typically thinks of the men and women in our armed services, fighting, giving their lives and bodies on the battlefield for the defense of this country and the idea that it emulates. There is, however, a second front. The innocent victims of crime in this country have also given their lives for the American idea. The freedom that Americans enjoy gave birth to the possibility of gross abuse by private citizens. As citizens of this state our greatest fear is not the state itself but those who would abuse their freedom to curtail ours. Those lives are the price of our freedom and they are price we are comfortable paying.
The price of this freedom went up on September 11, 2001 but not drastically. One solution to the terrorist threat would be the institution of a police state. This is, in fact, the most logical solution if we ignore context. But this solution was never given any thought--Why? Because it contradicts the American idea. So, as a nation, we batten down the hatches. We brace ourselves for the loss of life that we know is coming, but we do not change our ways. We recognize that the way that saves the most lives is not necessarily the right way. We recognize that innocent life is and always will be a casualty in this larger war waged for the American idea. The recognition of this fact seems lost in the larger torture debate; it should not be.
A friend of mine, a former interrogation expert in the Middle East for the military, said this when I tried to get him to discuss torture:
My opinion, for what it's worth, is that debriefings of a sensitive nature (call it what you will) should be performed outside the view of the media and, consequently, the sheepish public.
The truth of this statement is obvious. In order to be effective these practices would have to be shielded from the public eye. Unfortunately, although it would severely hinder our ability to extract information, keeping our permitted torture practices under wraps would run counter to America as it ought to be. America as it ought to be is not a place free of ugliness, but it a place that does not hide it’s ugliness, that attempts to excise it’s ugliness, or minimize it, or even accept it as necessary, but it does not hide it’s faults. Restricting the media is attractive and would make our interrogations more effective but it is un-American. In 
order to be consistent with our ideal, we must make public the allowable practices and the procedures for deciding who is subject to them. Once these practices become public they become subject to the whim of the electorate. The whim of the electorate may have its faults, but neglecting its own safety is not one of them. So I submit that acceptable methods of torture be set by the legislature, as with any law and as such subject to change when the public so desires. My friend would be extremely disappointed with this solution, because he can see the lives saved by the opposite solution, but this is incompatible with a free, open, democratic society, with an American society.
Being a Democracy we are always at a disadvantage, the Soviet Union had no Newsweek debacle, no large scale Vietnam like protests, except those that ushered in is doom. Every Cuban is a communist party member. Those in Cuba that openly oppose Castro are in jail. Of course we will never come close to that kind of unity and people will die because of that, and people will die because our process to determine who is eligible for torture will be too lengthy, too thorough and the methods we can use will be weak and less effective than those used abroad, but those people will be dying for a great idea, one that it is a privilege to die for.
Having rejected the left, rebuked it, I return to it very reluctantly and infrequently. This is one of those times. Whenever I find myself here, I grow suspicious and search frantically for the chink in my armor, weak beam underpinning my rationale, but there is no such beam, no such chink here. My opposition to opaque, disguised torture practices comes not from my old loony left anti-reactionism, but from my new found patriotism.
Posted by conryf at 11:02 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack