Torture: principle and practice

In reading about and talking about the torture report yesterday, I've noticed that some progressive atheists have used the report as a springboard to have another go at Sam Harris. This is by no means a widespread problem, but I do think it is a problem. Sam Harris bears absolutely no responsibility for Bush era torture policy. Firstly, this program goes back to 2001, years before Harris's first book was released. Secondly, even after becoming something of a celebrity in atheist circles, Harris still had no power to influence CIA policy. Harris isn't the one who decided not to pursue torture prosecutions. He's not the one who lied to Congress. He's not the one who spied on the oversight committees. 

If you're not familiar with the backstory, Sam Harris is the one who defended the view that torture isn't always wrong, and may in fact be morally obligatory in certain cases. It's a controversial view, although not nearly as controversial as his critics seem to think. It's actually a very common view among academic philosophers. To say that something is always wrong in all circumstances is quite a strong claim, and it doesn't take much to defeat it. All you have to do is imagine any circumstance, however implausible, where torture would be the right thing to do.

Harris imagines a situation where you have a suspect who is a known terrorist, and where you can be certain that he knows the location of a "ticking time-bomb", which will kill millions of people. This scenario piles implausibility on top of implausibility. In real life, there are no "ticking time-bomb" scenarios. In real life, not all suspected terrorists are terrorists. In real life, you don't know whether your suspect has the information you want, or even if the information exists at all. Harris's hypothetical also precludes any other approach, which is also implausible. Your only two choices are to torture a known terrorist, or sit helplessly waiting for millions of people to die.

This argument angered a lot of people. Many people saw this (and continue to see it) as straightforward support for torture, but it's not that. Harris is clear that he thinks torture should be illegal in all cases without exception. This is an important point which is usually misunderstood when it isn't overlooked entirely. In a situation where the consequences of obeying the law are worse than the consequences of disobeying it, disobedience becomes the morally preferred option. This is the basis for all civil disobedience. Obviously, torture has nothing to do with civil disobedience, but it's the same principle.

Other people were angered for another reason. Harris made this argument as a (minor) public figure, and he made it in the context of a very live debate over the very real issue of torture. Real people were being tortured under circumstances which did not come close to Harris's immaculate hypothetical. There's something a bit perverse about walking into an argument about the morality of real torture and declaring "Fantasy torture is okay." What's more, people who supported real torture could latch onto to Harris's argument, in exactly the same way that Islamophobes can latch onto criticisms of Islam. It was a mistake for Harris to wade into the issue the way he did.

But on the day that the Senate releases a torture report detailing the sickening reality of torture in practice, I think it's even more perverse to get hung up on a guy for defending hypothetical torture in principle.

The torture report

Yesterday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released its long-awaited torture report, and that's the end of the good news. Websites all over the internet are running their own versions of this article: The Most Horrific Revelations of the CIA Torture Report. There are a few general points I'd like to highlight as well.

It turns out that everything we thought we already knew was actually much worse than we thought. The report reveals that the CIA tortured more people than we thought, were far more brutal than we thought, and intentionally thwarted Congressional oversight even more than we thought. The report confirms that torture is ineffective, but also reveals that the CIA knew this even as it still continues to insist otherwise.

And of course we have to assume that the worst remains undisclosed. I mean, that's just how these things work. I'm grateful that this report was published at all, because there was a big push from inside the intelligence community to sit on it. The release was carefully negotiated between the White House, the CIA, and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Those negotiations have produced a partially-redacted 500-page executive summary of a 6,000 page document. There's still a lot we don't know, and it isn't the benign stuff that gets withheld.

The release of the report was met with genuine outrage, and I hope that this will spur Congress and the president into some kind of meaningful reform. But really, anything short of vigorous prosecution of everyone involved at every level is a white-wash. The people responsible for this are still around, and they're not chastened at all. Despite all of the evidence, they just know that torture works. I suspect this is a psychological defense mechanism. All of that means that this isn't over. Without prosecutions, people will know in the future that they can torture and lie about it to Congress without any repercussions. Imagine if you really believed that torture saved lives, and you knew you'd face no consequences, and you were presented with a suspected terrorist in custody. Under those circumstances, why wouldn't you torture him?

The legal framework of the Bush era torture regime is still in place. Obama put a stop to it by executive order, but there has been no legal reform to prevent this from happening again. All it would take is for a subsequent president (or even Obama himself) to rescind that executive order, and torture could resume immediately. This is not the last we've heard of the Bush era torture regime.

Finally, the issue of torture reaches beyond just the Bush era, and it's broader than just the "war on terror". We're still force-feeding prisoners every day down in Gitmo, and our civilian prisons have a disturbing fondness for solitary confinement. This nightmare is not over. There will be a political battle over this that plays out in the media, but beneath all that theater, the United States is an avowedly pro-torture country. President Obama can tell us that this report doesn't reflect the true values of America, and my god I think he might really believe that, but it does. This is who we are.