The war on terror torture debate didn't end with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Several of the men who would like to be the next president of the United States have said that they would definitely condone torture in a ticking time bomb scenario. We've all heard versions of that scenario: an attack is imminent and officials are holding a suspect who may have crucial information. Should s/he be tortured for the information?
Candidates Rudy Giuliani (R-NY), Mitt Romney (R-MA), Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Duncan Hunter (R-CA) enthusiastically said Yes to what Georgetown University law professor David Luban called "torture for intelligence gathering" in 2005. (Please e-mail me if you'd like a pdf copy of the 2005 article, Liberalism, Torture and the Ticking Bomb, which appeared in the Virginia Law Review.)
Pretty much across the board, we modern folk don't like torture.We think it is unacceptable to use torture to punish criminals, extract confessions from suspects or, of course, for the sadistic pleasures of humiliating or terrorizing our fellow humans. We especially despise torture, above all other forms of violence, because it is in miniature a reminder of how tyrannical governments deal with their subjects, as Luban explains. Americans should have especially little taste for tyranny: getting out from under oppressive government power was really the point of the whole American concept, as our Declaration of Independence points out. For us, each torturer is like a King George III, or Saddam Hussein, using his power illegitimately to hurt and humiliate his victim, as these leaders did to the people in their respective dominions (if very differently, given the time and space between the two men).
"The Liberal Ideology of Torture"
But torture for intelligence gathering doesn't seem cruel, it seems like a public service, especially since 9/11. Torturers seeking knowledge that will save lives don't want to torture, they must torture, as the hypothetical example goes. Luban calls this reasoning the "liberal ideology of torture" (by liberal means all of us in an open society with limited government powers, Republicans and Democrats). He argues that it is a dangerous fallacy. The implication is that its acceptance may lead us toward exactly the tyranny we abhor:
The liberal ideology insists that the sole purpose of torture must be intelligence gathering to prevent a catastrophe; that torture is necessary to prevent the catastrophe; that torturing is the exception, not the rule, so that it has nothing to do with state tyranny; that those who inflict the torture are motivated solely by the looming catastrophe, with not tincture of cruelty; that torture in such circumstances is, in fact, little more than self-defense; and that, because of the associations of torture with the horrors of yesteryear, perhaps one should not even call harsh interrogation "torture." And the liberal ideology will crystallize all of these ideas in a single, mesmerizing example: the ticking time bomb.
The ticking time bomb scenario is useful because it gets even those who think torture is an absolute wrong to admit that maybe sometimes, in some cases, it could be a little bit right. As Luban puts it cryptically, "now that the prohibitionist has admitted that her moral principles can be breached, all that is left is haggling about the price."