Is torture un-American?

Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson lays it on the line: “The more Dick Cheney defends torture, the more we Americans must end our tortured ambivalence. Either we are above using the same interrogation practices that police states use, or we are are not” [sic].

Having raised the question, Jackson then answers it by citing a slew of evidence that “we” were OK with using “the rough stuff” on terrorists after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, and we’re still OK with it: Bush-Cheney’s re-election “despite” the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses, and various polls taken this year that found Americans think torture is justified in some cases, such as getting terror suspects to talk; that while waterboarding is torture, it is an acceptable interrogation technique; and that the CIA’s methods should not be investigated by congress or an independent panel.

Americans have made their feelings on the issue quite clear, but Jackson just can’t handle the truth. He insists that “as Cheney continues to defend the dark side - even without conclusive proof that waterboarding coughed up critical intelligence - he is daring Americans to come out of the shadows to demand a bright light on interrogation and prisoner-treatment practices that render us hypocrites on human rights."

No, he is not. Cheney is speaking for the majority of reasonable Americans who think of waterboarding the way liberals think of abortion: That it should be rare and legal (it’s obviously safe, since Khalid Sheik Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and he’s still alive and kicking).

One of those reasonable Americans is Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen – a liberal who is “torn between my desire for absolute security and my abhorrence of torture”:

The one thing I know is that ideology does not provide an answer. For me, it settles nothing that Dick Cheney supported enhanced interrogation and that Cheney was wrong and deceitful on the war. It settles nothing that Cheney defined torture as something so extreme that almost anything less than, say, the rack is permissible interrogation. The issue is not Cheney. The issue is the issue.

The questions of what constitutes torture and what to do with those who, maybe innocently, applied what we now define as torture have to be removed from the political sphere. They cannot be the subject of an ideological tug of war, both sides taking extreme and illogical positions - torture never works, torture always works, torture is always immoral, torture is moral if it saves lives. Torture always is ugly. So, though, is the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center once stood.

Cohen argues, “No one can possibly believe that America is now safer because of the new restrictions on enhanced interrogation and the subsequent appointment of a special prosecutor.”

Well, no one except for Jackson and blogger Andrew Sullivan, who writes that “many regarded many of [Khalid Sheik Mohammed's] claims after being tortured as being false." Hate to break it to Sullivan but the reason that KSM was waterboarded in the first place is because he was giving his interrogators misinformation – just as he was trained to.

Um, make that no one except for Jackson, Sullivan and Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, who considers it “nothing more than a statement of obvious chronology, not causation” that KSM did not give up actionable intelligence until after he was waterboarded. Applying Greenwald’s reasoning, libs would have to admit that if it is true that global warming began after the Industrial Revolution it’s chronology, not causation. 

In fact, in a recent Rasmussen survey 54 percent of voters said that investigation of the CIA’s interrogation practices threatens national security, whereas 29 percent said it improves America’s image. But our national security and our image abroad are two separate issues entirely, and not at all equivalent. This is something Nicolò Machiavelli figured out almost 500 years ago: “[I]t would be best to be both loved and feared. But since the two rarely come together, anyone compelled to choose will find greater security in being feared than in being loved.”

Unlike Jackson, The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder understands the reality that the average American is not as exercised over torture as the average liberal, and that they "need to persuade people that the act of torture in a democratic society is always wrong, that the ticking-time-bomb scenario is rarely - if ever - the situation interrogators face, and that even if torture works in a few cases, it is not worth the moral (and tangible) costs to our country."

The National Review’s Andy McCarthy suggests that Ambinder and other opponents of torture use this tack: “While this is an excruciating choice, it would be better for thousands of Americans to be killed than to allow the CIA to use nonlethal coercive tactics (that cause no lasting physical or mental damage) on a terrorist who refuses to tell us what he knows about ongoing mass-murder plots.”

Did you find that convincing? Didn’t think so. Why not? Because it is irrelevant how “rare” the ticking-time-bomb scenario is (hasn’t Ambinder learned anything from “24”?).

Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, is far more persuasive making the case that it is immoral not to torture terrorists:

In a breathtaking display of self-righteousness and intellectual arrogance, the president told Americans that his personal beliefs are more important than protecting their country, their homes and their families. The interrogation techniques in question, the president asserted, are a sign that Americans have lost their "moral compass," a compliment similar to Attorney General Eric Holder's identifying them as "moral cowards." Mulling Obama's claim, one can wonder what could be more moral for a president than doing all that is needed to defend America and its citizens? Or, asked another way, is it moral for the president of the United States to abandon intelligence tools that have saved the lives and property of Americans and their allies in favor of his own ideological beliefs? …

[I]f the … worst-case scenario ever comes to pass, Americans will have at least two things from which to take solace, even after the loss of major cities and tens of thousands of countrymen. First, they will know that their president believes that those losses are a small price to pay for stopping interrogations and making foreign peoples like us more. And second, they will see Osama bin Laden's shy smile turn into a calm and beautiful God-is-Great grin.

For his part, Pat Buchanan ponders this quote from George Orwell in a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review op-ed: “Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf”:

[Barack Obama] and [Eric] Holder may not like what was done back then, but who does? And where is the criminal intent? These agents are not sadists. They were trying to get intel to abort plots and apprehend terrorists to prevent them from killing us. And they succeeded. Not a single terrorist attack on the United States in eight years.

Do we the people, some of whom may be alive because of what those CIA men did, want them disgraced, prosecuted and punished for not going strictly by the book in protecting us from terrorists? …

[O]n the issue of national security, as Barack will painfully discover, he is not more trusted than Dick Cheney or the rough men at the CIA who did the harsh interrogations of terrorists, to keep us sleeping peacefully at night.

Tell the truth: Did you ever think you’d live to see the day when Richard Cohen and Pat Buchanan would be on the same page regarding torture?

Sheila Lukins, c. 1942 – August 30, 2009