Torture and clarity

Last updated on: June 22, 2005 at 1:50 pm by Fred Clark

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Torture and clarity 2005-06-22T13:50:15-04:00 Fred Clark

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"What do we DO about this?" Katherine asks, cutting to the chase in comments below.

Hilzoy answers that question at Obsidian Wings:

Here are links to the email addresses of your Senators and Representatives. Write them and let them know that you want things clear. …

I wrote to ask my Senators to support S 654, and my Representative to support HR 952. Since none of my elected representatives has signed on as a sponsor of these bills, I asked each of them to do that as well. (If you click the links for each bill, you can find the lists of sponsors.)

S 654 and HR 952 are two similar bills, the first in the Senate and the second in the House. They would ban extraordinary rendition: sending people to other countries where we know they might be tortured: countries like Uzbekistan, Syria, and Egypt. … It's an odious practice, and should be stopped. But both of these bills will die without more popular support. It is up to us not to let that happen.

The links there are from hilzoy's original post. I will add one more — Project Vote Smart, which can provide you with the name and address of your representatives in Congress if you don't already know them.

Hilzoy's comment about wanting things "clear" echoes the larger theme of her post, which goes a long way toward the kind of constructive dialogue that Sen. Durbin's speech seems to have gotten started (even while everyone was insisting the speech was preventing it):

"Wanting it clear" means wanting an honest, open debate about what we want interrogators to do in our name. In the course of that debate, those who favor torture would have a chance to make their case. Is it useful in interrogations? Do ticking time bomb scenarios actually occur, and if so, how often? How much actionable intelligence have our "stress positions" and our "Fear Up Harsh" and "Pride and Ego Down" tactics actually yielded? Those who oppose torture would have a chance to ask: do these benefits, if they exist, outweigh the dangers of adopting a policy that seems to invite abuse? Do they create more terrorists than they allow us to capture or thwart? Have they made enemies of people who might have supported us? And are these methods consistent with our values as a nation, and with our noblest aspirations? When both sides had made their case, we could then decide openly what we want to do, and decide it as a nation.

"Wanting it blurry" means wanting to avoid that debate. It means caring less about considering the extremely serious issues at stake and getting them right than about being able to duck the uncomfortable knowledge that debating those issues might force on us. It means caring less about our country, its ideals, and its honor than about our own peace of mind, even when we have reason to think that that peace of mind might be undeserved. It means being willing to let taxi drivers whom we know to be innocent be beaten to death, detainees be sodomized with chemical lightsticks and have lit cigarettes stuck in their ears, and fourteen year olds be "suspended from hooks in the ceiling for hours at a time" while being beaten, in order to preserve the illusion that our own hands are clean.

Go read the entire post, which includes many, many more links to supporting documentation. The post ends with a long, thoughtful series of questions about the use of torture and other coercive forms of interrogation. These questions are an enormous contribution to the kind of national conversation we still seem to be avoiding about these practices and the policies that condone them.

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