American Values: Why the Torture Report Didn’t Go Far Enough

Last updated on: December 30, 2014 at 5:33 pm by Adam Ericksen

American Values: Why the Torture Report Didn’t Go Far Enough 2014-12-30T17:33:53-05:00 Adam Ericksen

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Last Tuesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released its report of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques following 9/11. The report is a 500 page summary detailing the CIA’s techniques and reveals the absurdity of the term “enhanced interrogation technique.”

Enhanced interrogation technique is a soft, friendlier term that intentionally hides and sanitizes the truth that we tortured people. And, in response to the report, President Obama claimed that torture is inconsistent with American values:

The report documents a troubling program involving enhanced interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects in secret facilities outside the United States, and it reinforced my long-held view that these harsh methods were not only inconsistent with our values as a nation, they did not serve our broader counterterrorism efforts or our national security interests. Moreover, these techniques did significant damage to America’s standing in the world and made it harder to pursue our interest with allies and partners. That is why I will continue to use my authority as President to make sure we never resort to those methods again.

I’m glad to hear that the President thinks torture is inconsistent with American values, but the President is being inconsistent. His statement shows that Americans need to re-examine our fundamental values.

According to President Obama, “Throughout our history, the United States of America has done more than any other nation to stand up for freedom, democracy, and the inherent dignity and human rights of people around the world.” We value freedom, democracy, and the inherent dignity and human rights of all people – and we are willing to kill anyone who we think gets in our way.

The method of sustaining our freedom is violence. “Freedom isn’t free,” the saying goes. But let me be clear – the United States isn’t free. We are slaves. And our master is violence.

The Senate gave us a torture report, but what we need is a violence report.

Here’s the fact about violence: Violence tortures. That’s why the torture report doesn’t go far enough. The report does more harm than good because it doesn’t critique the nature of violence. Our master, violence, has a logic. The logic of violence is based on the false premise that everyone believes: “we” use violence for good and “they” use violence for evil. Whenever we have tortured people, it was against our values because we falsely believe that we only use violence in the name of goodness, freedom, democracy, dignity, and human rights, whereas our enemies’ violence is purely evil. Like “enhanced interrogation techniques” is an effort to sanitize torture, the false distinction between “good” and “bad” violence is an effort to sanitize our use of violence. But violence, no matter who wields it, is evil.

The United States is not the only nation to be enslaved to the logic of violence, of course. René Girard, the founder of mimetic theory, states that throughout human history we have resorted to violence to achieve our goals of peace and freedom. But we have never achieved peace or freedom because the nature of violence is fundamentally imitative. If someone hits me, I want revenge. I want to hit them back. But I don’t just want to hit them back. I want to hit them a little harder than they hit me. That’ll teach them to never mess with me again!

That’s the exact formula that describes the United States after 9/11. Tragically, 2,996 people died on that horrific day. In response, the United States began the War on Terror. In the Iraq war alone, the US led War on Terror has killed an estimated and conservative 405,000 civilian Iraqis.

Those 405,000 Iraqis have no hope for freedom or democracy. Their inherent dignity and their human rights were squelched by the American War Machine. The President is right to claim that enhanced interrogation techniques “did significant damage to America’s standing in the world,” but he’s also wrong. Our problem isn’t just enhanced interrogation techniques. Our fundamental problem is our belief that violence works. Violence only “works” to create more violence. There are no “good” guys when we are enslaved to this cycle of reciprocal violence. When it comes to violence, there is no moral difference between “us” and “them.” There is no such thing as “good” violence. Girard claims in his book Violence and the Sacred that the fact is “evil and the violent measures taken to combat evil are essentially the same” (37).

When American values are dependent upon violence we are faced with the glaring fact that we are just like our violent enemies. And according to the numbers of civilian casualties, we are 135 times worse.

The solution to the imitative cycle of violence is to claim a set of values that isn’t enslaved to violence. The solution is nonviolent love that seeks justice, not revenge.

The United States has a moral obligation in the world because we have massive resources. Unfortunately, we have used those resources to spread our own brand of terrorism. We have tortured millions of families by killing fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters – only to create a new generation of enemies and ensure that the cycle of violence continues. We had other options, of course. We could have used our resources to create a more just world: to feed the hungry, create jobs, house the homeless, build hospitals, and promote education.

And so we are in desperate need of a violence report. Fortunately, that report has already been delivered. Girard claims that in today’s reign of cyclical and escalating violence we are “confronted with a perfectly straightforward and even scientifically calculable choice between total destruction and total renunciation of violence” (Violence and the Sacred, 240).

The United States is always faced with a choice. It’s time that we choose to change our values from violence to nonviolence. It’s time we free ourselves from our enslavement to violence. If we don’t, we will guarantee ourselves mutual destruction. If we do, we have hope for a better future.

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