Tortured Logic

In all the talk about which interrogation techniques constitute torture, we’ve never asked why torture should be bestowed exclusively on terrorist suspects. After all, why not torture a Mafia don to give up those that are ruining thousands of drug addicts’ lives? Or the chief conspirator in a child pornography ring? And I doubt that I’m the only Mets fan who’s thought about torturing former general managers to learn the twisted logic behind the Nolan Ryan and Scott Kazmir trades.

But as I learned in tenth grade, Americans don’t torture people (no matter the perceived benefits) because our collective definition of a decent society precludes us from doing so. How many of us would support chopping the hand off a thief, even if doing so reduced larcenies? Surely New York would be a much safer place if the NYPD listened to every phone call and questioned every person boarding the subway? A tradeoff between security and liberty is unavoidable in a modern and free society.

Our terrorist justice system also implicitly assumes that the government never accuses a man falsely. My father still receives stern letters from New Jersey, demanding that he pay a quarterly tax bill from 1999. He’s proved payment by digging up canceled checks and yellowing tax returns, but to no avail. But we’re to assume that every man locked up in Guantanamo is undeniably, beyond a shadow of a doubt, guilty? I don’t have that kind of faith in my hometown post office, much less the United States Government. Placing the burden on the accuser can result in guilty men going free, but that is the cost of our decision to absolutely minimize the chance that an innocent man is locked up. Extending this right to non-Americans would mean that “all men are created equal” isn’t just an empty catchphrase.

Making matters worse has been our choice to single out terrorists as undeserving of due process. This decision has had precisely the reverse effect that its proponents expected. To call ourselves a nation of laws, yet suspend those same laws at the whim of the executive blurs the distinction between the United States and the petty dictatorships that are Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Our battle against those that wish to murder American civilians is fundamentally a war of ideas, not a war against men.

Singling out terrorists only serves to glorify them in the eyes of their radical base. Rather than deter future acts, we stir a hornet’s nest of nationalism in Middle Eastern countries, where budding terrorists see little daylight between how their own governments and the United States behave. On the other hand, treating terrorists like common criminals deprives their leaders of the exceptional status that they so wantonly crave.

I’d rather not do Osama that favor.