Torture Fatigue

If anyone still doubted whether the U.S. is torturing prisoners, or whether there are legitimate legal concerns about it, they should check out this article. It seems that in 2005 the Justice Department endorsed, in secret, the legality of torturing prisoners deemed to be terrorists. First, if this wasn't already old news, we should leap out of our seats and say, "What has the world come to!?! My government is torturing prisoners!!!" Second, we should be appalled by the very possibility that this can be justified legally. And finally, we should seriously doubt that it can, in fact, be so justified. I have elsewhere outlined reasons for doubt, but we should also be skeptical of the simple fact that the Justice Department kept their endorsement secret!!! In an open democracy, laws must by nature be public. It makes no sense, then, for interpretations of those laws to remain secret, that is, until they are inevitably leaked to the press. A secret legal justification of torture has the smell of a conscious-soother, not a serious legal argument intended for use in court.

Let me make one more point. This is a moral, rather than legal point, but it cuts close to the moral foundations of the law. The Bush Administration and the Justice Department strove to find loopholes in treaties and U.S. laws that would protect their agents in the field, military and otherwise, from prosecution once they got back home. But by eliminating the laws, they eliminated the rules that establish and limit what counts as proper procedure. They opened a Pandora's box of unregulated activity. Abu Gharib is the obvious result, but there have no doubt been many such incidents. (If you have not, you should read "The General's Report" about a general assigned to investigate Abu Gharib.) When soldiers, or anyone, are given a carte blanche to act however they want, we can no longer expect them to act rationally or to any longer conform to decorum. (See the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment.) Laws are there for a reason, and not simply to limit executive power. The Bush Administration was foolish to even suggest that rules about torture should not apply. I hate to say it, but the U.S. deserves the bad reputation it has lately acquired.