Just the other night, eight out of 10 GOP candidates for president offered enthusiastic endorsements of torture, to lusty audience applause in South Carolina. The question posed to them, by pseudo-journalist Brit Hume, concerned a lurid hypothetical about three U.S. shopping malls being bombed. A suspect in a planned fourth attack has been captured. What would these candidates do to elicit the needed information and save American lives? In other words, the “ticking bomb” scenario, which is completely divorced from reality, yet used always and every time to justify “enhanced interrogation techniques” — i.e., torture, the erasure of the Geneva protocols, the abrogation of human rights, the tactic used by every vile dictatorship that history has known.
It’s hardly my original phrase, but I will go on repeating it: the purpose of torture is torture. It is not information-gathering. It is not about crime scenarios pulled from TV scripts. And it is not hypothetical, despite what Brit Hume suggests. It is real. This administration has authorized it and encouraged it. They’ve tortured people whose innocence they have later acknowledged. Some have died.
In the wake of Abu Ghraib, here are questions that should be put to the candidates: Do you believe that naked human pyramids are useful to the gathering of intelligence? Do you support the continued use of torture, as authorized by the current administration? Do you recognize the authority of internationally codified humanitarian law, or do you think the U.S. should formally withdraw from the relevant agreements?
A roundup of reactions from Marty Lederman here. Andrew Sullivan’s posts here and here couldn’t be better. He writes:
The evil of torture is therefore not just a moral one. It is a political one. A constitutional republic dedicated before everything to the protection of liberty cannot legalize torture and remain a constitutional republic. It imports into itself a tumor of pure tyranny. That tumor, we know from history, always always spreads, as it has spread in the US military these past shameful years. The fact that hefty proportions of US soldiers now support its use as a routine matter reveals how deep the rot has already gone. The fact that now a majority of Republican candidates proudly support such torture has rendered the GOP the party most inimical to liberty in America. When you combine torture’s evil with the claims of the hard right that a president can ignore all laws and all treaties in wartime, and that “wartime” is now permanent, you have laid the ground for the abolition of the American experiment in self-government. Imagine another terror attack, with Rudy Giuliani as president, and a mandate to arrest and torture at will, with no need to follow or even address the rule of law. We would no longer be a republic. We would be in a protectorate of one man.
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