POLITICS - A Good Argument

"America is better than torture" by Greg Sagan, Amarillo Globe

Over the past few weeks we have been bombarded with stories and arguments about America's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and torture.

These arguments reduce to the following categories:

First, are enhanced interrogation techniques legal?

Second, are enhanced interrogation techniques torture?

Third, can we torture our enemies if torture works?

Fourth, if we cannot torture our enemies on our own soil, then may we torture them on someone else's soil, either with our without the official participation of America's agents?

Finally, are we safer with torture than without?

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is making the rounds of everyone who will listen to press his claim that "enhanced interrogation techniques" work. Reports entering the mainstream media suggest that these techniques include waterboarding, sleep deprivation, long periods in so-called "stress positions," close confinement with insects, being slapped into a wall while bound, hooded and suspended by the neck, and simulated execution.

Mr. Cheney has even called on President Obama to do something former President Bush, apparently with Mr. Cheney's active support, would not do, which is to declassify CIA and other materials that speak to the efficacy of these techniques. Mr. Cheney is apparently convinced that these techniques "kept America safe."

This is an easy claim to make, and it's true so long as we ignore both Sept. 11, 2001 and the loss of more than 4,000 of our fighting men and women in Iraq since we invaded. Since the possibility of a terrorist attack using commercial airliners flown into buildings on American soil was known to our government at least one month earlier, one could plausibly argue that torture is still no substitute for paying attention to the intelligence gleaned from other methods. But the claim reminds me of the very old saw about the guy standing on a corner snapping his fingers. Someone comes up and asks him what he's doing, and he says, "Keeping the elephants away." The passer-by says, "You're crazy. There isn't an elephant within a thousand miles of here," to which the first guy says, "See? It works."

As to whether enhanced interrogation techniques, and especially waterboarding, are torture, it seems to me all we really have to do is consult history. Some of the methods that constitute "enhanced interrogation" have been with us since at least the Inquisition, and we all know what a crowd pleaser that was.

More recently, after World War II we considered those Japanese who waterboarded American prisoners to be war criminals. Either we were wrong about the Japanese then, or we are guilty of war crimes now. It would be nice if we could have it both ways, but we can't.

If ancient history doesn't convince us then all we need to do is answer this question: Would we consider such a technique torture if it were applied to one of our own service members by a foreign authority? If it's torture when they do it to us then it's still torture when we do it to them.

Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura had this to say about the reliability of waterboarding, to which he submitted while on active duty with the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War: "Give me one hour, a waterboard and Dick Cheney, and I'll have him confessing to the Sharon Tate murders."

The interesting thing to me is that all of these arguments are completely beside the point.

The real question, the most important question, the question almost no one is answering is whether America should torture anyone ever. Or, phrased more generally, the proposition is, if the good guys do the same things the bad guys do, are they still the good guys?

This is a moral test that America has failed already, and it's time to acknowledge that lapse and correct ourselves. The only thing that makes America worth defending, the only "moral authority" that makes the American fighting man readily fight our wars, defeat our enemies, and lay down his life for us all is the conviction that we are better than our foes. Once we descend to moral parity, or worse, compared to those with whom we war, our subtlest, least tangible, most powerful asset evaporates, and we are left with nothing to defend us but the magnitude of the damage we can do with our technologies of destruction.

America isn't land. It isn't wealth. It isn't a flag. It isn't the sum of our individual pretensions and boasts. America is an idea that even power has limits, that those limits are codified in our laws, and that anyone who violates those laws rates punishment that is neither cruel nor perverted.

Oh, and until we're actually convicted in a credible court after a fair trial, we're all innocent and must be treated that way.