Approved Torture Techniques

The AP and ABC have reported that the mysterious legal approval of torture techniques came from former attorney general John Acroft during a meeting chaired by Condoleezza Rice. Vice president Dick Cheney, secretary of state Colin Powell, and CIA director George Tenet were in attendance at a meeting that approved slaps, pushes, sleep deprivation, and the controversial act of waterboarding. President George Bush was purposefully isolated from this meeting, not that anyone doubts that he probably knew about it.

Last semester I took a class called Contemporary Moral Issues, which was actually a philosophy class. One of the units we studied was torture: what qualifies, what are the human rights issues, should it be used, and if so when? We also discussed water boarding which is probably widely misunderstood by the public because of all the hype surrounding it. It's probably by far the hardest technique to handle mentally, since it stimulates the feeling of drowning. It does not, however, leave lasting effects.

In a video released by ABC, it portrays John Ashcroft in a moral dilemma. History will not judge us kindly, he reportedly said. This topic is most definitely a complicated one. On one hand, torture is inhumane, doesn't actually work sometimes, and doesn't have much of a way of finding out if it actually works. On the other hand, shouldn't terrorist be held to harsher standards than the average citizen? And isn't it better to save a group of innocent people than cause a potentially bad guy some distress?

I recently saw the movie Rendition which portrayed the downfalls of torture techniques. Above every argument I've heard on the topic, watching this movie was the most powerful, and left the most lasting effects on me. Let me say first of all I'm a conservative and tend to think that anyone willing to kill thousands of people deserves to go through distress. I understand that everyone ought to have equal human rights, but I also think once you commit a crime to humanity, or are involved with a crime at that level, you lose those rights. That said, this movie completely changed my perspective.

A brief overview: An American citizen is in Africa doing some type of business. In the beginning you see a terrorist attack and a CIA official being killed from it. The American citizen is taken into captivity by the U.S. government after his flight back to the U.S. Any record of him being on the flight has been erased and he has in essence disappeared. While his wife persistently tries to find him, he is being tortured because of a phone call he made to the man involved with the attack. He also has previously knowledge of chemicals and knows how to create effective bombs, which these were, much better than the earlier ones.

In the movie, the man insists he doesn't know the man who's cell phone said he called. He is continuously tortured until he makes up a story about being payed to send them plans about the explosives. He gives them a list of names, which turns out to be a soccer team. The viewer never finds out whether the U.S. citizen knew this man or not. The scenes were fairly graphic and the U.S. citizen was a sympathetic character. After this movie it was hard for me to see the benefits. Whether this man knew him or not , it was clear that he had no incentive to participate in terrorist acts. He had a family in the U.S., an extremely stable and well paying job (the money was not an issue), and the treatment was completely unethical and illegal. He was not allowed to speak with a lawyer, call his wife, or go to any kind of trial. It was barbaric and made me realize how complicated the issue can be.

It's not always black and white, "good guy" and "bad guy." Sometimes it's unclear and in those cases torture is completely unethical. It's too difficult to make laws specifying when torture ought to be used, there are just too many scenarios. While others might be harsh on Ashcroft, I can understand his moral dilemma.