By Rachel Brock
Many of us recognize the image of a man standing on a box, dressed in rags, a plastic bag slung over his head and wires snaking from his outstretched arms. Below the photo, the caption reads: An Iraqi who was told he would be electrocuted if he fell off the box. This picture accompanies the breaking story in The New Yorker about American torture in the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib. This article was released in May of 2004, almost exactly a year after the United States invaded Iraq, and ignited a nation-wide debate about the ethics of torture. Another photo in the story depicts two male and female U.S. soldiers posing for the camera—in front of a pile of naked men, stacked on top of one another, with heads wrapped in dark bags. The blatant displacement between the grinning soldiers and the prisoners shocks the viewer. Further, these images, and others released from Abu Ghraib, pose a challenge for those who support the use of torture as a strategic tactic. Putting utilitarian moral considerations aside for a moment, how can one justify the use of torture when it clearly psychologically perverts those who carry it out?
Discussing torture is not easy. No one supports torture for the sake of torture itself. Rather it is in the Machiavellian sense that the gray area arises, in which torture as a means of extracting information or as an example to deter future action may begin to become justifiable. Where is the line, if one exists, where one can justify inflicting unimaginable pain on another human as a necessary act to accomplish a greater goal?
Herein, three obstacles arise (though many more exist). First, how does one define torture? Then, how can one guarantee that the consequences of that torture, whether good or bad, will outweigh wrongs committed during the act? If the torture is carried out to obtain information, how can one verify that the information obtained is accurate, timely, useful, and complete? These considerations do not even touch upon the psychological consequences that torture imposes on the victim, the perpetrator, and those indirectly connected to the act.
Definitions of torture from the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and other international bodies range from vague to almost incomprehensible. Torture, it appears, involves the intentional infliction of pain to obtain information, impose punishment, or to coerce a third party to follow a course of action. I believe international definitions of torture are so muddled because we, as an international community, do not know or agree on exactly what constitutes torture. Further, we do not want to create a constrained definition of torture because technological advancements and human progress naturally lead to the potential to develop new forms of torture. I use the part of the Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish Torture’s definition of torture to examine these definitive discrepancies:
Torture includes the “use of methods upon a person intended to obliterate the personality of the victim or to diminish his physical or mental capacities, even if they do not cause physical pain or mental anguish.”
Note that this is an excerpt from one clause, and that the scope of torture includes physical pain and mental anguish, as well as the motivations behind causing these feelings, and the consequences that torture elicits. Yet this statement highlights that torture affects the victim to the point at which he or she no longer possesses a personality, or the capacities that make one human. Ironically, it may be this profound dehumanization that allows the perpetrator to carry out the act of torture. It is painfully clear that the guards in the Abu Ghraib photos do not view their prisoners as people. Only by creating this psychological separation, by destroying those traits that connects us all as humans, can a person bring oneself to torture another.
As a college student, I am insulated by books, screens, thousands of miles, and millions of people from the realities or torture. I can never understand how it feels to quiver in front of a guard, smeared in feces, watching him finger his gun in a way that literally means life or death for me. I cannot know exactly what it means to be asphyxiated by water to an inch of my life, nor to be dragged around by a leash that connects to a collar around my neck.
But as a human, my heart aches. It aches as candidates such as Donald Trump promise to “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” in a deluded effort to garner votes. It aches as leaders justify torture policies as necessary to prevent worse evils from happening in the future. CIA Director John Brennan, in a rare departure from expected bureaucratic comportment, promised to ignore torture orders from a President Cruz or a President Trump. But his recognition of the gravity of torture rings hollow in legislative chambers.
I am equally concerned by the public’s general complicity relating to torture. By saying and doing nothing, we are in part responsible. This lack of action extends to conversation, in which silence and separation play equally pernicious roles. There is no way to separate the emotional response that torture evokes within us, because it is partially this response that makes torture potentially effective. Suggestions to create a sterile environment, an almost-clinical space in which one can discuss torture without fear of stepping on someone else’s toes, defeats the purpose of the conversation. Torture is a hard conversation, but it is one that the US public needs to have.
There are good arguments supporting the use of torture, and many statistics can be presented to empirically show its value. I do not discredit these lines of reasoning nor argue that these arguments do not exist. I also do not claim to have exhausted the topic of torture, nor hit all of the important discussion points. I merely wish to open a candid conversation about torture, and challenge us to deal with all of the grit and hard realities that accompany such a topic.
Think once more of the man perched precariously atop the box in Abu Ghraib prison, in a pose uncomfortably resembling Jesus on the Cross. His sacrifice sparked national awareness to the extent and frequency to which the United States uses torture, and renewed an examination of the collective American conscience. Let us hope that we do not continue to sacrifice our morality under the guise that “the end justifies the means”. Let us hope that we remember it is exactly this moral ability to reason that elevates us as humans, and gives us the ability to find ways to accomplish these same goals through humane action.
Rachel Brock is a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in International Relations and minoring in French.
