Torture Mon Amour

I really wish Dick Cheney would slide into the bog of retirement and let the peat close over his head. The only way I can be tempted to want to hear what he says (repeatedly) to justify himself is if he is hauled before the War Crimes Commission at the Hague.

When I was growing up, torture was something that the bad guys—the enemy did. The good guys, the Allies were above that and it was a plot line in war movies that the hero would be mistakenly underestimated by the enemy because he was apparently “soft” until, of course, the hero won.

Admittedly, a lot of this was propaganda for the home folks to keep spirits and resolve high, and admittedly also the side that wins gets to control the history books, but I was raised on the idea of torture as uncivilized. Torture has probably always been part of us, but the British liked to portray themselves as obtaining information through shrewd intellectual gamesmanship.

When Sid Scott, the sole survivor of my father’s Halifax crash in 1944, was interrogated by the Nazis, they threatened to shoot him if he didn’t give them details about his squadron. He gave them only the required name and serial number and also told them, “We don’t shoot German POWs in England.” His interrogators looked at one another and backed off. Apparently, they accepted what he said to be true. Sid says now that even if they had tortured him they wouldn’t have got much since they knew more about his squadron than he did. Torture, it would seem, is not a substitute for a good spy network. If the Nazis could find out details about squadron leaders, aircraft, and leadership without torture, it seems there are other ways to get what is desired.

But that was WWII and maybe the ideal of the gentleman flyer was a carryover from WWI. Today, it might be argued, things are very different with the threat of nuclear weapons. Still, it’s a matter of involvement. When a dictatorship uses torture on political prisoners, the rest of the population can (or may want to) distance itself from the inhumanity of it. Everyone is, to some extent, a prisoner of the regime. Those who disappear from the streets are only the most visible symbols of general repression and injustice. When the regime changes, there is room for the population to reclaim self-respect by repudiating the past.

The extent to which we are willing to accept that argument, of course, forms the basis of war trials, but at least the population can claim to have some shred of decency left.

But even that excuse, weak as it is, is not the case when a population accepts the idea of torture and allows it to be codified into its legal system. At that point, the greatest victim of organized torture is the self-respect of the population that allows it because there is no where else to shift the blame. It has nothing to do with the evil of the person being tortured. It has everything to do with who the people are. Are they a people who torture? If they are, they align themselves with South American dictatorships, near Eastern demagogues, and genocidal African lunatics.

Perhaps I am just naïve. Perhaps torture has always been one form of political expression and perhaps even the British have done it. But I certainly don’t want to be part of a culture where torture is legally enshrined, if only because if it’s part of our judicial system, anyone of us might be subject to it.