waterboarding
It was revealed that the US used a method of torture called waterboarding on terror suspects in Guatanomo Bay. The process involves lying them victim on their back, tying them down and then pouring water into their nose and mouth so they feel they are going to drown. The idea that we could do this to someone once sounds bad, but it appears one suspect accused of masterminding the 9/11 attrocity was waterboarded over 180 times seems unthinkable.
Television shows like 24 and Prison Break have shown this kind of torture in practice and may well have numbed us to the seriousness of this kind of infringement of human rights. Some argue that this is the only way to save more lives when people are willing to go to such extremes to cause death and destruction surely torture is our only way to avoid such tragedies.
But:
1) Two wrongs don’t make a right – when we torture others we are lowering our moral standards to those of the terrorists
2) The ends don’t justify the means – doing the wrong thing for the right motive is not an excuse
3) Garbage in- Garbage out - the quality of the information received from torture victims is very questionable anyway – people will say anything to avoid more pain
4) Universal means universal – if we have a universal declaration of human rights it means everyone has rights – even terrorists
Krish,
I would like to say thanks for this post, but thanks doesn’t seem appropriate for such a subject. Some thoughts:
1. ‘Do to others as you would have them do to you’ – where are the limits upon this word of the Lord Jesus? I’m not sure there are any.
2. Bonhoeffer wrote somewhere (sorry I can’t remember where) that it is better to be bombed than to bomb. How seriously do we take our duty to love our enemy?
3. On justice – it appears that the US had ruled that such methods of torture were permitted, but now the new administration have ruled that it is not permitted. I don’t consider it just to condemn those who practised waterboarding when it was permitted under new regulations in which it is not permitted. The defence is not ‘we were only following orders’, rather ‘it was legal at the time’.
thanks for posting a comment Gordon – i agree with you.
Do you know Derek Webb’s “A Love That’s Stronger Than Our Fear”? It’s available online at http://www.myspace.com/derekwebb
In his delightfully provocative way, he seems to be addressing the same concerns with the question: how far can we go in defending ourselves without losing ourselves in the process? Do we go from a patriotic defence of “freedom” to being traitors to our own cause? How can we embrace the tools and tactics of terror without becoming terrorists ourselves?
It’s reminiscent of the dilemma faced by the Operative in the movie Serenity who self-justifies his trail of death and destruction on the basis that he is doing a job that is temporary, dirty and regrettable in order to protect the (as he believes) virtuous Alliance. This confidence is only exceeded by his disappointment on discovering that his pragmatic disregard for the value of life is the true reflection of the Alliance he serves.
But ultimately the question Webb seems to come back to is: will our greatest joy come from being safe and in control or will it come from being extravagantly loved?
For sure this is medieval way of interrogation. Taking into account all achievements in medicine and human science this way of interrogation is very close to the regular aimless torture and nothing else. If they want to get real information from suspected (arrested) people I think is worst possible way to do that, which only demonstrates very low intellectual abilities of CIA agents.
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