“The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means.” by Mark Danner. The New York Review of Books. April 30, 2009.
An Annotation
Torture is one of the most controversial issues facing the US today. Amid two wars and concerns of unresolved government accountability, the release of the “Torture Memos” has forced Americans, and the international community, to re-examine the role of torture in national security and the war on terror.
“Torture, is a critical issue in the present of our politics. Torture is at the heart of the deadly politics of national security.”
The issue of torture demands that Americans assess the costs of torture, and specifically raises important questions over presidential authority and executive privilege in regards to national security. In other words, what are the costs we are willing to endure in the name of safety and protection—presuming these nefarious methods do indeed improve security at all?
“Torture’s powerful symbolic role, like many ugly, shameful facts, is left unacknowledged and undiscussed. But that doesn’t make it any less real. On the contrary.”
Although politically laden, the issue of torture has revealed violations and abuses of international human rights laws and norms, particularly the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, both of which explicitly regulate the treatment of prisoners. Furthermore, the “Torture Memos,” along with images from detention facilities at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, necessitate the reconciliation and re-establishment of our standing within the international community. No longer can America be complacent in committing grave human rights violations and abuses, the time for accountability and responsibility has presented itself in re-affirming essential human rights values and standards that begin by seeking justice at home.
These issues and others are considered in this month’s Roundtable.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Editor's Introduction - June 2009
Response to Mark Danner’s “The Red Cross’ Torture Report: What it Means”
by Charli Carpenter, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
“Torture probably does work occasionally. But so what? The whole point of the anti-torture regime is to stay the Inquisitor’s hand even when it’s in our interest to torture.”
Danner’s NY Review of Books treatise on torture calls our attention to many significant issues, but in his key argument he is critically wrong.
“The central unanswered question [is]: What was gained?...We have not so far managed, despite all the investigations, to produce a bipartisan, broadly credible, and politically decisive effort, and pronounce authoritatively on whether or not these activities accomplished anything at all in their states and still asserted purpose: to protect the security interests of the country. Investigating what kind of intelligence torture actually yielded is not a popular task: those who oppose torture do not like to admit that it might, in any way, have “worked”; those who support its use don’t like to admit it might not have. Some judgment must be made, based on the most credible of information compiled and analyzed and weighed by the most credible of bodies, about what these policies actually accomplished: how they advanced the interests of the country, if indeed they did advance them, and how they hurt them. The only way to defuse the political volatility of torture and to remove it from the center of the “politics of fear” is to replace its lingering mystique, owed mostly to secrecy, with authoritative and convinced information about how it was really used and what it really achieved.”
There are so many reasons why this position is untenable I don’t know where to begin. (You could write an entire blog post just on the idea of “authoritative and convincing information.” Whose authority? Convincing to whom? In social science, there is never an authoritative, decisive consensus about any cause and effect relationship—things as simple as whether democracy correlates with peace constitute a basis for scholars on both sides to make lifelong careers refuting one’s evidence; what makes Danner think a consensus on the effectiveness of torture is going to emerge from any bipartisan process?)
But I want to focus on the bigger flaw in this argument: the idea that the effectiveness of torture should matter to the question of whether to try and punish its perpetrators. As I’ve argued elsewhere recently:
“Torture probably does work occasionally. But so what? The whole point of the anti-torture regime is to stay the Inquisitor’s hand even when it’s in our interest to torture. If we only refused to torture when/if there was no conflict with our self-interest, the rule would be unnecessary. Torture is wrong because it’s wrong, not because it’s never effective. The more we get grace the discussion of torture’s effectiveness with our attention, the more we legitimate the idea that effectiveness matters.”
When it comes to trying and punishing perpetrators of torture, to say nothing of whether to repeat such a policy in the future, it doesn’t.
Charli Carpenter is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her teaching and research interests include national security ethics, the laws of war, transnational advocacy networks, gender and political violence, war crimes, comparative genocide studies, humanitarian affairs and the role of information technology in human security. She is the author of Innocent Women and Children: Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians, and the editor of Born of War: Protecting Children of Sexual Violence Survivors in Conflict Zone. Dr. Carpenter blogs about international politics at Duck of Minerva and about asymmetric warfare at