Is Torture Ever Justified?

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In reflecting on torture, Mark Bowden concludes that sometimes it is the right choice. But even so, he worries, “how does one allow it yet still control it? Sadism is deeply rooted in the human psyche. Every army has its share of soldiers who delight in kicking and beating bound captives. Men in authority tend to abuse it—not all men, but many. As a mass, they should be assumed to lean toward abuse.”

Loosening longstanding restrictions on physical and mental cruelty toward prisoners risks the dehumanization not just of the tortured but the torturers. What may be intended as carefully calibrated interrogation techniques easily tempt their implementers in the direction of sadism—pain infliction for the sheer fun of it, especially in the heat of military conflict, in a climate of fear and loathing of the enemy, and in the context of an endless war on terror. How many of us could be trusted to draw the line consistently between the permitted “grabbing, poking, and pushing,” on the one hand, and the banned “punching, slapping, and kicking,” on the other? How much self-control can we reasonably expect people to exercise? And once the line has been crossed to torture, as Michael Ignatieff claims, it “inflicts irremediable harm on both the torturer and the prisoner.”

Frederick Douglass commented famously on how holding a slave slowly ruined the character of the woman who owned him. Martin Luther King frequently talked about how in a sense the greatest victims of segregation were the white people whose souls were deformed by their own hatred. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, reflecting on the Soviet Gulag, said that “our torturers have been punished most horribly of all: they are turning into swine, they are departing downward from humanity.”

War threatens the dehumanization of all sides and all parties. This is why there are so many limits placed on how wars may be fought. The ban on torture is one of those limits, and for good reason.