Dear Editor,
Jonathan McPike, in his recent editorial "McCain: O, What a Pain" stated that he believes the United States should be allowed to torture terrorists and suspected terrorists to force them to divulge information. "If the rest of the world objects to our torturing a terrorist to save even one American life, then it will not cost me one wink of sleep," he wrote.ÿ
Well, Jonathan, I choose to disagree with you.ÿ
The United States was, for years, able to collect information without torturing suspects in its custody. For years, we adhered to the Geneva Conventions, considered by most people in the world to be the baseline for proper protocol in wartime. Jonathan, in saying that you're unbothered by the fact that we are now regarded by much of the world ----and I don't mean just the Middle East, I mean countries like Canada, Australia, and Britain as well ---- as brutal, and disrespectful of widely-accepted norms of behavior, you display an na?ve, pundit-fed understanding of international relations. We live in a globalized society, not a vacuum, and, like it or not, we must interact with other countries now, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. And yes, Jonathan, having good relations with other countries matters. It matters for trade, for military support and cooperation, and for the safety of Americans traveling and living abroad.ÿ
Real life is not television. The War on Terror is not "24," or "Alias" or a Bruce Willis movie. Even intelligence and military officials have admitted that the doomsday scenario where a terrorist is caught and must be forced to divulge the location of a ticking bomb is a scenario almost never encountered in the real world. Torture, more often than not, is inflicted on prisoners with little or no useful information, and the information it produces is mostly unreliable. As McCain put it simply in this week's Newsweek, "Under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear-whether it is true or false-if he believes it will relieve his suffering." McCain goes on to explain how, as a POW, he was tortured to reveal the names of the members of his flight squadron. To stop the excruciating pain, McCain listed the names ---of players on the Green Bay Packers football team.
Even if torture was effective in a limited number of cases ---and there is scant supportive evidence for even this--- at the heart of this debate is a moral question. For some illusory security, are we willing to fundamentally change not just the way not just the rest of the world views us, but also how we view ourselves as a nation, and as a people.
Una Ann Hardester SPA, 2008
