The New York Times’ Joseph Lelyveld: another “liberal” defense of torture

It is worth dealing with his arguments in some detail, not because they are credible in their own right, but because they provide an example of the way in which American liberalism functions as a facilitator for monstrous crimes being carried out by the US government.

The foundation of Lelyveld’s argument is his attempt to distinguish between torture proper and what he calls “torture lite.” This arbitrary distinction is essential to the elaboration of his case for the legalization of some forms of abuse of US-held prisoners.

At the outset of his article, Lelyveld asks us to “put aside the most horrific, shameful cases, those of detainees who died under interrogation,” citing the examples of Manadel al-Jamadi and Abed Hamed Mowhoush, two Iraqis tortured to death by American troops. “No one steps forward to condone what’s plainly illegal under United States and international law,” he asserts.

Instead, Lelyveld wants to deal with “the really pertinent, really difficult question: How do we feel about coercive techniques that are commonly, if somewhat cavalierly, held to fall short of torture?” Within this category he includes methods that do not leave “conspicuous scars,” including sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, “the pouring of icy water on a body that may be naked,” prolonged shackling, and “waterboarding”—a torture technique designed to invoke the feeling of drowning. These methods, Lelyveld says, fall under a category that can variously be called cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, “highly coercive interrogation,” or the term he prefers—“torture lite.”

This distinction between “torture lite” and torture proper is not only morally repugnant, it is fraudulent on a number of other grounds. First, the one inevitably leads to the other. Whatever limits Lelyveld might suggest—for example, that prolonged shackling or sleep deprivation be allowed, but not to the point of serious injury—they are little more than mental constructs. In the real world, such forms of abuse are bound to lead to heart attacks, strokes and other debilitating or fatal consequences, not to mention their profound and irreversible psychological effects.

The sanctioning of “torture lite” inevitably creates an environment in which severe torture is considered acceptable. It is irrelevant whether all of the gruesome techniques used at Abu Ghraib, and exposed before the entire world in a series of photographs just over a year ago, were explicitly ordered by senior officials. They were the outcome of a government policy that established prisoner abuse as a legitimate tactic.

The term “torture lite” is, in fact, an oxymoron. One cannot speak of “torture lite” any more than one can speak of “genocide lite.” Those who are subjected to these “lite” methods would no doubt beg to differ with Lelyveld’s sophistries, and one can be certain that if Lelyveld himself were in their position, he would not be inclined to make such fine distinctions. Such terminology in and of itself exposes Lelyveld’s basic contempt for democratic principles.

Lelyveld attempts to deal with his critics in the following passage: “Commentators and editorial writers who deplore torture use the ‘slippery slope’ argument to avoid facing the issue of lesser forms of coercion. Any breach in the norms of due process, they contend, is sure to be taken as a license for the grossest abuse. That argument may be true, even profoundly true, but it’s also something of a dodge, for it leaves unanswered the question of whether coercive interrogation ‘works.’”

Here, Lelyveld himself dodges the issue, offering no rebuttal to the argument that the legitimization of any form of abuse leads inexorably to more brutal forms of torture. He cavalierly acknowledges that this may be “profoundly true,” and then moves on to the question that really concerns him: does it “work?”

The distinction between torture and “torture lite” is also fraudulent from the standpoint of international law. Despite his claim that no one would “condone what’s plainly illegal under United States and international law,” all of the techniques that Lelyveld goes on to condone are plainly illegal under both international and US statutes. The Convention Against Torture (CAT) and US anti-torture laws prohibit both torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, thus encompassing all of the methods Lelyveld wants to discuss.

Moreover, under the Geneva Conventions, prisoners captured by US forces are entitled to prisoner of war status, according to which they “may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.” While the Bush administration has advanced specious arguments to deny Geneva Convention rights to some of its prisoners, this does not make its actions any less illegal under international law. The denial of the rights of the Geneva Conventions to so-called “enemy combatants” is itself a violation of international law.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/jun2005/tort-j23.shtml