The Long Shadow of Torture

This is an issue that won't - and should not - go away, forgotten, swept under some proverbial rug in a lost file room. This issue has a great deal to do with who we are as a people and what our values mean to us in the short- and long-run.

This was rekindled on Sunday morning as I was driving through the beauty of our Minnesota country on my way to my bicycling journey for the day. In stark contrast was the discussion on Public Radio's Speaking of Faith program with Krista Tippett. It was a program titled The Long Shadow of Torture.

It is not a surprise that those who torture are damaged by the process in some form or another. Darius Rejali is a professor of political science at Reed College in Portland, Oregon and author of Torture and Democracy. Here are some thoughts he had that shook me:

Most people are unaware of the incredibly long shadow that torture casts, not just for a government but for society and lastly, I think, for the families that are involved in this process. The cases of atrocity-related trauma that are tied to torture are the domestic abuse, alcoholism, suicide rates. None of these things are calculated when people think about torture.

And everybody kind of thinks that when evil walks in the door it's going to have horns on its head and a tail and it's actually — I didn't have to read Eichmann in Jerusalem or any Hannah Arendt to understand that basically much that happens in the world happens without that. Basically, when evil walks in the door it usually has a good French education or American education and invites you out for a beer and is very friendly.

We began the 20th century thinking that people who tortured had certain dispositions that made them cruel. And then we discovered basically two things: first of all, organizations that torture make sure that the people who torture are not sadists because sadists don't follow rules. They choose people to follow rules and be patriotic. If you kill the guy and get pleasure out of it, you've kind of failed to get the information. So that's a problem. And this is true, we discovered, not just among democratic states but, say, in Cambodia when we look at the genocide and the torture at Tuol Sleng. We actually have the torture manual from Tuol Sleng, and in it the head torturer says to his people, "You have to be more disciplined, more ideological. If you just keep on doing on the pain side of things you may kill the person before we need the information we get." Clearly it's a problem, even in authoritarian conditions. People get sucked up by the pain. So part of it is that we have very little evidence that people are chosen because they're sadists to become torturers, historically.
--Link to Transcript

It was chilling but not surprising. What we do when we begin to take torture as an appropriate means to an end is dehumanize those who do the torture and ourselves as a nation. It is amazing, but again not surprising to me that we can so easily fall into acceptance of such methods.

We think in terms of efficacy or efficiency instead of thinking of morality and humanity. Whether it is effective or not is irrelevant. The ends do not justify the means when the means are inhumane or downright evil. To think otherwise is to put ourselves in the same camp as those we seek to stop from destroying our way of life.

We must not allow that to happen.

Go read the transcript or listen to the podcast of Speaking of Faith- The Long Shadow of Torture. Read and pray.