Rationalizing torture; the dance of the intellectual apologists.

• Author: Barber, James David

RATIONALIZING TORTURE The Dance of the Intellectual Apologists

At this moment, thousands of citizens sit in their cells waiting for the next session of torture by their own governments. New techniques, such as painmaking drugs; pseudo-legal dodges, such as incommunicado detention and "disappearances'; ancient scenarios, such as children forced to watch the torture of their mothers--these practices have spread rapidly around the world. Amnesty International has tracked torture in nearly a hundred countries. Systematic, government-performed burning, shocking, smothering, cutting, crucifying, castrating--whatever horror you can imagine is probably being tried somewhere today. No government admits it. Most constitutions forbid it. But all you have to do is pay heed to the grisly accounts coming out of the trials of Argentina's former military rulers to see how deep and wide the morass of cruelty has become.

Many bear the responsibility of revealing and working against torture--intellectuals in and out of universities, the press, government officials in this and other countries. Scholars and intellectuals play a particularly important role in shaping our perception of the extent of government-sponsored torture and what can be done to combat it.

At least since the age of Erasmus of Rotterdam, intellectual communities have held high the banner of humane learning. Our callings differ, but we share a common sense that our thinking has a purpose, an end beyond itself, which is to advance a civilization in which the human spirit can flourish. This ideal in no way contradicts the ideal of objectivity. In the actual conduct of research, sentiment is out of place. Theories must be subjected, coldly and systematically, to the test of fact, not bent to fit the hopes of the researcher. But in deciding what topics to research and what to make of the findings, we confront the fundamental obligation to put whatever talents we have to work on behalf of justice, freedom and compassion in the world. Generations of intellectuals have toiled to understand--and thus to contribute to healing--the miseries of humankind.

Of course, there have always been people who, shying away from the Erasmian principle, pursue instead whatever little puzzles help them while away the hours of tenured tranquility, comforting themselves with the thoughts that they, unlike Dr. Mengele, would never take part in the personal torment of the helpless. But there is an even darker path for the intellectual. At least since Machiavelli, scholars who would never dream of hurting anyone themselves have put their brains to work justifying cruelty by others. Some are cynics. Some are passionate careerists. But a good many think of themselves as realists who, alas, must undertake the awful business of crafting reasons for supporting, or at least ignoring, government brutality and murder. Such reasoning is often very subtle. It can connect with genuine realism, with the duty all of us bear to bring virtue into real life, not to be satisfied with merely hypothetical or vicarious decency. But what at first looks like reasonable compromise can easily drift over into the justification of cruelty. Even the most sincere torture abolitionist can be trapped by apparently sensible alternatives to the steady, adamant insistence that torture stop. The following are, I think, the major examples in our day.

The progress trap

If the U.S. government makes foreign aid contingent on a nation's human rights performance, how is that performance to be judged? What mode of judgment will work--in the real world--to end abuses?

An obvious criterion would be to assess whether the nation's performance is getting better. If the nation's human rights record is improving, the aid will continue; if not, it will be cut down or cut off.

But the trap is also obvious. Putting aside the many ways governments can play with numbers, what constitutes progress? Recently Turkey, an ally of the United States and a government practicing torture on a massive and systematic scale, reduced from 45 days to 30 days the legal period of incommunicado detention in areas of emergency military government. That is when most torture takes place--during incommunicado detention, before family or friends or a lawyer can see the prisoner. Does that "Progress' deserve approval and support from our government? The United States was asked to continue and increase aid to El Salvador because, in a given period, death squad murders declined from the thousands to the hundreds. Was that supportable "progress'? What if the Soviet Union were to release Andrei Sakharov tomorrow--should that good news constitute "progress,' justifying a more generous economic policy by the U.S.?

Another way of posing the progress question is...