Moral values apply to torture, too
Other Columnists
This is the year we condoned torture.
Of all the cultural markers of 2004 - a bare breast at the Super Bowl, a
controversy over whether gays may marry, the tarnishing of baseball icons in
the steroid scandal - which signpost says most about who we have become?
We have, as a nation, said there is really nothing wrong with torture and
abuse as an instrument of national security policy. At least we will not go out
of our way to punish it.
Oh, we punish individuals of low rank - especially those caught on camera,
like the troops involved in the humiliations at Abu Ghraib. But we leave
unpunished, and indeed undiminished, the architects of this lawlessness.
Isn't this the most powerful message? The United States does not consider
itself bound by the moral code the civilized world imposes upon itself.
The policy has not been announced from an official podium. But it was
certified at the ballot box.
We re-elected a president who abandoned the Geneva Conventions; who
constructed a gulag at Guant�namo Bay, Cuba, and who continues to defy the
Supreme Court by keeping hundreds detained there without charge. The
International Committee of the Red Cross says the intentional use of physical
and psychological coercion at Guant�namo is "tantamount to torture."
The president has created a whole new class of war prisoners, "ghost
detainees." Their identities and whereabouts are secret. They are hidden from
international observers, sucked into a network of secret facilities run by
Americans or perhaps by a "friendly" country whose own record of torture and
human-rights abuses we decry in State Department reports.
How many ghosts are there? Who are they? Why do so few of us ask?
President George W. Bush constructed this web with full knowledge. His own
secretary of state warned of the dangerous slope down which the United States
could slip. But his White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, was of the opinion
that it was OK.
Gonzales sought and appears to have concurred in Justice Department legal
advice on how to abandon the Geneva Conventions and circumvent both
international treaties and U.S. laws prohibiting the torture and degrading
treatment of captives. For his acquiescence in the unthinkable, Gonzales was
rewarded with nomination as the next attorney general. The Senate, with a few
grumbles, is likely to confirm him overwhelmingly.
That has been the response of our democratically elected representatives
since the horror of Abu Ghraib became public, since the deaths in U.S. custody
of Afghan detainees. A hearing here, a press conference there and they move on.
Why is a nation consumed with moral values so blind to state-sanctioned
immorality?
Torture, says Harvard University professor Herbert C. Kelman, an expert in
the social psychology of conflict, is a "crime of obedience." Society's
acceptance of it usually occurs when the state feels threatened, when there is
a vast apparatus to carry out the abuse - and when the targets are "enemies of
the state." Most often they are ethnic or religious minorities. They are
terrorists or insurgents or "evildoers." It becomes "unnecessary to relate to
them in moral terms." So it has been since the Romans, Kelman argues.
"The readiness to trust the authorities is heightened when it comes to
actions in a military context and especially when there is a high level of fear
in the population, as has been the case since 9/11," Kelman said in an e-mail
response to questions.
Fear and fact do not fit comfortably together. There is no explaining why
duct tape and gas masks were hot sellers all around the country after 9/11,
when the real threat of chemical attack is in a place like New York's subways.
There is no way to explain why we condone a culture of immorality in our
conduct abroad, when at home we're obsessed with enforcing a particular sort of
morality on our neighbors.
For all our talk about traditional values, 2004 was a year of violating
them. We applauded ourselves and rewarded the violators, all the same.
. Her e-mail address is
cocco@newsday.com.
