Torture, broadly speaking, has two main goals: to elicit confessions and to punish. In the category of punishment, most modern societies exempt capital punishment, i.e. execution, from their definitions of torture, even though some methods of execution could hardly be distinguished from non-lethal torture. In modern times torture as a punishment, at least as officially recognized, is illegal and is viewed by most as immoral. The United States Constitution itself prohibits "cruel & unusual punishment". However, retaliatory violence falls within the personal moral codes of many people as a reaction to physical attacks, theft or insults. Pope Francis' assertion that he would answer an insult to his mother with a punch in the nose is an example, albeit mild, of this. The Paris killings of cartoonists who "insulted" Islam's Prophet Muhammad is a more extreme example. Granted neither of these example could reasonably be called torture, but rather retaliation or revenge.
Torture as a means to extract admissions of guilt or to yield valuable intelligence is alive and well not only in military situations, but also in many police departments. Torture has likely operated behind the scenes and unacknowledged over the years, but in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, torture has been redefined and utilized in an effort to prevent further attacks. Recently a Congressional Report on the use of torture was published with differing opinions shrilly expressed on either side. The ethics of torture of been debated and argued, but one thing stands out in the report, something that any expert on torture could have told you beforehand...
Torture doesn't work.
Some of the biggest proponents of the use of torture in the "war on terror" admit that they gained no useful intelligence when torturing prisoners. Not only did torture fail to yield any usable information, but at least 25% of those detained at Guantanamo had committed no crime, were not associated with terror groups and in fact had done nothing wrong. Yet these people were repeatedly tortured for information that they did not have and pressured to admit to acts that they did not commit.
Many supporters of torture make the case that we should not wring our hands over the rights of "terrorists", posting pictures of the burning towers or the jumpers as a visual rebuttal to those who recoil at our use of torture. These people, perhaps with full knowledge of the point that they are making, perhaps ignorantly, are asserting that the fact that a person is accused is proof enough of their guilt and that revenge is appropriate.
These people are advocating, not torture as a means to save other lives, not as a means to determine who is guilty and who is innocent, but as a primal response to extract the pound of flesh to make someone suffer for our suffering.
If we are going to have a debate on this subject, let's stop pretending that it is about gaining confessions or intelligence, that it is about preventing future terrorist plots or capturing those who previously conducted acts of terror. Let's make it about whether we want to sink to the level of those who would conduct indiscriminate violence for the sake of violence, whether we want to be the people who committ atrocities over real and imagined wrongs, whether we are the people who don't really care about who actually hurt us as long as we make someone hurt.
From what I hear from many Americans, we already are those people.
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