Torture and Truth

There is a kind of fantasy at loose in our popular culture right now that the purpose of torture is to get at the truth.  Torture not might be nice, the fantasy goes, but sometimes it becomes necessary because the authorities have to get at the truth, and the risk to public safety is so great, and the need for the truth so urgent, that there isn’t time to get at it by more courteous means.  I say this is a fantasy because it shows complete ignorance of history.  Using torture is a temptation to every ruler, and in the broad view of the history of states, it is the norm, and not the aberration.  And even the slightest familiarity with the way that torture has functioned in societies from ancient empires to early modern monarchies, from the regimes of Hitler and Stalin to the dictatorships of today, shows us that its purpose is not to expose the truth, but to spread terror.  It is not to bring new information to light, but to force everything and everyone into the darkness that does not conform to those in power and their Big Lie.

If you have any doubt that this is the way torture really operates, I urge you to consider that it is always carried out in secret.  The people who do the torturing, the locations where it is practiced, even the techniques that are employed, are always kept shrouded in darkness.  This secrecy adds to the mystique of terror that surrounds the whole enterprise, which is the key to its power.  This is the issue at the heart of the current controversy over the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s use of torture in the first decade of this century.  At stake is the question of which is more important: the right of a free people to know their own history, and make their own judgments about whether their government exceeded the rightful limits of its power; or the need of the state to enhance its power by keeping some of its weapons concealed in darkness.

The founders of American democracy understood these dilemmas, but I think it’s pretty clear which side they came down on.  Our Constitutional prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures, indefinite detention, and cruel and unusual punishment, do not stem from squeamishness about “taking the gloves off” when dealing with terrorists and criminals.  They are rooted in a clear-eyed understanding of history, and a personal familiarity with the habits of power.  The founders considered themselves men of Enlightenment, bringing about a new historical moment, where the human spirit, breaking out of the darkness of the old absolutist regimes of Europe, could breathe the free air of a new world of liberty.   And they understood that this new world of freedom, of free speech, and a free press, and the free exercise of religion, would never survive without restraints on the power of the state to operate in the shadows.