TRUMP ON TORTURE

Now that President Trump has said that he might send more suspected terrorists to Guantanamo, reinstate the CIA's black sites--prisons in foreign countries into which people can be "disappeared" and tortured--and now that he has said that he absolutely believes that torture works and that if his advisers want to torture, he'll "work toward that end," all of us who refuse to condone torture need to speak out against it once again.

Here's what I believe about torture:

1. Torture in any guise is morally wrong, repugnant, and soul-destroying, not only to the victims but also to the torturers. Whenever and wherever it has been used, it has left a stain that lasts for centuries. We still recoil at the horrors inflicted on suspected witches in medieval Europe, the cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition, or the tortures inflicted on "enemies of the state" in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Calling torture "enhanced interrogation" does not make it any less repugnant or reprehensible.

Institutionalized Torture at Abu Ghraib

Credit: Wikipedia

2. It doesn't work. Under torture people will admit to anything and everything. Although proponents of torture always trot out the tired argument, torture cannot be justified as necessary to elicit potentially lifesaving intelligence. When a state institutionalizes torture, it is almost always to  terrorize and control its own population or some demonized subgroup. 

3. It's an unhappy commentary on human nature, but both history and decades of psychological research have shown that it's remarkably easy to use authority, peer pressure and institutional norms to turn ordinary people into torturers. 

4. Therefore we need a strong moral stance, laws and positive leadership to prevent torture from becoming institutionalized and "normalized," especially in times of uncertainty and fear. If our elected leaders fail in this vital role, or worse yet, conspire to lead our nation to once again practice and justify torture, it's up to all of us to resist in every way we can.

It seems to me that torture is such a gross violation of our shared humanity that it is not an issue on which anyone can remain neutral or silent.