I’LL DO ANYTHING, BUT I WON’T DO THAT. UNLESS… CalPundit has a couple questions (and answers) for torture’s proponents: “Is it OK for a doctor to torture prisoners if the end result is a medical therapy that could save thousands? No.

“Is it OK to torture a scientist’s family in order to coerce him to work on an invention that could predict earthquakes and save millions? No.”

But we don’t have to go to these hypotheticals. We can look at the cases presented by the supporters of torture. They’re bad enough. Here are what I see as various attempted stopping-points on the slippery slope, and the reasons I think that it is exceptionally unlikely that we will actually stop at any of them once we have accepted that torture is something the United States does (note that I say “accepted”–I think we all know that in fact, torture happens, Americans do it, as we do all kinds of other things; but we have not yet, thank God, accepted that it is right):

We’ll only torture when there’s a ticking time bomb-type situation. Well shoot, that one goes pretty fast, doesn’t it? The time bomb is a rhetorical device, designed to get us to say, “Yes, we should torture in that case”–even though it’s got to be one of the cases in which torture is least likely to be useful!–so that we have no grounds, later on, to oppose the use of torture to prevent more speculative or distant harms. So I’ll just note that the cases Balko adduces to prove that torture can prevent attacks don’t include a single ticking-time-bomb scenario, and leave it at that.

We’ll only torture non-citizens. C’mon. I’ll return the hypothetical Balko poses to torture opponents: “Let’s throw out another hypothetical:

“We capture an al-Qaeda commander. We have intelligence saying a suitcase nuke has entered the country. We know he knows where it’s going and when it will be detonated. We sit him in a room and question him for days. But we don’t use force or coercion. He says nothing. We lose Buffalo.

“I say if our government knew he knew we were going to lose Buffalo, and our government didn’t take every single step at its disposal to extract that information from him — to protect the live of perhaps a million Americans — then our government failed us. And I’d be pretty pissed off.”

OK, well, would you really let Buffalo go so John Walker Lindh can keep his fingernails? Why?

We’ll only do some kinds of tortures. We’ll pull out your fingernails, but we won’t rape you. And if the “soft” stuff doesn’t work… goodbye Buffalo? It seems to me that part of the point of the pro-torture argument is that maximum psychological pressure should be placed upon terrorists in order to get them to tell us stuff that would protect us. For some people, maximum pressure won’t be needed–they’ll crack quick. But if they take longer, or if they respond better to major agony than to minor, what emotional or rational barrier would prevent us from proceeding to the “hard stuff”? Let me quote an article cited favorably by Balko: “They broke most of his ribs, burned his genitals with cigarettes and poured water into his mouth until he couldn’t breathe. After 67 days, he came up with the information which enabled the Filipinos, together with the Americans–who were provided with the fruits of the interrogation–to frustrate the plot.”

We’ll only torture the guilty. Well, I used to think this was the strongest argument, the closest there was to a stopping-point on the slope. After all, terrorists deserve punishment; non-terrorists don’t. But there are two reasons to think that this obstacle too will be overcome: First, the Pat Buchanan argument, “Look, we’re going to kill lots of people in this war, if we’re going to kill why can’t we torture?” doesn’t exactly provide a robust rationale for only torturing the guilty. Innocent people die in war all the time–as Buchanan notes. If we’re killing innocents, and killing is equivalent to torture, why can’t we torture innocents?

Second, two of the cases Balko cites showing the efficacy of torture–thus, presumably, a case where he approves of the forms of “pressure” used–are these: “‘In a sense, we already use torture anyway,’ one CIA officer told me. ‘When we arrest a foreign national who we think has important information, we hand him over to a foreign government such as the Egyptians. Its police will arrest the suspect’s wife and children, put them at the other end of the same cell, and then produce a couple of pit bulls and say: “Talk, or we let these dogs go at your wife and child.” That usually works.’

“It seems to have worked, for instance, on Mahmud Abouhalima, an al-Qaeda member involved in the first plot to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. Abouhalima unwisely fled to Egypt, where he was arrested. So was his mother. He was interrogated by the Egyptians and persuaded to name those involved in the plot. The CIA received a transcript.” (my emphases)

This time, they didn’t need to rape a terrorist’s mother in front of him, or let him hear his son’s screams. But what if threats weren’t enough? If you’re willing to kidnap innocents and threaten them with agony, you’ve already inflicted some pretty serious psychological pain on them; what will stop you from inflicting physical pain as well?

[Here, in reference to the Pat Buchanan argument, which Balko has also cited, I should talk about why torture is worse than killing. I don’t completely have a handle on it; it’s something I’m still thinking about. (A commenter at Balko’s site had the succinct suggestion: “death is what you wish for when you’re being tortured.”) But here’s one reason to think one is worse: You can die with dignity. But the whole point of torture is to remove dignity. You can see this in 1984–the purpose is to invade the citadel of the self. That’s how you break people and get them to tell you what you want to know. With regards to killing or torturing innocents, there’s another obvious difference in that we have to seek to avoid the death of innocents, whereas you can’t simultaneously seek to avoid torturing innocents and go around, uh, torturing them.]