One of the infamous photos from Abu Ghraib, the U.S. Army prison in Iraq.
I am sometimes accused, even by members of my own staff, of being too liberal. Sometimes, they suggest, my politics costs the newspaper money.
This criticism mystifies me. I am just about the most conservative person I know. I wear khakis and dress shirts. I teach rules of grammar to college freshmen.
I pay extra for local beer. My idea of an extravagant evening is to order a pizza with both pepperoni and Canadian bacon.
I run a small business that has survived 17 years in the worst newspaper market in two centuries. Our pages are always open to dissenting views, with no arbitrary word lengths to discourage the opposition.
So I don’t get it, but I know it’s there. That’s why I jump at chances to stand up for conservative values. When a U.S. Senate committee’s so-called torture report was recently released, I saw a golden opportunity to speak out about my deeply held patriotic beliefs.
After all, the American principle that prisoners should be treated humanely goes back at least as far as George Washington, who even while fighting for everything he had in the world understood that if he was going to found a nation on principles of individual liberty, he couldn’t start out by abusing those whose liberty he was abridging.
When President Reagan signed the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in 1988, he made it clear that he opposed not only practices that met a strict legal definition of torture, but all inhuman treatment.
David Crisp
George Washington and Ronald Reagan! What two more iconic conservatives could possibly be on my side? Besides, how could conservatives who complain that raising the gasoline tax a few pennies per gallon amounts to government tyranny possibly defend using government force to coerce information out of people who were never even charged with, much less convicted of, a crime?
Boy, was I wrong. The radio talk-show hosts lined up in instant and unanimous opposition to the Senate report. Republicans nearly uniformly denounced it, with only a few contrary voices, such as that of good ol’ John McCain, still serving his country with distinction decades after he himself was tortured as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.
Ryan Zinke, who will become Montana’s lone representative in the U.S. House in January, issued a news release condemning release of the report, arguing that it would put U.S. troops and allies at risk overseas.
For all of Zinke’s distinguished service in defense of freedom, this showed a remarkably blinkered view of what freedom means. The inability of governments in free societies to keep secrets isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. If the government doesn’t want the world to find out that it’s up to no good, then do good.
Many of the arguments in defense of the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation practices were equally irrelevant. Many argued, for instance, that the techniques were justified because they produced useful intelligence.
But that Convention on Torture, the one that Ronald Reagan signed, says, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”
True, it’s not hard to square the moral equation that says it’s OK to use waterboarding or sleep deprivation or rectal feeding or threats to murder family members if those practices could have saved 3,000 American lives back in 2001.
But why stop there? Aren’t 3,000 American lives worth pulling out a few fingernails? Amputating a couple of limbs? Where does it end?
And what if we can’t be sure the person we are interrogating actually has information that could save lives? Is 90 percent certainty enough to justify torture? Is 51 percent?
Opponents of the report also pointed to the Obama administration’s use of drones, which have killed an unknown and probably unknowable number of innocent civilians. There are many reasons to be concerned about the legality and wisdom of the drone program, including the possibility that it creates more terrorists than it kills, but torture isn’t one of them.
It’s OK to shoot at enemy combatants when they are free to shoot back. When the shooting stops, rules of decent human conduct kick in.
International prohibitions against torture were a long time coming, hammered out by free people after centuries of state-sponsored brutality and abuse. The prohibitions recognize eternal truths: that governments find it all but irresistible to use the power of the state to bend people to their will, that we naturally tend to view our enemies as less than human, that left to their own devices, nations can always think of reasons why the rules shouldn’t apply to them.
To end torture, halfway measures wouldn’t do. The ban had to be immediate and total, with no exceptions and no prissy legal technicalities.
If you disagree with that, then maybe the problem is not that I’m too liberal. Maybe the problem is that you aren’t conservative enough.
David Crisp has worked for newspapers since 1979. He has been editor and publisher of the Billings Outpost since 1997.
