Gregory Djerijian points us to a recent Meet the Press interview in which Bill Clinton suggests that while torture should officially remain illegal, American soldiers — a la Jack Bauer — should not hesitate in ticking bomb scenarios. Although they would have to be prosecuted for violating the law (in order to preserve our national image), these soldiers should be considered great patriots acting on behalf of their country.
This is a deceptively dangerous precedent to set, however. Contrary to Clinton’s assertion, torture must be explicitly rejected with no exceptions for heroes. Ticking bomb scenarios are not realistic, and soldiers should not be led to believe that torture is their duty under any circumstances. Ultimately, because soldiers often tend to believe that their particular detainee holds critical information, the tacit acceptance of occasional brutal interrogation methods will inevitably lead to the broad use of such techniques. (Who’s to say that this detainee hasn’t been involved in planning a major attack? Who’s to say that he doesn’t know where the next roadside bomb will be exploding? Who’s to say that he isn’t aware of the whereabouts of other murderous plotters?)
Israel, starting in 1987, had their own telling experiment with torture. In certain scenarios, Israeli interrogators were allowed to use harsher techniques against their captors. The result was not the limited use of torture, but the widespread adoption of such brutal techniques as interrogators assumed that there was a bomb-maker behind every detainee. (Israel’s Supreme Court, in 1999, finally declared the practice illegal.)
As the Israeli example shows, it’s much better to have an iron-clad rule of no torture with no exceptions than for policymakers to quietly hint to soldiers that they can (and even should) use such techniques if they somehow decide the situation demands it.