ABSTRACT
During World War II, a member of the Resistance Movement, Jean Améry, endured torture at the hands of the SS at Auschwitz. Decades later he wrote of his experiences in an essay entitled “Torture.” Améry declared that “whoever was tortured, stays tortured.” He expanded on this statement: “Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased . . . It is fear that henceforth reigns over him.”3 If the psyche of the torture victim is not enough of a reason to avoid this practice, there are more practical reasons. In her book The Dark Side, Jane Mayer quotes Major General Paul Eaton as saying, “Torture is the tool of the lazy, the stupid, and pseudo-tough. It’s also perhaps the greatest recruiting tool that the terrorists have.”4 Put in more colloquial terms, violence begets violence. Weeks after the Abu Ghraib photographs were released, the world received a grisly demonstration of this axiom when American citizen Nicholas Berg was executed by a group of militants in Iraq. His beheading was videotaped, broadcast on the Internet, and available for anyone to see at the click of a mouse. His executioners read a brief statement that said, in part, “[W]e tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls. You will not receive anything from us but coffi ns after coffi ns . . . slaughtered in this way.”5 Nicholas Berg’s gruesome execution did not balance the proverbial scales of justice, nor did it stop the escalating violence in the war on terrorism, but it did suggest that this is a war that is without fronts. It also suggested that the word “civilian” may have been irrevocably altered. The Bush administration asserted that violence against U.S. civilians is evidence of the barbarism of the enemy. But an alternative view may be that acts of violence against American civilians indicate that they may be perceived as sharing responsibility for the actions
of their political and military representatives. It may indicate that in this war without fronts, all American citizens are legitimate targets. Whether it is portrayed as the enemy’s barbarism, or the civilians’ burden of responsibility in a democracy, the reality is that safety in today’s world is depicted as a commodity in short supply. Unfortunately, the answer to the problem given by U.S. leaders has been that desperate times call for desperate measures. Few measures could be more desperate than torture as a remedy for keeping Americans safe.
