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suspended for emergencies. We have laws against burglary and theft, and for good reason: Society couldn’t function if homes and property had no protection. But if a starving plane-crash victim stranded in the wild broke into a locked cabin to get food, he wouldn’t be sent to prison.
The complications of the torture issue arise once you move from the extreme hypothetical case to the messiness and uncertainty of the real world. Almost everyone would agree it’s permissible to use forcible interrogation methods to prevent nuclear holocaust. But it’s impossible to write a law that restricts the use of torture to cases where 1) a considerable number of lives are in peril, and 2) police are sure they have a guilty party who can provide the information needed to avert the catastrophe. The brutal techniques are therefore likely to spread.
We know that from experience. Most states that employ torture do it pretty much anytime it suits their law enforcement purposes. And Israel, the rare government to attempt to impose clear standards and limits on the use of coercion, found that the exception threatened to swallow the rule.
With an eye to the “ticking bomb” scenario, Israel authorized the use of “moderate physical pressure” to persuade suspected terrorists to talk — including shaking them, covering their heads with foul-smelling hoods, putting them in cold showers, depriving them of sleep for days on end, forcing them to crouch in awkward positions, and the like. These were needed, the government said, because of the chronic threat of Palestinian attacks on civilian and military targets. And, besides, they weren’t really torture.
But this option quickly expanded beyond the cases where it might be excused. An Israeli human-rights group that successfully challenged these methods in court said that 85 percent of Arabs arrested each year by the General Security Service — including many never charged with a crime — were subjected to such abuse. That works out to thousands of victims over the years.
Israel found its carefully controlled approach escaping control in two ways. First, the brutal techniques were soon used in routine cases, not just extreme ones. Second, “moderate” pressure sometimes became immoderate: An estimated 10 detainees died from their mistreatment.
The problem is not with Israel but with human nature. To a man with a hammer, said Mark Twain, everything looks like a nail. Give police and security agents in any country a tool and they’ll want to use it, and even overuse it. If the government were to torture the suspects arrested after Sept. 11, it might find they don’t know anything important.
There are, of course, other options for inducing cooperation from suspected lawbreakers, including carrots (light sentences, money, relocation with a new identity) and sticks (long sentences, extradition to countries known for harsh punishments). That strategy has worked on other terrorists, like the one caught trying to sneak explosives into the U.S. for a millennium attack.
So it would not be wise to formally authorize the use of torture to combat terrorism. And what if the cops someday have to try it to save New York City from a nuclear blast? I trust they’ll do what they have to do, and forgiveness will follow.
Is John Walker a failure of liberalism?
Sunday, December 16, 2001
He’s an ordinary suburban kid who was dissatisfied with the anything-goes culture of modern America. So he set off on his own to serve God and follow a strict code of morality, though the trendy people he grew up with might scoff. He even became a soldier.
In another context — say, if he had become a born-again Christian and joined up with rebels in Iraq — John Walker might be a conservative hero. Instead, since he went off to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban, he and his parents are being used as a prime example of what’s wrong with liberals.
Walker, you see, grew up in affluent and left-leaning Marin County, Calif., which tells some conservatives everything they need to know. “He was prepared for this seduction not just by the wispy relativism of Marin County, but also by a much broader post-60s cultural liberalism that gave his every step toward treason a feel of authenticity and authority,” pronounced Hoover Institution scholar Shelby Steele.
The Wall Street Journal said Walker and CIA officer Johnny Michael Spann, who was killed in a riot at the prison where Walker was being held, came from “two Americas that don’t even speak the same language.” The Journal editors said they found Spann’s world “refreshingly unenlightened” compared to the squishy permissiveness that infects Walker’s hometown.
Critics on the right had a field day deriding Walker’s parents, who were found guilty of a variety of sins. The kid was named for John Lennon! He went to an alternative high school! His mother had an interest in Buddhism! They sent him money even after he fell in with Islamic zealots abroad!
And what do you think Dad had to say after his son was found carrying an AK-47 against his own country? “I don’t think John was doing anything wrong,” Frank Lindh offered, in words that seemed designed to evoke winces. “We want to give him a big hug and then a little kick in the butt for not telling us what he was up to.”
By my lights, that’s taking parental understanding a bit too far. But what is a father supposed to do when a child he has loved and cherished from birth goes astray, placing himself in mortal danger? Maybe there are some parents out there who would say, “Kill the traitor,” but not many.
Most parents, if one of their children faced possible execution for his crimes, would choose to support him rather than abandon him. That is not the same thing as excusing his conduct. If Lindh plans to castigate his son for his grossly repellent choices — and for all we know, he does — he can hardly be blamed for preferring to do it in a private family conversation rather than on “Good Morning America.”
The rush to blame Walker’s crimes on his free-thinking parents and his wealthy, liberal hometown is way too facile. Timothy McVeigh came from what conservatives might call a “refreshingly unenlightened” place — Pendleton, N.Y., a blue-collar town of 5,000 people near Buffalo. He was also an Army veteran who saw combat during the Gulf War. But I don’t recall any conservatives saying that something rotten in the culture of Pendleton or Ft. Riley, Kan., brought on the Oklahoma City bombing.
Likewise, Theodore Kaczynski grew up in the heavily Catholic, salt-of-the-earth Chicago suburb of Evergreen Park, which is known as “The Village of Churches.” But when the Unabomber was finally caught, no one blamed his murderous attacks on the pervasiveness of Christianity and patriotism in his youthful surroundings.
Plenty of bad people have grown up in wealthy, permissive, liberal towns — and plenty have grown up in middle-class, authoritarian, conservative ones. Human nature is the same in both places, and neither environment guarantees good citizenship. If old-fashioned moral attitudes are more likely to provide a reliable check on our baser impulses, why is it that murder rates are higher in Bible-Belt states like Mississippi and Alabama than in more liberal locales? Why do mass school shootings typically take place in Norman Rockwell country instead of Cambridge or Berkeley?
As for judging the influence of Walker’s family, long-distance psychiatry is not terribly reliable. Maybe his parents did a poor job raising him, or maybe he was headed for trouble no matter what they did. Evil and stupidity are often hard to comprehend. Good parents can produce bad kids, just as bad parents can yield good kids. We shouldn’t assume that someone else, with a stronger backbone and clear rules, would have had any more success with Walker than his parents had.
Conservatives insist the Walker case proves that if you don’t raise children with traditional moral values, some of them will veer wildly out of control. They’re right, of course. But they neglect to mention that if you do raise children with traditional moral values, some of them will do exactly the same thing.
Some lessons we have learned
Monday, December 31, 2001
A year ago, Americans were still recovering from a profound trauma: an excruciatingly close and bitterly disputed presidential election. It had to be resolved by the courts after a five-week legal