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The Atlantic Monthly
April 2002
Letters to the Editor
Torture
Reassuring as it is that Bruce Hoffman ("A Nasty Business," January Atlantic) would never "condone, much less advocate" the use of torture to extract information from those suspected of possessing information about terrorism, his article leaves the distinct impression that others, less practiced in the wringing of hands than he, may very well be forced to take out a few bad guys in order to keep America safe. One does not have to be a "softie," however, to recognize exactly what is wrong with that approach.
Torture violates both the U.S. Constitution and the Convention Against Torture, to which the United States is a signatory. Torture is morally repugnant. As Hoffman's article fleetingly admits, torture often elicits inaccurate information, and it always alienates the very people whose sympathy is needed in order to put an end to the conflict at hand.
I am not in a position to evaluate the testimony of the Sri Lankan army officer whom Hoffman calls Thomas (though I would note that for all Thomas's bravado, the war in Sri Lanka grinds on just as brutally as ever), but as one who has interviewed admitted torturers and scores of their victims, I can say unequivocally that "intelligence" gained through physical and psychological abuse is almost always wrong. The reason is obvious. As one Liberian prisoner who had been forced to lie down in a bed of red ants for more than an hour told me, "I would have said anything to get out of that pit of bugs." Alistair Horne, whom Hoffman quotes approvingly, admits as much when he notes that the names of Algerian terrorists the French entered onto their organigramme were "not always necessarily the right name."
Moreover, in the course of trying to obtain information through torture, authorities invariably end up manhandling innocent people. This causes tremendous resentment in the communities from which those innocent come, as Hoffman acknowledges in the case of Algerian Muslims. But those are the very communities whose citizens are potential sources of exactly the kind of data that can help stop the violence in the first place. Hoffman sympathetically quotes a British intelligence officer defending the torture of Irish terrorists. What he fails to mention is that-as John Conroy so potently describes in his groundbreaking study Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People-the government of the Republic of Ireland was so outraged by British atrocities in the 1970s that it abandoned the kind of cautious diplomacy that has finally brought relative peace to Northern Ireland and filed suit against the United Kingdom before the European Commission on Human Rights. Who knows how much earlier "the Troubles" might have been resolved and how many lives saved had Britain not resorted to torture in the first place.
Certainly ours would be a far simpler world if the formula "torture a terrorist, save a million people" could be relied upon. Because it cannot, we have resort to human rights. The consequences of their violation are not a safer but a far more dangerous world for every one of us.
William F. Schulz Executive Director Amnesty International USA New York, N.Y.
