Norman Geras criticises some liberal commentators for endorsing Obama’s recent pronouncements on torture, in particular the decision not to prosecute those at the sharp end of the policy carrying out the procedures:
As regrettable as Obama’s fudging of this issue – his failure, that is, to state forthrightly what is being sacrificed to the political goal of avoiding disunity – are the large numbers of liberal commentators who simply endorse what he did, as if it were to them the most routine matter. Of all people, Philippe Sands:
“Obama is right not to target the interrogators in the sense that real responsibility lies much higher up.”
Consider two situations:
A. Individuals are told by a higher authority they can carry out procedures when interviewing that are torture and are known to be torture by both the higher authority and those performing them. They carry out the torture. At a later date, a change in authority occurs, removes the permission to carry out torture, and then also says no-one will be prosecuted for past torture.
B. Individuals are told by a higher authority they can certain coercive procedures when interviewing. The higher authority, and their lawyers, judge that legally these procedures are not torture. Individuals therefore carry out these procedures under the assumption they are not torturing individuals (or at the very least that others will not view them as being involved in torture) At a later date, a change in authority occurs, removes the permission to carry out the coercive procedures, deems them to be torture and then also says no-one will be prosecuted for their past use.
It seems to me that Obama is dealing with situation B. It may well be that there are other coercive procedures still in use, currently not judged to be torture at present. Some of us may even judge those to be torture. It is likely that a continuum exists with harsh language at one end, all the way to physical torture of the worst nature. Is the dividing line clear? I’d like to think I’d know torture when I saw it morally, and many of these techniques look like torture to me, but I’m not sure I’d know torture when I saw it legally (either way in the continuum). I’d like to think I would have had the moral courage not to carry out these procedures based on my own assessment of their effects on individuals, but then I don’t work for the CIA.
Is an individual, who in good faith did not believe they were torturing because of advice they were not, who carried out coercive procedures later deemed to be torture, different from an individual who knowingly carries out torture after orders to do so? The latter would seem to fit Norm’s sensible view that “Those who order torture are indeed responsible; and so are those who torture.” In the case of the former, then doesn’t Obama have a point? Even if some of us, instinctively and by practical demonstration, feel what was happening was torture.