When Barack Obama was President-elect, he set out what would become the mantra of his administration on accountability for torture. Asked by George Stephanopoulus on This Week whether he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate possible criminal actions by the Bush administration with regard to torture, President-elect Obama said: “We're still evaluating how we're going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we're going to be looking at past practices and I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”
The apparent contradiction between saying nobody is above the law and that his administration would look forward and not backwards has been noted by many commentators, but few have pressed for accountability as necessary for the rule of law as forcefully as Rebecca Gordon in this volume. The volume is not primarily an argument for accountability. Instead, it seeks to demonstrate that torture is not an occasional act of isolated individuals. Rather, it is a practice adopted by states, one capable of forming the intellectual habits and character traits of a people. Alas, Gordon argues, after September 11, 2001, the United States institutionalized a torture regime and that regime continues to shape the American character.
The most provocative claim in the book, and one that deserves serious discussion, is that torture breeds cowardice. “There is,” Gordon writes, “a word for people whose first concern is always for their own safety, a name for people who will permit anything to be done that they believe is necessary, as long as it keeps them safe” (4). That word is “coward,” and while Gordon stops short of saying that Americans have become a nation of cowards, she clearly believes that some of its leaders are.
Whether one finds this claim to be plausible, it is certainly the case that Americans have become more accepting of torture since September 11, 2001, and that this trend has continued even after President Obama condemned torture and enhanced interrogation but refused to seek accountability for those who authorized and implemented the enhanced interrogation regime. Gordon notes, for example, that in a 2005 USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll, 82% of those polled morally disapproved of waterboarding suspected terrorists; by 2012, that percentage had shrunk to 55. Given the firestorm that greeted revelations about enhanced interrogations at Guantanamo Bay and C.I.A. black sites around the time the first poll was taken, and given the fact that President Obama repudiated the use of these techniques as inconsistent with American values, it may be surprising that acceptance of waterboarding and torture has actually increased. Gordon's work suggests that we should not be surprised.
Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre's account of social practices, Gordon argues convincingly that, following the terrorist attacks of 2001, torture became a practice embraced by the highest levels of the U.S. Government. Like all practices, torture “has its own history and traditions, its own culture and ritual of initiation, its own goods and evils, its own virtues and vices” (91). Gordon is trained in theological ethics and she uses that background to good effect in exploring the idea that torture is a practice. For example, she illustrates the ritual quality of torture by noting William Cavanaugh's analysis of torture in Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ. According to Cavanaugh, torture has a liturgical function in that it enacts a narrative that reinforces the imaginative power of the state. We tend to think that torture creates enemies of those who empathize with the tortured. In fact, torture creates enemies by fostering a social imaginary among citizens of the state that torture, which in turn defines enemies as precisely those the state tortures. If we are torturing them, they must be the enemy.
We can now see why Gordon's work supports the call for accountability. If torture is a practice and not merely isolated acts conducted by individuals, then it is not enough merely to repudiate particular acts of torture. To repudiate torture requires holding accountable those who use fear to instill a worldview that corrupts core American values. According to Gordon, torture is a practice, but it is a false practice. “It is,” she says, “a practice in which the quest for the good life has been diverted and in which the cardinal virtues of justice, courage, temperance, and prudence . . . are deformed” (194). Whether one individually approves of torture does not matter. To live in a state that tortures is to inhabit a world where fear trumps all.
When Maj. General Antonio Taguba filed his report on the abuses at Abu Ghraib he was only doing what he had been ordered to do: investigate and report. “After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations,” Taguba reported, “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.” Despite the fact that he acted with integrity and honor in preparing the report, his thirty-four-year Army career was over. There was to be no accountability for the horrific practices at Abu Ghraib, just as later there was to be no accountability for abuses at Guantanamo Bay. Taguba himself put the point in a way that reinforces Gordon's analysis of torture from the perspective of virtue ethics. “From the moment a soldier enlists,” he told Seymour Hersh, “we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service…. The fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable” (“The General's Report,” New Yorker, June 25, 2007). Gordon would wholeheartedly agree.
