On December 9, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report on the interrogation techniques employed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
The committee found that the CIA misrepresented the brutality of the tactics used on terror suspects, the extent and frequency with which those tactics were used, and the value of the information obtained from the interrogations.
Since the report's release, much of the coverage has focused on its claim that the CIA's use of torture was ineffective in obtaining information critical to the prevention of terrorist attacks—a claim that is disputed by Republican members of the committee, who chose not to participate in the writing of the report, agency officials, and members of the Bush Administration. But whether or not the interrogation techniques were effective, were they ethically justified? And what about the concerns of critics who say that the release of the report will inspire new attacks?
HDS asked Research Professor of Ethics Arthur J. Dyck, author of Rethinking Rights and Responsibilities and When Killing is Wrong, to share his thoughts on the torture debate.
While he decries torture as a symptom of moral decay in U.S. society, Dyck also has concerns about the ethics of fully publicizing the Senate report's findings. Moreover, he asserts that no human decision can ever be fully moral, and so calls for understanding and compassion for those involved in the interrogations.
HDS: Critics of the Senate Committee's report say that the United States is in an existential struggle with global terrorists, and point to the brutality of groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS as proof. Is it ever ethical for agents to torture a suspected terrorist if they believe that it will save lives?
Dyck: Torture really can't be justified. You can get results in many different ways. I recently heard an interrogator for the military say that he doesn't use rough techniques and he can get information. But ultimately, it isn't a question of whether or not it's effective. If you love your neighbor as yourself, you don't do those things to people.
HDS: In a recent Pew survey, 62 percent of white evangelical respondents said they believed that "the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information" is justified at least some of the time. How does religion shape the way we think about torture?
Dyck: Well, there were some terrible things done in scripture. But there's also a progressive revelation where the Israelites realize that they're not supposed to behave as they first did when they went into Palestine.
In the New Testament, the Samaritan was the person that was hated. It was assumed by Jesus that the lawyer was among those who hated the Samaritans and he got him to say that the Samaritan was really the one who was the neighbor to the one who lay bleeding on the side of the road.
The moral is that even people we have reason to hate should not be treated in inhumane ways. And it doesn't matter whether you're Christian or not. All of the major religions say that you should love your neighbor as yourself. It's a hallmark of what makes a community possible. That's the golden rule. You can't have a community—you can't have a society—if you don't have basic respect for one another. Otherwise everyone's in danger. If you can torture, if you can lie, if you can cheat, pretty soon you don't have a society. In that sense, torture is really part of a larger moral crisis.
HDS: What's the larger moral crisis?
Dyck: We are not paying attention to the requisites of community. It's no accident that a community was founded, for example, on the Ten Commandments. Those are the hallmarks of the community: don't kill; don't steal; don't lie. You can't have a community where people don't obey the moral rules. If you do, then pretty soon there's no community.
And it's not just a moral code; it's the way we're wired for compassion. A child will cry with another child who's crying. If one child breaks a toy, another will say "Here, take mine." Our empathic emotions are expressed in what we call our moral code.
Now we're human. We're supposed to love unconditionally, but most of us fail there. It's very difficult to love people who treat us meanly.
HDS: What about the "ticking bomb" scenario? Law enforcement apprehends a known terrorist who's admitted to planting a ticking time bomb. Is it ethical to torture him or her in order to find out the location of the bomb and save lives? Is it ethical NOT to torture someone and let the bomb go off?
Dyck: Here's the thing about that situation: I don't know what it takes to get that information. Could someone slip through without torture? I don't know. All I know is what I think is the right way to treat people. I might try the moral way and I might fail. But a person who tries torture might fail, too.
There's not always a clear ethical course. That's by definition. That is, if you ask me, "Cognitively, how do we justify our moral decisions?" We actually need all the facts. But we don't have them. We never have them. Only an omniscient being has them. So we're going to be shortchanged right from the start.
We also need to imagine how our actions will affect everyone. Again we're going to fall short. We'll do the best we can, but we're going to fall short.
And we also have to be even-handed. We have to be impartial. What that means is equal compassion for the victim as well as for the perpetrator. It's not setting your emotions aside. It's equal concern for both.
Now, who can meet all those standards? Only God. That's why all of our moral decisions will be less than we can absolutely know to be the right ones. We can only try to get as close to God's will as we can. And we do that by being conscious of all those things: the impartiality, the imagination of how others will be affected, and to get as much information as we can.
So, the most ethical choice is always to do the least harm that you can do. Think about what a surgeon does. Anybody could die on the table, even in the most routine operation. That's why every decision to do surgery is to do the least harmful thing. You have to know that what you're doing is absolutely necessary.
HDS: Finally, critics say that the details of the report are ancient history. The interrogations took place nearly 10 years ago and have since been discontinued. Moreover, they claim that, by publicizing the report, the committee puts Americans—particularly those serving in the military—at risk for terrorist reprisals. Could the release of the report itself have been unethical?
Dyck: If you're concerned that people will be harmed, it would be better to release the report internally. For instance, the U.S. has bolstered security at some of its embassies. If they are that fearful for the safety of people overseas, then it wasn't wise to make the report public right now. It's not ethical to put people in harm's way.
HDS: So the ethical choice is to keep secret the knowledge that the CIA was engaging in torture?
Dyck: I'm not saying that the report should never come out, but not in this partisan way. It should come out at a time when we don't expect a violent reaction. Right now, there should be a statement from the president and the various appropriate committees saying "We have uncovered activities that we do not sanction. It's a blot on our record. We are going to deal with it and will not indulge in any of those activities, which we thoroughly condemn."
Apart from that, the main quarrel I had with the release of the report was that they didn't get all the facts. You don't do a report like that without interviewing the leaders of the CIA, even if you don't believe them. You have to let people defend themselves and find out why they did what they did from their point of view. It was foolish, never mind unethical, not to do that.
Some of the CIA officials say that they intervened a number of times to stop certain kinds of procedures. It wasn't as though they didn't have any ethical standards whatsoever. That needs to be known. And then we can argue about whether or not their standards were sufficient. That's a fair argument. So it wasn't an impartial report, apart from whether the conclusions were correct.
HDS: Should the people involved in the interrogations be prosecuted?
Dyck: Not necessarily. The best thing might be to issue an official pardon, which signals that the actions were unacceptable. If not, we risk creating a situation where no one wants to serve, which creates a problem with keeping the nation secure.
It's a balancing act. The interrogators were in ethically conflicted situations. If we think they did their best to make good faith judgments, people can be pardoned for their crimes.
—by Paul Massari