Torture can’t be ignored

By John M. CRISP

Tribune News Service

Two interesting stories appeared in the same edition of my local newspaper last week.

The first involves an awkward problem that Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush faces: his brother, former president George W. Bush.

Many Republicans have managed to hold their noses when they consider George W. Bush’s administration, especially his unprovoked and ill-advised invasion of Iraq. Jeb Bush has stumbled over this issue several times, looking for ways to put the best face on a huge foreign policy error.

He has admitted that “mistakes were made” and relied on the dubious proposition that “taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.” But this simplistic notion – Saddam Hussein is easy to demonize – depends on the electorate’s failure to notice the chaos that the Iraq War unleashed.

A sub-element of Jeb Bush’s problem surfaced in a short article under this headline: “Bush won’t rule out use of torture.”

Jeb Bush was asked by Iowa Republicans if he would rescind President Obama’s executive order banning enhanced interrogation. He said that “in general,” torture is “inappropriate.” And he gave his brother credit for ending – this is debatable – the CIA’s use of torture before he left office.

But, Bush said, “I don’t want to make a definitive, blanket kind of statement.” He was suggesting that brutal interrogations may sometimes be called for to keep the country safe.

Savage practices

So if Jeb Bush becomes president, torture appears to be back on the table, which isn’t welcome news to those who hold the hopeful progressive idea that humankind’s most backward and savage practices – cannibalism, human sacrifice, slavery, genital mutilation – can be gradually consigned to the past once and for all.

Torture is in this category. Not so long ago torture was an ordinary part of the judicial systems of many countries even as they made slow, fitful progress toward enlightenment. For example, the gruesome punishment of drawing and quartering for the crime of high treason wasn’t officially removed from English statutes until 1870.

Now torture is generally proscribed by international law, and most advanced countries agree that the practice should be left in the past. Of course, a great deal of torture still takes place, but we’re embarrassed enough to try to cover it up or to deny it outright. Thus George W. Bush asserted in 2007: “This government does not torture people.”

This statement evidently wasn’t true, but at least it reflected the high-minded position that torture is a practice that civilized countries shouldn’t permit.

But the same newspaper that reported Jeb Bush’s position on torture carried this story, as well, a New York Times report on the Islamic State’s “Theology of Rape.”

This isn’t the incidental rape by drunken marauding soldiers that often occurs in war. Last summer ISIS fighters invaded Yazidi villages on the slopes of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq. Men and boys old enough to have armpit hair were marched into adjacent fields and executed. Women and girls were inducted into a highly organized system of sexual slavery.

This raises an important philosophical question for all of the presidential candidates, as well as for all Americans: In the face of ISIS’s savagery, what level of brutality are we willing to accept in order to defeat them?

John M. Crisp, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas.