The scarlet letter of torture

The release of the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA’s detention and interrogation practices is rightly leading to widespread national soul-searching, like the torture debate Americans had after the Abu Ghraib photos were published in 2004. Yet a lot about it seems repetitious, as if we are caught in a loop.

With former Vice President Dick Cheney in the lead, stalwart defenders of “enhanced interrogation” insist it saved American lives. Others are rightly taking another opportunity to denounce torture as beyond the moral pale (not to mention applicable law), or even call for accountability for these grave crimes. It might be that only bringing those responsible to justice would allow America to put this sordid episode behind it. But along with justified self-righteousness, further self-examination should also come.

One promising route is to consider our torture debates “moral panics.” The root idea is one familiar to any reader of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter”: Moral stigma reveals a lot about not only the stigmatized but also the stigmatizer. Moral panics often coalesce around real problems, and torture certainly is one. But their other features are equally problematic.

Made famous by sociologist Stanley Cohen, the concept was first applied to street muggings sensationalized a few decades ago by American and British media. Since then it has been applied to all sorts of social outcasts from asylum seekers to teenage deadheads, and many taboos from adultery to prostitution. The point is to understand our outrage, not merely to indulge in it. Just as in the days of Hester Prynne, moral panics ratify social consensus, but also rule out less comfortable discussions, while giving their proponents an unearned sense of purity. What they bathe in the harsh light of public opprobrium is less important than what they cast in the shade.

To work, moral panics monumentalize the ills they focus on. When it comes to torture, one victim is too many. But the number affected was small — about 40 people, according to the Senate report — compared to other and still mounting victims of the ongoing war on terror. Supporters of the policy might point out that the number of those harshly interrogated, even if it is too high, is dwarfed by American dead in the 9/11 attacks, whose fate demanded justice, and American troops brought home in caskets from different engagements. Critics, however, might point to the civilians who fall prey weekly to American arms (including drones) across a vast battle space or who died in the civil disorder that followed our military intervention, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya.

In addition, torture was shut down within George W. Bush’s administration itself. Cheney has gamely justified the earlier terrified response to 9/11 by our government, but the truth is that law was reimposed during his time in office. And although Obama strengthened constraints on the war on terror even further, he also — or even amplified — many of its most troubling aspects. It is proving easier to hate and debate torture than to take stock of our ongoing war.

If focusing on other things might cause too much dispute, moral panics rarely threaten really powerful people, interests or practices. The years since 9/11 have seen lots of stigmatizing of torture, but this may distract us from bigger and harder questions, such as why we are perpetually at war and whether our response has been disproportionate. I don’t mean to suggest the answers are obvious. On the contrary, since more contentious topics divide the public, it is much easier to indict a superseded policy than to wonder if the nation is still going wrong.

But most important, moral panics turn us away from self-examination. At bottom, they are really about ratifying the public’s sense that its own virtue is pure. 

For a few Americans, principled anger about torture has turned on the issue of accountability, which the United Nations Convention against Torture, to which the United States is a party, demands. But impunity for perpetrators and especially the politicians who ordered their crimes has always been a bipartisan commitment. For most people, hating torture without punishing it is providing an unearned sense of moral cleanliness.

For many, it was cause for celebration just a few weeks ago when the government finally decided to acknowledge that the treaty forbids torture anywhere in the world. America’s unequivocal yes to the global torture ban, which the government affirmed under pressure in Geneva and after considerable domestic agitation, allowed for a victory lap for commentators who generally do not call for holding American torturers — and presidents — accountable for war crimes. The Committee against Torture, the UN body that monitors the law, welcomed that we belatedly joined the global consensus, but also urged the United States to hold perpetrators accountable and to investigate who ordered their work. Our country’s acceptance of the global norm against torture appears equivocal if no American is ever punished for breaking it.

One reason, of course, is there is simply no political will to punish wrongdoing. While some have compared the new report to the Sen. Frank Church’s committee study on U.S. intelligence services after Vietnam and Watergate, that moment was far more self-critical than any of the torture debates in the past decade, and led to attempts at more fundamental governmental reform, which went far beyond prosecution. What does it say about us that we feel torture is horrendous enough to be ashamed about but not to pursue as criminal acts or treat as part of a larger national posture to correct? What does it say that we focus so singularly on it as America’s signature post-9/11 error, as if the isolating the singularity of that mistake would make us pure? The resemblance of the hatred of torture to other moral taboos, honorable as today’s frenzy of anger is, raises the specter of hypocrisy. People like to feel good about their country for saving itself from moral pollution, but the deeper motivation is sometimes to avoid condemning it for any remaining stink.

Identifying absolute evil and making sure our community is free of it is an old American — indeed, human — pattern. We did it after 9/11 when it came to radical Islam, and we have done it repeatedly in response to the torture that followed. Let’s not only impose a scarlet letter on our torturers but also start to think about what doing so says about ourselves.