Book Review: Torture: A Collection by Sanford Levinson

"Torture: A Collection" by Sanford Levinson contains diverse perspectives about international human rights, ethics, moral philosophy, political freedom, and national security. Highly advocate reading this book becuase it's an assortment a wide range of contrasting writers.

If do not want to go through the whole book of various philosophical sophistry and legalistic jargon then read at least one chapter to refute the "ticking bomb scenario", the nine pages of Chapter 15, by Elaine Scarry.

By letting the reader put themselves into a particular example makes the topic more open to be talked about without sounding like an academician. Elaine Scarry's, Five Errors in the Reasoning of Alan Dershowitz, is the best and easiest argument against legal torture warrants as advocated by Dershowitz in his chapter aptly titled chapter, Tortured Reasoning. Dershowitz could just as well have titled his chapter, Contorted Conclusion, Deformed Deduction, Heinous Hypothesis, or Twisted Thinking.

Scarry states that even with the very best case of qualifying factors with a god-like omniscience of being absolutely sure that you can get the correct information from a tortured victim, that because of the long history of governmental inability to investigate the true perpetrators - even years after the fact - is proof enough that the torturer will NOT save the city from a ticking bomb.

What would Jack Baur do, is the wrong question for which there is no right answer. Unfortunately Supreme Court Justice Scalia supports the misdeeds of the infamous loose cannon, Jack Bauer, of '24' fame.

On page 284, Scarry writes, "We have failed, in two and a half years, to find the anthrax murderer, despite the fact that the precisely identified strain of anthrax limits the pool of candidates to a tiny handful of people: this is not like finding a needle in a haystack, it's like finding a needle in a bright red pincushion that contains one needle and nineteen straight pins."

There was one argument that none of the writers addressed. What if Timothy McVeigh was in custody prior to the Oklahoma bombing? The investigative torture would of had to have been worse than the capital punishment that he eventually received in his execution. What if the DEA had Terry Nichols beforehand, gang-raped his wife, and forced his preadolescent child to join in the rape of his own mother?

How can something so naturally reviled ever be mitigated or excused? Scarry writes the most effective argument of all for an inclusive and absolute taboo on torture. If a human being would be willing to die in order to save a city full of people from a ticking nuclear weapon then that somebody would also be willing to lose their freedom or life, "in order to gain that information."

The multitude of writers use some of the identical citations with disparate viewpoints. In chapter five, The Legal History of Torture, portions from "Torture and the Law of Proof Europe and England in the Ancien re´gime" by John H Langbein are used. The missing excerpt from this book is about sovereign privilege in regard to torture is another unargued position against torture warrants as proposed by Dershowitz.

Most telling of how contemptible Alan Dershowitz's position is, that even Israel, facing daily terrorist attacks, have outlawed the very same tactics Dershowitz advocates and which are currently being practiced by the United States today.

On page 111, " ... [Israeli Supreme Court] recognized the 'difficult reality in which Israel finds herself' and that, 'this decision does not ease dealing with that reality.' But it concluded that 'this is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it, and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it.'" [Supreme Court of Israel, H.C.5100/94 Sept. 6, 1999]

There is bound to be at least one writer that the reader will resonate to within this book. In some of the eclectic chapters, the writers explain by example about how the judiciary do not want to officially have "dirty hands" and that is why the pretense of virtue of so many hypocritical countries, including the United States, which do have anti-torture laws but still maintain a campaign of senseless persecution.

"Torture: A Collection" by Sanford Levinson ISBN: 0195172892 Oxford University Press

Foreword: The Tyranny of Terror: Is Torture Inevitable in Our Century and Beyond? by Ariel Dorfman

Page 9, "Torture also corrupts the whole social fabric...the process of denial." Page 15 quotes from Chapter 35 from the book "The Brothers Karamazov," by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

"Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature -- that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance -- and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth."

1. Contemplating Torture: An Introduction by Sanford Levinson

Page 28, Menachem Begin quote excerpted from the book, "Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People, The Dynamics of Torture", by John Conroy. "The spirit of a sleep-deprived prisoner, Begin writes, " ... is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady and he has one sole desire to sleep, to sleep just a little, not to get up, to lie, to rest, to forget.... Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger or thirst are comparable with it."

Part I: Philosophical Considerations

2. Torture by Henry Shue

Page 53 This chapter talks about how terroristic torture is the dominant form of depravity - not interrogational and that is usually racist or religion based.

Page 57 "There is a saying in jurisprudence that hard cases make bad law, and there might well be one in philosophy that artificial cases make bad ethics."

Page 60 note 13, " For a realistic account of the effects of torture, see "Evidence of Torture: Studies by the Amnesty International Danish Medical Group" (London: Amnesty International, 1977. Note in particular " ... undoubtedly the worst sequelae, (pathological consequence), of torture were psychological and neurological ... "

3. Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands by Michael Walzer

Page 86, "The Dark Art of Interrogation," Mark Bowden in the '(Atlantic Monthly', 10.2003) describing torture lite, "Fear that something may happen is more effective than any drug, tactic, or torture device....The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself."

4. Reflection on the Problem of "Dirty Hands" by Jean Bethke Elshtain

Part II: Torture as Practiced

5. The Legal History of Torture by John H. Langbein

6. American Interrogation: From Torture to Trickery by Jerome H. Skolnick

Page 116 "When a suspect waives his right to remain silent and to an attorney, and agrees to talk, police are permitted to lie, even about the evidence they have in their possession." [Jerome H. Skolnick and Richard A. Leo, "The Ethics of Deceptive Interrogation" In Issues in Policing: New Perspectives, ed. J. Bizzack (Lexington, Ky.: Autumn House, 1993),75-91

7. The Mental State of Torturers: Argentina's Dirty War by Mark Osiel

Page 132, "Bishops also privately offered theological justifications, drawn from medieval thought, for the practice of torture. Navy officers returning from dropping victims into the sea received comfort from chaplains who would cite parable from the Bible about separating the wheat from the chaff."

Part III: Contemporary Attempts to Abolish Torture through Law

8. Escalation and Necessity: Defining Torture at Home and Abroad by John T. Parry -

Page 157 "One of the characteristics of torture is the way responsibility for the pain flips from the torturer to the victim. In City of Los Angeles v Lyons, the victim's responsibility for his injuries emerged from subsequent cases, in which courts suggested that his status as a lawbreaker - driving with a broken taillight- was crucial to the Supreme Court's decision that he could not seek an injunction against choke holds." [See Spencer v Kemna, 523 U.S. 1,15 (1998); Hodger-Durgin v de la Vina, 199 F.3d 1037,1041 (9th Cir. 1999).]

9. Judgment Concerning the Legality of the General Security Service's Interrogation Methods by Supreme Court of Israel

Page 175 "Suspect's head covering - which cover his entire head, rather than eyes alone - for a prolonged period of time, with no essential link to the goal of preventing contact between suspects under investigation, is not part of a fair interrogation. It harms the suspect and his (human) image. It degrades him. It causes him to lose sight of time and place. It suffocates him... is prohibited."

10. Can the War against Terror Justify the Use of Force in Interrogations? Reflections in Light of the Israeli Experience by Miriam Gur-Arye

Page 191 "Morally repugnant. No one should torture innocent children - even when done to produce a sizable gain in aggregate welfare." [ See Moore. "Torture and the Balance of Evils," 292]

11. The Promise and Limits of the International Law of Torture by Oona A. Hathaway

12. The European Convention on Human Rights and Its Prohibition on Torture by Fionnuala Ni Aolain

13. The Prohibition on Torture and the Limits of the Law by Oren Gross

Page 248 "[p]ersons who act within social organizations that exercise authority act violently without experiencing the normal inhibition or the normal degree of inhibition which regulates the behavior of those who act autonomously."[Robert Cover, "Violence and the Word" 95 Yale Law Journal 95 (1986): 1601, reprinted in "Narrative, Violence, and the Law", ed. Martha Minouw (19920, 203, 221

Part IV: Reflections on the Post-September 11 Debate about Legalizing Torture

14. Tortured Reasoning by Alan Dershowitz

15. Five Errors in the Reasoning of Alan Dershowitz by Elaine Scarry

16. Torture, Terrorism, and Interrogation by Richard A. Posner

17. Loose Professionalism, or Why Lawyers Take the Lead on Torture by Richard H. Weisberg

Page 305 Note #3 "(Bush) Administration that offer compendious rationalizations by Administration lawyers tending to soften the taboo against torture. They raise serious questions not only about the merits of their legal analysis, but also about what is the "professional responsibility " of lawyers who believe themselves under pressure to justify what is in fact moral evil."