THE SPECTRUM

Dean Ornish M.D.

Tortured Logic

There are important reasons why the most sacred medical oaths and doctrines prohibit doctors from participating in torture in any way.

Oct 18, 2007 | Updated: 6:43 p.m. ET Oct 18, 2007

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"The end excuses any evil."
--Sophocles, "Electra" (409 B.C.)

"No man is justified doing evil on the grounds of expediency."
--Theodore Roosevelt, "The Strenuous Life" (1900)

Last week, I was having dinner with a good friend who is an extremely bright and thoughtful person. I shared with him how shocking it is to me that our country is having a rational debate about whether or not it's permissible to torture people. "It's unfathomable to me that some people think it's morally defensible to torture people in the name of defending our freedoms," I said. "If we can't draw a bright moral line about torturing, then where can we? Torture is never the right thing to do."

"Oh, yes it is," he replied, causing me to choke on my sushi. "What if some guy abducted your beloved wife and son, had them locked up somewhere with a bomb that was rigged to explode in two hours, and the police captured him. Wouldn't you torture him to get the information you needed to save their lives?"

"I don't know what I would do," I replied, "but I'd like to believe that nothing ever justifies torture. Expediency is a slippery slope."

As the cartoon character Pogo once said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Sometimes, people do the darkest acts in the name of helping protect their loved ones. Sweet and precocious young Anakin Skywalker goes to the Dark Side and becomes the evil Darth Vader in hopes of gaining enough powers to protect his beloved wife from dying in childbirth.

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Posted By: suburbdweller @ 04/05/2008 12:16:09 PM

Correction: A quick internet search reveals that roughly 110,000-120,000 Japanese Americans were interred by the United States during WWII (not millions as I stated earlier). Perhaps two thirds of those were American citizens.
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Posted By: suburbdweller @ 04/05/2008 12:03:18 PM

For a nation proud of its institutions of fairness and justice, it is unthinkable that Americans would exact, much less allow to be commonplace, acts of cruelty in her name. And yet, justified by fear and bigotry, we have found it easy to do just that. Again. How? Through the use of labels.

By labeling someone an Islamic extremist or a terrorist these days, one can be instantly demoted from the ranks of those worthy of due process, habeus corpus, presumed innocence. Rightfully so? Perhaps. But how do you know someone is a terrorist? And how many Americans take that a step further? Watch in amazement at how easily Americans have been suckered into agreeing, with a wink and a nod, that the labels "Arab" and "Muslim" really are synonymous with "terrorist" and thus worthy of the same aforementioned demotion.

Could one argue that torture is justified to thwart an imminent threat? Perhaps, but such scenarios are rare and short lived---quite possibly no one at Guantanamo ever possessed knowledge worthy of stirring the debate.

Guantanamo prison is a huge, self-inflicted black eye on the image of a supposedly kinder & gentler nation. Yet it continues to operate, as it has for years now, fueled by the labelmakers in the White House, supported by all those other "conservative" Americans, all of whom will insist to their dying breath that their cause justifies the means, just like those who happily and in clear conscience canceled the rights and stripped away the property of an entire ethnic group of its fellow countrymen a few decades ago, taking them from their homes and putting them in concentration camps for no reason other than their heritage.

I'm not referring to the Holocaust. I'm referring to the internment of millions of Japanese Americans in the wake of Pearl Harbor.

Most Americans (not all) look back at those events and shake their heads in shame that we were capable of such acts. And yet today, at this very moment, our government is lashing out with the same blind fervor prevalent during WWII. Will we wait again until a new generation has emerged before we see the shamefulness of our current deeds?
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Posted By: burbank @ 04/05/2008 4:47:53 AM

Could torture be looked at another way? Not to be used as a means to obtain information about suspected enemy action, but rather as a means to exact revenge on an unseen and untouchable foe. Consider the actions of a sociopathic lust killer. In the highly evolved fantasy world in which he lives, he has total control over the various acts played out over and over again in his mind. After enough time has pased, he will ultimately act out those fantasies much to the detriment of the object of his desire. He does not go after the cause of his anger and fustration, but after a surrogate. Could this, then, explain the motive for torture? We cannot get Bin Laden, but we can get his minions. In trying to exact information, we exact revenge on a man that we cannot see or touch. And in doing so collect payment that is due on atrocities that have been committed against the innocent.