Apr 27, 2009
You can crack under torture and still be a man. Really.
Much as I support the idea of waterboarding Sean Hannity for charity, I take issue with a couple things Lawrence O'Donnell, the MSNBC analyst interviewed by Olbermann, says in this video.
O'Donnell seems to believe that torturing only works on wussies. He identifies himself as just such a person, and says Hannity is one, too. This is why Hannity thinks torture would work, O'Donnell explains: since it would work on him, he thinks it would work on everybody. Hardened warriors, however — be they in the American military or members of Al-Qaeda — are not susceptible to a little waterboarding, a little fingernail-pulling, the occasional afternoon spent being electrocuted. They are real men. And torture doesn't work on real men.
Merriment ensues, since this take on the situation casts Hannity as a wimp. In other words, he's kind of a girl.
Forgive me if I don't find being "too feminine to endure torture" as much of an insult. I mean we're not talking about a snake bite here, or the ability to keep running after you get that stitch in your side. We're talking about undergoing physical pain so horrific it can bring on a spontaneous heart attack in an otherwise healthy individual. Yes, military personnel do get some training in withstanding these techniques, but when it comes to pain at this level, stamina and commitment to one's cause don't mean much. And that's the thing: terrorist groups know this, which is why they do things like refer to each other by code names, and ensure that the chains of communication are so convoluted that the individuals most likely to be caught won't have any information to give.
(In the movies, of course, all the bad guys sit around a table and plan the whole operation together. That way when Kiefer Sutherland captures one of them he can conveniently shoot him in the knee and immediately he'll learn where the bomb is, who put it there, where that guy is now, the first middle and last names of everyone involved in the plot, and all the passwords to their computers.)
Outside of Hollywood it's not so tidy. The "ticking time bomb scenario" isn't unworkable because terrorists are immune to pain: it's unworkable because if you've only captured one guy by the time the bomb has started ticking, you're screwed. You won't get much useful information out of him, because he doesn't have much useful information to give. This is true even if he tells you absolutely everything he knows, which he probably will and then some.
And here we have the other problem with O'Donnell's take. Members of Al-Qaeda, in his imagination, are inhuman, almost literally: so inhuman they don't respond to pain. He tries to pass this off as a progressive argument — since it falls under the rubric of "therefore we shouldn't torture!" — but in doing so he's glossed over all the human rights implications of being a nation that okays torture, not to mention all of the foreign policy decisions that lead desperate people to turn to terrorism in the first place.
He also continues to cast this conflict in gendered terms, where torture is masculine, whether you're enduring it or dishing it out, and cracking under it is feminine and wimpy. Under that logic, if Sean Hannity decides that you know what? he'd rather not be waterboarded, it's not because he's a hypocrite: it's because he's a pussy. If he does go through with it, though, well by gosh buy that man a beer!
