The Abu Ghraib images stick with me. On their own, they are horrifying, but it's the knowledge that these acts were done in the name of the United States — my country, supposedly the world's beacon of freedom — that makes these images unerasable from my mind. But I view the images differently now. When I saw these images for the first time years ago, I saw bad apples. When I revisit the images today, I see the surface of a deep-rooted system of state-sponsored violence that many still defend.

State-sponsored violence is often justified in the name of national security, but is this a valid justification? As noted in class on October 12, the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture did catalog the CIA's brutal “enhanced interrogation techniques”, but they did not go as far as to say they were unjustified. To be fair, this is not a completely clear-cut moral question. The well-being of suspected terrorists has to be balanced with the well-being of the American populace. In his memoir Consequence, Eric Fair was trying to gather information about Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons program. In actuality, such a program didn't exist, but if it had existed, would it have been acceptable to torture detainees in Iraq? This question is reminiscent of the ticking time bomb scenario, which is as follows:^[1] “Suppose that a person with knowledge of an imminent terrorist attack, that will kill many people, is in the hands of the authorities and that he will disclose the information needed to prevent the attack only if he is tortured. Should he be tortured?” The scenario is useful in that it reveals the hidden assumptions necessary in supporting torture.

The first assumption, like mentioned previously, is that the threat actually exists. The second is that the interrogatee has knowledge of the threat. Fair admits that many of the detainees were likely uninvolved with Iraqi military activities: “Most of them have not been interrogated because no one suspects them of anything. Some detainees are simply rounded up in sweeps and mistakenly sent to the interrogation facility” (6.6). Fair describes a culture within the military, fostered by higher-ranking officials, that strongly discourages releasing detainees. When Fair and his fellow interrogator Ferdinand recommend detainees for release after it becomes apparent that they have no information to give, his supervisor “tracks [Fair and Ferdinand] down, wakes [them] up, and demands that [they] return to work and question detainees until they provide valuable information” (6.6). What results from this culture is a significant population of innocent Iraqi citizens that are indefinitely detained and continually interrogated, often involving brutality, until they provide information they don't have.

This brings us to a third false assumption: using violence is the best method of gathering accurate information. Fair shares an example of an Iraqi boy who, after being brutalized, falsely confesses to delivering car batteries to men building car bombs (5.10). Information provided through torture will not always be reliable because people without information are incentivized to give false information. In a way, Sebastian Mallaby subscribes to this third assumption. In his article The Reluctant Imperialist, Mallaby claims imperialism is the least worst option if we want to turn dysfunctional states into functional ones. But Mallaby fails to consider the consequences of ignoring the means for the end. Fair's detainees grow hateful for the United States; they call the interrogators “Satan” (6.8). In the same way, victims of imperialism grow hateful of the imperialists and their goals, which leads the homegrown support for democracy — which is arguably essential in forming a functional state — to diminish. Today, Iraq and Afghanistan are not functional states, in part because of this reaction. Even if it was immediately effective — which it is not — imperialism has unruly consequences, and so does torture.

Many of the assumptions underlying the ticking time bomb scenario are often either false or unprovable, therefore torture cannot be justified, even in the name of national security. This raises the question: how do we prevent torture, and human rights violations more broadly? An easy answer would be to punish human rights violators, but who are the violators worthy of punishment? Fair ultimately presents himself, wittingly or unwittingly, in a sympathetic light in Consequence. This is despite his urges that he is a torturer (13.13), despite his perennial judgment of his actions, and despite his admission that he felt he deserved to go to jail (11.2). Through the format of a first-person memoir, Fair places the reader in his shoes, activating self-preservation and a repulsion to punishing human rights violators. Fair reinforces this through admitting his fear of punishment and desire to move on: “We are guilty, but we don't want to go to jail. Instead, we talk about going home, finding new jobs, and coming back to Iraq” (7.3).

Many people, including myself, would call for punishment of human rights violators (though perhaps for different reasons). But Fair does not place much emphasis on punishment. In part, this is because Fair asserts that the torture was not the result of a few “bad apples” (7.3), but of top-down instructions. Towards the end of the book, Fair describes a child who “urinates on a large sycamore tree” because “his father taught the son how to pee in the woods”, and Fair defends the child (albeit humorously) by saying “He's just following orders” (12.3). In this passage, Fair implies that it is unreasonable to blame someone for following instructions. There's only one problem: soldiers typically aren't two years old. When you are a fully functioning adult, “following orders” doesn't absolve you of guilt. For a society to function properly, and to prevent human rights abuses, people need to be expected to have a certain level of agency and moral responsibility. Punishing human rights violators in the U.S. military who were just “following orders” wouldn't just be for punishment's sake — it would set a precedent that everyone is, both legally and morally, responsible for their own actions.

While retributive justice may work to prevent torture in the future, it doesn't fix the problems that torture has created — this is why reparations are also necessary. Fair first approaches his guilt in a Presbyterian sense, aiming to receive God's forgiveness, but he comes to realize this is insufficient. Fair's friend Seth Goren brings him to read the 12th-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who says: “For example, a person is not forgiven until he pays back his fellow man what he owes him and appeases him. He must placate him and approach him again and again until he is forgiven” (13.8). Atonement has the aim of receiving the forgiveness of who one has wronged, which is not only more moral, it acts to provide victims and bystanders a sense of justice, and therefore, make them more comfortable to forgive. It acts to counteract the effects like those in Fallujah, where U.S. bombings turned sympathetic Iraqis against the United States and against the principles the U.S. claimed they invaded for (class, October 12).

However, even reparations are limited in their effect; they cannot undo the original sin. In his article The Case for Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates tackles this limitation: “Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany's reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name” (X). Where Mallaby considers a “great nation” (5) to be one that extends its influence through violence, Coates considers a great society to be one that urges ethical practices and attempts to repair the damages of its past unethical actions.

The United States may never be great. The U.S. wants to keep human rights abuses as an option to protect national security, as evidenced by the absences in the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture. Atoning for its past abuses would close that door; the U.S. could no longer scapegoat “bad apples” to explain away torture because pursuing reparations would be an admission that the state itself was guilty. But if we want to reach our ideal as the world's beacon of freedom, we Americans need to collectively ask: is our current approach towards human rights acceptable?