A bit of blog silence the last few days.  I have been busy trying to write a paper and following the disastrous Massachusetts Senate election.  For the past twenty years, I have lived in Massachusetts and this has got to be the biggest disappointment in a state-wide (i.e. not national) election that I have experienced here.  I have my own ideas about why things turned out as they did (petty bourgeois rage at the financial bailout that was not sufficiently assuaged by stimulus spending coupled with the incompetencies of the Democratic candidate), but I don't want to blog about that….

Rather, let me turn to a worse story, the continuing outrage of the torture regime of the Bush Administration.  This week Harper's editor Scott Horton ran a piece that suggests that at least three prisoners at Gitmo, said to have committed suicide, were actually tortured to death.

Andrew Sullivan, who has consistently pressed for complete revelation of torture committed by the US, gets to the heart of the matter:

There are now credible accounts that, far from being suicides, these
deaths were either the result of serious negligence in treatment of
prisoners under "enhanced interrogation" or that, quite simply, they
were tortured 
so badly in what appears to be a secret Gitmo black site that they
died. Their deaths were then covered up and faked as suicides. Like
some footnote in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's work, these suicides were
nonetheless described by the military as aggressive acts of
asymmetrical warfare against the U.S. Many branches of government must
have been involved in such an act of torture or negligence or both, and
the subsequent cover-up – from the FBI, the Justice Department, the
State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA, and JSOC. The cover-up
appears to have been continued by the Obama administration – a
staggering surrender to pragmatism that is in fact a cooptation of evil.

I agree that Obama should press for investigations.  But I don't think that he will, especially now that he will be feeling more political heat due to the MA Senate election.  But his sin is one of omission.  Worse are those who continue to call for "enhanced interrogation techniques," for torture.  And the Scott Brown, newly elected MA Senator, is one of them.  Perhaps he was just gong for a cheap rhetorical punch on the campaign trail.  Sadly, though, I think we should take him at his word: that he believes that torture is useful and acceptable.

Neither is true.  Torture is simply wrong.  Fundamentally inhumane.  Both Confucius and Mencius recognized this:

Asking Confucius
about governing, Lord Chi K'ang said: "What if I secure those who abide
in the Way by killing those who ignore Way – will that work?"

"How can you govern by killing?"
replied Confucius.  "Just set your heart on what is virtuous and
benevolent, and the people will be virtuous and benevolent.  The
noble-minded have the Integrity of wind, and the little people the
Integrity of grass.  When the wind sweeps over the grass, it bends." (12.19)

I take this injunction against killing as a general rejection of coercion.  Mencius would concur:

Mencius
said: "To pretend force is Humanity – that's the mark of a tyrant, and
a tyrant needs a large country.  To practice Humanity through Integrity
– that's the mark of a true emperor, and a true emperor doesn't need a
large country.  T'ang began with only seventy square miles, and Emperor
Wen began with only a hundred square miles.  If you use force to gain
the people's submission, it isn't a submission of the heart.  It's only
a submission of the weak to the strong.  But if you use Integrity to
gain the people's submission, it's a submission of the sincere and
delighted heart….(3.3)

Mencius lived in a brutal era. Coercion and force and torture were all around him.  But he rejected these in the name of Humanity.  He had to make a consequentialist argument here – pointing out that  Humane government will be more effective than force – but the spirit of his book is more deontological: Humanity is a good in and of itself and should be practiced for that reason….Something that newly-elected Senator Brown and other American torture supporters could learn from.

But wait, you might say, Brown is only talking about specific circumstances, when a "terrorist" is being held, then, and only then, would torture be allowed.

But this doesn't work either.  We know that torture does not yield actionable intelligence.  Sun Tzu knew that, too:

Treat the captives well, and care for them.

This is called "winning a battle and becoming stronger." (II.19,20)

And just for emphasis, one ancient Chinese commentator on this passage, Chang Yu, adds:

All the soldiers taken must be cared for with magnanimity and sincerity so that they may be used by us.

So read some ancient Chinese thought, Mr. Brown, and give up the torture fantasy.