Torture and Civilization

The fact that we are having a national political debate over torture shows again how a grim century of war and totalitarianism has coarsened our civilization and eroded its ideals. At the turn of the last century, before the rise of the Nazis and the Communists and the other 20th Century tyrannies, it was commonly understood that torture, like witch hunts and pogroms, was something from the dark, Medieval past that the civilized parts of the world had finally moved beyond. Subsequent facts of course proved otherwise. Now, a hundred years later, and in the United States of America, we have come to the point of arguing about whether to sanction torture.
The people who argue for the use of torture against captured terrorists make valid points about the nature of the enemy. Islamic terrorists are vile and despicable murders in the service of an evil cause. They function in secret and without honor or decency, torturing and brutalizing prisoners, targeting innocent noncombatants and shying like cowards from direct combat with armed men. They have no established bases, uniforms, or formal deployments. They have to be found before they can be attacked.
People favoring torture also make valid points about the practical value of extracting information from prisoners. Learning the location of a planted bomb or the plans for an attack or the names and whereabouts of members of a terrorist cell can save innocent lives and enable us to find and destroy the terrorists.
However, for a couple of reasons, I believe that those favoring torture are wrong. First most of the points above apply just as well to cases where torture is properly banned, so they cannot be conclusive. As a hypothetical example, suppose that during a military campaign against the Nazis or the Soviets we capture an SS or a Red Army officer who possesses important information about a planned attack by his unit. The prisoner is a cruel and brutal killer in the service of an evil cause, a murderer of civilians and himself a torturer. He has information that would save many lives and increase our chance of success in the coming battle. Yet by law and practice the armies of the United States world refrain from subjecting him to torture, and even the people who want to torture terrorists likely would agree that that was the right thing to do. A second example is even more to the point. Consider a vicious criminal, a thug who knows when and where the rest of his gang are going to pull off a violent heist that will inevitably kill many innocent bystanders. The prisoner is a worthless, cowardly murderer and rapist who serves no nation and wears no uniform. He and the rest of his gang function in secret, hiding in the shadows and coming out to prey on the innocent. They have no honor and follow no civilized rules. Learning where the rest of the gang is hiding would allow the police to save lives and take dangerous criminals off the street. Yet by law and practice, American police would refrain from subjecting him to torture, and, again, most of the people who want to torture terrorists would agree that that was the right thing to do.
In each case the prisoner is as loathsome as the Islamic terrorists. He is also in service of ends that are evil. To agree that these prisoners should not be tortured is to concede that the moral status of the prisoner and the evil of his cause and even the importance of the information he holds and the good we could do with that information are not sufficient to justify torture.
This leads to the second and more important reason for opposing torture. We should oppose torture, not out of any tender feelings for the terrorists, whom we should gladly see dead, but out of concern for ourselves and our country. In our hearts we know that torture is wrong, and that refraining from torture is right. We also know that while in some cases doing right can be tragically inexpedient, we should do it anyway. We do right, not because it always produces the best short term or local outcome, but because it produces the best long term and global outcomes and because of the sort of people and nation that doing right makes us.
We should fight, pursue, catch and kill the scum and those who support them without mercy but also without becoming something we should not be.