Swiftly executing terrorists is more humane than torture

In the wake of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program—the so-called “torture report”—many have argued that what we did to captured terrorists after 9/11 was justified because it helped disrupt future terror plots and led to the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and other “enhanced interrogation tactics” saved American lives, we’re told, so it was all worth it—even if we had to bend the law, even if it was inhumane.

But there is a more humane and morally justifiable way we could’ve dealt with terrorists after 9/11. We could have executed them.

We have a precedent for such a response to terrorism. Execution is exactly what we did during World War II. Their remains were buried in a potter’s field outside Washington DC.

Here was a case of enemy combatants hiding among the civilian population with the objective of carrying out terrorist attacks and industrial sabotage. When we caught them, we didn’t detain them in a special prison, we didn’t waterboard them or force them into coffin-sized boxes for days on end to get them to divulge all they knew. We simply tried and executed them—swiftly.

Today, we are at war with an amorphous network of terrorist organization operating all over the world. Yet the Dasch case is similar to the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in a few important respects. In both cases, America had recently suffered an unprecedented surprise attack that claimed thousands of lives; U.S. military intelligence and domestic law enforcement agencies were on high alert for further possible (and possibly imminent) attacks; and we had scarce intelligence about the enemy’s capabilities and plans.

Herein lies an important distinction: a man may, owing to the severity of his crimes, lose his right to live; he should never lose his right to be treated humanely, to die with a measure of dignity. His punishment is that he lose his life—not his humanity. This holds even for the wicked, who have not themselves been humane to their victims.

An extension—and arguably a perversion—of this principle may well account for the sharp rise in drone strikes against terrorist targets under President Obama, more than six times as many as his predecessor. In light of the barbarity that a place like Guantanamo requires, so the thinking goes, perhaps it is better if we do not apprehend these men in the first place. In a recent column, Victor Davis Hanson asked whether the next Senate Intelligence Committee will “charge that in the topsy-turvy morality of the Obama presidency, his administration preferred to bypass Guantanamo by choosing to kill suspected terrorists rather than capture them?” Maybe that’s precisely what the president was thinking—rid himself, and us, of the greater evil in favor of a lesser one.

Christopher Hitchens once told an audience of liberal college students that Guantanamo was an outrage. Asked what should be done with the detainees, he replied—to the students’ horror—that if it were up to him he’d have the terrorists lined up and executed by firing squad. That shouldn’t be so difficult to understand. In the wake of the Taliban’s slaughter last Tuesday of 145 people at a Pakistani school, most of them children, one mourner at a recent vigil for the victims in Lahore held up a placard that declared: “Terrorists should be publicly executed.”

Perhaps they should. They should certainly not be tortured.

John Davidson is a health care policy analyst in the Center for Health Care Policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

December
22, 2014

Swiftly executing terrorists is more humane than torture