Tosca and Torture

(apologies, this is so not the current story at the moment. but if I tried to keep up, I would never post anything.)

Some of you may know that I'm a major opera lover. I was thinking today, for whatever reason, about Tosca. Tosca has a scene in which one of the characters is tortured (offstage) for information about a terrorist he's suspected of harboring, while his partner Tosca, who also has the information, is onstage having the torture described to her by Scarpia the police chief and listening to his screams. He doesn't break. She does.



Now, someone in favor of torture might come out of there thinking, "Torture works. She had the information, she was psychologically tortured, and she gave it up."

Here's the thing, though. It so happens that the person by whose physical torture Tosca is mentally tortured is also an accomplice to terrorism. But if he weren't? Nothing about the situation dictates that the person being tortured offstage have anything to do with the crime - all that is necessary is that he or she be someone dear to Tosca. If Cavaradossi weren't guilty? If it were her brother, or her mother?

This is the fundamental problem with torture apologism. This is what happens when you follow the utilitarian aspect of it to its logical conclusion. The argument that one hears is that the human rights of the torture victim are secondary to the lives of the people that could be saved if "we" had that information. Doesn't even matter if each individual detainee is guilty or even knows anything. The overall set of people who would suffer is much smaller than the set of people who would not (so the argument goes) and thus torture is acceptable.

But wait. We've already seen CIA operatives threaten to kill detainees' children and rape their female relatives in order to get information out of them. What's stopping them from actually doing it, from torturing a child in the next room while one of the detainees is forced to listen until he cracks? It's only one child - hundreds or thousands of children could be saved if the supposed terrorist gives us the plans for that bombing or plane hijacking.

The situation presents two problems. One: why is it all right to torture innocent men, but not innocent children? Remember that we don't know that the people we're torturing are guilty; in fact, we know that a good number of detainees are not only innocent, but of no intelligence value. And two: why are apologists trying to deny that the detainees are human, with human feelings, while advocating the extraction of information by threats against people close to them?

It's obvious enough, but it's worth stating again: torture is not practiced to extract information. It is practiced to punish people, not for crimes, but because we don't like them.

(The other famous operatic torture scene is the one from Turandot, where, after giving her captors false information, Liù refuses to reveal what she knows and then kills herself. Oh right, but torture works.)