Torture and the Laws that Enlightened Us.

On August 24th 1780 King Louis XVI abolishes torture as a means to get suspects to confess. It was one of a number of reforms the young king made during his historically fateful reign. The mandate was by nature a political move on the part of Louis XVI to alleviate the growing unrest among the populous but it also indicated a genuine desire on the part of the monarch to appear more enlightened then his predecessors. The amends the king attempted to make were ultimately implemented far too late to quell the outrage of the public; who had suffered excessive abuses of power under the crown for centuries.

France was not the first to abolish torture. Many other European nations abolished the practice before 1780, some followed after. The removal of torture as a government function reflected a growing consciousness on the part of the monarchy that the political and moral convictions of the people were shifting beneath them. The abolishment of torture in the 18th century did not have the overwhelmingly constructive effect that the mere statement might cause citizens of the 21st century to imagine. The abolishment of torture eradicated trial by ordeal under the law, and displaced the inquisitorial proceedings of the previous centuries in favor of courts lead by accusatorial process. It did not however change a number of other abuses. The Catholic church continued to impose the idea that prison should constitute hell on earth, foreshadowing the eternal damnation of the condemned in the next life. To spite increasingly humanitarian forms of thought, very little was done to alter this metaphorical hell scape. Many people died in prison awaiting trial without being convicted of committing any crime.

Leaders of the French Revolution “made frequent use of the guillotine, a recently invented machine that brought about supposedly humane executions... In 1793 King Louis and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, themselves went to the guillotine” (p. 790). Corporeal punishment in Europe was not always as influenced by humanitarian thought as in the French Revolution. England retained laws which imposed the harshest punishment on convicted traitors to the crown who were to be hang and quartered.

The Humanitarian thought which persuaded Louis XVI to alter French law, and which shortly thereafter inspired the the French people to over through the monarchy altogether, became an integral part of Western ideology. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century a number of international treaties were created to protect human rights during armed conflict, which included the Geneva Convention, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (p.1154-1155). The United States participated in the creation of both treaties and ratified each of them.

Accusations of alleged prisoner abuse by American armed forces in 2004 enraged Americans as well as members of the international community. In response to these allegations CNN reported that then President Bush “defended his administration methods of interrogating terrorism suspects insisting, ‘This government does not torture people.’” Evidence which has surfaced in recent years documents the abuses of prisoners by their American captors as well as it’s government sanction and internal promotion. The LA Times reports that CIA memos releases earlier this year “provide the most detailed account to date not only of the interrogation tools the CIA employed against Al Qaeda suspects in secret prisons around the world but the legal arguments the Bush administration constructed to justify their use.” After denying for years that suspects were tortured in American controlled prisons members of the former Bush administration, most notably former vice president Dick Cheney, have sought to justify their actions citing the countries national security interest.

Many Americans and international critics have rejected this. Matthew Alexander, former Air Force counterintelligence agent who volunteered to go Iraq to work as a senior interrogator, wrote for the Washington Post: “We’re told that our only options are to persist in carrying out torture or face another terrorist attack. But there truly is a better way to carry out interrogations -- and a way to get out of this false choice between torture and terror.” The fact that prisoners of war were being mistreated over the last seven years flies in the face of American ideology and international law. The torture of prisoners represents regressive policies which were abolished by Europe’s last monarchs in the 1800s. The government sanction of such practices threatens the progressive humanitarian thought of the last two centuries.

The release of the CIA interrogation methods was by nature a political move on the part of the Obama administration to alleviate the growing resentment within the Islamic community but it also indicated a genuine desire on the part of the white house offices to appear more enlightened then their predecessors. In a statement issued with the documents the President said: In one of my first acts as President, "I prohibit the use of these interrogation techniques by the United States.... Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our values, move forward with confidence... The United States is a nation of laws. My Administration will always act in accordance with those laws, and with an unshakeable commitment to our ideals."

Obama promised Americans that ‘steps had been taken to ensure that abuse of detainees would never take place again.’ The removal of Bush administration interrogation procedure revealed a acute awareness on the part of the Obama administration that the American people would not support programs which encouraged torture once it was know to them. The rejection of such programs reflects the underlying strength of America’s humanitarian values and beliefs, inherited from eighteenth century Enlightenment movement.