Should you permit the Torture of a fellow human???. Review on Rendition Movie

A bomb explodes somewhere in North Africa and an CIA agent killed. Anwar El-Ibrahimi, a US Citizen and a chemical engineer, is on his way back to his home in Chicago, USA from Cape Town, South Africa. He gets a call on his cell, a call from a strange unknown number, but is not able to pick the call. That call was from Rashid, a terrorist, believed to be responsible for the bomb blast by CIA. In a more reasonable world this would mean nothing but in the world of intelligence and espionage and black ops and what not, this is not just a coincidence because these people don't believe in coincidences because they are paid not to.

Anwar is apprehended and detained when he land at the airport in USA by US authorities and interrogated by a CIA officer. He is sent to North African authorities who will now question him about his suspected involvement with a man known to be an international terrorist. The methods of interrogation followd by the North African authorities, are of course, not particularly friendly. Anwar is tortured by various methods and is subjected to various degrees of pain and sufferrings as they try to get some information out of him.

When I checked the dictionary, I found Rendition means tranferring of suspected criminals or detainees to such countries where torture is permitted. A reference is made in the movie to the concept of Extraordinary Rendition, which started during Clinton's time but after 9/11 it took a completely different meaning.

A real life parallel of this story is the detention of a doctor working in Australia as a terror suspect because a cell phone sim-card registered to his name was illegally used by some other people to communicate with international terrorists. That story took great international significance because of the whole human rights issue. A recent Bollywood movie "Shaurya" has this dialouge(translation) - "This is the border between India and Pakistan. Civilization is 500 kms away from this line. Democracy and human rights are also 500 kms away from this line". Then I also recall the famous line from the movie Crimson Tide - "Son, we are here to preserve democracy, not to practice it."

Another mention, very interestingly is made in the movie to two sayings which demonstrate two completely different schools of thoughts. One is - "Beat your wife every morning, if you don't know why, she would". It could be interpreted as meaning - you capture a suspect and you beat the hell out of him, if you don't know why you are torturing the person, he certainly knows because he is the bad guy and he has done bad things and quite obviously he knows for what bad things he is being tortured and sooner or later he will tell you the things he had done and/or plans to do.

This interpretation assumes that the person is infact guily to the things which he is suspected of. This brings us to the question - should we torture terror suspects or other people falling the same class? The justification which is often given is - one man must suffer is order to save a thousand others. In fact there is a dialogue in the movie to this extent. Furthermore, if the one man is the bad man, and bad people by default must suffer, what's wrong with that?

I don't think this is the right way of thinking. Good or bad are very subjective terms - subject to interpretation, subject to indoctrination, subject to culture and a lot of other factors. Civilized and reasonable people must understand that this world is not black and white. It never has been in black and white. We have shades of grey here, and different shades. Every white has a little bit of black in it and every black has a little bit of white in it. We must work to eliminate and suppress the black and let the white come out and blossom. Of course, it is not possible to eliminate the black completely, but we can sure suppress it. And use of torture and violence is never going to suppress and stop it - you cannot make black white by adding more black to it.

And then there is another saying, the other school of though acc. to which -  'When men are put under pressure and they are questioned, they will say whatever you want them to say and that might not necessarily be the truth'. I say, that if a man is giving you information which you have obtained after subjecting the man to tortures, the reliability of that information is very very low. The reasons for this are following -

1. A man will say anything he has to say to save his life - so when he figures out that he is going to die if he does not confesses the crimes he is charged with, he would be ready to confess any and all crimes as long as you are not going to put him in a cold cell without clothes or give him electric shocks.

   
   




2. People who use torture techs to obtain information use them and defend their use because they are of the opinion that these methods are effective. Their criterion of effective being quick and the belief that when men are subject to pains they would tell them what they know for the pain to be stopped. First, this assumption suffers the shortcoming noted above in first point. Second, men can train themselves to bear the physical pain if they have a bigger(religious or moral) reason to do so. This is applicable not only to torture but sometimes men subject themselves to pain intentionally during certain religious rituals. There is enough documented and video evidence of these religious rituals that I don't think it is necessary to discuss them here.

   
   




3. A trained person can actually use the assumption noted in point 2 above to deliberately spread disinformation. A lie told which has some truths interwoven in it is very tough to detect and in this world where it has become increasingly difficult to figure out what is the truth, the possibility of taking this half-truth-half-lie statement made after being subject to torutre is increasingly high.

   
   

For these reasons, moral and practical, it is never a smart thing to subject a person to cruel torture techniques.

And then furthermore, there is an even bigger issue here - the issue of principles. Some might discard it as a waste of time to discuss it but that would be  nothing less than escapism and self-deception. We are what we are because of the principles we believe and follow.

There is difference between civilized people who respect human being and human life as sacred and those who simply don't. And that difference should remain.This movie perhaps, shows, how that difference is evaporating and why this difference needs to be maintained. I would suggest another movie - The Siege - to the readers. After watching these two in conjuction, perhaps my observations would be more clear.