Why I choose liberty over security

Saturday marks the birthday of R. C. Hoiles, the libertarian thinker (some might say “agitator”) who founded Freedom Newspapers, now called Freedom Communications, the company that owns the Desert Dispatch.

Each year for Hoiles’ birthday, newspapers in our chain are encouraged to recognize Founder’s Day and communicate his philosophy of liberty.

Today I wonder what Hoiles might have had to say about our administration’s decision to endorse “enhanced interrogation techniques” that most people recognize as torture.

Scratch that — I don’t really have to wonder what Hoiles might say; Hoiles famously opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans in camps during World War II, an unpopular decision at the time. I have no doubt he, in the strongest terms, would have spoken out against waterboarding or any other interrogation method that caused physical or psychological pain and suffering.

No government has the right to deliberately inflict pain upon people as part of an interrogation process. There are no justifications that create this right, no matter how well-argued, no matter how much we would like to believe it serves a greater good, no matter how bad the people are, and no matter how many action-movie scenarios we dream up to put the safety of the world at stake.

To choose security (the illusion of security, rather) over liberty is to live like a beast — a violent, territorial animal, like a bear — the symbol of the Soviet Union’s totalitarian past, where the choice was always security over liberty. Russia appears to have drifted back into this direction, and we are rightfully concerned, because we see where it leads. We should be just as concerned that we head down the same path.

As a policy we don’t endorse candidates and we will be following this policy in the 2008 presidential election. I will say, however, that I will not vote for any candidate who approves of torture (no matter how they try to spin it) as an interrogation technique, regardless of where he or she stands on other issues, regardless of whether I agree with the rest of his or her platform.

And if I were challenged to decided between living safely in a country where torture is permitted or dying brutally at the hands of a terrorist, there is no question: I would choose death, even if that death came to me tomorrow. The alternative is the death of the spirit and the soul, the destruction of everything that identifies us as humans, not beasts, and at that point, what happens to the body no longer even matters. We become empty shells, stumbling through a meaningless, thoughtless existence.