Torture's Unanswerable Questions

Call him a terrorist or a suicide bomber or anything else you want, but understand that he is willing -- no, anxious -- to give his life for his cause. Call him also a captive, and know that he works with others as part of a team, like the Sept. 11 hijackers, all of whom died, willingly. Ishmael is someone I invented, but he is not a far-fetched creation. You and I know he exists, has existed and will exist again. He is the enemy.

Richard Cohen is a liberal who occasionally gets fits of intellectual honesty. You can see the start of such a fit in the first 1/2 of this column. But then he starts getting disconcerted about where he is going, and he wills himself into confusion in the final paragraphs.

But I think the admissions in this column make it worth reading.

Actually, I thought his conclusion in the final paragraph was spot on.

The questions of what constitutes torture and what to do with those who, maybe innocently, applied what we now define as torture have to be removed from the political sphere. They cannot be the subject of an ideological tug of war, both sides taking extreme and illogical positions -- torture never works, torture always works, torture is always immoral, torture is moral if it saves lives. Torture always is ugly. So, though, is the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center once stood.

This is an ends and means argument. Some will argue the end never justifies the means, others (notably commies) that it always will.

I, and apparently the author, don'e see it as that simplistic. Some ends are evil and no end is justified in their pursuit. Some ends will justify almost any, but not ALL, means.

Some means are so evil that absolutely no end can, IMO, justify them. An example is torturing an innocent child to get a parent to provide information. Even if doing so will save many other lives, it cannot be justified morally.

So we're back to trying to deal with the specifics of which ends justify which means. This is messy and unpleasant and slippery slopes abound, but it is unfortunately the real world.

It’s messy generally, but I thing the particular moral judgment that its OK to water-board and and sleep-deprive a guy who you have solid evidence knows about ongoing terrorists plots, is justified. This is an instance in which it’s not just allowable but moral to hurt another.

When a lib like Cohen admits there is gray area, it’s a rare event.

I wish the CIA would start leaking out incidents where even the mildest form of coercion resulted in valuable info, but a lot of that stuff is probably classified.

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