Posted on 12/12/2014 6:52:36 AM PST by SeekAndFind
For a long time I resisted the word “torture” when discussing the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used against high-value captives in the War on Terror. I don’t think I can do that anymore.
The report put out by Dianne Feinstein and her fellow Democrats may be partisan, one-sided, tendentious, and “full of crap,” as Dick Cheney put it the other night on Special Report with Bret Baier. But even the selective use and misuse of facts doesn’t change their status as facts. What some of these detainees went through pretty obviously amounted to torture. You can call it “psychological torture” or something to that effect, but such qualifiers don’t get you all that far.
It’s true that torture is to some extent in the eye of the beholder. Everyone can agree that hot pokers, the rack, and the iron maiden qualify. But loud music, sleep deprivation, and even waterboarding? At first, maybe not. But over time, yes. Torture can be a lot like poison: The dosage matters.
One of the great problems with the word “torture” is that it tolerates no ambiguity. It is a taboo word, like racism or incest. Once you call something torture, the conversation is supposed to end. It’s a line no one may cross. As a result, if you think the enhanced interrogation techniques are necessary, or simply justified, you have to call them something else. Similarly, many sincere opponents of these techniques think that if they can simply call them “torture,” their work is done.
The problem is that the issue isn’t nearly so binary. Even John McCain — a vocal opponent of any kind of torture — has conceded that in some hypothetical nuclear ticking-time-bomb scenario, torture might be a necessary evil. His threshold might be very high, but the principle is there nonetheless. And nearly everyone understands the point: When a greater evil is looming in the imminent future, the lesser evil becomes more tolerable. This is why opponents of the interrogation program are obsessed with claiming that it never worked, at all.
And this suggests why the talking point about drone strikes has such power. Killing is worse than torture. Life in prison might be called torture for some people, and yet we consider the death penalty a more severe punishment. Most people would prefer to be waterboarded than killed. All sane and decent people would rather go through what Khalid Sheikh Mohammad went through than see their whole family slaughtered from 10,000 feet by a drone. And yet President Obama routinely sanctions drone strikes while piously outlawing the slapping of prisoners who might have information that would make such strikes less necessary — and, more importantly, would prevent the loss of innocent American lives.
It’s odd: Even though killing is a graver moral act, there’s more flexibility to it. America killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in World War II, but few would call that murder because such actions as the firebombing of Dresden were deemed necessary to win the war.
In other words, we have the moral vocabulary to talk about kinds of killing — from euthanasia and abortion to capital punishment, involuntary manslaughter and, of course, murder — but we don’t have a similar lexicon when it comes to kinds of torture.
When John McCain was brutally tortured — far, far more severely than anything we’ve done to the 9/11 plotters — it was done to elicit false confessions and other statements for purposes of propaganda. When we tortured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it was to get actionable intelligence on ongoing plots. It seems to me that’s an important moral distinction. If I torture a fiend to find out where he left a child to suffocate or starve in some dungeon, that’s a less evil act than torturing someone just to hear them renounce their god or country. Also, KSM was not some innocent subjected to torture to satisfy the grotesque desires of some sadists. He is an unlawful combatant responsible for murdering thousands of innocent Americans.
This may sound like nothing more than a rationalization. But that is to be expected when you try to reason through a morally fraught problem. If you believe torture is wrong no matter what, then any sentence that begins, “Yeah, but . . . ” will seem like so much bankrupt sophistry. The same goes for truly devout believers in nonviolence who think any and all killing is wrong.
I can respect that, because I think the taboo against torture is important and honorable, just like the taboos against killing. And just like the taboos against killing, sometimes the real world gets a veto.
— Jonah Goldberg is a senior editor of National Review and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
.....Yet what took place on 9/11, was that not torture?
Another globalist unmasked.
How far does a civilized country go before it begins to act like the barbarians it is fighting? Just asking....
Interesting that half the nation and half the Congress has absolutely no problem with abortion, including late term, but somehow sees waterboarding a scumbag Muslim terrorist as being “morally wrong” and “against out Constitutional principles”
If the waterboarding scenes in Zero Dark Thirty were even halfway close to reality, then I say “so what”? They didn’t bother me one bit, in fact, I cheered them on. Speak out you terrorist slime, and they’ll stop. A terrorist problem, not a USA problem, so let the b******* eat cake after they spit the water out.
If only liberals held the same compassion for the future victims of terrorism as they do for the terrorists.
RE: How far does a civilized country go before it begins to act like the barbarians it is fighting? Just asking....
_______________________________
Traditional common sense morality involves three moral determinants, three factors that influence whether a specific act is morally good or bad.
1) The nature of the act itself,
2) the situation, and
2) the motive.
Or, what you do; when, where, and how you do it; and why you do it.
It is true that doing the right thing in the wrong situation, or for the wrong motive, is not good.
Making love to your wife is a good deed, but doing so when it is medically dangerous is not.
The deed is good, but not in that situation. Giving money to the poor is a good deed, but doing it just to show off is not. The deed is good, but the motive is not.
There must first be a deed before it can be qualified by subjective motives or relative situations, and that is surely a morally relevant factor too.
Furthermore, situations, though relative, are objective, not subjective. And motives, though subjective, come under moral absolutes.
They can be recognized as intrinsically and universally good or evil. The will to help is always good, the will to harm is always evil. So even situationism is an objective morality, and even motivationism or subjectivism is a universal morality.
The fact that the same principles must be applied differently to different situations presupposes the validity of those principles. Moral absolutists need not be absolutistic about applications to situations. They can be flexible. But a flexible application of the standard presupposes not just a standard, but a rigid standard.
If the standard is as flexible as the situation it is no standard at all. If the yardstick with which to measure the length of a twisting alligator is as twisting as the alligator, you cannot measure with it. Yardsticks have to be rigid.
So, in the case of Kalid Sheik Mohammad, the mastermind of the 9/11 attack....
Can the above principles not be applied in his case, given :
1) The situation we were in ( unsure if another attack was coming ).
2) The Act itself ( which although bad, is COMPRATIVELY TAME compared to what the terrorists themselves consider torture )
3) Our motive ( to save additional lives, not to do it simply for the hatred or the hack of it ).
At the point where not doing so becomes suicidal and just plain stupid. You don’t win wars by playing nice and you don’t win street fights by fighting fair. Fair fighting is for boxers not for a nation that is going to be nuked and have it’s woman used as sex slaves and it’s men and children having their heads lopped off if they don’t bow to islam. Jeez when will Americas fool wake up? I’ll tell you when.....after it’s too late.
Constitutional protections are only for Terrorists, Looters, Rioters, Gentle Giants, and Trayvons.
White Cops, Soldiers, Agency Spooks, Fraternities, Republicans named Barry are all GUILTY!
See how that works?
What I never get is how anyone either brings up the Bill or Rights or the Geneva Convention when neither is applicable to these people. The first is for citizens and residents (captured terrorists are neither), and the second is for lawful combatants and civilians which again, neither applies.
If you actually want a functional Geneva Convention you have to put some teeth into the people who violate it from the ‘we didn’t sign on, and barbarically ignore it’ end. If you treat them with kid gloves as they regularly torture and murder your people, you do nothing to deter their actions.
You want to send a message? Reciprocity. They kill our prisoners? Well then we kill theirs right back (after dragging any information out we can by whatever means). Sure we don’t need to be barbarians and do it on posted video, but firing squads still work just fine.
If you let people you are fighting ignore the Geneva Convention without any consequence whatsoever, why the hell would anyone you fight in the future honor it?
Personally, I have no problem with torturing people who are out to kill us in order to save more innocent people from being slaughtered. The terrorists should otherwise be dead, so what is the big deal about a little sleep deprivation or waterboarding in order to save good people?
How sad that we’ve become so stupid that this doesn’t seem rational.
Hey Goldberg, want to know what’s real? God is real.
About two feet past where the barbarians are.
Remember, we didn’t start this war. But we can damned sure make the fools who did regret the day they were born. We owe them nothing, not even humanity.
Why does John McCain hold them accountable only for torture?
Everything they do is done in secret, so why should we expect anything to be on the level?
Anything you care to enlighten us on the drug trade, Senators McCain or Feinstein?
It’s not like you Senators are going to even for one second consider doing the right thing, so why not just go back to the way things were in decades past, when none of this stuff made it to the news?
You’re all a bunch of thespians.
RE: John McCain
Does having gone through torture at the Hanoi Hilton give him especial moral authority on this matter?
They have neither signed on to or abided by any “agreement” concerning the treatment of captured combatants. They therefor are NOT entitled to any deference concerning the non-use of torture or any other civilized treatment of captured fighters.
Well written and clearly considered post. However, I cannot accept your blanket assertion that “the will to help is always good; the will to harm is always evil.” I suppose it could come down to perspective, but if I execute a criminal, I fully intend to do him harm. Yet in the broader sense, his death benefits many by removing his moral pollution from society. In a similar vein, many liberal programs are ostensibly created with the intention of helping someone, but almost universally end up hurting many more, often including the intended recipients of their largesse.
Maybe these scenarios fall under the heading of “doing the wrong thing for the right reason,” but I’m not convinced that “help” or “harm” can be the sole factor differentiating good and evil.
It gives McCain less moral authority because he’s extremely and irrationally biased. He can’t think straight.
But I think the torture debate is nothing but show for political games and manipulation.
It’s a stupid discussion. Forget about whether you’re going to get the truth out of a torture victim—you’re going to get even less truth out of John McCain. And even less out of John Brennan.
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