Posted on 12/12/2014 7:47:39 AM PST by Kaslin
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 Diane 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 that 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.
Only if done in public at prime time.
If there was no other way of obtaining critically important information, I would reluctantly agree to his mistreatment. Which, as I understand it, was considerably less aggressive than it could have been.
But that’s a quite different moral position than “there should be no restrictions at all on how we treat our captives.”
In some of the posts on this thread there also seems to be a conflation of the concepts of torture as retribution or punishment and torture to obtain critical intelligence.
Where on the spectrum of pain or bodily damage would you draw the line? Or do you have a line?
Could the above be worse than listening to Hillary or Yoko Ono?
Thanks. I think you’ve made your position clear. Others can now draw their own conclusions about your moral character.
I really can’t get over how much he looks like John Belushi on a bender.
And yours.
PS: You never answered my question in post 17. Care to now? BWhahahahaha.
Who'd like to see him raped by ten gorillas on PPV?
Yes, it was immoral. Torture is always immoral.
Sometimes a lesser immoral act is necessary to prevent a greater one. Lesser of two weevils and all that.
But that an evil is lesser does not make it un-evil.
War, for example, is by definition evil. Yet sometimes it is necessary to prevent greater evil. But that simply does not ever make it good.
Wow, just wow. Calling the CIA agents immoral? What site are you on? Maybe the DU might suit you better....
We don’t need to stoop all the way to their level. Though I do admit I wouldn’t really shed a tear if they did go full medieval on them.
Considering alternatives, water boarding and firing squads is plenty humane enough for the likes of these people.
Government actions are never to be questioned or called immoral? What site are you on?
In this case it isn't really a question of morality so your premise is flawed.
So who elected you the arbiter of morality?
Back at ya.
Jews and Kulaks were just living their lives and posed no threat to anyone or anything; KSM, not so much. I don't see how you can make any moral comparison between the treatment of Jews and Kulaks with that of al-Qaeda operatives.
Making someone “uncomfortable” or “disoriented” IS NOT TORTURE!
It’s that simple.
Yep. The entire water boarding thing is a rope-a-dope by the anti ‘torture’ people. The terrorists KNOW they are gonna survive water boarding. It is NOT pleasant for sure but they know they are gonna survive it to live another day. (That cattle prod pic has been well debunked as not Chris Stevens though).
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