Posted on 12/17/2014 4:24:07 PM PST by Kaslin
In an interview on Sunday, NBC's Chuck Todd asked former Vice President Dick Cheney whether he is "OK" with the fact that a quarter of the suspected terrorists held in secret CIA prisons during the Bush administration "turned out to be innocent." Todd noted that one of those mistakenly detained men died of hypothermia after being doused with water and left chained to a concrete wall, naked from the waist down, in a cell as cold as a meat locker. Cheney replied that the end -- to "get the guys who did 9/11" and "avoid another attack against the United States" -- justified the means. "I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective," he said.
Charles Fried, a Harvard law professor who served as solicitor general during the Reagan administration, and his son, Gregory, a philosophy professor at Suffolk University, offer a bracing alternative to Cheney's creepy consequentialism in their 2010 book, "Because It Is Wrong." They argue that torture is wrong not just when it is inflicted on innocents -- and not just when it fails to produce lifesaving information -- but always and everywhere.
That claim is bolder than it may seem. As the Frieds note, most commentators "make an exception for grave emergencies," as in "the so-called ticking-bomb scenario," in which torturing a terrorist is the only way to prevent an imminent explosion that would kill many people. "These arguments try to have it both ways," they write. "Torture is never justified, but then in some cases it might be justified after all." The contradiction is reconciled "by supposing that the justifying circumstances will never come up."
The Senate Intelligence Committee's report released last week, for instance, argues that the CIA's brutal methods did not yield valuable information that could not have been obtained through other means. In fact, it says, waterboarding and the other "enhanced interrogation techniques" were often counterproductive, eliciting false information or discouraging cooperation.
Maybe that's true, but it's awfully convenient. If torture is never useful, eschewing it entails no trade-offs. It is a cost-free commitment.
The Frieds' argument requires no such assumption. They acknowledge that torture may save lives but reject it anyway, arguing that "there are things worse than death." They offer an example that most people would consider beyond the pale: Suppose the most effective way to elicit lifesaving information from a terrorist is to torture his child. Is that tactic morally acceptable, provided the payoff is big enough?
If not, then certain forms of torture are absolutely wrong. The Frieds go further, contending that "innocence and guilt are irrelevant to torture," which desecrates "the image of God" or, in the secular version of the argument, "the ultimate value of the human form as it is incorporated in every person."
The Frieds argue that we lose our humanity by denying someone else's, by treating him as an animal to be beaten into submission or an object to be bent or broken at will. "To make him writhe in pain, to injure, smear, mutilate, render loathsome and disgusting the envelope of what is most precious to each of us," they write, "is to be the agent of ultimate evil -- no matter how great the evil we hope to avert by what we do."
That is just a taste of the Frieds' argument, which deserves to be considered at length. It surely will not convince Dick Cheney, but it goes beyond mere squeamishness in an attempt to articulate the moral intuition underlying legal bans on torture and other forms of degrading treatment.
If the Frieds' reliance on the concept of sacredness strikes you as superstitious, consider what can happen when nothing is sacred. During a 2005 debate, John Yoo, who helped formulate the legal rationale for the interrogation techniques the Frieds condemn, was asked whether encouraging a prisoner's cooperation by crushing his child's testicles would be legal, as well. Yoo replied that "it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that."
Yes, I am familiar with it.
And if we continue to allow our government to run amok, that could certainly be a possible result.
I don’t think that potential scenario is relevant to the waterboarding that occurred after 9/11, however.
It’s up to us to secure our freedom, and we are failing to do that. Consequences of that failure could very well be extremely severe.
My apologies for assuming that you were sticking up for terrorists though, I understand where you are coming from.
"turned out to be innocent."
How innocent?
If my wife and kids were in danger, yes.
Actually no — I'm taking the next logical step from the premise given by DuncanWaring (see post 7).
We havn't used so called "waterboarding" as an EIT "regularly" with terrorists, quite rarely actually. Only three individuals out of thousands, and those were years ago.
Right — That it's not regular/usual might mean something.
That being the case, perhaps it would be helpful to rephrase your question.
If waterboarding is a morally acceptable interrogation technique, what is to stop the police from using it domestically?
Especially considering that there are large swathes of citizens that the government has all but officially declared terrorists.
(Remember the 2009 DHS report?)
Not a problem; I tend to get a lot of flak for "sticking up for X" when I argue from the Constitutional side of things, like (for example) being against the War on Drugs because it's been used to weaken almost all of the Bill of Rights, to the point where it's effectively made some of the amendments of virtually no effect (e.g. the Fourth and the Seventh).
It’s up to us to secure our freedom, and we are failing to do that. Consequences of that failure could very well be extremely severe.
Very much agreed — I think that Article V is pretty much our last non-violent solution to securing liberty.
(Here's my proposals for Amendments, if you're interested.)
That’s a start, you’ve backed away from the regular use strawman.
Frankly, who’s to say the police havn’t already used it. It wouldn’t surprise me, and it may well have saved lives. And so-called “waterboarding” used under supervised conditions has harmed no one that I’m aware of, much less kill anyone.
Would you use it to save the life of your wife, your child, 100’s of people you don’t know? Where do you draw the line. Where do you expect the police to draw the line. Would you impose more restraint on them than you would impose on yourself.
I definitely agree on the war on drugs, but along with the constituional reasons to oppose it, I am also against it on the basis that I view addiction as a medical and a spiritual problem, and I do not personally belive that criminal laws offer any sort of solution to people with that problem. I say this as a former addict.
Addiction is a war that only the addict himself can win with the help of God, and clearly the government invloving itself is for the purpose of empowering government. It’s bad situation all the way around that needs to end.
As far as an Article V convention goes, I to believe that it is the only remaining civil solution to America’s waning liberty. I support it fully, and I do not fear it. If we do not use this tool that our Founding Fathers gave us, it will be a true failure on our part.
Yes, because of their positions of authority, representing the government (and the Law) they should be held to a higher standard than the average Citizen.
But he that knew not and committed things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required; and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.
— Jesus, in Luke 12:48
Where do you expect the police to draw the line.
I think that they should be constrained by the lines drawn by the Constitutions of their States; most all of which explicitly cite the federal Constitution as binding law.
Would you use it to save the life of your wife, your child, 100’s of people you don’t know? Where do you draw the line.
I honestly don't know.
Yes...and anything else they might do to extract information.
A rascally witness makes a mockery of justice, And the mouth of the wicked spreads iniquity. Judgments are prepared for scoffers, And blows for the back of fools. Prov. 19:29
That's unfortunate, but I do appreciate your honesty.
Stay safe and enjoy your weekend.
>> I honestly don’t know.
>
> That’s unfortunate, but I do appreciate your honesty.
Well, part of it does stem from the fact I’m unmarried; I know that should I be a LOT of priorities change.
> Stay safe and enjoy your weekend.
Thanks; you too.
That's like saying murder is wrong even if it's self defense.
I believe that not defending yourself is morally wrong.
In this particular case, at this particular time, I consider interrogation as a form of self defense by the nations as a whole.
That’s not torture; it is, however, an unprovoked act of war by unlawful combatants.
Remember that under the Laws of Land Warfare a combatant who is not clearly distinguishable from the civilian population (as well as adhering to several other conditions) is eligible for summary execution.
Makes waterboarding trivial by comparison, doesn’t it?
Just fyi - it was not waterboarding the got KSM to crack, it was sleep deprivation.
SO: Is sleep deprivation torture? Because, for KSM anyway, it was worse than waterboarding.
Of which I have no objection to.
Makes waterboarding trivial by comparison, doesn’t it?
Actually, no.
A summary execution, though the ending of a life, need not be done with excruciating pain or for sheer cruelty; in fact, it would be far more humane to get it done and over with than to drag it out, playing mental games, to break him (which, incidentally, is what the terrorists do to their captives before beheading them).
Torture does not, and cannot, preserve human dignity; an execution, however, may.
Did you not get the point?...... 9/11 was way more than sufficient for our men to do whatever was needed, no mater how brutal it might be, to obtain information from these people.
Anything our men would do to those who orchestrated 9/11 could not be compared to the suffering/torture those people endured in those flaming towers.
I have no problem with whatever mean they use if it’s to prevent American people from these atrocities and deaths...and that goes for today as well.
You can call them “unlawful combatants” or any other flowery name to be politically or legally correct...they were and are brutal dastardly murders of the worst kind....capable of killing on notice without batting an eye.
...”Torture does not, and cannot, preserve human dignity”....
Terrorism is contempt for human dignity....what we’re facing with Islamic terrorists is an unprecedented threat to human dignity...the right to live.
We lose dignity if we tolerate the intolerable...and that of our children and the generationss to come.
So, the They did something terrible, so that justifies our doing something terrible
line of reasoning?
Anything our men would do to those who orchestrated 9/11 could not be compared to the suffering/torture those people endured in those flaming towers.
I have no problem with whatever mean they use if it’s to prevent American people from these atrocities and deaths...and that goes for today as well.
I'm not saying that they don't deserve retribution; but it doesn't justify turning ourselves into monsters.
IOW, the existence of evil or injustice does not justify further evils or injustices.
You can call them “unlawful combatants” or any other flowery name to be politically or legally correct...they were and are brutal dastardly murders of the worst kind....capable of killing on notice without batting an eye.
And who is saying they weren't?
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