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."
Nobody's saying we should tolerate terrorism.
Would it have been acceptable for the paki government to torture someone with guilty knowledge in order to prevent the murder of 148 students and teachers.?
They deserve death so anything less than that is moral.
You're talking about torturing people, you're basing your justification of it on what they did, that their degradation of the human lives of their victims justifies degrading their lives. Then you turn around and post that, implying that Jesus's righteous fury at the degradation of the temple is on the same level as torture?
Wow.
Don't you know what Jesus said?
(Matthew 12:36)If even idle.empty words will demand an account on the day of judgement, do you think that torture wouldn't?
But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken.
(Matthew 22:15-22)Three times we are told here that Man is made in God's image.
Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said. So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”
But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the tax.”
And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?”
They answered, “The emperor’s.”
Then he said to them, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away(Genisis 1:26-27)
Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
I see you evade the point.
No ..I made my point.
It is extremely frustrating to watch pundits and politicians put ideology and legalize above the safety of the American people, and that’s what’s happening... War is war...there is nothing “fair” about it. To attempt to legalize behavior at any level is insanity.
We use to fight wars ‘to turn back evil men’....now we send attorneys to determine if they take a shot or not if it’s legal....only to see those very men who are not shot kill our boys in the next round.
This debate over interogation techniques will not go quietly into the night because ideologues rarely admit they are wrong.
Oh my point is clear....the US needs to win wars and conflicts however possible to do that...otherwise evil men will simply continue to do what they do to this day...and are.
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