“Please consider the possibility that the President was weighing national security against the legal and moral implications and that – just maybe – he did not begin from all of the same assumptions that you begin with.”

If that was the case, then not only did he disregard the oath he took upon assuming office:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

but he also failed in his constitutional duty to see that the laws be faithfully executed (such as the Convention against Torture).

Also, what many are losing sight of is the difference between personal moral agency and the function of employees of the government. Those employees all take a similar oath to that of the president, which is an oath to uphold the consititution. They owe no similar moral duty to my family that I do.

So while the question of what I would do if confronted with some kind of one-in-a-million situation that for example Mr. Evans refers to, where I could save my family by committing torture, I can’t honestly say what I would do in that situation. Perhaps I would commit what is undeniably a wrong in the hopes of saving my family. But if I did it would be because I believed that I owed such a moral obligation to my family.

But even in that case, I would also have no reason to expect legal immunity or even leniency. Seeking legal protection strips the entire exercise and justification of its moral profundity. Either you think your moral justification trumps the law or you don’t. Having official and legal approval doesn’t make your action a morally trenchant decision, it makes it following orders.

There is no evidence of a similar moral duty owed to citizens by employees of our government. They may believe it is so; but that does not make it so. They are acting in their capacity as our employees. If we wish to empower them with that ability, we should undo all of the laws on the books forbidding such behavior and withdraw from all treaties that do so as well. People may attempt to graft that moral obligation to MY family onto our servants in government, but that merely represents an attempt to win by visceral reaction, rather than logic. Yes, I would probably HOPE that some random interrogator would save my family by torturing a suspect, yet I have no legitimate reason for expecting it. In this respect the analogy to WW II Germany is apt: a German interrogator may have been able to morally justify torturing a captive in an effort to save his family (say by gaining information about a planned bombing raid in Dresden), but he should not expect to escape legal liability at Nuremberg.

As far as the practical results of torture, I would say that the use of torture could result in increase peril to our troops in battle because opposing combatants who thought they might be tortured would be more apt to fight to the death rather than surrender. There was a good reason why the understood rule among German soldiers in WW II was to run west not east if they found themselves behind enemy lines or separated from their unit.

Finally, also from a practical point of view, I would ask that people examine the case of Ahmed Ressam, the captured millenium bombing plotter:

http://corrente.blogspot.com/2005/08/terrorizing-judges.html

A sample:

“Ahmed Ressam became a terrorist turncoat.

On May 10, 2001, FBI Agent Fred Humphries questioned Ressam, the first of dozens of interviews. The information was invaluable — and terrifying. He explained how he was recruited in Montreal and funneled into the bin Laden camps. He talked in detail about training with Taliban-supplied weapons. He informed on Abu Zubaydah, Abu Doha and other top al-Qaida operatives. He provided the names of jihad fighters he had met in the camps. He revealed that he had contemplated blowing up an FBI office and the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C….

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Ressam’s solitude has been broken by a stream of visitors, often FBI agents such as Fred Humphries, but also investigators from Germany, Italy and elsewhere.

With federal public defender Jo Ann Oliver at his side, he is told names and shown photographs of suspected terrorists and asked if he knows them.

On several occasions, Ressam has been flown to New York City for similar questioning. There, he is held in a detention center just blocks from Ground Zero.

Ressam did not recognize any of the 19 suicide hijackers from Sept. 11. But he was able to identify student pilot Zacarias Moussaoui of Minneapolis, now in U.S. custody, as a trainee from Osama bin Laden’s Khalden camp.

Ressam informed on Abu Doha, a London-based Algerian who was the brains and money behind Ressam’s Los Angeles airport plot. He identified Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who ran the Khalden camp, and Abu Sulieman, who taught bomb-making at the Darunta camp.

Most importantly, Ressam named the previously little-known Abu Zubaydah as a top aide to bin Laden. That helped smash the notion that Zubaydah, also now in U.S. custody, was little more than a travel agent for terrorist wannabes making their way to the al-Qaida camps.

Ressam is expected to testify at the trials of these and other suspected terrorists.

So it is that Ahmed Ressam — the boy who loved to fish in the Mediterranean, the teenager who loved to dance at discothèques, the young man who tried and failed to get into college, who connected with fanatical Muslims in Montreal, who learned to kill in bin Laden’s camps, who plotted to massacre American citizens — has become one of the U.S. government’s most valuable weapons in the war against terror…

Ressam’s information was given to anti-terrorism field agents around the world _ in one case, helping to prevent the mishandling and potential detonation of the shoe bomb that Richard Reid attempted to blow up aboard an American Airlines flight in 2001”

I am not sure what point you are trying to make with mention of this case – that people murder children?, that police sometimes feel entitled to break the law when dealing with people they are sure have murdered children?

You’ll note that the police in this case tortured (or, rather, threatened to torture) in order to produce a confession, not to gain information that might prevent harm or eliminate an imminent threat. No ticking bomb here.

So this ghastly case would hardly serve the casuist’s cause in this discussion in which the hypotheticals invariably figure torture as an instrument for the extraction of preventative information.

But still, as examples go, this would rather seem to argue against torture – the extracted confession was ruled inadmissible, the case was nearly derailed, and the sentence may yet be overturned. Torture didn’t ‘work’ (if the work it was supposed to do was secure a conviction).

The confession was ruled inadmissible because torture (and in such circumstances, the threat of it) is illegal. Torture can only function ‘usefully’ in a system of laws if that system formalises it as a judicial instrument.

The hypotheticals of the torturephilic imagination (the ones that I have encountered) seem mostly aimed at trying to construct scenarios which persuade that most ‘normal’ people would torture in certain circumstances. This may be so, but, as an exercise in casuistry it is deeply flawed (as with most such exercises).

In the first instance such hypotheticals ask us, in our admission that ‘we’ would torture in the given scenario, to imagine torture as a ‘skill’ that we might be able to spontaneously express. But of course torture, at least as an instrument of interrogation, is a learned ‘skill’. Torture is learned from torture instructors and from torture manuals (many of the US manuals have long been in the public domain – techniques learned from the Nazis, honed in Korea, transferred to Vietnam, institutionalised in the ‘School of the Americas’ – not the use of torture, but the attempt to overtly institutionalise it, is new).

Torture is a systematic, codified practice that exists in institutional contexts (we are not considering spontaneous acts of sadism here – though surely sadism is involved).

Such hypotheticals, then, on one level, try to emotionally muddle us into taking what should be a reasoned, principled position on the institutional use of torture by asking us to admit that each of us is potentially a torturer (which is a diferent issue).

But at the same time as these hypotheticals try to appall us into supporting the codification of torture through emotional manipulation, they mask that emotionalism by at once appealing to a utilitarian calculus (which doesn’t add up) and in that mode of tough rationalism we are tempted to neglect the ‘emotional’ or ‘spiritual’ question over what accepting such a calculus condemns us to.

These same people who are happy to spout ‘noble sacrifice’ on the battlefield, are terrified moral cowards hiding beneath a nasty mangle of irrelevant emotionalism and weak rationalisation.

America once had 90% top income tax rates, and large-scale government sponsored developments in many walks of life.

Certainly torture is wrong, but it is wrong everywhere, every time. A great many nations do this, and not just America.

Frankly most American leftists do view their own people with contempt. Yet if an alternative were offered to Americans Bush and Co. might not be in power.

COINTELPRO was failure, as were most of the government persecutions-such as they are-of the 60’s and 70’s. Furthermore the causes championed by the left were achieved, such as getting out of Vietnam.

The Gäfgen/Metzler case was not a hypothetical. Casuistry is useful for deciding whether we oppose torture entirely or only when it is immoral for other reasons (e.g., the victim might be innocent; other, less brutal means are effective; no crime is in progress). In the case of a ticking time-bomb, many people would support torture if there was a ticking time-bomb.* The problem today is that torture and near-torture is being used when there is no ticking time-bomb or kidnapped child. Torture is being used as part of intelligence collection.

• The ticking time-bomb scenario requires that 1) there is a ticking time-bomb, i.e., the torturers have near-certain evidence such a bomb exists, not a supposition or suspicion and 2) the person to be tortured knows where the bomb is, i.e., the torturers have evidence that the person knows, not a supposition or suspicion. Those conditions are rare, and have never existed in any of the examples put forward by advocates of “enhanced interrogation.”

This is what I mean. Check out 73 again. You are either a liar or can’t read. I can’t deal with people who completely make shit up. One of the more despicable commenters I have ever encountered.

See, the blacks have organizations operating openly and explicitly to protect their interests. Some of them are more or less mainstream organizations that are tolerated by the elite and get significant media coverage. Show me a single class-based mainstream organization.

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abb1:

“I suspect it would correlate better with social status than skin color. Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice have nothing to worry about.”

Nowadays it seems that it’d correlate best with ideology. John Edwards doesn’t belong to the correct ideology, which makes him fair game for mud-slinging (though I don’t know whether he’s also fair game for torture…).

And you are the one who’s asking the rest of us lowly masses to go all ninja against the Bush administration while you sit back and look tough. You are the one ordering people to do this and do that.

Guess who’s being paternalistic here? Who’s being elitist here? Who’s making himself out as a “better” here?

It’s called democracy. You don’t get to plan everything because the people have a say. Or should, if the little bureacratic dictators ever give up a little power. Statists like you look at the Reconstruction in Iraq and never imagine that we could have asked the Iraqis what they needed and wanted, or even let the Iraqis do the the rebuilding with American money. You demand a “plan”. You know what’s best for the little brown people.

Colonialism with velvet handcuffs. Paternalistic liberalism.

Since you have apparently read me without realizing I am attacking liberalism from what I badly understand as its left, left-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, left-libertarian, whatever you might want to call it.

My “Power to the People Right On!” may be pathetically dated, but at least I am not trying to convince the people that they really aren’t suffering economically, they just think they are. Silly little plebes need to listen to their betters?.

“I am neither a liberal nor a General, and I don’t do plans. That more than likely sounds ridiculous and irresponsible to a liberal, but it is a very important and radical theory of politics.”

“Here’s my plan: – Listen to what Joe Blow thinks are his problems – Give Joe the tools and confidence to organize – Get the hell out of his way”

So your plan is to say that we should trust that you have a plan? What a great, um, plan.

Oh, you realize that your ‘radical theory of politics’ exemplifies everything that’s so wrong with the Iraq War,(*) don’t you? Chickenhawkish posturing, lack of planning, total disregard for facts and logic, insinuations that any librulz who object to these are namby-pamby traitors. Yeah, the same theory that got the US into this whole bloody quagmire in the first place, and now we’re the same un-method will bring us out of this whole mess!

If you have anything to offer other than the same old swaggering nonsense, be my guest. Otherwise, shut up.

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(*) Except the WMD part.