It is not true that torture does not produce useful results. It does. There has been no attack on the United States in four years. Many anti-terrorism experts attribute this to our having acquired essential intelligence—the same intelligence that has allowed us to roll up much of the al-Qaeda network. In North Vietnam, the communists tortured not for military information, which they had anyhow, but to obtain highly-valued propaganda. They succeeded because POWs, McCain among them, understandably (and forgivably) “broke” after exhibiting superhuman endurance beyond what anyone can be expected to survive.
There is no moral reason for this country not to torture. If in self defense, we can lie, cheat, deceive, firebomb cities, shoot spies, defoliate jungles, assassinate enemies, annihilate armies, steal secrets, and even use atomic weapons—all of which are perfectly appropriate responses in a just war when a democracy has been attacked— it stands to reason that it is not only optional, but a moral imperative, to employ “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” in the name of defending ourselves and perhaps saving our civilization.
Friday, January 20, 2006
Conservative thinkin'
An old article from The Conservative Voice, via Verbum Ipsum:
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4 comments:
Arguments like this remind me of the story of the man in Chicago who walked around snapping his fingers. Someone asked him why he kept doing that.
"It keeps the elephants away."
"Really."
"Yeah, you don't see any elephants around, do you?"
CKR
Nice, Cheryl.
I was amused by the abuse also of Just War Theory as simply saying anything goes in self defense. JWT has its faults, but combined with contemporary thinking about intervention it has become a complex theory that is irreducible to simple self defense. There's just no way to claim that the list of war actions outlined here are facets of just war. And then the tenet of cruelty is the closest the writer comes to one of the qualifications on all-out war involved in JWT, and he uses a false premise about JWT to toss that out.
We can almost formulize this kind of move:
Strawman + willful misrepresentation or outright lying - actual inference = whatever the hell the conservative wants to say as a supposed justification for abusing others + the conservative's own interests
I could be accused of picking on an easy target. The only problem is that we see this over and over in various contexts.
I'm not sure this commentator is sophisticated enough to be calling on JWT. (I must admit I didn't click through to the link; seen too much of this stuff.)
It's more lex talionis: you do it to me, I'll do it back to you in spades. Or third grade playground with dangerous implements.
And I have no idea what to suggest on your laptop, except maybe to check that all the screws are tight.
CKR
Yes, lex talionis, eye for an eye. But I'm not so sure it deserves even that since, even if we grant LT it still requires an initial offense against which the response takes place. Since much of the torture has taken place within Iraqi prisons, and since some 80% of prisoners have been deemed by an American general to have been caught in "the wrong place at the wrong time", the initial offense hasn't even been committed in most cases.
No need to click on the article link. That's it for the writer's "just war" take.
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