moral calculus

I have been reading with some interest the ongoing drama associated with the CIA destroying video tapes of them using "enhanced interrogation techniques" on (amongst others) Abu Zubaydah. While this topic is worthy of righteous indignation in and of itself, I will try to contain myself on this rich topic for another day.

Ok. One thing. What the hell sort of lawyer fetish does this administration have going on. Every dumbfuck stunt that they seem to try is met with "Well my lawyer said that it was ok." quickly followed by "Oops! Guess I made a mistake!" Cowards and Fuckwits.

But I have an agenda and intend to follow it...

In an good read from the Washington Monthly, we get the following:

And here is Barton Gellman's gloss of Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine:

Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each...target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

As those of you who have the dubious pleasure of knowing me, it is no surprise that I have a strong opinion about these things.

If you are willing to sit there and tell me that it is ever ok to torture another human being, then you better be able to address the following:

In all the scenerios that I have had the misfortune of reading, there is some dreaded emergency where we scoop up some evildoer who has the everlovin secret sauce which will let us foil the plan. I have yet to hear one of these stories where an individual who has been provided with due process and has been found guilty in a court of law under the protection of the constitution is said evildoer. A suspect, forbidden access to rule of law, is tortured. I am sure you are still ok with this since there might be a "reasonable prospect that the torture of a terrorist will save innocent lives".

For the sake of everybody's sanity, I will skip the notion of terrorist identification. What it would be good to remember is that many of the people who find themselves in Cuba (and elsewhere) have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism. They were kidnapped and turned in for the money offered by the US Government.

Does any of this change if the suspect is a US citizen who has not been formally charged with anything?

So what do we do now if the torture does not work? What does the calculus of our moral system provide? We have recited that it is ok to torture a possibly innocent person to save innocent lives. So I give you your fictional '24' scenario. The suspect and their hidden bomb. You torture them and do not get the required result. What now? Their driver? What about their friends? Their spouse? Their child? What defines the line for right and wrong? What would you do?

In reading the comments to the article, I was struck by the moral calisthenics that people seemed to engage in to both support torturing there fellow humans and to pretend that this is still a country where there is some notion of rule of law. Nowhere did I see the issue of 'innocent until proven guilty' addressed. It is though that whole notion gets swept off the table. One comment really made an impression on me for it's wholesale lack of morality.

I doubt it, because unlike Nick, I think if there is a reasonable prospect that torture of a terrorist will save innocent lives, it should be used as a last resort. Actually, I hope we develop some modern form of "virtual" torture that does not signficantly harm the person, but secures necessary and accurate information.

Posted by: brian on December 8, 2007 at 1:44 PM | PERMALINK

Virtual torture. The play on words here is a little odd. The mechanism of choice that we have been all focusing on is waterboarding which is, as we have heard from countless experts, a way to simulate the whole drowning experience. Now virtual torture seems to provide a sort of ethical middle path for brian here. If we really don't beat the shit out of someone or deprive sleep or waterboard them, but instead only simulate an exact duplication of the experience it is somehow cleaner. Less wrong.

That is unless you have an issue with destroying the mind, body and soul of another human being.