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And Rightly So
January 19, 2010
When the infamous "torture memos" delineating the
"enhanced interrogation techniques" approved by the Bush
administration were released by the Obama administration,
and you could get a better look at what exactly we had
done, I was actually somewhat relieved. Until that point,
I'd had a vague impression that unspeakable horrors had
been perpetrated by our agents and authorized by our
government. Patriotic Americans, and particularly
conservatives, don't want us using the very same techniques
(or the very same arguments from moral expediency -- that a
good enough end justifies any means) as we condemn when our
enemies use them.
But the actual "torture memos" seemed to demonstrate
that the folks in the Bush administration were doing their
best to avoid actually harming our prisoners while still
putting as much pressure on them as they believed they were
justified in using, in order to live up to their
responsibility to stop future attacks. They tried to draw a
clear line between torture and real physical harm, on the
one hand, and, on the other, techniques that were only
somewhat painful and very frightening, but not really
damaging. The details of some of the approved techniques --
particularly "walling," in which the prisoner (his neck
having been carefully supported against the possibility of
whiplash) is slammed into a specially constructed soft wall
-- seemed to demonstrate that our government was going to
extraordinary lengths to treat our enemies humanely.
Now, the officials making these decisions may not have
drawn that moral line in exactly the right place. I'm still
disturbed by some of the approved methods -- lengthy sleep
deprivation even more than waterboarding -- aside from, of
course, deploring the grotesque abuses, as at Abu Ghraib,
that never were approved.
But whatever the effect on us of the release of those
"torture memos," it seems clear that their publication is
not going to make Americans safer. That's the burden of
Marc Thiessen's book, our Main Selection this month.
Thiessen, as the White House speechwriter charged with
defending "enhanced interrogation" to the public, probably
knows more about it than anyone but the CIA agents who did
the interrogations (and who aren't permitted to defend them
in public). In
Courting Disaster, Thiessen argues
persuasively that the information we got from these methods
-- and that we didn't get or wouldn't have gotten by using
only gentler ones -- has allowed us to stop attacks that
would have killed large numbers of Americans. And that the
world is going to be a more dangerous place now that the
terrorists know exactly how far we were ever willing to go
in interrogations -- and that we've pulled back from that
point.
Of course the effectiveness of an interrogation method
is no justification for it if it's wrong in itself. But are
these methods certainly wrong? Thiessen addresses the moral
argument as well. I don't think his reasoning here
(particularly on "double effect") is as persuasive as in
the practical case, but he seems to be right in pointing to
casuistry -- careful case-by-case reasoning about the
morality of different particular acts -- as the right
method for approaching the problem. It's no good just
throwing up your hands, saying you refuse to touch this
filth with a ten-foot pole, and declaring that anyone who
wants to make gradated distinctions among interrogation
techniques is a torture apologist. Is dismembering a
prisoner on the wrack always wrong? Yes. Is
waterboarding? That seems less clear. What about "walling"? I rather
doubt it. Yelling at him? Surely not. Unless the only moral
way to treat actual terrorists, who are not supposed to be
beneficiaries of the Geneva Conventions, is to ask them their name, rank, and
serial number and leave it at that -- even in a ticking time bomb scenario -- then it's worth
discussing exactly where the lines are between right and
wrong in these cases. Marc Thiessen's book is a valuable
contribution to that conversation.
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