Not that I often need a diversion or digression to get me following a random string, but a friend sent me an article the other day about US government use of torture, prohibited by decree of Barack Obama in one of the first acts of his presidency. The author opined that as president Mitt Romney was likely to rescind that decree. There was a link to an article about SERE training (see first line of yesterday’s post for link) and the US government’s perverse relationship to the torture it rightly condemns when barbaric enemies employ it.
I sent the link to that article to my friend and we shared reactions to it. He wrote that he was aware that as soon as the acetylene torch came out he’d tell them everything. We seemed to agree on most points. Then, after a long and stressful day, I got an email from him with that old chestnut, the ticking time bomb scenario. He said use of torture was not such a clear moral issue when your loved ones were on the verge of death and the prisoner in the chair likely knew how to stop it– but wasn’t talking. In that case, he said, there is an arguable duty to use any means necessary to save your loved ones, including the worst tortures you can think of.
I reacted with a good measure of horror, and arguments, and I slapped at the hypothetical that American advocates of torture had recently used over and over to justify the torture of many innocent men, people they called “detainees” and kept in secret “black sites” or on an American military base in Cuba that they lawyered up to claim was not, therefore, subject to U.S. and International laws.
This torture in my name, although the torture was legally redefined in a secret internal memo and defended as merely “enhanced interrogation”, and marketed as necessary to protect us from terrorists who’d planted countless ticking time bombs, has been one of the most galling aspects of the rise of the “neo-Con” partisan in American politics. That most of the people tortured, these “worst of the worst”, had later been released as innocent is another fact that makes me wanna holler.
My friend, a skilled lawyer, hit back on each of my points, then made this point, toward the end of his gamely fighting email:
Me: Your conclusion would seem to be that if there’s a time bomb ticking, or if you believe strongly enough that there is, everyone should probably be tortured, just in case one of them knows something you would come to regret not torturing them to find out.
Him: There you go again. Screw the fucking time bomb. Why not just torture everyone and get it the fuck over with. There, I said it. Somebody had to.
I’d thought he was at least half (if not 90%) joking, so I’d ended my previous with this:
Him: Wait your turn.
When I wrote back, my will and spirit finally broken, I told him: You win, torture away.
Him: I am, my friend, I am.
gratuitousblahg 