Settling It Right: The Torture Question

This blog is dedicated to the idea that the whole truth should come out about the torture, earlier in this decade, of enemy combatants (suspected terrorists) imprisoned by the United States. It holds that those who broke the law against torturing enemy prisoners should be prosecuted.

Torture is, this blog insists, morally wrong under all circumstances. The torture of enemy combatants by any country — including (or especially) America — should be no exception. After all, the torturing of prisoners is illegal under international law for a very good reason. That reason is based on the moral principle that torture per se is cruel and inhuman.

For those who have missed the recent news coverage: in 2002 and 2003, prisoners who were deemed terrorists/al-Qaeda operatives were being held by the U.S. in prisons abroad. While imprisoned as enemy combatants they were subjected to "waterboarding" and other means of torture, in order to extract information about al Qaeda's organization and, in particular, about whatever plans the terrorist group might be hatching for more attacks on the U.S. of the 9/11 type.

The torture tactics were carried out by civilian operatives of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency — not the U.S. military — under legal justification provided by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). This happened during the Bush administration. The memoranda involved in the legal justification have recently been declassified and released by the Obama administration, which has also officially desisted in continuing such tactics.

OLC's legal "justification" of the torture was, this blog believes, a false and cynical attempt to hide the nature of what was about to be done. However, this blog realizes that others have a different opinion. That is why, this blog believes, we need a "truth commission" to adjudicate such issues.

This blog will highlight articles and opinion pieces culled from newspapers and elsewhere which deal with the issues surrounding the torture question in general. The opinions may or may not be ones this blog agrees with, so I will usually indicate my responses one way or another. However, I will try to play fair with opinions that disagree with mine, because I hope to encourage all Americans to think deeply about these issues, whatever side of the political fence they are on.

This blog will be guided by two general principles. First, as Rudyard Kipling put it, "Nothing is ever settled until it is settled right." This is why this blog disagrees with the strategy adopted thus far by President Obama: publish the original memos, cease perpetrating the torture, then turn the page.

In many situations, that would be the expedient thing to do. In this situation, no. Torture is too heinous a moral crime to be sequestered in a supposedly "over" past. Heinous moral crimes have to be not just settled, but settled right. Otherwise, they continue to fester.

The second principle: "The end does not justify the means." There can be little doubt that those who authorized, those who justified, and those who perpetrated the torture were sincere in their belief that the victims of the torture harbored secrets that they would cough up only under extreme duress. These secrets presumably concerned future terrorist attacks. The assumption was that heading off such attacks provided a moral (as well as legal) justification for torture and extreme duress.

That assumption, however, violated the principle that ends, no matter how good and just, cannot justify means, when those means are intrinsically inhuman and immoral.