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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ManyMoose who wrote (76556)	1/10/2010 6:44:16 AM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 90947

A Question of Context and Taboos By: Jonah Goldberg The Corner I'm pretty reluctant to wade back into the torture/waterboarding debate again myself. I don't much like the idea of waterboarding captives and, given my druthers, I'd be perfectly happy if the US never did it again (ideally because it never needed to). I'll leave it to Marc and others to debate the "is it torture?" question. But I still have big problem with how the “is it torture?” argument tends to dominate these debates. Torture is a taboo word, and for good reason. Like incest, bigotry or, in some circles, censorship, the word torture separates good from evil, right from wrong. Once we decide something is torture, we end the debate over what the right policy should be. The right policy is to never torture. That's one reason why supporters of waterboarding reject the term torture, preferring "enhanced interrogation methods" or some such; because conceding that it’s torture is like surrendering. It’s also why opponents of waterboarding are so intent to win the argument that it is torture. I don’t doubt they believe it, but they also recognize that the taboo value of the term is their strongest weapon against the practice. They certainly aren’t going to win much ground trying to muster sympathy for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And so the discussion descends into a battle of semantics, dictionary entries and checklists. Joe Carter lists a bunch of definitions and if he persuades the reader that waterboarding fits the definitions, bada bing: he wins. My problem with this taxonomical approach, as I've written before, is I think context and intentions matter. The Catholic Church -- as Carter and Marc both know far, far better than I -- has a theory of just war. That means war is sometimes justified, right? It also means it is sometimes evil and criminal. The question depends on the circumstances. Similarly, killing is sometimes murder and sometimes it is self-defense or (for some) lawful and justified execution. No one has ever explained to my satisfaction why torture, or let's say some kinds of torture, is objectively and in all ways worse than killing. Which would you rather happen to you? Would you rather be waterboarded or killed? Which would get you a stiffer criminal penalty, waterboarding someone or murdering them? Why do you think that is? Which do you think deserves the greater criminal penalty? It seems, going by Marc’s response, that CIA waterboarding is not quite the same as what they did during the Spanish inquisition. That’s good to know. But even if the two were more similar, Carter leaves out a hugely important difference. Waterboarding someone for punishment or to force them to renounce their faith and convert to Christianity is morally a very different thing than waterboarding someone to find out how to stop the next 9/11. It may be that the latter waterboarding is still wrong - that’s a real debate - but it surely must be less wrong than waterboarding for sport. A kid who kills dogs and cats for fun is a sadistic bastard. A vet who euthanizes dogs and cats when it’s necessary to ease their pain is something very different. Admittedly this is an extreme hypothetical, but if someone had information on where a nuclear bomb was under Washington DC -- where I live and my family lives -- and if some form of torture was the only way to save my life, my wife and daughter's lives and the lives of a million other people and the social, political and economic security of my entire country, qualms about the ethics of torturing the guy who could abort the detonation if he revealed the location wouldn't rate very high. Opponents of torture/waterboarding hate these ticking time bomb scenarios not simply because they have no good response to them other than to wish them away as scare tactics and red herring fantasies. I suspect what they really don't like about the ticking bomb scenario is that it undermines torture's status as a taboo word. If torture is sometimes permissible, if torture is one of those things - like killing and war - that can be justified depending on the circumstances, then the opponents of waterboarding lose a very powerful rhetorical weapon and actually have explain why a specific human being in a specific situation should not be waterboarded. That’s much harder than simply invoking the abracadabra power of “torture.” corner.nationalreview.com