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| Home Front: WoT |
| Wretchard: The Grand Inquisitor |
| 2005-01-06 |
| EFL'd to save Fred's bandwidth -- go read it all. At one level the debate over the use of torture in the War on Terror is moot. The United States military has a long operational history of forgoing possible practical advantages in favor of upholding certain national values. The most obvious modern example are rules of engagement in the use of fires. During the recently concluded assault on Fallujah and in current operations in Iraq, military restrictions on the use of firepower around mosques or populated areas are enforced with the foreknowledge that such steps will result in statistically higher casualties to troops. This practice follows long historical precedent. The policy of precision daylight bombing during World War 2; the tendency toward 'No First Strike' during the Cold War and even the restriction on political assassinations in the Carter years are all examples of unilateral renunciations of military advantage. As Eugene Volokh pointed out, framing the debate over torture in purely moral terms blinds us to other issues that it raises. Unless it is wholly pointless and sadistic, torture is the act of substituting the torment of one person for another; the suffering of a suspect to prevent the suffering of the presumed victim. This characteristic makes the legalization of torture appealing even to intelligent people like Alan Dershowitz. His characterization of the need for a 'torture warrant' to find a way out of the predicament of the 'ticking time bomb' underscores the fungibility of suffering in the starkest terms. The absolute refusal to employ torture under any circumstances is inevitably the acceptance of the suffering of victims whose death or dismemberment could have been prevented by its use. Yet accepting the legitimacy of torture, however extreme the circumstances, carries with it the danger of what Eugene Volokh called the 'slippery slope': the embrace of an abhorrent principle to satisfy the exigencies of the moment. The way out of this logical prison may lie in appreciating the similarity between restraints on torture and restrictions on dealing out death on a battlefield on which innocents may be present. Time and again a military commander must give orders which will result in the statistically certain death of civilians in order to combat the enemy. He never admits to its desirability -- never embraces the abhorrent principle -- but instead binds himself to a process designed to reduce these evils to the practical minimum. It is a position made tenable only by the rejection of absolutes: on the one hand to maintain the principle against harming innocents while at the same time accepting the existential need to defeat the enemy. It is often a world of compromise and sometimes of fiction. But it is real enough. Americans pay the price of humanity with actual red blood. . . . |
| Posted by:Mike |