Friday, May 01, 2009

re: Dr. K.    [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

They broke the mold with Charles. I'm always humbled by the man and the writer.

On his column today, if I ran into him, I might ask just one thing, in all intellectual curiosity and moral seriousness: "But is that torture?" As a morally serious, good man e-mailed me this morning:

Krauthammer was right this morning in his column but for one thing.  It's not torture.  It is a simulation designed to spur information...  It doesn't make me feel less of this country either that we subjected three of the most horrendous people on earth to some discomfort for the cause of protecting innocents.  

The U.N. defines torture as:

"torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

In a symposium on NRO yesterday, Christopher Eberle, who teaches philosophy at the U.S. Naval Academy wrote:

Two assumptions should shape the manner in which a civilized society interrogates those, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who effectively plan to attack and destroy innocent human beings.

First, human beings have a worth, or dignity, that we cannot do anything to alienate: KSM, as with any and every human being, possesses a (God-given) dignity that prohibits us from taking extreme measures to protect those he targets. Even if we can effectively protect innocent human beings only by subjecting KSM to extreme (Jack Bauer–style) physical damage, we should not do so. Second, a person’s actions can make it permissible for us to treat that person in ways that would otherwise be morally forbidden. The fact that KSM initiated a plan to destroy the World Trade Center explains why the U.S. government was morally permitted to capture, incarcerate, and interrogate him.

How does this second assumption shape the manner in which we may interrogate KSM? Suppose that, as was apparently the case, KSM had initiated further plans that would have killed a large but indeterminate number of innocents. Suppose again that KSM had information about those future attacks that, if obtained, would have allowed us to prevent them. But suppose that, having exhausted more pacific means, we could not acquire that information without waterboarding KSM. In that case, fairness in distributing harms would permit us to waterboard KSM. Given that he had forced us to choose between his well-being and the well-being of many innocents, we could “distribute” the harm to him, not them.

Do you do an injustice to the seriousness of these moral but lawful decisions by using the t-word?

I'm asking.

05/01 10:51 AMShare