Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was not asked to renounce his faith or sign a false confession when he was reportedly waterboarded. His suffering wasn’t intended as a form of punishment. The sole aim was to stop an ongoing murder conspiracy, which is what al Qaeda is. If accounts from such unbiased sources as ABC News’ Brian Ross are to be believed, his suffering saved American lives.

Here Goldberg employs a common trick—pointing to the exception and treating it as a norm.  Unless you are prepared to believe that every person we have “coercively interrogated” is as valuable an asset as KSM, then pointing to him as a success story is completely disingenuous.  Let’s assume that the facts of this incident are true:  KSM was waterboarded, he gave us valuable information, this saved American lives, and this provides justification.  There are still a number of glaring logical flaws in Goldberg’s argument.

1.  It assumes that waterboarding was the only way that we could have gotten this information from KSM.  Since there was obviously no “ticking time bomb” information in what he gave us, we cannot know that he would not have given us this same information two days later through traditional interrogatory techniques.
2.  It assumes that all assets we waterboard are of the same level as KSM, when clearly they are not.
3.  If we waterboard someone long enough, he’ll admit to anything.  If I strapped Jonah to to the board and performed this technique on him, he’d admit that he liked dance around the house wearing his grandmother’s panties while planning how to release poison gas on the subway.  His argument thus assumes that the information we obtain through waterboarding is accurate and actionable.
4.  Goldberg states that the fact that KSM gave us this information provides the justification for the waterboarding.  Suppose he had not.  Suppose we waterboarded him and used the cold room and made him stand and the tough nut simply refused to crack.  Wouldn’t we be justified in taking it up a notch above waterboarding?  Why not pull his fingernails out?  This information is absolutely essential, right?  And which is worth more, the national security of 300 million Americans or the fingernails of a terrorist?  But what if the fingernail trick doesn’t work?  Well, we take it up a notch.  And up and up and up.

If context can be used to justify certain behavior, then it can be used to justify more or less anything.  Unless, of course, you believe that there are certain rules which should never be broken.

Consider killing. In every society in the world, murder is punished more harshly than non-lethal torture. If I waterboard you, or lock you in my basement with Duran Duran blasting at you 24/7, even if I beat you for hours with a rubber hose, my punishment will be less severe than if I murder you, simply because it is worse to take a life deliberately than to cause pain, even sadistically. We all understand this. Would you rather take some lumps in a dungeon for a month, or take a dirt nap forever?

Yet, according to the torture prohibitionists, there must be a complete ban on anything that even looks like torture, regardless of context, even though we’d never dream of a blanket ban on killing.

One reason for this disconnect is that we’ve thought a lot about killing and barely at all about torture. Almost no one opposes killing in all circumstances; wars sometimes need to be fought — the hopelessly suffering may require relief; we reserve the right to self-defense. Indeed, the law recognizes a host of nuances when it comes to homicide, and the place where everybody draws an unambiguous line on killing is at something we call “murder.”

This is a bait and switch argument.  Of course there is a difference between murder and killing, and there are all sorts of exceptions and situational variations on this rule.  But, are the rules regarding killing and the rules regarding torture really that different?  The law makes a distinction between murder—the intentional, planned taking of another life—and a life taken in self defense.  However, the standard is on the killer to justify after the fact why he felt his life was in danger, and that the appropriate course of action was to kill the other person.  Think of the cases of battered wives or abused children who kill their abusers.  The law also makes a distinction between an illegal death committed with premeditation (murder) and without (manslaughter).

In order to justify taking a life, the only real justification is “him or me.” If there is a viable alternative to taking another person’s life then the law usually expects you to take it. 

Such as it is with torture.  It is incumbent upon the torturer to justify the torture by showing how that information could not have been obtained by a non-torturous means.  It is an absolutely false analogy to say that since we can kill people on the battlefield and that’s okay, anything less than death can subsequently be justified.  Why?  Because on the battlefield there is an enemy actively working to kill you, and this the “him or me” situation comes into play.  How, exactly, is someone handcuffed to a chair supposed to represent an immediate threat to you?  How can you possibly compare the two?

Think of it like the police.  When the police are in the process of apprehending a suspect they are given a great deal of latitude in what techniques they are allowed to employ, ranging from beating with a billy club all the way up to deadly force.  But, even then, the force is applied within a rigid set of constraints, and it must be justifiable after the fact.  Once the suspect is in custody there are a totally different set of rules.  You can beat a suspect in the process of apprehending him, but you cannot do so once he is in custody.  And, in a similar manner, you can kill someone when they are on the battlefield, but when they are in your custody it is a totally different circumstance and thus subject to a totally different set of rules.  Just because behavior is justifiable in one instance does not mean it is justifiable in all instances.

As Jonah himself wrote, context matters.

But there is no equivalent word for murder when it comes to torture. It’s always evil. Yet that’s not our universal reaction. In movies and on TV, good men force evil men to give up information via methods no nicer than what the CIA is allegedly employing. If torture is a categorical evil, shouldn’t we boo Jack Bauer on Fox’s 24? There’s a reason we keep hearing about the ticking time bomb scenario in the torture debate: Is abuse justified in getting a prisoner to reveal the location of a bomb that would kill many when detonated? We understand that in such a situation, Americans would expect to be protected. That’s why human-rights activists have tried to declare this scenario a red herring.

As I have said many times on this blog, in a ticking time bomb scenario virtually any level of medieval barbarity could theoretically be justified.  There is, however, one vitally important point to be made here.  When, in modern human history, has this ever happened?  The very fact that Goldberg has to cite a fictional character in order to prove this point shows just how insanely low the chances are of it ever happening.  I grew up watching James Bond and Dirty Harry and I’m a big fan of 24.  Note to Jonah:  these are the product of the mind of a Hollywood screenwriter, not germane examples of real-world occurrences which can be used to justify geopolitical ends.  I mean, he might as well cite Mars Attacks to highlight the need to use our nuclear deterrent against invading alien races, or Armageddon to warn of the impending doom caused by a giant asteroid hitting the earth. 

While it is certainly possible that Martians might attack or an asteroid might kill us all, really, how likely is it that these are going to happen?

Sullivan complains that calling torture “aggressive interrogation techniques” doesn’t make torture any better. Fair enough. But calling aggressive interrogation techniques “torture” when they’re not doesn’t make such techniques any worse.

Still, there is a danger that over time we may not be able to tell the difference.

This is absolutely correct.  The important thing to note here is the definition of torture versus aggressive interrogation.  This, to me, seems to be roughly the distinction between a night of passionate lovemaking and a quickie in the back seat of a car.  They’re a difference of degree, not kind, and treating them as if there is some massive gulf between the two concepts is astonishingly dishonest.

Jonah mentioned a “disconnect” earlier and I agree, there is indeed a disconnect.  Jonah and I are roughly the same age, mid to late thirties.  We both grew up in the same time period, where the US was the good guy and the USSR was bad.  What made the US the good guy?  Our rhetoric, and the fact that more often than not our rhetoric matched our actions.

The Geneva Conventions, and the international accords on human rights and torture, were all the product of a totally different generation.  This generation experienced firsthand the abject evil that humans are capable of.  They saw the death camps, the extermination of tens of millions of people, the destruction of an entire continent, the gulags, the Bataan Death March, and all of the other examples of the sheer inhumanity that humans are capable of.  As a direct result of these horrors this generation took the initiative in enacting a set of hard rules governing the behavior of civilized nations.  Why?  Think of human behavior like a gradient between black and white.  Black is evil, white is good.  Civilization requires that we exist mostly in the white areas.  What these laws did was establish a minimum baseline below which civilized nations would not go, to operate as a bulwark against a society turning to the forces of evil which resulted in fascism, nazism, and totalitarianism.  Whether or not we happened to agree with this arbitrary line in every instance, the fact was that it was there, and everyone knew what it was.  There was no ambiguity in the interpretation of these laws, we all knew what they meant.  Now Bush has created ambiguity and resentment and nuance where before none really existed.

Now, so-called conservatives are looking to blur this line.  “Well, it’s okay if we go a little bit towards Hitler because we’re the United States and we’re inherently good, therefore everything we do is righteous.  If we implement Hitler’s techniques it’s different, because we’re doing it to make the world safe from menaces.” Jonah seems to forget that Hitler thought he was ridding the world of a menace, too.

The disconnect comes in that our generation—mine and Jonah’s—has never really had to sacrifice.  We grew up in the safety of a world made so by our grandparents and great-grandparents.  The evils of that generation are so foreign to us and so obviously evil that the idea we might be heading down that path is ridiculous.  Jonah trusts his own interpretation of the necessity of these laws more than the opinion of the people who not only lived through those evil times but paid an almost unbearable price to defeat it.

Allow me to get back to Jonah’s murder analogy for a second.  There are strict rules defining what is murder, what is manslaughter, and what is justified.  Killing someone just because they’re a real scumbag is STILL against the law.  You could not kidnap a serial killer and torture him in your basement and expect this to be justified under law, despite the fact that the guy is a serial killer.  You are not allowed to rape a prostitute, despite the fact that she might have already had sex with 30 guys that day.  While nuance counts, it only counts so far.  And just because a detainee might have information, and just because he might be involved with terror, this does not provide the legal or moral justification to do anything to him we wish.

Taboos are the glue of civilization because they define what is beyond the pale in ways mere reason cannot. A nation that frets about violating the rights of murder-plotters when the bomb is ticking is unlikely to violate the rights of decent citizens when the bomb is defused.

A nation which actually bases policies on issues as vitally important as these on fictional situations from movies and TV really can’t be said to have any taboos of its own can it?

I suspect this is what motivates so many human-rights activists to exaggerate the abuses and minimize their effectiveness. Slippery-slope arguments aren’t as powerful as moral bullying. Still, their fears aren’t unfounded. Once taboos have been broken, a chaotic search ensues for where to draw the new line, and that line, burdened with precedent and manufactured by politics, rarely holds as firmly as the last. But that is where history has brought us.

The important point here is that while you can quibble over where the line should be, until recently we all knew where it was.  We’ve now established the precedent that the position of the line is situational, dependent only upon our needs at the time.  There is no right and wrong, only beneficial and detrimental to our cause.  And that attitude has been the hallmark of every totalitarian regime that our nation has ever fought against.

In the recent debate over torture, everybody decided to kick the can down the road on what torture is and isn’t. This argument will be forced on us again, no matter how much we try to avoid it. We’ll be sorry we didn’t take the debate more seriously when we had the chance.

Actually, I think that thirty years from now, when our nation’s soldiers are suffering because of the shortsighted actions we are now taking, I think the last line of this paragraph would better read “We’ll be sorry we didn’t have a serious debate when we had the chance.”

Because, after all, we’ve got “terrorists” to torture.  Who cares what happens thirty years from now?