Thank you for your service, Sir.

And thank you for providing a very good description of waterboarding and the whole torture situation without the usual heavy dose of political BS.

Your report is informative, convincing, and much appreciated. Hopefully Mr. Bush will come to understand your point of view on this. Hopefully the next CinC will, as well.

I also thank you for your service. And I thank you for this important and disquieting article. I recall Franz Kafka's reference to "An axe in the frozen sea". He was talking about writing. And this is the effect your authoritative essay has had on me.

I, like so many of us, am still reeling from the shock of 9/11. The more I have learned about our enemies since that awful day, the more my heart has hardened against them. The more my heart has hardened, the less room is left for any form of compassion or compromise.

I see us as being weakened by our very own high-minded ethical standards. I continually try to see the enemy for who they are and stop trying to rationalize away their hatred or empathize with their positions. I want to see us toughen up as a nation and face these obvious threats clearly, without multiculturalist obfuscations.

I bristle at any suggestion of our moral failings by the highly-vocal, activist antiwar left. I feel that they are purposely undermining the moral foundations of their own country in a time of war for their own selfish political agenda.

This was my mindset coming into this article. I had come to terms with the whole "torture" debate by accepting its efficacy. To the often-asked question: "If there was a nuclear attack planned against a major US city, would you subject a captured terrorist to torture to reveal where it was planned to take place?" the answer was pretty obvious to me: Of course. Give him the full treatment.

The argument that if we use torture, then our enemies might use it against us seemed ludicrous. I could hardly visualize the beheaders of Nick Berg stopping for a moment to first consult their copy of the Geneva Conventions Rules.

However, because of your obvious experience and credentials, I followed your argument to the very end. And, thankfully, because I followed it to the end, my rock-solid certainity was shaken. I hadn't considered what FUTURE governments might do with this precedent. I even began to question the efficacy of the whole idea.

In short, I've started to have some serious doubts about my previous convictions. I have to think about it some more. You may very well be right, after all. And I might be wrong.

Isn't this what good political writing is all about? Not just preaching to the choir, but standing up for something you believe in and fighting for it with the best words you can conjure up.

In this you have most certainly been successful, and I thank you for upsetting this particular applecart.

"Waterboarding is Torture...Period"

Thank you Mr. Nance for a plain statement of fact; a fact that should be obvious. It that breaks my heart that so many Americans, my countrymen, in high positions of privilege, with magnificent educations and extraordinary talents, don't see the plain immorality of torture. What they see is that advocating torture might make them look bad, so they make "nuanced" arguments about "enhanced techiques" and which we should consider under what circumstances.

All their arguments are rationalizations of evil. Thank you for pointing that out.

How sad. You have the audacity to designate the brave men and women of our armed service -- who perform their duty by water-boarding men of admittedly unspeakable evil -- to be morally comparable to their enemies. You arguments are demagogic and specious.

1. "Torture does not work." You are correct, unless of course it is applied in a tactically sound manner. In the stereotyped scenario, which admittedly has been employed by the truly sadistic, a torturer begins by developing a list of crimes to which he hopes the torturee will confess. Then torture is applied and -- lo and behold -- a confession is extracted. IF our nation was so foolish as to use this technique, I would agree that torture doesn't work. But they do not. Instead, they start with a portfolio of intelligence they believe to be true with a high degree of certainty. Then they slowly apply more and more powerful psychological and physical techniques until they believe that the subjects will has collapsed. But they do not accept just any interesting tidbit -- they first ensure that the subject's will has collapsed and that they are not being sabotaged by asking questions to which they already have an answer. In so doing, they ensure that they are not being fed the answer the subject "knows" they want to hear (For a real-istic example, "Was there a chemical weapons unit being trained in the second safe-house you slept at in Karachi?" A subject who has not been trained yet that false positive answers yield further punishment may decide to answer incorrectly. But this will worsen his treatment. He will learn quickly, I assure you).

2. Our enemies will torture our soldiers. They do and will continue to. This is truly a rhetorical trick -- you, I and the other readers all know our most evil enemies will subject our men and women to unspeakable, undeserved pain and humiliation as they see fit. Our more civilized enemies might not, just as we wouldn't decide to torture our more civilized prisoners (the highest officials in our government -- last I checked, it was the President himself -- must sign off on each and every increase in severity in interrogation techniques for each and every prisoner on a case by case basis. So these would not be employed in -- say -- a hypothetical war against the civilized soldiers of the African Union).

3. The heart of the argument is an argument of moral equivalence. Our enemies torture and that is evil, so if we torture, we are evil. But they same can be said of killing (ie, murder), capturing (ie, stealing) enemy supplies, etc. This is why it is better to use the Orwellian-feeling phrase of "enhanced interrogation". "Killing" is morally neutral. As is "capturing". But that "torture" historically has no such analogue is an outcome of squeamishness, moral cowardice or faulty logic, not wise ethical philosophy. Throwing an innocent man in jail is evil, whereas throwing a criminal in jail is just; similarly, torture birthed of sadism or employed upon a likely innocent victim is evil, while it employing it on an admitted mass murderer to prevent further mass murder is just. You are trying to decree a purely amoral act as immoral while stripping it of its entire ethical context. This is at the least irresponsible and wrongheaded, or worse -- in accusing honorable men of profound evil -- morally negligent. You sir and your ilk are enabling the criminals of al Qaeda to employ the argument of moral justice -- bin Laden's favorite when addressing the West (see, eg, http://dissimulationexposed.blogspot.com/2007/10/dissimulation-on-display.html ).

4. You equivocate on the word "torture". By comparing our brave men and women to the denizens of Hitler, Stalin, Saddam and Pol Pot, you invoke images of pure hell and sadism. But when our troops are found guilty of that breed of sadism, they are roundly punished. This renders hollow the claims of our enemies that "We closed Saddams torture chambers to open our own". What audacious bile! And yet, you mention Abu Gharaib, when its very infamy proves the falsity of your accusations. No sir, America has not given up its heart and soul -- for we punish those whom our enemies promote!

5. Just for the record: al Qaeda manuals teach their readers to dream up the most unspeakable tortures and humiliations whenever possible. Also, several very popular "torture tell all" documentaries, treatments, articles and appearances have later proven (almost certainly) false.

In conclusion, your piece is interesting, but at worst vile and at best terribly misguided. I am almost entirely certain that in your case it is the latter. Sadly, that is not the case when our most dangerous enemies employ almost the exact same arguments.

Mr. Nuzzolillo:

In your first section, you imply the "brave men and women...who perform their duty by water-boarding" have the same courage as those who go out on Route Clearance Teams, or are EOD techs, or land helicopters in contested fields to rescue downed crews, or go out of foot patrols day after day. They don't. At best they have been misled and exploited by leaders who should know better; at worst they are sadists.

Your point 1 is as chilling a rationalization of evil as I have ever read.

Point 2 seems to state we will play the moral judge, "this group deserves it, but that group doesn't". The African Union trooops make your cut, how about abducted members of the Lord's Resistance Army, their abductors, the officers, who? Are you going to publish a list?

Point 3: Yes torture is evil, even if WE do it. No moral equivalence about it. It seems to me you are using vengeance and torture interchangeably; this guy did wrong therefore torture (vengeance) is OK, this guy did no wrong therefore were aren't justified in seeking vengeance (torturing him) upon him. This seems to be an effort to cloud the moral point.

Point 4: A few low ranking soldiers served a few years in jail for Abu Ghraib. The Sec Def, the Attorney General, and John Yoo, the guys who helped set the stage for that shame, their careers kept marching on.

This whole thing horrifies me because my countrymen are like the "denizens of Hitler...and Pol Pot" if they do these things.

Point 5: You point out Al Queda is evil. I can agree with that.

Short comment follows. Agree 100% with Mr Nance; disagree 100% with Mr Nuzzolillo; and agree 100% with Carl's response to Nuzolillo.

I wish Mr Clifford May of the Weekly Standard would have read Mr Nance's excellent piece (i have already saved Nance's for future reference)before he wrote an oped piece a few days ago shamelessly justifying such techniques; or to be more fair to May's argument to at least consider the possibility of using such techniques as waterboarding. NO

I like the comment that a marine General made last year when asked if he thought that such techniques such as waterboarding were legitimate. He said no and his justification was pure, simple, and heartfelt. If his son were captured by "an enemy" would he think such techniques as waterboarding would be appropriate for intergogation in this hypothetical with his captured son? His answer of course was NO and it would be mine too. Well done Mr Nance.

Sir, Thank you for clearing this up for any who still have doubts. I believe your stance and the stance of USMC is correct.

I recall a particular story about a captured Japanese soldier during WWII. He fully expected severe torture but he was treated with respect according to the Geneva Convention. He was offered food and drink, even a smoke. It shocked him so, to the point he became very cooperative and useful.

Those conditioned to hate may be the best candidates for the above mentioned treatment and the results more effective.

I see fear and the resulting hate as the biggest threat to civilization and our victory against the forces of evil.

Thank you for your service and this astute article.

Salaam eleikum.

The problem with Malcom's argument is that it's incoherent to suggest that we can ethically use the technique on our own volunteers (for whatever pedagogical reasons) but that it must be out of bounds when applied to people who are willing to kill tens of thousands of Americans at a time, saw off our heads with a rusty blade, etc. I'd suggest that any technique that volunteers are willing to undergo is fair to apply to an enemy, provided that the extremity and duration of the application are comparable, and that similar monitoring methods are used.

In fact, the only argument I can think of against such usage is that it's impossible to ensure those conditions. And that isn't a moral argument, it's an empirical one... and therefore testable.

Point 3. is extremely weak as is Fian's somewhat adaptation of it.

Our enemy beheads prisoners and subjects them to extreme mutilation, yet we don't and no one even thinks it would be a good idea for us to do it. The fact is that when this enemy has control of our people or anyone else he is not going to make some rational case for waterboarding because we might have used it. He is what he is, regardless of any choices we make in coercive interrogation.

Those who would rather see LA hit by a nuclear weapon and send Jack Bauer to prison for trying to get information to stop it have made their moral choice and if they are not in LA at the time the bomb goes off will have to live with their feelings of moral superiority.

As for the I don't want my son to be subjected to ... argument, I find that as weak as the I don't want my son to die for oil argument. Frankly I don't want my son to die defending the capitol steps, but I respect the choices he made when he joined the Marine Corps as I did.

A Common Response:

My correspondents seem to have a problem with the fact that we will play the moral judge. That is precisely what we do each day our men and women stay in a combat zone. We decide who lives, and who dies. It's interesting that one is willing to kill an enemy or vaporize him in his home (even at the expense of 'collateral damage') but is unwilling to apply techniques that volunteers in our military purposefully endure.

To the marine general I ask -- tho purely rhetorically of course: "Do you want your son to be shot in the head, arm or leg? Would you like for him to lose all his limbs because he has come to meet you in your home for the celebration of a religious dinner?". If not, I suggest he stops doing the same to his enemies, or (hopefully) recognizes the dangerous inconsistency in his position.

Unfortunately, it is my interlocutors arguments that force our moral philosophy to be unsteady and vague when it must be stalwart and stark. Killing a man is fair play, while causing him psychological terror is not? No, the moral difference is not in the tactic used -- it is whether the action is justified.

Where our enemy goes wrong is in its purposeful targeting of innocent, esp unmobilized, civilians, its actions birthed of sadism and -- most of all -- the terrible injustice of its cause.

We must continue to use any and every means to thwart terrorists. Torture is not a means to thwarting terrorists, if anything it gives them more fuel. The gentleman who wrote this article should be commended for this post. He has shared his experiences with us. I sense that he is grieved because of the course this nation is taking. I was not shocked when I first heard of the techniques that are being used. But I am alarmed that there was not more of an outcry from the public. We as the citizens of this great nation are culpable when we do not speak out against things like this. It is not simply a matter of debate. It is a matter of conscience; it is a matter of honor, and a matter of integrity. I'm reminded of a song by the 70s group War. It states, "You've been slippin' into darkness, pretty soon you're gonna pay." We should not maintain the use of torture as a practice and give it another name, for instance "robust interrogation". Our morals and standards are slipping, and this should be a cause of great concern.

An addendum:

I want to highlight the fact that waterboarding should only be used in specific, extreme circumstances. It is a terrible thing, and must only be used when all other, more savory, techniques have failed.

All righteous, thinking people feel much the same about war, with the possible exception of pacifists. It is interesting as a gedankexperiment to employ the same exact arguments used against torture to the subject of war. One must accept pacifism, or reject the validity of those arguments.

War is cruel and terrible. But not evil per se. Only by carefully examining the surrounding moral context (especially the wars aims and its justification) can one determine if engaging in war is a morally upright action. This is completely analogous to torture.

Responding to Nuzzolillo's two comments:

I'm intrigued by your line of reasoning. It's quite simple, really, despite the many ways you've explained it: Because we kill people in war, anything else we do to them is okay - so long as we can claim cause. Truly fascinating. You've even been kind enough to provide a basic litmus test in your final paragraph. If we aren't (1) targeting the innocent, (2) sadistically motivated, and (3) without just cause, then the sky is the limit!

This got me thinking about treatment of prisoners in our own country. Most states have the death penalty, so does the same argument apply? If we are willing to kill our prisoners while they sit motionless and incapable of causing us harm, are we free to terrorize them (with cause!)? And since you're the present authority, can you define which causes are just? If the prisoner has knowledge of crimes yet to be commited, can we let loose? Do those crimes have to be especially egregious (ie: child molestation / rape / murder), or will simple property crimes do?

If acceptable only for the particularly heinous stuff, how many citizens must be at risk? A bus full? A building full (how many stories)? A whole city? I've noticed the "nuclear bomb in a major city" cliche come up a few times. That one's easy, but I'll need somebody to help me out with the exact number that makes it okay to do that which has, until now, been the very thing we fought to stop.

The full extent of your argument is just beginning to dawn on me. Any country that has ever been involved in a war has given itself permission to treat its prisoners/detainees/word-of-the-day however it sees fit, so long as there is the promise of information that may, or may not, prove to keep its citizens from harm! Brilliant! Would this have applied to the Vietnamese holding John McCain? Were their aims (self-preservation? victory?) enough to justify his treatment?

What makes me particularly angry is that you and your ilk presumably consider yourselves true Americans (at least, I got a taste of that from Prariepundit's comment immediately preceding yours). You're not. And even commendable service in the military won't change that. True Americans are unwilling to sell their souls for security, are unwilling to justify cruelty in hopes of maintaining the illusion of security, and don't use the evils of war to justify whatever actions will help them feel safe on that particular day.

Those who would rather see LA hit by a nuclear weapon and send Jack Bauer to prison for trying to get information to stop it have made their moral choice and if they are not in LA at the time the bomb goes off will have to live with their feelings of moral superiority.

If the Hollywood screenwriter's scenario of a ticking time bomb ever actually happens on Planet Earth-- which, to date, it has not-- then Jack Bauer will have to hope for a pardon, prosecutorial discretion, or a sympathetic jury.

But it is extremely unintelligent to insist on the regularization of violating human rights, US law, and international law, simply because you saw something on TV that would render that violation justified.

I responded with criticism over at my blog.

Mr. Nance's piece works very well as an op-ed. Rhetoric is clearly one of his many, many, many talents (I read the author bio!). He has a future in it.

However, this piece does not work to convince someone who does not already agree with his opinions. In this, it is similar to Dawkins' argument against religion.

Reading comments sections is my guilty pleasure. In all the years I've been reading these sections, I've never seen such well-thought-out arguments. This is a very complicated issue, isn't it?

I'm glad that the people who've chosen to comment on it so far haven't just reacted, but have instead shown that they've been affected by the information he has presented.

Nance has presented arguments that have changed my thinking.

My previous instinctive reaction has always been that America should apply a "whatever it takes" approach to those "24" ticking time bomb scenarioes. And from what I'd read on the internet about waterboarding, it didn't sound too bad at all. In fact, the nicie-nice descriptions of waterboarding made me wonder why we were even bothering with it at all. Hey, even our troops who had been put through it in training didn't have any complaints about it.

If waterboarding isn't any worse than putting panties on someone's head or a dog collar around their neck in order to take a picture showing that you are "the boss of them", then why even bother with it? Nobody suggests that our interrogation experts have ever used panties as a last resort in order to extract information from someone suspected of withholding crucial information. So why is waterboarding any different?

Nance has described how waterboarding can be used in actual practice that show very clearly that it can be considered a type of torture. I don't think that any of us have ever really understood how bad this procedure can be in the hands of operatives totally lacking a hint of conscience.

Can we really compare the experiences of SERE students who've been waterboarded for a short time (under careful supervision) to the experiences of those subjected to it in the field when they are inhaling pints and pints of water into their lungs?

Until I read Nance's post, I would have been among the first to say that America needs to push the limits when it comes to extracting information from suspected terrorists. But it certainly appears that this "acceptable" form of pressure could easily be abused.

1. Every professional who speaks out against this makes a contribution. Thank you for adding your voice and "street-cred" to those who do not think 24 is a counter-terrorist "how-to" manual.

2. The "ticking time bomb scenario" isn't just unrealistic - it is often so farcical that it appears to be based on deliberate lies.

During one of the first Republican debates there was a hypothetical question regarding the interrogation of a team of suicide bombers who were captured before their mission. The question stipulated (paraphrased) "....we have good reason to believe that they know about other, more terrible, attacks in the future" and then asked the candidates if they would approve "enhanced interrogation techniques" on the would-be bombers.

When I saw this I jumped up and screamed at the TV "Why THE F*** would a suicide bomber be told the details of any plots except the one he is going to DIE IN???!! " Are we really to believe that OBL told these would-be martyrs "Oh, and before you go let me tell you the operational details of an attack we will be launching after you are already dead. In fact, since you are going to be dead anyways I guess there is no harm in telling you exactly where we are hiding the bomb".

Al Queda is NOT stupid and they know there is nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by telling details of plots to people who do not need to know them, are not going to take part in them, and are actually supposed to die before the attacks take place.

You know the debate in this country is in sorry shape when an obviously contrived and unrealistic scenario, premised on the unwarranted assumption that our enemy is more loose-lipped than a drunk woman with tourettes, can be put forward without a single candidate or member of the press pointing out that the entire premise is so divorced from reality as to be, simply, "bullshit".

Many Theoreticians of Torture are great examples of "Ivory Tower" philosophers who refuse to dirty their hands with real-world constraints and practicalities, allow "pure reason" to take them along paths that stray far from reality. We have listened to them for years, to our own peril. We should be listening to people like Mr. Nance instead.

I agree 100% with Mr. Nance.

The utilitarian argument put forward for waterboarding neglects to mention that the information produced by torture is notoriously unreliable.

Furthermore, with the certainty that torture will be applied, the use of simple security techniques ensures that the information produced will be of little or no value and have a very short "shelf life".

As Mr. Nance said so eloquently: "It's not a fair trade for America's Honor."

Walrus,

Would it be fair to say that your objections are entirely technical -- that information just won't be reliable, that there are not methods around this, and the time value of the information is very small.

(And, of course, if for whatever reasons these objections do not hold, torture is perfectly permissible? Is the acceptable utility/honor trade price published or knowable?)

When it comes to extrating information from military combatants, are harsh methods acceptable? Oh, yeah. They are not only acceptable, they are NECESSARY.

Sometimes I think that the critics of military interrogation tactics have been subconsciously influenced by the police dramas on TV. After all, Starsky and Hutch could draw out a confession just by playing "Good Cop, Bad Cop". And today on Law & Order Criminal Intent and CSI Miami, all it takes to make a suspect crack and tell all is to get in their face while tilting your neck.

Cara Segwick on The Closer really applies the pressure, though. She bats her eyes and uses a southern accent to get her confessions (no head tilt needed).

TV's portrayal of successful interrogative methods has come a ways since the days when Perry Mason was always able to get the guilty party to leap to his/her feet in a courtroom and proclaim their guilt. There's a general public awareness now that harsher methods are required, but everyone realizes that Liberals have hamstrung our police interrogators.

Before we legislate exactly "who and how" can be effectively interrogated by our military and homeland security personnel, we should stop and think. Don't just react instinctively.

Obviously, we are going to need to find the middle ground in all of this. The best answer to the crises we face isn't going to always be in the extremes as it was when we were forced into firebombing and nuking Japanese cities in WWII.

I agree with everything we did in WWII. Extreme warfare requires extreme responses.

Not to sound Lincolnesque here, but we are now engaged in a great war that will test not only our resolve, but also our treasure and most importantly, the principles we are fighting to defend.

The question seems to be, "How low will we go?"

Dan, No, I don't believe torture is ever justified morally or legally. I was merely pointing out that the utilitarian argument FOR torture fails on any number of purely utilitarian grounds.

Simply applying the espionage techniques developed since WW1 almost completely neutralizes the value of torture. These techniques include: need to know, a cellular organisation, dead letter drops, cut outs and any number of other techniques that can be found in any of Le Carre's novels.

Of course once one accepts the utilitarian argument, then of course there are others who could do with a good "torturin", starting with accused kidnappers, drug dealers, gang members, etc. all for the greater good of course.

Walrus,

"Dan, No, I don't believe torture is ever justified morally or legally. I was merely pointing out that the utilitarian argument FOR torture fails on any number of purely utilitarian grounds."

Perhaps it's better to distinguish your arguments. After all, technical arguments pro and con are best handled by experts, because domain-specific knowledge becomes very important.

"Simply applying the espionage techniques developed since WW1 almost completely neutralizes the value of torture. These techniques include: need to know, a cellular organisation, dead letter drops, cut outs and any number of other techniques that can be found in any of Le Carre's novels."

Indeed, and any of a large number of counter-measures defeats any large number of measures. But often, for whatever reason, a counter-measure isn't used.

"Of course once one accepts the utilitarian argument, then of course there are others who could do with a good "torturin", starting with accused kidnappers, drug dealers, gang members, etc. all for the greater good of course."

Not sure why you used the non-standard form "torturin'" I assume you are trying to tie support to torture to some unpopular ethnic group (given the construction, either southern vernacular or african-american vernacular). (Of course, your motive for using it is as irrelevant as whatever point you were trying to make by using it.)

Anyway, the point you raise is a good one. The answer is that the police power of the state is much more limited than its military power (except in case of rebellion, where they become indistinguishable). This is why, for instance, the military was able to force law schools to accept recruiters would why the FBI would not be (Rumsfeld v. FAIR).

If the Hollywood screenwriter's scenario of a ticking time bomb ever actually happens on Planet Earth-- which, to date, it has not-- then Jack Bauer will have to hope for a pardon, prosecutorial discretion, or a sympathetic jury.

Hear! Hear!

1. Two Words: "Jury Nullification". There are circumstances under which I would not convict even if I knew he was guilty.

2. The threat of prosecution helps to ensure that it only ever happens when the people involved thinks the situation serious enough to risk their own asses. It also give the people who order the techniques an incentive to make damn sure that they have the right guy and solid intelligence and keeps them from making mistakes out of sloppiness or impatience (like the German we kidnapped and tortured for months solely because his name was superficially similar to that of a known terrorist. "Whoops. Sorry about that. No hard feelings, eh?")

3. Has anyone else noticed that the people who most eagerly defend torture of known terrorists under extraordinary circumstances are also the people most opposed to any safeguards designed to protect the innocent or keep such practices restricted to circumstances that really are extraordinary?

If the Hollywood screenwriter's scenario of a ticking time bomb ever actually happens on Planet Earth-- which, to date, it has not-- then Jack Bauer will have to hope for a pardon, prosecutorial discretion, or a sympathetic jury.

Presumably, we could use the same logic to make all gunfire illegal under the Uniform Code of Military Justice -- after all, if it was really necessary, surely the soldier would not be convicted.

Demosophist wrote

it's incoherent to suggest that we can ethically use the technique on our own volunteers (for whatever pedagogical reasons) but that it must be out of bounds when applied to people who are willing to kill tens of thousands of Americans at a time, saw off our heads with a rusty blade, etc. I'd suggest that any technique that volunteers are willing to undergo is fair to apply to an enemy, provided that the extremity and duration of the application are comparable, and that similar monitoring methods are used.

There are several problems with this.
1. The purpose of using this on our own volunteers is to help them, in controlled circumstances, understand what they may face if captured. The purpose during interrogation is to force someone to tell things that he doesn’t want to tell, (if he even knows them). So I don’t see how the two situations will ever be “equivalent in extremity duration and application.”

2. A key word in your paragraph is “volunteers.” Our guys are volunteers, and know this is a part of the SERE course. They also know that those running the course will do everything possible to avoid real damage.

3. This is akin to some of the rhetoric that was used about Abu Ghraib. Some argued because some men might volunteer for a fraternity initiation where panties are placed on men’s heads, that made it OK to do it those who are not volunteers. Corollary questions: Because some may volunteer and even eagerly participate in auto-erotic asphyxiation, does that make it OK to do non-volunteers? Because members of the Polar Bear club volunteer to swim in icy water, is it OK to force prisoners to do that?

I agree with the article’s author that the answer is “no.” And I thank him and commend him for giving us the benefit of his experience and knowledge.

Presumably, we could use the same logic to make all gunfire illegal under the Uniform Code of Military Justice

tdaxp-- please be aware that the use of gunfire has actually proved useful in real combat situations. The "ticking time bomb" scenario, by contrast, has never actually happened in the real world.

You are correct that 24 is an exciting television program.

It's just not clear to me how much weight that carries in discussions of American morality and strategy.

It's becoming too hard to keep up with all of these comments. I will say that the calamity affecting the commentor who rebuked the use of reason in understanding ethics is the root of the problem.

Others are just missing the point. No, of course the preservation of an evil regime does not supply sufficient warrant to torture an enemy -- but it also doesn't warrant raising a rifle and firing a single shot. An evil regime justly deserves destruction, so any act taken specifically in defense of it will likely be similarly evil.

The arguments mocking me as being an inept Moral Judge are inconsistent. As I have already pointed out, the decision to go to war is a moral decision, as is the decision to fire a weapon in the fog of combat, as is even the decision to implement severe economic sanctions on a regime. All of these have a far higher chance of causing undue, unjustified suffering on the innocent than does using harsh interrogation techniques on known terrorists (btw, I am far more comfortable using these techniques on admitted or well-known enemy operatives. It would be hard to justify this sort of treatment if the guilt of the person was truly and reasonably in question).

My arguments will surely ring hollow to those who lack the means or desire to understand and accept that morals are indeed objective and that proper moral action can be discerned within a reasonable and actionable degree of certainty. But those same people who don't accept the objectivity of ethics might as well stop carrying on about how we are trading our soul or honor or ideals for our defense. And for those who believe we cannot be certain that it is just to torture a man, I ask them how they are certain that a man deserves to die? The fact is, we all know that proper moral judgments are possible, as we constantly make them and expect our government to make them on our behalf. If one believes that morals are objective but cannot be known to an actionable degree of certainty, then one would be guilty of the most vile evil if one advocated or engaged in going to war, or indeed any act of force.

It is also interesting to note that some of those (here and elsewhere) who oppose the use of this category of force in defense of our nation would also not criminally punish men who justly decide to act in this way. But that gives lie to the argument from morality. Either it is an evil act that must always be punished, or there are grounds when it is morally justified.

To be clear: I am advocating that an actor is justified in using the minimum force possible, against a guilty party, sufficient to meet the goal of preventing unjustified violence against the undeserving. It is indeed up to the conscience and reason of the actor or party involved to determine just how much force is required and under which circumstances. To prevent accidents, I am comfortable with every manner of safeguard provided it doesn't sufficiently diminish the ability to prevent further harm to the innocents in question.

In any case, I am arguing less about what a particular law should or should not state, and more about whether one should so eagerly condemn those who make the decision to engage in this practice without regard to the entire moral context.

One need not imagine a ticking nuclear bomb, by the way. One only need imagine that they are a father who has captured a man who belongs to a pedophilia ring that managed to kidnap his 2 year old daughter. In other words, the life of the innocent need not be in direct or immediate danger, nor must there be a high number of innocents in danger. A single innocent babe in danger of being subjected to such inhuman cruelty deserves to be protected by any means necessary, provided one is certain they have collared a member of the ring. I would never ever be able to forgive myself for allowing my daughter to be degraded in that way, and believe I would sleep well and without guilty conscious should I subject such a man to the minimum force possible to rescue her.

The last line in my most recent comment above should have read:

"I would never ever be able to forgive myself for allowing my daughter to be degraded in that way, but believe I would sleep well and without guilty conscious should I subject such a man to the minimum force possible yet still sufficient to rescue her."

Thanks.

"tdaxp-- please be aware that the use of gunfire has actually proved useful in real combat situations. The 'ticking time bomb' scenario, by contrast, has never actually happened in the real world."

That's not my understanding of the situation. While "torture doesn't work" sure makes for pleasant-sounding sloganeering, I am quite sure we've received actionable intelligence through the use of enhanced interrogation techniques.

One only need imagine that they are a father who has captured a man who belongs to a pedophilia ring that managed to kidnap his 2 year old daughter. In other words, the life of the innocent need not be in direct or immediate danger, nor must there be a high number of innocents in danger.

Yep, that's where this is heading.

Once you accept that torture is a tool in the government's arsenal, why limit it to bad foreigners?

Why shouldn't we pass laws allowing the government to torture alleged murderers, or kidnappers, or large-scale embezzlers?

After all, the failure of Enron led to thousands of layoffs, bankruptcies, and decimated savings. If the directors had only been tortured once wrongdoing became apparent, maybe the company's collapse could have been averted. As long as the government inflicting torture on one person is counterbalanced by benefits to others, why refrain?

To get to the ultimate point Jared, no government can be trusted with such powers because ultimately all have abused it and I fail to see why the United States Government should be any better.

You make wonderful fine distinctions - "Known" terrorists, "Defending" our country and so on. The fact is that nothing is ever so black and white, and the potential for abuse is simply frightening - and it will be abused if the apologists are not thrown from office.

I'm not sure if America's reputation is now even recoverable.

walrus,

I could be persuaded that a particular government should not be trusted with the power to torture, or even that legally defining "acceptable torture" is difficult to the point of inaction.

But that matter is wholly separate from the matter of whether it is logically possible to torture someone morally.

Do you agree in principle that such a thing is possible?

ReflectionEphemeral,

It is impossible to make a valid general moral argument against an action per se by appealing to a slippery slope. You may be able to make an argument against a specific use case or the granting of powers to perform the action, but you certainly cannot argue against an entire class of action in that manner. I am sure you are quite capable of imaging several of the limitless such arguments one could make against granting war powers to a government.

I did purposely use the word violence in my "to be clear" section. Now, we could argue over what constitutes violence, or we can skip that boring conversation and you could just agree that you instinctively and rationally understand the difference between lesser and greater crimes, and that dissimilar force can be justified to prevent or punish them. After all, following your logic, "Why don't we shoot ever criminal immediately to prevent further crimes? How can you judge when it is fair to or not? If you are willing to use force to prevent crime, how do you decide how much?" And so on and so on...

The slippery slope is truly a slimy thing and can almost without fail be turned on its conjuror (unless they are relativsts in which case discussion is futile).

Best wishes.

Of course if you are not a secular humanist, you can make up any religious reason for torture you care to name.

However if you believe in the universality of human rights, then you cannot logically deny them to anyone - including alleged terrorists.

Anyway its an academic argument now, since America has joined the ranks of the worlds totalitarian governments and admits it conducts torture against those it believes may be its opponents.

Thanks for remaining civil, walrus. We can agree to disagree. But you are also welcome to explain how the right to life is less important or less universal than the right to avoidance of torture. That is, unless you are a secular humanist pacifist, in which case I truly do humbly commend you on account of your consistency.

Mr. Nuzzolillo:

Short question for you that involves elements of a hypothetical since i dont know much about you.

If you had a son or daughter, or younger brother or sister, and they were serving in the American army and were captured by "an enemy" would you accept waterboarding done on them as an interogation technique by the enemy since the "enemy" thought that they might have information that was deemed potentially "actionable?"

Hmm, so the arguments for Torture amount to "the ends justify the means". This of course works because in all cases the person tortured "has actionable information" and knows of the location of the "ticking time bomb".

So based on this argument we would NEVER torture the wrong person or round up non-combatants, lock them up for years and give them no access to lawyers or any means to prove their innocence.

Is the argument also that we have some way of always catching the one person that knows the details of the plots? So anyone we catch MUST be a high level terrorist and have actionable intelligence?

Not to point fingers but this administrations past and continuing history of incompetence gives me no comfort that we are not routinely torturing innocents that simply were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Let me pose a question - What kind of a country would capture people based on heresay, spirit them to hidden prisons around the world and torture them for months if not years, then when realizing that the person wasn't involved in anything - oops, releasing him on a deserted road?

Tell me that we haven't already gone too far down that slippery slope...

Mr. Nuzzolillo’s argument rests on a simple unstated and faulty premise – we can do these things because we are the good guys and they are the bad guys. As he emphasized, they deserve it. He presumes they are guilty. The problem is every enemy we fight against thinks the same thing – that they are good and we are bad, thus, torture can be justified or seen as deserved. The United States of America is not always the white knight but Nuzzolillo’s presumes we are. This rationale can work for any nation or organization on the face of the Earth to justify whatever it wants.

Mr. Nuzzolillo wrote: "My arguments will surely ring hollow to those who lack the means or desire to understand and accept that morals are indeed objective and that proper moral action can be discerned within a reasonable and actionable degree of certainty."

If morals are so objective and proper moral action can be discerned within an actionable degree of certainty so easily in this instance, we wouldn’t be having this debate. No, all you are saying is that waterboarding works in your subjective moral system. You simply think it is objective because you can’t see beyond it.

There is one question about torture that I have never seen its advocates address: Who are they going to get to do it for them? How are they going to recruit and vet these people?

I assume they would reject the flocks or psychopaths who would voluteer for the job and seek normal well adjusted people and train them to torment others. But if you did that, wouldn't you run the risk of transforming them into pychopaths? And if you did, wouldn't you be liable? If your practioners weren't transformed into devils incarnate wouldn't the mental stresses on them be horrific and again would you be liable for that?

What would happen to your torturers after they left the service? How would a potential employer react when he found out what this guy used to do?

15 years down the road, what would he tell his son when the boy asked "What did you do in the war Dad?" Do the torture advocates really want to create a group of who would have to answer "Why son, I strapped people to a board and savaged them."

To slightly amend Gain P Gentile's question to Mr. Nuzzolillo, would the torture advocates encourage or be proud of their son or daughter or brother or sister if they said "I want to torture for Uncle Sam."

You guys gotta think about what you want to create.

Judging by many of the comments on this post, I would not want to take my chances on jury nullification to save those who think it is wrong to use coercive interrogation. Some would have the President weigh a choice between impeachment and mass slaughter of non combatants so they can feel morally superior.

Great post and appreciate it the clarity. That said, and a question for all, how do we have a logical discussion with educated individuals who believe the opposite? In other words, we are living in a time where educated individuals and, for all intensive purposes, good people, believe that we should torture, we should hold people without Habeas Corpus rights, and perhaps, when it comes down to a situation, I may bend my own moral rules. How do we stand fast to our values and our morals, how do we educate good people who believe we should 'bend the rules"? For me I see this as one of our biggest challenges. Because now our "leaders" have made it ok...thoughts?

Thanks...
M

Sir. Thank you for honouring your pledge to uphold the constitution by speaking out.

To the debate: I find it interesting that the US has decided to unilateraly shelve the entire geneva-conventions and a myriad other cases of international law in order to perform what is essentially a psychological demonstration rather than a practical matter of necessity. Info extracted under duress is next to worthless.

Somewhere, somehow, the Republic has in its employ a large unit of serving officers who are actively managing and manning a network of torture-institutions. Do you truly want such a class inside the US system, people willing to do anything for the greater cause? For revenge? For nation and honour? For the president? For the fuhrer?

I wont even comment on the irony of christian people being some of the hardest supporters for the use of torture. Jesus wept. But from a military point of view, its a matter of cost-analysis, and that clearly shows that the US war-effort is significantly weakened by the loss of softpower that the destroyed image of the US has caused. Remember, your whole propaganda-effort prior to 9/11 was "the land of law and order", where the Rule of Law was something akin to a religion in its own right.

Once you let the genie loose, its very hard to put back in the bottle. What is needed is a purging, both military and politically, and I for one would feel more secure if I was assured men like Malcolm Nance was conducting the purging. Best wishes from Norway.

Gian P Gentile,

No, of course that would not be a moral action. But neither would it be moral for them to raise a single rifle or fire a single shot at my relative-in-arms. That exact same logic precludes waging a violent campaign of any sort. No, the difference here is whether one side is working towards evil and the other good, the individual motivation of the specific actors involved, etc.

I am getting the distinct idea that several of my interlocutors have not read all of my posts in this thread. I don't blame them :-) But in the interests of not having to repeat myself ad infinitum (and boring people to further tears), I'd ask that they do and let me know if they still want me to clarify my beliefs. Anyone who thinks I am making an argument that amounts in totality to "the ends justify the means" probably hasn't read what I've written.

But to be clear "the ends" are nearly always taken into consideration in ethical decision making. For instance, is it moral to invade another country? That question cannot be answered -- the problem is that invading another country is an amoral act. One must know the moral context ("the ends", motivation, etc) before one can determine if a particular act of invasion is a moral act.

zvelf,

The premise is neither unstated nor faulty. In fact, that is almost (the grounded version of) my entire argument: There is a fact of the matter as to whether al qaeda is evil -- drumroll -- they are! So while we may be justified in killing an al qaeda operative, they are not justified in killing an American soldier. Killing, stealing, kidnapping, inflicting pain upon others -- these must be amoral acts at the core if you are to support war. The surrounding ethical context must be known to determine if the particular act in question is to be held in contempt.

But it really doesn't matter if the US is right and al qaeda is wrong for my abstract argument to be valid. Instead, there must be at least one logically possible case in which torture is justified. If such a case exists, then it becomes a matter of degree, motivation, intent, etc.

As I said, those among you who do not believe in objective morals will not understand this argument. But if you do not, it would be foolish for you to even participate in the argument above that level. You can try to convince the sane (just playing ;-)) among us that morals are subjective, but there is literally no reason for you to argue against torture.

Again... if instead you believe that morals are objective but cannot be objectively discerned, then you must advocate withholding action in any situation where force is being considered.

nuzzolillo: Armchair philosophy. Torture is illegal according to US law, as far as I know, wich is why the president keeps on insisting that the US does not torture. There is a great difference in breaking the law by necessity in a crisis-situation of insant evaluation (J. Bauer, etc.) and the planned and premeditated breaking of the law. Either torture is legal, or it is not. If it is, then the US has descended to the levels of barbarism, and become an empire as opposed to a republic.

the President weigh a choice between impeachment and mass slaughter of non combatants

(1) If the president pardons someone whose torture, for the first time in world history, averted the mass slaughter of non-combatants, Congress will likely not vote to impeach him.

(2) If the president is impeached, even if it's a decision with which one might disagree, it would be by the procedures in the Constitution and our laws. That is not the case for torture, which violates at least domestic law, as well as international law to which we have signed on, and maybe the Constitution, too, if the Eighth Amendment applies to the torture victim. This is, or was, a nation of rule by law, not of men.

fnord,

I am not arguing about whether something is legal or not. I am arguing about whether it is moral or not. They can be -- and often are -- very different things.

Nuzzolillo: Wich is why it is armchair philosophy. Its like discussing if women are partly to blame for sexual assaults if they dress provocatively while a actual woman is being raped in front of you. Sorry for that disturbing image, but I think it is applicable.

nuzzolillo: The reason that in battle it is morally justified to kill or injure, whereas it is not morally justified to kill or cause injury to a prisoner (and I consider torture to be causing injury here) is this: in battle, an enemy soldier is attempting to do the same to you, therefore, it is self-defence. In captivity, the soldier is unarmed, and cannot cause harm to you directly. There is no moral ambiguity here; sniping an enemy soldier is self-defence, shooting an unarmed prisoner is not. Lopping off the arm of a man with a sword coming at you or someone you are defending is okay. Maiming the same man after he surrenders to you is revenge. Sinking an enemy ship and causing the drowning of enemies is defence; drowning a prisoner is torture.

How can the extraction of information about a terror cell or an enemy outpost be any different than the extraction of information and confession of a crime from a person you know is guilty? Are we more enlightened than we were 63 years ago, when we wouldn't torture POWs even when we knew their side was? When did "Do unto others as they do unto you" become acceptable? If we don't hold ourselves to a moral high ground, then we lose our right to complain and punish those who use the same techniques. Otherwise, we could say "Give us information, or we will bomb 5000 innocent civilians", because they did it to us.

Lastly, I think that questioning the opinion of a man who has undergone the torture, without going through the same, is weak. Will you tell a man whose genitals have been electrocuted to "suck it up, buttercup" if he says it is horrible, and wouldn't wish it on his enemies, as his life wasn't in danger, and no lasting physical harm came of it? Or what do you think of the use of Ebi-zeme, a torture that can last for days without any lasting physical harm, but which can kill if not stopped in time? Until you go through with it yourself (like cops getting pepper-sprayed), your opinion on the matter counts for less than someone who has.

Aleph Null: Amen. When I was in the army, we got teargas and fire drills under real conditions, and I have been subjected to serious beating. When I read the Padilla case, my stomach turns. Every time. There is a bunch of sadists loose within your (US) core.

What makes one man good, and another man evil? Can we agree that it is by the actions, and not by the thoughts alone (think Jesus, kicking a man in the face while saying "blessed are the meek..."). In other words, you know a tree by it's fruit.

Then, to be the good guys, don't we need to be the ones who treat all men like men, and not like animals? Saddam was evil, in part, because he tortured. Germans and Japanese were evil, in part, because they treated POWs like animals. If one is going to argue that we're good and they're evil, and argue against objectivism (they say the same thing),then they need to define what makes one side different than the other, outside of superficial things like race or religion. What are the actions that separate us from them?

Am I alone in seeing the contradiction at the heart of Jared Nuzzolillo's entire position? On the one hand, the man says

"The surrounding ethical context must be known to determine if the particular act in question is to be held in contempt."

and on the other,

"As I said, those among you who do not believe in objective morals will not understand this argument."

So what he's saying is that a) there are objective morals, but b) only the context determines if an act is moral or not. I hate to break it to you, Jared, but if it's the context that determines if something is moral or not, that's known as subjective morals.

I am pondering Aleph Null's very cogent and interesting argument (though I believe I will demonstrate it is flawed, at least in part on the grounds that self-defense alone as an impetus to action is generally not sufficient to render an act moral, as counterexamples should suffice to show). But expect more on that when time permits; in the meantime, I will take a moment to answer Petrit Qahiri.

Petrit Qahiri,

There is no contradiction, sir. Murder and killing both end in the violent death of a person -- it is the moral context surrounding a violent act that determines whether it is justified and therefore moral.

I should note that when I say "objective morals exist" I mean simply that there is a fact of the matter as to whether a certain act is evil or good; there need not be universal acceptance of this fact, just as the fact that some men believe that truth is relative does not and cannot change the fact that 1+1=2 is objectively true. So, eg, murder (ie, unjustified killing) is wrong in every context, culture and time.

Nuzolillo: You forget that there is a difference between reactional violence and premeditated violence. Sociologically speaking, these are two different categories.

Malcom,

Great article.

Regards,

Charly

Nuzzolillo,

Here is your comment in response to Petrit Qahiri's assertion that by having to assess the context of an act in determining its morality, you are confessing that morality is subjective:

"There is no contradiction, sir. Murder and killing both end in the violent death of a person -- it is the moral context surrounding a violent act that determines whether it is justified and therefore moral."

A brief side note: using "sir" in such a way makes you sound like a condescending prick (you used it in a similar way in your initial response to the main blog). Perhaps you aren't a condescending prick, but I just wanted to point out how your rhetoric is received.

Back to the argument. I can't see how your statement is meant to counter his claim. You merely reiterated that determining which killings are murder demands the observation of each act's context. So, instead of a willingness to profess "all killing is wrong" (an objective statement of morality), you demand the option of explaining away certain killings as "not murder" (a now important distinction) based on the subjective morality of your own culture.

The problem with objective morality is that it demands an unambiguous statement of belief which the claimant is almost never willing to follow to its logical conclusion. I could give a hundred examples, but I seriously doubt it’s necessary.

Perhaps you can respond with a better defense of objective morality, and, this time, I would try not to include new ways of explaining how your objective morality is so subjective.

Having been to SERE School, I abhor the idea of torture and believe that the US should be the “good guys” BEYOND debate. However, I certainly acknowledge that the subject of whether water boarding should be considered torture is, in fact, debatable. (Everything unpleasant can’t possibly be considered torture.) I happen to believe that it should not be considered torture, in and of itself.

Even still, I happen to be against the official use of water boarding by the US government against its enemies. That being said, I still support its use (and all current training techniques we employ) on our own people. Therefore, I don’t believe that water boarding should be considered the travesty some of you think it is.

1. Are some of you people making a deliberate attempt to not understand Nuzzolillo’s argument, or is his argument actually escaping you?

Is killing another human amoral? Are there ever justified circumstances (beyond self defense) for killing another human? Is it ok to empower our government officials to make this decision?

If you find it unacceptable for a police officer to kill another human in an attempt to save others (which, by the way, is NOT unrealistic), then I think you get a free pass from Nuzzolillo. He will not debate you any further. In fact, he will commend you on your lack of hypocrisy.

If, however, you find it justifiable to kill another human in certain situations, then you must acknowledge the argument Nuzzolillo is making. The human that gets killed by a police officer might be innocent. The human that gets killed by the police officer MIGHT believe that the police officer is the bad guy. Do you still think it’s possible to justify the police officer’s actions? Do you think the police officer should be forced to hope for a pardon, prosecutorial discretion, or a sympathetic jury? Or do you agree that it’s ok for an agent of the government (the police officer in this case) to be entrusted with the discretion to kill another human being (via an affirmative defense which is written into the law)?

If your answer to my last question is “no” then you need to widen your criticism to include most states’ penal codes.

Let’s not stop at killing. Do you believe that it’s justified to confine some humans to prison? If so, then why? What gives the government the moral authority to confine? The human might be innocent. The human might believe that the jailors are the bad guys. Have you simply been CONDITIONED to believe that confinement is justifiable by governments?

2. Why do some of you assume that SERE School type water boarding is conducted in a more controlled environment than water boarding during an actual interrogation? If training and actual water boarding were equally controlled and equal in duration would you be ok with it?

3. For others, what data exists to indicate that water boarding doesn’t render reliable (or actionable) intelligence? Or are you relying on anecdotal comments from certain individuals with previous intelligence experience? If so, what makes you think they are more “right” than the intelligence experts which are recommending the technique in certain circumstances?

4. One poster mentioned a Japanese prisoner that responded to the “soft treatment.” Great. What makes you think that the same technique isn’t tried first on terrorism detainees? It’s certainly possible that the US has enjoyed volumes of intelligence using soft techniques. From what I understand, interrogations by national intelligence professionals are a very sophisticated process – probably more sophisticated than you think. I’m sure methods have been developed (maybe even tested) to increase the reliability of the information generated. The one poster’s comments about false positives is certainly germane. This being said, would you be ok with techniques such as water boarding if it was only attempted AFTER a soft treatment has been deemed ineffective and if it was only accompanied by techniques to increase reliability? Ask yourself if you would still object to water boarding even if all intelligence professionals agreed that it was effective. If you would still object, then I recommend you discontinue to use the ineffective argument as a shortcut.

Let me state again, I am against water boarding as an interrogation technique by the US government against its enemies. I think we need to be a shining example of prisoner treatment to the world (Keep in mind, I’m not against all duress type interrogation techniques.) We can “win” without water boarding. My fear is that some of you are against winning. I hope I’m wrong.

Nuzzolillo, I’ve defended you enough , here’s my argument for you. Couldn’t I use all your arguments in support of more cruel interrogation techniques? Can’t I argue that putting a prisoner’s head in a vise could be justified under certain “context, culture, and time?” This is NOT a slippery slope argument. Please tell me why/if you would object to such a technique. If you don’t object, then I commend you on your lack of hypocrisy.

If you do object, then I suspect you will argue that, despite the context/time of an imminent threat to innocent human life and the current American culture, a head in a vise interrogation technique would rarely be morally justified. If that is your argument (or close to it), then I would argue back that the question of water boarding might also be rarely justified. At the very least, we don’t now how many (or what percentage of) individuals (or professionals) within the American culture would justify water boarding. Should this be the test that we (the US) uses?

I’d just like to add that if you do believe that it’s ok for government agents (e.g. local, state, and federal officers, etc.) to kill other humans in certain circumstance, and you believe that it’s ok for government agents (e.g. judges and wardens) to confine other humans in certain circumstances, then you must admit that you believe it’s ok to subject other humans to death or duress in certain circumstances.

Therefore, I think the argument becomes the extent with which you are comfortable empowering our government. Prison? Death penalty? Water boarding? “Rope torture?” Head in a vise? Obviously, most Americans object to extreme forms of torture while few object to prison. I think the areas in-between are a subjective matter.

Support for water boarding doesn’t necessarily make a person a criminal or cruel. Objecting to water boarding doesn’t necessarily make someone weak on terrorism. I just hope we’re all on the same side.

Well I wonder Jared, what the Judges at Nuremberg would make of Bush, Cheney and Torture?

My view is that they would be lucky not to be hanged.

http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/nuremberg.htm

ARTICLE 6

The Tribunal established by the Agreement referred to in Article 1 hereof for the trial and punishment of the major war criminals of the European Axis countries shall have the power to try and punish persons who, acting in the interests of the European Axis countries, whether as individuals or as members of organizations, committed any of the following crimes.
The following acts, or any of them, are crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility:

(a) Crimes against Peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a Common Plan or Conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;
(b) War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;
© Crimes against Humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war,14 or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

Leaders, organizers, instigators, and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution
of a Common Plan or Conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.

ARTICLE 7

The official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or responsible officials in Government departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment.

ARTICLE 8

The fact that the defendant acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior shall not free him from responsibility, but may be considered in mitigation of punishment if the Tribunal determine that justice so requires.

corkie30,

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I was beginning to wonder if I was insane.

I guess I must split the horns of the dilemma to answer you. Inflicting pain on a captive is certainly very rarely justified. All manner of other techniques must be exhausted, starting with those not involving force and slowly (relative to the situation at hand) escalating all the way to extreme pain. I can surely imagine some cases when it would be justified, and that extends to vices and all other implements of torture. I sincerely hope that we would never be in a position where reason and conscience demanded that we use such techniques. It is enough to leave me shuddering.

As I've said from the get-go, near certain knowledge of guilt and a high degree of certainty that the subject possesses important intelligence that could be used to protect the innocent would be absolutely necessary in justifying the escalation of force beyond a rather low point -- and those qualifications assuredly rarely obtain (perhaps the case of KSM is a stark instance where they did? I am not prepared to argue that without more research, but it definitely seems like it could be).

Others,

Please take my statements at face value, and do not attempt to ascribe emotional meaning to them beyond that suppled by the words and context. To do otherwise would be uncharitable, and you wouldn't want to be uncharitable would you? In any case, I will use an emoticon or other obvious rhetorical device when I intend to portray emotion. To be fair, I am usually just writing the first words that leap into my head (even if it may sound conversational at times), so I can see how someone might be sadly tricked into thinking otherwise.

Part of the problem is that I am having trouble dreaming up new ways to explain myself as I keep being misunderstood, or questions I have already answered resurface, etc. Please accept my apologies when this is due to a lack of clarity.

walrus,

While the articles of the Nuremburg tribunal are certainly of historical and/or legal interest, it escapes me how they could change whether an act can morally justified (and to think otherwise would be to accept actual moral relativism; eg, that the law of a land can render an otherwise moral act immoral).

Walrus,

Article 6 (b) applies to “murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas.” A prisoner of war is very well defined. Every member of the US military is taught to take steps to maintain a prisoner of war status in case of capture even if such steps preclude certain tactical advantages.

For example, disguising yourself in an enemy uniform could give you a substantial advantage in sneaking up on an enemy outpost. Or, dressing in order to blend in with the local population might allow you to conduct better surveillance. However, if captured in either case, you would not be entitled to receive POW benefits. These benefits include the enemy’s restrictions against murdering or ill-treating you.

Have any of the prisoners been legally considered POW’s (they certainly weren't persons of the seas)? If so, I haven’t heard of any. If they aren’t, then they would not be protected by such language.

Nuzzolillo,

Thanks for your honest answer. While I consider myself a warrior willing to take the fight to any of our enemies. I wouldn't want a government empowered to employ techniques that would leave you "shuddering."

And for those of you having a hard time understanding what I mean by objective morality, consider the follow:

Paul shot a gun and the bullet hit and killed Angelina. Angelina was not a threat to Paul. Is Paul an evil murderer?

That question is -- I hope! -- impossible to answer. For 1) Paul could have been shooting at a man who was raping his wife at knife point, and accidentally hit Angelina as she passed his window. Or, 2) Paul could have shot Angelina because she was tied up to his bed and it got him off sexually.

Now, (1) killing a person accidentally while defending your wife is not evil and does not render you a murderer. But (2) killing someone for the sole purpose of sexual excitement is always evil.

So you see, there is an objective moral conclusion to be drawn, but it is 100% dependent on the context surrounding the action.

Corkie30,

Do realize that even if no current "detainees" have been labeled POW's, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be (particularly early captives in Iraq and Afghanistan where some captives were taken in far more "traditional" battles than the current operations).

Assuming they were being commanded by a "responsible person" and carrying arms openly, it would come down to whether they wore a "distinctive sign" and were "conducing their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war." If Bush/Cheney/etc were ever brought up on war crimes, this would obviously have to be determined.

Of course, our government always has the option of taking the high road and classifying these detainees as POW's anyway... Any bets on the likelihood of that?

Republicans: WRONG about Torture

Republicans are bad people. They do indeed want to use waterboarding against patriotic Americans who don't go along with their Conservative Authoritarian views.

I feel that the real reason why George Bush and his Conservative Authoritarian Republicans are promoting torture, is because torture makes monsters of those who carry it out - or apprehend prisoners with knowledge that they will be tortured.

George Bush is using torture to train monsters. An American who comes out of the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marines would probably not carry out orders to use force against Americans. BlackWater, and these other un-patriotic people - they would.

The interrogators and those who feed them victims by going on raids and bringing victims back to be tortured, have no souls. They don't have any rights. They don't have any morality. Even better for the Authoritarian Conservative Republicans, is that if enough Americans go along with their Torture, then Americans will have lost their soul. Stripped of our moral high ground, we have no defense against the Authoritarians. Torture is an assault on America's honor and integrity.

Waterboarding promoters are sick, evil, disgusting, un-patriotic people.

Jared Nuzolillo, I rarely pull rank like this, but I'm a professional philosopher, and I want to make it clear to you and the people on this thread that your arguments are shallow and meretricious. Had they ever been put before me or any of my colleagues in a classroom setting, they would have been justly decimated. I'm offended that your ability to ape philosophical discourse might deceive some here as to your essential childishness. And I'm disgusted that your mimicry of philosophy sullies a noble tradition. It is good that your "dissimulation" blog enjoys a well-deserved obscurity, for it would otherwise bring even more pain to those of us who have devoted our professional lives to the tradition of philosophy. At best you are a sophist; but even that gives you too much credit; you are more like a clever parrot who has imbued some jargon which you spit back in great clots of pseudo-meaning.

Please join us in protest.

This is the end of the line. When a nominee for Attorney General does not concede that waterboarding is illegal explicitly in order to protect waterboarders from criminal liability, there is nothing left but shame and mourning.

We call upon others to join us in our symbolic protest at www.stop-torture.org by posting in silent, drowning black.

Nuzzolillo,

I am not a philosopher, so explain something: Where do your moral facts come from (the ones used to make your "objective moral conclusions")?

What strikes me as disturbing in this thread is the penchant for movie plot threats: LA being blown up, a woman being raped, etc. These are cheap ways to get an emotional response, rather than a logical one. There's continual references to "morals" but they are cloaked in spectacle and drama. I don't think you can evaluate the morality of this while you envision a Hollywood blockbuster.

What the torture apologists are missing is that US and Allied forces gathered valuable intelligence from POWs in WWII by simply being themselves -- representatives of a great democracy. Prisoners were treated fairly and as a result, lost their mistrust and became useful assets. You can look it up. If you don't think those prisoners were a greater threat than Al Queda, you have a warped understanding of history.

This is countered by what I can only see as a mass-entertainment-fueled lust for vengeance, as typified by 24 and those who think intel work is all about gunfights and races against time as explosions rip up the scenery.

I have no confidence that torture or mistreatment has yielded any actionable intelligence. If it had, where are the results? The endless chain of Al Queda number 3s? That's the payoff for trashing America's reputation? Five years into this and still no sign of Osama bin Forgotten. We have his driver, though.

I thank Mr Nance for taking up this argument.

Mr John Protevi,

As a professional philosopher, I wonder if you have ever been introduced to an argument ad hominem? What about an argument from authority? I am sure you have. So you are purposefully engaging in fallacious demagoguery? Oh, ok. If you're comfortable with that, I'll let you wallow in it.

John Protevi

Nuzzolillo has offered a logical argument (granted his presuppositions) for why torture may be morally acceptable in some circumstances. I would really appreciate it if you as a "professional philosopher" would not engage in such an obvious logical fallacy as an argument from authority. I can think of many things which I consider morally abominable that were sanctioned by a particular philosopher/s (Marquis de Sade or Nietzsche anyone?).

To All,

While I have a visceral reaction to the idea of torturing another human being, I have the same reaction to the idea of killing another human being (an action I consider to be moral in some circumstances). I have to admit that his logic is convincing, granted the limiting factors and restrictions that he himself admits to (i.e. his references to situations where killing another human being is justifiable). Does anyone have an actual LOGICAL response to Nuzzilillo's argument. Note, this does not include legal or practical arguments (while they do have their place in other aspects of this debate). Thanks

I see Mr Nuzzolillo beat me to the punch. Quickly written sir! Just out of curiosity, what are your moral grounds for morality? The Bible, Torah, Natural Law etc.

In any case, this thread has taken up far too much of my time. I have been called a "condescending prick", "weak", a "barbarian" and worse, all without the pathetic invective spewed from my most recent interlocutor, who has brought new meaning to the phrase "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" (note that his post amounted to nothing more than 'na na na na na poo poo head').

For those of among the readership who might take something away from what I have written, take only this: before you condemn the men and women in the difficult position of deciding when or when not to escalate force; before you decide once and for all that some category of action is always immoral and off limits; before you tie the hands of the government that is ostensibly here to protect us, be sure you have given this subject grave and careful thought, for it is of the utmost importance.

(Ok, so I will try to stay away... I just wanted to point out that Mr Protevi is from the Department of French Studies and teaches Women's
& Gender Studies... :-p Just playing Mr Protevi. That doesn't actually affect your argument. Here is a link to his "obscure" web site http://www.protevi.com/john/ ... Seriously tho, I am just playing.)

And add "buffoon" to the list, as Mr Protevi was so proud of his ad hominem display that he decided to share it on his "obscure" blog

http://proteviblog.typepad.com/protevi/2007/10/everyone-has-a-.html

Civil Discourse 0
Childishness 2 (me and Mr Protevi)

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

Before we paralyzed outselves with multiculturalism and political correctness summary execution was the customary fate of unlawful combatants, UNLESS their continued existance was deemed useful in some way.

These are non-state actors, brigands and pirates. They have no rights. No right to not be tortured, no right to live. Keep them alive if it suits our purpose, at our convenience, for what they are worth to us, and when their continued survival no longer serves our purpose, execute them.

We didn't used to be this squeamish.

"Keep them alive if it suits our purpose, at our convenience, for what they are worth to us, and when their continued survival no longer serves our purpose, execute them."

Cannoneer #4, your life must have been great back when you were young, and fighting with the SS. Now there was some resistance to multiculturalism.

Texan,

Even if everything in your reply to me was accurate, it still does not change the fact that the language you posted earlier was ineffectual.

Yes, maybe this administration should afford certain detainees POW status, but you’re going to have to articulate a stronger case if you want to argue that Bush/Cheney would have been hanged by Judges at Nuremberg.

By the way, if they had been ordered hanged would you support such an order? If so, would you support American judges’ orders to hang Gitmo detainees? If not, would you support international judges’ orders to hang Gitmo detainees?

Paul,

Your comment,

"What the torture apologists are missing is that US and Allied forces gathered valuable intelligence from POWs in WWII by simply being themselves"

has already been addressed several times. It wasn't missed.

Mr. Nuzzilillo,

Leaving? Let's be clear: I didn't call you a condescending prick. I said your rhetoric makes you sound like a condescending prick. You actually reaffirmed that in your "Dear John" post:

"For those of among the readership who might take something away from what I have written, take only this: before you condemn the men and women in the difficult position of deciding when or when not to escalate force; before you decide once and for all that some category of action is always immoral and off limits; before you tie the hands of the government that is ostensibly here to protect us, be sure you have given this subject grave and careful thought, for it is of the utmost importance."

The condescension comes in the way you assume we haven't given the subject "grave and careful thought". The prickishness comes from your general tone.

You didn't respond to my request to find out where your objective morals take their root - where these "moral facts" come from - so this is me asking again.

Oh, and I'm curious why you were so selective in your truth telling of the Professor's background: You made light of the fact Mr. Proveti teaches in the Department of French Studies. You may have been "just playing", but you failed to mention that his PhD is in Philosophy from Loyola. Interesting choice.

AX,

“Republicans are bad people. They do indeed want to use waterboarding against patriotic Americans who don't go along with their Conservative Authoritarian views.”

Your most recent post makes me suspect that you're actually a conservative that's trying to cast liberals in a bad light. Either way, you’ve lowered the level of discourse in this debate.

“Republicans want to use waterboarding against patriotic Americans…” I doubt you’re going to find anyone here on either side of this debate to support that crazy statement.

Republican Conservative Authoritarians are dying to torture people. They say, "we gotta torture, we gotta torture, oh please don't stand up for what's right".

You don't have logical discussions with barbarians. Republican Conservative Authoritarians want to see these torture techniques such as waterboarding used on Americans - and in their Hellish Authoritarian version of America you would have Liberals, Conservatives, Moderates - all getting sucked up and disappearing into their system, nobody would be safe and nobody would be free.

Americans do not torture, look it up - The Bill of Rights, the US Constitution, and the anti-torture laws America respects.

Notice it is only these sick, evil, Conservative Republicans who are WRONG about Torture. Liberals are RIGHT. Notice how much Liberals have been right - about Bush, about Iraq, and about Torture - while it is only some Conservative Republicans who are absolutely WRONG.

To Corkie30,

It's easy to confuse who wrote what here, so I understand your mistake, but it wasn't I that originally suggested the administration is guilty of war crimes. I was merely adding a bit of information to the question of what defines a POW. I'm not a lawyer and have very little knowledge in this area, so I pulled the definition from the Geneva Conventions and thought it over.

I have no idea how the four criteria I mentioned have been interpreted by governments and the international court over time, but I do think they should be revisited to address whether our present enemy should be granted the rights of POWs. Though we might not care how Iraqi insurgents are treated, what of countries where we do support insurgents and guerrillas fighting against dictatorial regimes (no, I'm not defining the US in such a way)? Would we not want those governments held accountable for their treatment of prisoners? Again, this is a new line of thought for me, but it's what seems right at first glance.

As for your questions about the death penalty being carried out, I personally think execution is a spineless, barbaric act. Since I'm sure no one wants to get into that argument, I will address your questions hypothetically and say that I do believe in the rule of law. Since America is a nation of laws, no one in the US should be above the law. If Rumsfeld were found guilty of crimes for which the punishment is death, is there an argument that he is any less responsible for his crimes than, say, the soldiers found guilty for abuses at Abu Ghraib?

And, yes, the same would go for detainees (Gitmo or elsewhere) with the very important caveat that I have serious concerns about where and how their cases are being "heard".

Texan,

I'm sorry. I should have checked. Thanks for your great reply.

I have heard a lot of discussion over the objective or subjective nature of the situations whereby someone would be killed/tortured. And one of the arguments has been that even if the WRONG person (i.e. Innocent) was tortured/killed that is acceptable because the greater good is at stake.
(Ticking time bomb scenario / in process rape)

If the argument is that MORALLY we have the obligation to torture someone if there is expected harm then why would you put any limits on the torture? Would it be acceptable to rape and kill the persons family in front of them? How about using those power drills like the insurgents do in Iraq? Mutilation?

Where do you draw the line so that the actions you are doing do not turn you into the monster that you are trying to stop?

And I still haven't heard how you can know with any degree of certainty that the person you are torturing has ACTIONABLE information.

Do we really want to be the country that tortures anyone we "think" is a threat to us? There would need to be an entire industry created to facilitate the torture...has this administration already created that infrastructure with their Blackwaters et al?

freetobeyouandme,

“Where do you draw the line so that the actions you are doing do not turn you into the monster that you are trying to stop?”

I think you’re asking the right question. A line needs to be drawn.

I think you would agree that we are currently debating whether or not water boarding should be within or without the line. The good news is that most of us are not debating whether or not more brutal interrogation tactics should be included within the line.

Personally, I believe that water boarding should be considered out of bounds. However, I respect that others may believe that water boarding is acceptable (even if only marginally).

It seems that you believe that water boarding should be restricted and should be considered torture. What else do you consider torture? Is it torture to tell someone that if they don’t cooperate that they will spend the rest of their life in prison? Is it torture to keep someone awake for 16 hours straight? 18 hours straight? 20 hours straight? Is it torture to use an open hand slap?

I assume that you do approve of some level of interrogation. If so, then please provide me with one example of an interrogation technique which you could approve. Ideally, I’d like to have an example of something which you believe to be acceptable, yet borderline.

Please don’t think that I’m going to disrespect your answers. Everyone can’t possibly agree on this difficult issue.

Mr. Nuzzolillo:

"As I said, those among you who do not believe in objective morals will not understand this argument. But if you do not, it would be foolish for you to even participate in the argument above that level. You can try to convince the sane (just playing ;-)) among us that morals are subjective, but there is literally no reason for you to argue against torture."

You keep saying this, but you’re wrong. For example, one can believe in the subjectivity of morality and be a pragmatist about it – encouraging rules in society that protect individuals, but specifically so that you yourself are protected. You might not want to call this morality because you’re trying to define objective morality as the only real morality, but then this just becomes a matter of semantics.

"But it really doesn't matter if the US is right and al qaeda is wrong for my abstract argument to be valid."

I’m not dealing with your abstract argument but with the specific case at hand. Arguing on your grounds, whether the U.S. is right is paramount according to your “surrounding ethical context.” But whether the U.S. is right is a pretty gray area. Was the U.S. right to invade Iraq, which was not really much of a threat? Is the U.S. right in every single action it’s taken, and if not, at what point is the U.S. wrong? If the Iraq War was wrong, then how does that affect the moral standing of torture performed by the U.S. on combatants in Iraq who may otherwise never have been there?

Again, all you are saying is torture is okay because it’s being done by us (because we’re the good guys), but it’s not okay when it’s done by them (because they’re the bad guys). And in your theater of the absurd, who gets to decide who’s bad and who’s good? Us. Don’t you understand how ridiculous that sounds to any one who disagrees with you?

corkie30:

"Are some of you people making a deliberate attempt to not understand Nuzzolillo’s argument, or is his argument actually escaping you?"

Not escaping, but it is nonsensical. The internal logic is there, it’s the premises that are faulty.

"Is killing another human amoral? Are there ever justified circumstances (beyond self defense) for killing another human? Is it ok to empower our government officials to make this decision?"

I’m one of the subjectivists that Nuzzolillo complains about, but without going into how subjective morality is quite possible, I personally believe that no one should intentionally kill another person outside of self-defense (wars can be considered self-defense). Police officers killing someone can be considered self-defense in that they are charged by society to protect all of us. Also, I don’t agree with the death penalty.

"Why do some of you assume that SERE School type water boarding is conducted in a more controlled environment than water boarding during an actual interrogation? If training and actual water boarding were equally controlled and equal in duration would you be ok with it?"

After arguing that context matters (and I agree), are you actually implying that context doesn’t matter in this instance? No, I would not be okay with it as this is a theoretical that would prove impossible to realize in actual practice.

"For others, what data exists to indicate that water boarding doesn’t render reliable (or actionable) intelligence?"

I am no expert on this matter and have no opinion on it, but the pragmatic trade-off between our reputation/moral high-ground and what would likely be gained through actionable intelligence the vast majority of the time is not worth it in my opinion. Apparently, you agree.

"My fear is that some of you are against winning. I hope I’m wrong."

I think you are very wrong on this. Wanting to win in a way different from Bush/Cheney is not being against winning, although "winning" is probably the wrong word since one is as likely to win a final victory in a war against terror as one is a war against drugs.

Finally, great points, freetobe. Mr. Nuzzolillo makes arguments that sound logical in theory but are exceedingly messy in practice.

Jared Nuzzolillo, your invocation of "ad hominem" and "argument from authority" makes my point for me: you've ingested some jargon from who knows where and spit it out without understanding it.

First of all, I didn't make an ad hominem, which in its fallacious use is to deny the truth of an assertion or the validity of an argument by appeal to the character of the speaker. Instead, I made a professional judgment as to the quality of your arguments. So it's not an "ad hominem" because nothing in my comment was addressed to your character; it was addressed to the poverty of your intellect as it is displayed here, which I am perfectly qualified to judge as a result of my professional status. This is in a sense an appeal to authority, but not all such appeals are fallacious. It's not a fallacy to accept the judgment of an expert; no one considers it fallacious to accept the judgment of an experienced physician as to the quality of the diagnoses of an medical student.

To test my judgment in this case, find 100 professional philosophers and point them to this thread. 50 will laugh at your pretense; 50 will be saddened by your ability to fool others with ill-understood jargon. I just happen to fall in the latter half.

Corkie,

You ask for an interrogation method that is acceptable to me - the below information is an interesting read on how police interrogations / interviews are conducted.

http://lawdev.wlu.edu/deptimages/Students%20for%20an%20Innocence%20Project/Getting%20to%20the%20Truth_FINAL.doc

Here is the Wikipedia definition of interrogation:

Interrogation Techniques

There are multiple possible methods of interrogation including deception, torture, increasing suggestibility, and using mind-altering drugs.

[edit] Suggestibility

The methods used to increase suggestibility are moderate sleep deprivation, exposure to constant white noise, and using GABAergic drugs such as sodium amytal.

[edit] Reid

Main article: Reid Technique

One notable interrogation technique is the Reid technique. However, the Reid technique (which requires interrogators to watch the body language of suspects to detect deceit) has been criticized [1] for being too difficult to apply across cultures and is impracticable for many law enforcement officers.

[edit] Deception

Deception can form an important part of effective interrogation. In the U.S., there is no law or regulation that forbids the interrogator from lying, from making misleading statements or from implying that the interviewee has already been implicated in the crime by someone else.

[edit] Torture

Main article: Torture

Interrogations may involve torture, which is judged to be ineffective at producing accurate information[citation needed] but is effective in getting false confessions which might be useful for political reasons for the officer and organization in question by raising the number of successful investigations.

I believe that all methods short of torture should be used in interrogations.

Jared Nuzzolillo: I am not sure who is technically correct as to Prof. Protevi's claims, but I am sure that a blanket dismissal of your arguments is of little value in the debate.

Substantively, I think that you are confusing "the lesser of evils" concept with morality. In a "Lesser of evils" argument literally anything can be justified- boiling a baby alive for example is always going to be less evil, and by your analysis therefore "moral" when compared to boiling two babies alive.

Morality suggests that there are some things that are not done, come what may. Morality suggest that these things are not done even if, or perhaps especially if, they are effective.

Torture is not forbidden because it isn't effective, it may not be effective for gathering intelligence but it is certainly effective in gaining obedience and obtaining confessions.

Torture is prohibited because it is poison, it will destroy the torturer as surely as the tortured. It will erode the systems of government and the souls of its people.

Worse you are proposing that the power to torture reside in one man, the torturer- or perhaps in one branch of government, the executive. This is a recipe for disaster, avoiding it is worth risking the annihilation of a City.

From long experience we have learned that whatever short term gain may be attained from the rack, the thumb screw, or the waterboard much greater things are sacrificed. We learned this lesson long ago, apparently we are about to relearn it.

John Protevi,

Do you have an opinion regarding the matter being debated? Or are you content to merely assert that Jared Nuzzolillo is a lousy philosopher?

freetobeyouandme,

Thanks for your answer. It’s interesting that you believe that, “moderate sleep deprivation, exposure to constant white noise, and using GABAergic drugs” SHOULD be used in interrogations.

I’m not sure how I feel about exposing someone to constant white noise, etc. I suppose that some would include these methods in the torture category

*BTW, I hope everyone would admit that there’s a difference between attempting to get a confession and attempting to generate useful intelligence.

zvelf, others,

I am not interested in establishing and defending a basis for moral objectivity in this thread. It'd never end. That is why I mentioned that the argument as a whole is only valid should you accept the existence of moral objectivity as a premise.

Ah Mr Protevi,

You said, "I'm offended that your ability to ape philosophical discourse might deceive some here as to your essential childishness". That statement and its ilk are at worst ad hominem, at best demagoguery at its worst. The fact that you keep referring to such things as "essential childishness" and the "poverty of [my] intellect" demonstrates the truth of my claim. Had you spent half the words actually attacking my arguments that you've spent puffing up, attacking me, bragging about it, and then defending the whole silly adventure, we might be having a more civil -- and perhaps even somewhat useful -- discussion right now.

Your "pulling rank" instead of addressing the arguments at hand is probably the clearest example of an argument from authority in actual use that I have ever seen. Maybe you can use this as a (surprisingly) realistic example in your next textbook :-p.

And I think you might just want to poll your colleagues (since polling is always a good measure of truth ;-] ) and ask them if you have here provided an honorable and potent display of your "noble" tradition (which I agree is noble, but found it ironic that you here demonstrated so little that is noble of it to date). Ask them first if they find my conversational argument valid, and then ask them if your conversational argument was valid [My prediction: somewhere near 0 to 0 ;-)].

I don't doubt that you are a perfectly intelligent and well-qualified philosopher. I was just playing about the French Studies thing since we were having a discussion in part about moral squeamishness. In any case, it seems that you were enraged, and anger often leads one to abandon logical and reasonable argument for emotional appeals and pseudo-logic. You can see the same thing happening in my first post in a couple of places.

Finally,

I did intend to stay away (and by that I mean cease commenting, since I am spending too much time on it and don't feel like working late again to make up for it), but I wouldn't want any of the readers to think that the arguments I made had been addressed in any serious manner by Mr Protevi. It would be a real shame for even a single reader, due to lack of focus, indigestion or faulty reasoning, to leave with the sense that if a philosopher says an argument is invalid, it must be so. Maybe I will abstain now but please do not take my absence for acceptance. Perhaps I will answer only in the evenings or on the weekend should he persist (though more likely it would light a fire under me to respond immediately :-/).

In any case, I don't think there is must more to say regarding my central position.

Happy Halloween to all, including Mr Protevi (seriously, I am sure you are a fine gentleman. I wish we had 'met' on other terms).

mlaw230,

Thanks for providing a cogent argument. I actually enjoy responding to such posts.

I am not suggesting that circumstances could ever turn an evil act into a good one. Instead I am suggesting that many (most?) violent actions are amoral per se, and the surrounding context must be known to determine if they are immoral or moral. See my example regarding Paul and Angelina above*. Is it such a leap to presume that the same logic that applies to murder/killing, stealing/capturing, kidnapping/imprisonment, etc can apply to torture/enhanced interrogation? Maybe, but I cannot see why.

• http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/10/waterboarding-is-torture-perio/index.php#comment-763http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/10/waterboarding-is-torture-perio/index.php#comment-763

Mr. Protevi,

You have used your so-called "professional status" as a talking point above. Note here that while I have watched this discussion thread with interest, I am NOT weighing in on either the merits of the original article or any of the points or counterpoints made in said thread.

However, if you are who you claim to be, you have no doubt pounced on one or more of your students for making the same mistake you did above. Your "professional status" is quite irrelevant and of absolutely no value whatsoever to the validity or the truth value of your argument(s), be they immediate inference, syllogism, defeater arguments, or whatever. "Professional" philosophers beg the question, have unstated axioms and presuppositions, make non sequitur arguments, etc., just like everyone else does. The truth value of an argument is no respecter of persons.

Referring to who you are as a "professional" is to commit the genetic fallacy, and again, no doubt you have flunked a student or two for making it. I certainly learned it in my philosophical studies. You're better off simply to avoid the indignation and hostilities and focus on the logic. Lay your case out for people to assess, your detractor can rebut, and so on. This is how good debate is done.

I hope to have this question answered by you.

It is well known that the "fear of death" literally can cause a person to shit their pants. This was described, for example, related to Jews waiting for executed in the Shoah (see film series by that name).

My question: Does waterboarding, which can lead to death if not ended in time, and which leads to the sensation that one is going to die, result in defecation?

This may seem like a small question. But something like that happening might help folks understand the gravity - the physical and psychological degradation - of this process.

Thank you for a response.

zvelf,

You obviously understand Jared Nuzzolillo’s argument. Therefore, my comment was not directed at you. Overall, I agree with your other comments. However;

1. As I stated in #1, you obviously understand why the killing argument was presented. You wrote,

“I personally believe that no one should intentionally kill another person outside of self-defense (wars can be considered self-defense).”

I assume that I could rephrase this and state that you believe it is ok for an agent of government to be entrusted to intentionally kill another person or wage war in certain circumstances.

2. You stated, in response to my question regarding whether you believed water boarding would be ok if it was equally controlled and equal in duration to the water boarding used to train Americans,

“No, I would not be okay with it as this is a theoretical that would prove impossible to realize in actual practice.”

Wouldn’t that be like saying that we should NOT allow the military to drop bombs because any constraints on the use of the bombs would be theoretical and would prove impossible to realize in actual practice.

The military and agencies of the government conduct training and operations which are highly regulated and carefully controlled every day. Believe me when I say that the government is really, really good with bureaucracy. I don’t think it’s unrealistic at all to think that restrictions on water boarding would be strictly followed.

Otherwise, why should we bother having these conversations? If the military and government agencies are disregarding guidelines, then it doesn’t matter what the guidelines state anyway.

If I misunderstood your point, then I apologize.

Seek Wisdom,

That’s a very interesting question. Unfortunately, I don’t know the answer to it.

May I ask (only half jokingly) if you are implying that a “defecation” test be used to determine whether or not a technique should be considered excessively degrading physically and psychologically?

corkie30,

I’m only speculating since I have no personal experience with waterboarding someone else, so take this as you will, but the reason I can’t see the standards of waterboarding an American trainee working the same way as waterboarding an enemy combatant for information is that the mindsets of the person doing the waterboarding would be completely different due to their goals being different. First, I’d be surprised that American trainees are waterboarded to the point where they’d feel like their will is utterly broken or they are near traumatized. Wouldn’t something approximating that be necessary to get an enemy combatant with significant knowledge (meaning you’re not waterboarding Joe Schmoe) to talk? I’m not an optimist when it comes to human behavior and if waterboarding is the worst kind of torture we’ve condoned and it doesn’t get the job done in 5 minutes, I can easily see the torturer or his superior be tempted to "bend the rules" and just try another minute and then another and then another. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about between theory and practice.

The last time we had people in Western history explicitly argue that they had a legal and moral right to apply torture to extract information it was called the Spanish Inquisition.

This should give us pause. The worst aspects of Spanish Empire's religious intolerance - slavery, torture, forced conversion were themselves mirror image reflections of Moorish dynasties like the Almohads and Almovids.

We have no interest in becoming like the people we fight.

all I know for certain is that our enemies who readily employ torture seem to be hanging in with us in just about all theatres of conflict despite the mental energy being consumed on this matter. They are winning the IO war by all practical accounts using a torture mindset as a cornerstone of their message(s). At some point we are going to have to examine what is really transpiring in the shadows of our white hats. Holding the moral high ground and having fat war budgets is not going to get it done. This debate has no direct bearing on the development of nuclear weapons in Iran, the growing strength of the taliban in Afghanistan and the serious potential for real instability in Pakistan. This ongoing morality play is strategically stifling at best.

corkie30: Are you Mr. Nance? Or another poster? I am assuming Mr. Nance would know the answer. But perhaps no one ever asked this before.

I'm glad your question is only a joke. And no, of course, I am not suggesting that we have a "degradation scale" - just a question, given the effects of expecting death on Jews in Nazi Germany. And an interest in things psychological and the effects of trauma. Torture, of course, being one of the worst sorts of trauma.

Thanks, by the way, for your comment.

Corkie30 at 1:24 p.m., you've summed up my contribution here very well. What you do with this is your business.

While I'm thinking about this, if someone is experiencing "torture" as "part of training," I can't help but question whether anyone can truly understand the absolute sense of isolation and total helplessness induced by being detained for long periods in a situation where there is no end in sight, no context of training surrounding the experience, and one feels the utter despair, degradation, humiliation - that must be part of any detention and interrogation "for real."

I'd like to go back to Jared Nuzzolillo's post in which he describes a scenario in which his 2-year old daughter is being held by pornographers.

If you watch many police procedural/forensic shows on TV (Law and Order, NCIS, Bones, The Unit, the CSI shows, etc.), you'll know that we are constantly under attack from terrorists. It's a major source of scripts. (I love these shows, but they are FANTASY). Mr. Nuzzolillo's scenario is similar to one on a recent L&O: SVU in which an attorney, played by Steven Weber, says that, as a cop, he prevented something similar by torturing the perp. If anybody has any credible evidence that anything like that has ever happened, I'd love to hear about it. (The irony is, based on blog posts of his that I've seen, Mr. Weber isn't likely to agree with his character's actions.)

Alan Dershowitz uses such a hypothetical situation as a teaching technique. He's written a book about it. (Don't remember the name.) My comment to Prof. Dershowitz is the same. Has this scenario ever happened and is even possible? It seems more a matter for Talmudic scholars than for serious security professionals.

I am not a fan of the war on terror. If terrorists really wanted to wreak havoc on the United States, a few simultaneous C4 attacks (or even one) on tanker cars carrying liquid chlorine in urban areas would more than do the trick. The Washington Post reported this just after 9/11. Frankly, I believe that the lack of terrorist attacks here since 9/11 has very little to do with the war on terror and much to do with the fact that Bin Laden accomplished everything he set out to do.

Franklin Roosevelt was so right when he said, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, blind unreasoning terror."

Two points:

While I vehemently disagree with Jared Nuzzolillo's position(s), I must say that even if Mr Protevi is correct in his broad assertions, it would be far more effective for him to "decimate" the actual arguments, rather than asserting superior knowledge and expecting the readers to accept his judgments at face value. Very disappointing.

Secondly, as others attempted to point out, the most serious and disturbing flaw in Nuzzolillo's argument is the notion that "good" and "evil" can somehow be identified with precision, and that someone in the government would be empowered to make such a decision. That is not just wrong, but outrageously so, and if the government is allowed to torture people, the one absolutely CERTAIN result will be that, just like the death penalty, innocent people will suffer as a result.

Goesh,

It's arguments like yours that really scare me the most. You said:

"At some point we are going to have to examine what is really transpiring in the shadows of our white hats. Holding the moral high ground and having fat war budgets is not going to get it done."

If all this country and its history amounts to for you is a vehicle for your own personal safety and prosperity, then this argument makes sense. If that is the case, then we should surely do whatever is necessary to protect ourselves, to the point of kidnapping, torturing, and killing anyone whom we perceive to be a threat.

If, however, it is our "white hats" that set us apart, if this idea of America as a "beacon of freedom" is to be more than an election year slogan, then the shadows must remain the refuge of our enemies - even at our own peril.

I have to admit that reading this article made me rethink a few things. I always considered waterboarding as something relatively painless... I guess I was wrong.

Nuzzolillo's argument is wrong even on its own terms (which are flawed as well). It is obviously possible for torture to be worse than death. Otherwise it would be pointless to use it on people like suicide bombers or even front-line soldiers, who are perfectly willing to die for their beliefs but cannot withstand torture. The whole point of torture is that it is a deeper insult to the human spirit and human dignity than simple death is.

There is therefore no logical contradiction at all between seeking the death of one's enemies and refusing to torture them. A decision that the evil of torture outweighs any possible good that might theoretically come from it is morally perfectly coherent and consistent.

There's a ton of other reasons Nuzzolillo's arguments are wrong -- scarily wrong -- but that's one of the obvious ones.

America is supposed to be the good guys. America does not torture. Torture is against the US Constitution, Torture is against the Bill of Rights, Torture is against Christianity, and Waterboarding is torture.

Giuliani, Romney, Thompson, Brownback - just like Mukasey and Cheney and Bush, have stained America's virtues.

America needs our honor and integrity RESTORED. Republicans are trying to drag America into an Authoritarian Hell, where people can be detained and tortured on orders from the Commander in Chief.

Waterboarding is controlled drowning - filling a helpless prisoner's lungs with water. It does cause defecation - as the guy was asking earlier - yes - and it can easily cause death.

Conservatives want to have it every which way. We don't torture - but waterboarding may or may not be torture. We don't torture - but guilty terrorists should be tortured. If waterboarding isn't torture, then it isn't illegal to say "George Bush should be waterboarded". If waterboarding isn't torture, then how long till some little kid waterboards his younger brother?

Conservatives are up to their necks in responsibility for promoting torture. Once torture is okay for "guilty" terrorists, pretty soon its okay for "guilty" criminals. After all, some ridiculous hypothetical flim-flam argument or excuse can be thrown together in support of it.

Conservatism = Big Brother Running Wild.

Where are the moral, ethical, decent, patriotic Conservative Americans willing to stand up for what is right. ?

Thanks to everyone for making this one of the most cerebral internet discussions I’ve participated in for a long time. I’m equally impressed with the general level of intelligence and general level of civility on this web page.

AX, you’re somewhat of an exception to this, but you’re still ok. :)

Jeremy Jet and others, why do you think comments like those of Nuzzolillo are worth refuting? The position he defends is morally depraved and engaging with it lends it a respectability it doesn't deserve. We have on the one hand, Malcolm Nance, who is "former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the US Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego, California," a man of honor, integrity, and experience. On the other, we have Jared Nuzzolillo, who has the temerity to try to tell Nance, who actually knows what he's talking about, that his (Nuzzolillo's) speculations about torture have something to add to the discussion.

Look guys, Nuzzolillo is running an old internet troll scam on you all: play the tough guy and propose depraved and obnoxious positions at extraordinary length and blown up with half-understood jargon, but do it with false "civility," as with his "sir" and "Mr." and so on. Then when someone calls him on the depravity and obnoxiousness of his positions, he can always play the civility card, or when they refuse to treat him with a seriousness he doesn't deserve, he can play the wounded, misunderstood intellectual card.

The bottom line: dealing with Nuzzolillo and other torture apologists is a litmus test. If you can't recognize the empty shell of his bluster, the pathetic rationalizations of his masturbatory fantasies, the essential depravity of his writing, then shame on you all. It would be shameful to engage him as if he deserved anything other than the scorn of decent people, and I refuse to give him any more than that, and neither should you.

Jared Nuzzo, in his very first comment, wrote:

"How sad. You (Malcom Nance of SERE) have the audacity to designate the brave men and women of our armed service -- who perform their duty by water-boarding men of admittedly unspeakable evil -- to be morally comparable to their enemies. You arguments are demagogic and specious."

Any basis for a cerebral, respectful discussion? Accusing a SERE instructor of aiding
Al Qaida - just because the SERE instructor won't go along with your Authoritarian, pro-torture philosophy?

Jared Nuzzo, continued in his very first comment:

Nuzzo: "This is at the least irresponsible and wrongheaded, or worse -- in accusing honorable men of profound evil -- morally negligent. You sir and your ilk are enabling the criminals of al Qaeda to employ the argument of moral justice -- bin Laden's favorite when addressing the West"

AGAIN, accusing the SERE instructor of aiding Al Qaida - just because he doesn't go along with your Conservative, Republican, Authoritarian support for torture. The SERE instructor put the uniform on, served his country - and you spit on him, accusing him of helping the enemy.

Nuzzo: "By comparing our brave men and women to the denizens of Hitler, Stalin, Saddam and Pol Pot, you invoke images of pure hell and sadism"

AGAIN, stooping to dishonesty and smearing the SERE instructor. The SERE instructor didn't compare our "brave" men and women to evil people, he compared our "cowardly" men and women, who are willing to carry out illegal and sadistic orders for expediency, and that is exactly 100% the truth - though you may not like it. The "brave", patriotic Americans are the men like Malcom Nance, who stand up for what is right.

Nuzzo: "In conclusion, your piece is interesting, but at worst vile and at best terribly misguided. I am almost entirely certain that in your case it is the latter. Sadly, that is not the case when our most dangerous enemies employ almost the exact same arguments"

AGAIN, accusing a patriotic American of collaborating with the enemy, just because he doesn't go along with your Authoritarian, Conservative, Republican views in favor of torture.

WHERE, is the basis for a cerebral discussion? CAN there be a basis for discussion, when you immediately accuse a patriot of helping the enemy, in typical Republican Authoritarian fashion?

This is amusing in that supremely annoying, silly sort of way; like how a petulant child's courage and recalcitrance can be at once both endearing and terribly miserable.

You accuse me of faulty logic and deploy fallacious argument after fallacious argument in an attempt to convince others that my arguments are incorrect.

You accuse me of bluster, yet have submitted the most blustery, vacuous comments found in the entire thread. Do you even know the meaning of the word "bluster"?

Believe me, I am not trolling. I feel very strongly that it is of the utmost importance to have a consistent moral basis upon which to discern the proper application of force and that our moral system does not restrain us in the defense of innocents beyond that which is necessary, according to reason and conscience.

But now that you mention it, I wonder if you are trolling... In all seriousness, you have contributed nothing but name-calling, rants and faulty logic. If indeed you are a professional philosopher (and at this stage I would probably be wholly convinced otherwise if you hadn't also posted to your long-established blog), you should hope that your students do not stumble across this truly sad demonstration of the powers and procedures of "professional philosophy".

Ax, in almost every single section you quoted, I provided two possibilities -- that the article was a terrible mistake due to faulty logic or lack of due caution, or that it was to irresponsible to the point of being morally negligent. Not once did I claim that it was likely Mr Nance had set out to aid our enemies; in fact, I said that the opposite was most likely. The point was not that he was plotting to aid al Qaeda by writing this sort of article, but instead that in accusing the men and women of our intelligence agencies of gross evil, he may (accidentally) contribute to the growing movement in our nation that struggles to create a sense of moral equivalence between al Qaeda and our military. I am sick of the sloganeering and demagoguery surrounding this important issue.

The fact of the matter is this: when addressing Western audiences, al Qaeda is terribly fond of making the argument that they are David acting only in self-defense, against a brutal, greedy and sadistic Goliath. Many among us (ie, Americans) accept this argument or some version of it, and any argument which supports it is potentially dangerous -- not necessarily immoral, but potentially dangerous nonetheless.

Beyond that, I think it is wrong to make a blanket assumption regarding the moral character of anyone, especially people who choose to serve and protect our nation.

As I already admitted in a response to Master of All Knowledge Protevi (now that is a snide honorific, taken directly from Mr Protevi's writings), "[I was angry when writing my first post, and one can see in some places that] anger often leads one to abandon logical and reasonable argument for emotional appeals and pseudo-logic". But my arguments still stand, aside from their unfortunate or irresponsible initial delivery.

Former jihadists have admitted that they are served when Americans accuse their government of evil conduct. This is likely compounded when the accuser is a man of stature or part of that government. This does not render the accusations false, or even suggest that one should not make such accusations if they are in fact true. But it does imply that one should tread very carefully should they decide to make such an accusation, and that it should be done calmly and without resort to demagoguery.

Best wishes.

Nuzzo, No Americans accept Al Qaida's propaganda, or any version of it. Rejecting the Authoritarian Conservative pro-torture pro-waterboarding propagand of You, Bush, Cheney, Thompson, Giuliani, Romney, and other Republicans, IS NOT equivalent to accepting Al Qaida's propaganda in any way. Besides, your comments were addressed to a SERE instructor, who certainly does not embrace ANY VERSION of Al Qaida propaganda whatsoever.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/05/AR2007100502492_pf.html

Money quote:

"We did it with a certain amount of respect and justice," said John Gunther Dean, 81, who became a career Foreign Service officer and ambassador to Denmark.

The interrogators had standards that remain a source of pride and honor.

"During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone," said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. "We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I'm proud to say I never compromised my humanity."

If we didn't stoop to the level of the Nazis, why should we stoop to that of a bunch of criminals?

Waterboarding Instruction Video on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GcXl1y_mQw

This is a video that good people will not want to watch. If you enjoy this video it's a good bet that you're psychotic.

Careful, now don't ever tell anybody the truth about this video, because if you do, you're helping Al Qaida.

President Bush has stated that "America does not torture." I'm prepared to accept that.

Mr Nance states that "Waterboarding is torture." I'm prepared to accept that.

Mr Nance states "Is There a Place for the Waterboard? Yes. The waterboard must go back to the realm of SERE training our operators, soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines." I can accept that. I'd call this "limited waterboarding".

The difference between "waterboarding" and "limited waterboarding" should be subject to careful definition. Perhaps Mr Nance can provide a suitable legally enforceable definition.

These considerations may influence Mr Mukasey's reluctance to be drawn on the details of the subject, particularly given Congress's inability to provide clear legislated guidelines.

I just want to say thank you for saying this. I wrote a doctoral dissertation on the history of torture recently, and although the dissertation was begun before the release of the Bush Torture Memos, I suddenly found myself embroiled in a very of-the-moment topic. The most frustrating thing about watching our country lose its honor has been that I know better than what the politicians have told us. It's written in every interview of former torturers or interrogation personnel, in every textbook and scholarly investigation of the subject, in every worldwide survey of technique use and effectiveness: torture is NOT a reliable source of information. It is impossible to get accurate information quickly with torture techniques; all it accomplishes is to open our own personnel to torture in retaliation. It's been painful to see our country make this mistake, and I thank you, as someone to whom people will listen, for speaking out to try and correct some of the gross misapprehensions that have crept into this 'debate' that should never have been.

I wish that posters on this thread would take the time to inform themselves before offering opinions. Several times, I've seen people mention 'How do we know that torture/waterboarding is ineffective? They say it works, so we should use it, it save lives.' The answer to the question there is simple. There is a LOT of documentation about torture techniques, going all the way back to the pre-medieval period. Torturers have written about their craft, victims have written about their circumstances, prisoners have written letters to families and interrogators have written reports for judicial bodies (yes, for a long time torture was a legitimate part of the judicial process for most of Europe. This was beofre forensics was invented. When forensics did come about, every country that had been using torture dropped it from their judicial slate. Why? Because they found that it was producing inaccurate evidence.). From the French judicial torturers alone, there are over 10,000 pages of manuscripts discussing various techniques, their efficacy, and the length of time it takes to gain 'good' information from them. More recently, governments and NGOs have made extensive efforts to document torture in both war and peace times, from the perspective of victims, torturers, and the bureaucrats that act on information produced. Vietnam alone produced thousands of anecdotes and hundreds of written reports from interrogators. Korea was similarly well-documented, thousands of interviews and written records. The Japanese government kept meticulous records of their interrogations during WWII. There is a beautifully and chillingly clear written record of the Armenian torture regimes under French colonization. Egypt, France, China, Cuba, various African and South American countries: all of these have (within the last 70 years) been involved in extensive torture operations, and kept written records. The victim's perspective in all of this have been filled in by interviews conducted by the UN, various governments (often in preparation for trials about recompense to victims), and human rights organizations like Amnesty Intl and the Red Cross. Lest you be laboring under the mistaken idea that torture techniques are secret and not well understood, let me make this clear: we have a VERY GOOD idea of how torture works, and when it is effective. So when experts like this say 'It doesn't work', they aren't just relaying anecdotes based on personal experience. They're talking about the collective experience of thousands of people, in thousands of different situations. Despite this, the conclusion doesn't change: only in the rarest cases will torture provide reliable information that was inattainable by other, less violent means. Over and over, people say, "We got it wrong, and we lost a little of our humanity in the process."

It. Doesn't. Work.

Those who would rather see LA hit by a nuclear weapon and send Jack Bauer to prison for trying to get information to stop it have made their moral choice and if they are not in LA at the time the bomb goes off will have to live with their feelings of moral superiority.

If LA is blown up by a nuclear weapon it will be because some Jack Bauer-wannabe is wasting time torturing a suspect instead of doing something that would actually be effective in stopping such a plot from succeeding.

If that happens I just hope you'll be able to live with knowing that your sadistic thrills came at the cost of the lives of millions of American citizens.

Dan, I wish'd I'd said what you just said,
here these Authoritarian Scholars are accusing anyone who's against torture of endangering national security.

"America has to torture, because otherwise the terrorists are going to blow up Los Angeles"

"Now, I'm not saying don't tell the truth - just think about it and be careful - because if you tell the truth you're helping the terrorists"

"Don't oppose torture, because I don't care how much you've served your country, if you oppose torture you're attacking our troops".

And we all know these kinds of arguments, we've heard them over and over and over again, from these kinds of people - many of them in high office.

Anna S: Well put, I second you.

For another twenty-year veteran leaving in disgust, see http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15783244

NAd again, i put to the military people here, as a NATO ally: Do you really want a independent torture unit? Its all very very early Stalin, and we know how it went with the Red Army generals in 1920. What will you do when the tsjeka comes for you?

Eddie, who is currently behind the Great Navy Firewall, has 10 questions on torture.

"To defeat Bin Laden many in this administration have openly embraced the methods of by Hitler, Pinochet, Pol Pot, Galtieri and Saddam Hussein."

For the love of God can we PLEASE ban the Pol Pot and Hitler comparisons until we actually have a genocide in place? Or does that take all the fun out of it?

Anna,

1. You stated,

“only in the rarest cases will torture provide reliable information that was inattainable (sic) by other, less violent means”

Are you saying that torture IS effective in rare cases?

2. You also stated,

“So when experts like this say 'It doesn't work', they aren't just relaying anecdotes based on personal experience. They're talking about the collective experience of thousands of people, in thousands of different situations.”

I doubt that everyone who states “it doesn’t work” is an expert and basing it on the collective experience of thousands of people. So, who are these experts that ARE basing their statements on the collective experience of thousands of people? Also, is there any way you can share or at least convey their research methods?

I found the article persuasive, but was troubled by a lingering thought, and found courage in what Mr. Nuzzolillo wrote.

To summarize: Nothing is evil of itself, but the spirit in which it is done.

In a natural world, if my wife or daughter were taken from me, I would stop at nothing to get her back. I would beg, steal, torture, maim, kill. In that order, until my objective were attained. And I would be at peace with God in doing so.

@Jared N:
I still look forward to an example where killing in self-defence would be immoral (and I don't think I'll accept "what if you're insert monster who isn't Hitler or Pol Pot here?" as that's too easy, and I think that most evil people don't believe they're evil, just "doing what needs to be done for the greater good". I'm looking for arguments that prove that we are good, or at least better than the side we are fighting/torturing/killing, outside of the us vs. them perspective that we all have. I want an argument (dammit, I always spell argument with an extra e) that, if the situation was reversed, and the Muslims were the west and the Christians the East (that's how they see us, anyways), that I would see that torture of Americans was sometimes/always/never justified, or the same with terror tactics, ICBMs. I'm looking for a TOE for morality here, people!

Also, I went to monsieur Protevi's blog, and whereas I didn't defend your viewpoint, I did defend your civility and attacked his lack of arguement. Dammit, I say that philosopher's are only good for conversation, so make an argument. Otherwise, what good are you at a party? "What is reality? You wouldn't know, so get me a drink!"

As far as where I'm coming from, most of the time I ask "what would Jesus do?", but sometimes I say "who would I kick the crap out of?", or "what wouldn't the church do?" (this one is, unfortunately, the same as the WWJD? answer...) Leaders must sometimes make unsavoury (I'm canadian, so excuse the spelling) decisions, but they also have to live with these sins (I'm sure someone said something about this, so I'll wrongly attribute it to Churchill, as he was a great source of quotes).

Also, I also don't think too much before I post (ADD does have a couple of drawbacks), but I'm humble, and have no problem admitting when I said something stupid ;) So if I say something stupid, let me know, people! I'm here to serve.

Do you believe it is necessary to actually have a genocide in order to compare the methods embraced by this administration which are similar and/or equal to those "of by Hitler, Pinochet, Pol Pot, Galtieri and Saddam Hussein."?

Yes, as anything else only displays either a weak command of English or a shocking lack of historical perspective. Since the author is also responsible for gems like " Now our enemies will take the gloves off and thank us for it" it is difficult to determine if the problem lies in lack of education or willful ignorance.

Stay on topic. I've had several requests to close comments because of flippant remarks.

Moreover, I'm not going to allow any attacking the messenger posts. We pride ourselves at SWJ on professional discourse - maintain that standard here and we will keep this discussion open. For those that saw fit to launch a personal attack - I'm deleting your posts.

I'm late to this, but what a great post -- factual, logical and devastating. Thank you for your service to our country, both in the military and with this post.

Corkie,

1. Yes, I am saying that, in the sense that 'even a broken watch is right twice a day'. Even ineffective techniques will on rare occasions turn up information. This is not an argument for using them as a matter of policy, and it is not a point in favor of using torture techniques. In the vast majority of cases, interrogators will waste time, money, and effort on torturing when other methods of interrogation or information gathering would have been more efficacious. But it would be dishonest to deny that torture ever works. Almost never works? Yes. But never (full stop) is a very long time.

2. I was referring to Mr. Nance specifically when I said 'experts like these', as he makes reference in his essay to having made a study of torture techniques and their efficacy through various recent wars. But if you want other experts, or references to surveys of torture techniques through various historical periods, I would point you in the direction of Edward Peters' book "Torture", which, though a little dated now, is nonetheless an excellent survey of early torture methods, continuing up through Vietnam and Korea. More recently, look to reports from Amnesty International (start with the pamphlet "Torture in the Eighties", and move up to the yearly reports which have been published for the last two decades) for good, broad overviews. AI generally attempts to document the types and frequency of torture techniques in use by various nations. To get deeper into the topic, it helps to have a letter from a university or the government (or both), which would open doors to foriegn government archives for the reports I mentioned above.

Thanks for answering, Anna.

1. Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough with my first question. I apologize.

Using your example, a broken clock might be exactly right twice a day, but it is NOT an effective predictor of time. A sun dial might be more than 50% useless (at night and during cloudy days) and never be exactly right, however, under certain conditions, it is very effective predictor of time. These conditions are easy to identify (sun is shining) before a prediction is made so that the predictor can have confidence in the prediction.

In fact, studying seasonal response to the sun dial would increase its efficacy. Therefore, earlier users (before seasonal studies were performed) of the sun dial wouldn’t have the accuracy benefit of the seasonal knowledge.

You had stated,

“we have a VERY GOOD idea of how torture works, and when it is effective”

and you stated,

“in the rarest cases will torture provide reliable information.”

So I assumed that you were implying that there are conditions under which torture was considered effective (much like my sun dial example). However, according to your description of your answer, it sounds as if you did not mean to imply this (despite your, “Yes” answer. I wasn’t trying to catch you on the scientific definition of efficacy.

2. Thank you for providing those sources. It is very greatly appreciated. I will certainly attempt to reference them and study their scientific approaches. Until then, I don’t feel comfortable making any assertions regarding the effectiveness of torture. However, I will still feel comfortable commenting on the credibility of assertions of others.

Aleph,

Thanks again.

You said "I think that most evil people don't believe they're evil, just 'doing what needs to be done for the greater good'". This is the crucial place where we differ, at least in part. The denizens of jihad should know better, and that they don't (or more correctly, that they refuse to admit that they do know better) is indicative of supreme and vile moral weakness. They are unwilling to follow their conscience, most likely due to a lack of courage, or perhaps at times as an excuse to seek revenge unfettered by moral constraints. Each time they raise their hand in violence, I suspect that deep, deep inside them, their conscience screams and they willingly deafen their ears to it. They fear being outcast from their community, disowned, and in many cases, killed for apostasy.

If one doubts the worthiness of their cause, they should suspend violent action until such time as that doubt can be eliminated.

I suspect some of the men I have in mind have conditioned themselves to not respond to their souls own prodding. Having done this, they have accepted moral culpability for all of the future acts that this most grave and terrible decision enables.

One of my favorite phrases from the Bible is "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness". Whether or not one believes that the Bible is true, or that this verse is factual in the context that it was intended, is wholly immaterial to my reason for mentioning it. That phrase, "men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness", most powerfully, succinctly and artfully communicates my stance on this subject.

Best wishes, always.

I really don't have the time to do clean-ups in aisles 1, 2, 3 and 4. Keep it civil - last warning. I've done some clean-up, will do some more and probably missed several. Bottom-line - clean-up means delete.

Thanks for understanding folks.

Jared:
I can't say what I would believe if I were born into Afghanistan or Iraq, but I've talked to people who lived and worked within muslim countries for years, and many (I won't say most, as I'm not sure of the numbers) see that the reason for the world's inequality of wealth, suffering, etc. is due to the hypocrisy of the "Christian" west. The majority of the world's wealth is held by us, without sharing with the poor, as we should, if we followed Christ's example. "Christian" society produces most of the world's pornography, violent and "offensive" media, etc. Because there is no separation of faith and day-to-day life in the East, they think the same of Western countries, and view "Christians" as hypocrites. I can then see how some people, already with very little if anything to lose, can become entrenched in "Jihad" idealism, trying to overthrow the shackles that they see the West has put on the Muslim world. I feel that many suicide bombers are probably uneducated, and brainwashed by someone with authority that this is for the greater good of mankind, and not someone who does it because they "hate freedom".

Anyways, I'd still like to hear an argument on how we can torture, and not sink down to a level where we can "prove" that we are the good guys, even to someone of a different perspective (convince that they're on the wrong side, like some Germans who realized that their beliefs were wrong).

"victims of torture like Senator John McCain. If you want consistent, accurate and reliable intelligence, be inquisitive, analytical, patient but most of all professional, amiable and compassionate."

Would Sen. McCain have betrayed his country more if the interrogators had been inquisitive, analytical, patient, professional, amiable and compassionate? Would he then have taken that early release he was offered? As he has already said he broke under torture and revealed information that he should not have, it seems that he is trying to have this argument both ways. Torture does not work, except when it does.

I think this entire discussion also leaves out the purpose of torture. While it is possible to get information, both accurately and timely, from torture, it is not very reliable. However releasing human zombies into the society from which they came, broken tortured men, you do achieve a certain,powerful, level of control. This is rarely addressed, and is by far the most effective use of torture. The information is trivial in the big picture, the cold deep fear that it instills in anyone who dares cross them, is to quote Master Card,priceless.

SWJED - thanks - I've been the biggest violator of civility. Military folks like to be civil and polite even when it isn't easy. I have nothing civil to add to this discussion because I am so angry about this topic. I'll lurk quietly - I really appreciate this opportunity to comment on this dreadful topic.

he majority of the world's wealth is held by us, without sharing with the poor, as we should, if we followed Christ's example. "Christian" society produces most of the world's pornography, violent and "offensive" media, etc. Because there is no separation of faith and day-to-day life in the East, they think the same of Western countries, and view "Christians" as hypocrites.

The quality of Arab porn is actually quite high, not nearly as widely distributed as western porn, but there is a very enthusiastic audience. In terms of violent and offensive porn and media, that decidedly unchristian Japan leaves everyone else in the dust. Religious hypocrites should actually just be run together like a big German word as I tend to use them in that fashion.

@ Dbltap:

I don't think you caught the gist of my argument. I'm not talking about how things are, I'm talking about how the Muslim world views us.

I'm not sure if Japan is targeted by radical Muslims in the same way, as there is also no history between them. (Well, there is a history between Japan and some eastern countries that are now muslim, I think, but there have never been religious wars between them. Maybe that makes a difference.)

Radical Muslims see the Americas and Europe as the source of these evils. Muslim countries may have porn, but is is not accepted and flaunted as it is here, and muslims would say it's because we tainted the world. Doesn't have to be reality, but it is how they see it.

I'm asking that if someone says that it can be moral to "do whatever it takes to win" sometimes, then what differentiates us from "the bad guys" if we both will resort to torture or worse, and call it moral.

Or something like that. I'm all pissed out now, and low on vinegar.

I think there are a number of problems with Jared Nuzolillo's argument.

The most glaring one, to me, is made stark by his misunderstanding of moral relativism, as evidenced by his implication that "the law of a land can render an otherwise moral act immoral", a potential he decries when admonishing another poster against using the Nuremberg rules as a moral yardstick. This is incorrect. The law of a land is immaterial in considerations of morality. That is, laws may be moral, but not necessarily. The question is how the determination of whether a particular act is moral or not, not whether it is legal.

This is in one sense consistent because Mr. Nuzolillo attempts to confine the discussion to what is moral, not what is legal, but it is also odd because Mr. Nuzolillo seems to be making an argument of moral permissibility (or perhaps moral compulsion) to torture, based, as he says, on the circumstances. This is in fact the definition of moral relativism. Whereas moral absolutism says that particular acts are always immoral, moral relativism says that the answer to whether a given act is moral or not is 'it depends on the circumstances'.

I think the more useful distinction here would be one of deontological vs. consequential ethics. Deontological ethics, which have a strong tradition in religions such as Catholicism, hold that certain acts are immoral in and of themselves (in the example of Catholicism, usually because they offend God).

Consequentialism, on the other hand, holds that the morality or immorality of an act is determined by weighing the outcomes, good and bad, of performing that particular act. It is therefore compatible with the matching of means and ends which Mr. Nuzolillo attempts here.

Personally, I think Mr. Nuzolillo is correct in his method of separating law and morality but wrong in the conclusions he draws.

Because the law is designed to protect our rights and to determine explicitly what powers may be exercised and when by the government, it is dangerous to give the ability to torture the imprimatur of legal sanction. In fact, if one wishes to make the case that, morally, there are circumstances which torture is justified, the law should provide no safe harbor whatsoever. This would serve to make the moral profundity of the potential torturer's action even clearer: despite the risk to himself and his freedom, he did what he must do, and will suffer the consequences of the law, come what may. If we ask our people in uniform to die to protect us and our rights, why is it unreasonable to ask them to risk potential prosecution for stepping over the line?

I personally find the possibility that this could ever realistically be a plausible scenario (as others have pointed out elsewhere, the possibility of the ticking time bomb, we KNOW we have the right person, etc. all coming to pass are negligible), but I suppose one could construct some extreme scenario whereby it could be argued that that is the duty of the interrogator, but extremely unlikely hypotheticals make bad law.

Speaking strictly morally, the admonition to never torture is actually more defensible, because it is a more consistent position e.g. no moral relativism or situational ethics required to explain - it's just a bedrock principle of human rights, moral absolute etc. This just begs a whole larger discussion of why it's a bedrock principle, how do you determine what are good underpinnings to your ethics, Divine Command Theory etc. There is a lot more to say here, for which I don't have the time...

Just my $.02 for now.

Aleph Null,

"I'm asking that if someone says that it can be moral to 'do whatever it takes to win' sometimes, then what differentiates us from 'the bad guys' if we both will resort to torture or worse, and call it moral."

I don't know if others are saying that, but I know I am not. Instead, I am arguing that the use of ever-escalating levels of force can be justified if and only if one has been rationally convinced that their opponent is evil and that he is extremely likely to be withholding information that could be used to protect innocents.

This is why one could arguably be justified in torturing, say, KSM, but not in torturing, say, a Pashtun who has never left his valley and knows only that someone has come to attack him in his home. That Pashtun is not necessarily evil, and accordingly must be treated with all of the courtesies afforded to a traditional prisoner of war.

This criterion is also what rules out al Qaeda's capture and justified torture of one of our soldiers. They must have a high degree of certainty that our soldier's intent in fighting them is evil before they could contemplate escalating force. Then they'd need to be able to justify that the reason that they seek to torture him is just -- ie, that their goal in torturing him is noble. And al Qaeda would never be able to justify that they are noble given their goals and methods (including attacking and torturing those that are not evil!).

I should also say that taking the minimum action needed to defend oneself, when it is not reasonably clear whether an attacker is acting morally, could be justified. But once the threat has been removed, one could not justify further escalation of force without possessing a high degree of certainty that the attacker had evil intentions and that the attacker is withholding information that could be used in the defense of oneself or others.

This line of reasoning assumes that the actors in question do not have an anomalous condition that prevents them from differentiating between right and wrong, should they be willing to do so. If humans do not have such an ability, than I don't think one can justify violence in any case -- even self-defense -- because one would not know if self-defense is moral.

I am tired, so please forgive me the sorry state of this comment.

Null

The Arab street views us with the same level of hypocrisy that the US street views them. I am however a tad concerned about taking moral pointers from people who view stoning as a solution to adultery and tipping a rock wall on a person as a definitive cure for homosexuality. Hmmm that's it! Iran and the UAE sent all their queers to the Taliban.

The arguments for an against torture quickly turn into intellectual masturbation. American prisoners in the present conflicts will be treated just as badly pre,post or present water boarding. To say other wise ignores the facts on the ground.

To say that American Jurisprudence will collapse because KSM got a boo boo or some other dirtball got an attitude adjustment from the Egyptians is just plain silly. Go to your local VFW or RSL and buy a shot and a beer for some of the greatest generation and then sit back and listen to the loving and patient way they treated captured Germans and Japanese. We survived WWII, the Civil War and other challenges this too will pass.

Torture is an ugly business, a bit of both parties souls are taken, much like killing. However there are times when we as a society or a tribe must say that the rules are now a bit different or we will no longer have any rules at all.

Maimonedes,

Thank you for contributing an interesting comment.

I am pretty sure you've misunderstood me. I said "and to think otherwise would be to accept actual moral relativism; eg, that the law of a land can render an otherwise moral act immoral". In other words, the legality of an act has literally no bearing on whether the act is immoral. I was giving an example of moral relativism that I outright reject.

My claim (with regards to objective/relative morality) is that there is a universal, timeless and firm fact of the matter as to whether any particular act is moral or not. But that fact can only be discerned by taking into consideration the motivation behind the act; that, generally speaking, a description of an act that omits the mental state of the actor is not sufficient to determine whether an act is justified morally.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this position, is that it is very similar to what most people believe in practice. People like to say that lying is wrong, but when they learn that the liar was lying to save his family from a murderer, they decide that his lying was morally justified. People are quick to say that killing is wrong, but almost without fail make exceptions for accidental killing or self-defense. The common man will decry stealing, but hails as hero the courageous soldier who captures a supply depot. And so and so on. The common arch here is that one cannot accurately discern the moral status of an act without knowing the intent of the actor.

This does not, as far as I can tell, imply that there is not a fact of the matter as to whether any specific act is evil or good; instead, it suggests that that fact is in large part determined by intent (but I would stress that proper moral action requires not just 'good intention' but also: the responsibility to be prudent in moral judgments, especially those bearing on the application of force; the necessity that one be entirely willing to accept what reason and conscience dictate; etc...).

There are some problems with this approach to moral "philosophy", but I have yet to encounter an approach that better explains proper moral reasoning.

While all of this might seem like it is dreadfully off topic, it is crucial to understanding my argument that the act of torture per se is amoral (provided one does not define "torture" in a manner similar to "sadistically inflicting great pain upon another").

As always, best wishes.

And just to head off the claim that the essential commonality among my examples is instead that the actors are engaged in battle, consider instead for a moment the hypothetical example of a man who fires a gun at a target while at the gun range. Just as he fires, a child steps out in front of the gun, is struck by the bullet and dies. Is the shooter guilty of an evil act? Of course not, and it is only knowledge of his intent (shooting a target at a gun range) that leads to understanding the moral status of his act. This scenario doesn't need to be likely for it to support my claim; instead, it need only be logically possible that the scenario could occur.

"For those of among the readership who might take something away from what I have written, take only this: before you condemn the men and women in the difficult position of deciding when or when not to escalate force; before you decide once and for all that some category of action is always immoral and off limits; before you tie the hands of the government that is ostensibly here to protect us, be sure you have given this subject grave and careful thought, for it is of the utmost importance."

Thank you for advisory about giving the subject careful thought...I have, and I don't see how anyone who has issues with waterboarding as torture is condemning anyone.

Waterboarding is torture, and thus wrong.

I could easily torture a pedophile who confessed to the whereabouts of my missing daughter. I could bring myself to end his life after I extracted that information, in fact. I would fully expect that I would be jailed, tried, and perhaps sentenced, b/c what I did was against the law.

A professional staff non-commissioned officer I know frames life pretty easily. Right is right, and wrong is wrong. Sometimes it is that black and white, whether we want to spend hours defining morality.

Mr. Protevi, thank you for your excellent breakdown of the "intellectual" internet troll. It very clearly explains the debate techniques employed by someone who very clearly "gets under my skin."

Nuzzolillo digging the hole deeper:

You said "I think that most evil people don't believe they're evil, just 'doing what needs to be done for the greater good'". This is the crucial place where we differ, at least in part. The denizens of jihad should know better, and that they don't (or more correctly, that they refuse to admit that they do know better) is indicative of supreme and vile moral weakness. They are unwilling to follow their conscience, most likely due to a lack of courage, or perhaps at times as an excuse to seek revenge unfettered by moral constraints. Each time they raise their hand in violence, I suspect that deep, deep inside them, their conscience screams and they willingly deafen their ears to it. They fear being outcast from their community, disowned, and in many cases, killed for apostasy.

There are so many erroneous or unprovable assumptions going on in this paragraph that I don’t know where to begin.

Instead, I am arguing that the use of ever-escalating levels of force can be justified if and only if one has been rationally convinced that their opponent is evil

This statement is the clearest example of the absurdity of your argument. You’re saying if good people do sordid acts, it’s okay, but if bad people do it, then it’s not. Hmm, what determines whether someone is good or bad? Could it be whether they perform sordid acts? You’ve decided to remove morality from the action being performed to who is doing it, which is totally at odds with the moral absolutism you claim to embrace.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this position, is that it is very similar to what most people believe in practice. People like to say that lying is wrong, but when they learn that the liar was lying to save his family from a murderer, they decide that his lying was morally justified. People are quick to say that killing is wrong, but almost without fail make exceptions for accidental killing or self-defense. The common man will decry stealing, but hails as hero the courageous soldier who captures a supply depot. And so and so on. The common arch here is that one cannot accurately discern the moral status of an act without knowing the intent of the actor.

Nuzzolillo, you are assuming what you are trying to prove. Contrary to what you say, I think moral absolutists would claim that lying is wrong but it’s less wrong than letting your family be murdered. Another poster already made this point with your argument. Frankly, this appeal to “what most people believe in practice” is hypocritical when you’re also making claims that appeals to legality are irrelevant since what is legal in a democracy is usually what most people believe in practice.

Forget about your extremely unrealistic “what if a child stepped in front of a target-range shooter who would have to be ludicrously negligent” example. I’ll point out the absurdity of your argument with a simple one based on something that really happened. KSM was captured. According to you torture is okay depending on the circumstances and the intentions of the people involved. As you say, “I am arguing that the use of ever-escalating levels of force can be justified if and only if one has been rationally convinced that their opponent is evil.” Just how evil is KSM? Do you know precisely? What level of “ever escalating” force is allowed to correspond to this level of KSM’s evil? Waterboarding is okay to you. What about putting out his eyes? Cutting out his tongue? What about dismembering all his fingers and toes? Genital mutiliation? Peeling off his skin? According to you, the moral agent will know precisely how evil the subject of his torture is and know exactly the level of “ever escalating” force that can be applied accordingly. Since your morality is objective, not subjective, there must be rules written somewhere for this, right? Or is it really just each person’s judgment call and you’re putting your faith in the torturer because he’s one of us and not one of them?

Actually Jared, I think I understood you perfectly, at least based on what you wrote, which was:

"While the articles of the Nuremburg tribunal are certainly of historical and/or legal interest, it escapes me how they could change whether an act can morally justified (and to think otherwise would be to accept actual moral relativism; eg, that the law of a land can render an otherwise moral act immoral)."

Without getting into Searle-esque discussion of the valid meaning of a written or spoken statement, it was clear that you implied the acceptance of the proposition that legal disposition implies moral judgment is representative of moral relativism. That is not the definition of moral relativism; moral relativism is the belief that differing moral systems can arrive at equally valid moral conclusions based on the same circumstances.

What you did was graft the interlocutor's contention that similar acts committed by the Nazis were considered war crimes and punishable by death to your insistence on sticking to the morality of it to create two conclusions which are not valid based on what he said: 1. that the judgments at Nuremberg represented a moral rather than legal judgments and 2. that legal judgments are dispositive of moral findings. While he may have believed both of them, I see no evidence in his posting that he does. Or as lawyers are prone to say, 'assumes facts not in evidence'.

More important though, it appears you are a moral realist, at least based on this statement:

"My claim (with regards to objective/relative morality) is that there is a universal, timeless and firm fact of the matter as to whether any particular act is moral or not. But that fact can only be discerned by taking into consideration the motivation behind the act; that, generally speaking, a description of an act that omits the mental state of the actor is not sufficient to determine whether an act is justified morally."

That's certainly a reasonably defensible opinion, and it's been believed by many for thousands of years. That doesn't mean that it's not without its problems, and isn't in some ways inferior to other belief systems such as moral relativism, moral skepticism etc.

For example, there is the problem of discernability, which involves the belief that though there may exist immutable moral truths, the ability of humans to determine what they are is highly questionable. This is what ultimately turned people away from situational ethics. The judgment of the actor is dependent upon the consideration of all implications of an action. Since everyone admits there are unintended consequences to just about every action, many have come to doubt the ability of people to discern objective moral truths with regard to any dilemma. Because while reasonableness demands that we understand people can't always see the consequences of their actions, moral objectivism can brook no doubt; it lays claim to moral truth, after all.

Moreover, while I agree that the mental state of the actor is a necessary component of determining morality, it is not sufficient. In your example, suppose there are small kids running all around the gun range. Would not the reasonably determined level of risk outweigh the lack of intention on his part to shoot the child? What if in the past kids had used the place to play hide and seek?

You also have an implicit infinite regression problem with moral realism. That is, for every act that intends a good, G, one might plausibly have to commit a bad, B. This must be true because you imply that there is a right answer for the actor in every moral dilemma - that is, the ends justify the means. Setting aside the inherent problem of explaining how you determine what is good and what is bad, your system necessitates a greatest good, G, or worst bad, B, such that there is at least one B which is so bad that nothing can justify it, and some G which is so good that anything can be justified in its pursuit. So you will need to set the very boundaries that you seem loathe to accept from those who say torture is always wrong. They are saying it explicitly; torture is always wrong.

I could go on, but I think that the essential problem is one of human fallibility. And the further afield one is from the generally accepted fifty-yard-line of moral behavior, the more difficult it is for the great mass in the middle of the field to distinguish just what is going on down by the end zone. The safest course, therefore, is to set some boundary, say the twenty yard line, beyond which we won't stray, even if it means making a hundred-to-one touchdown saving tackle.

Maimonedes,

Again, thank you for taking the time to write an interesting reply.

I defined my use of "moral relativism" above. I apologize if I have used the term incorrectly, though I think it's not far from the common vernacular usage, eg, as presented in wikipedia "In philosophy, moral relativism is the position that moral or ethical propositions do not reflect objective and/or universal moral truths, but instead make claims relative to social, cultural, historical or personal circumstances.". Perhaps I misinterpreted his argument, but to paraphrase my understanding of it: torture is morally wrong because it is illegal -- just look at Nuremberg and you will see. To me, this is moral relativism, because it implies that torture is evil in the event that one's society has passed laws forbidding its use. So, as laws can differ across culture, time and place, there is no universal or absolute fact of the matter. He probably doesn't believe that that is the case, but one can deploy an argument without accepting or realizing its implications.

In any case, I admit that there are problems with this moral system and that my entire argument rests upon its truth. I do not, however, believe that any of problems of which I am aware render the system inconsistent or untrue.

zvelf,

Very briefly, no! I would never say that unethical action can be morally justified by circumstance. Instead, I am saying that most (all?) physical acts are amoral per se, and that judging their ethical status requires one to understand a greater context beyond the physical act itself, including, but not limited to the intent of the actor, the actor's willingness to subjugate his moral judgment to reason and conscience, the prudence of the actor in taking actions that include the application of force, the ability of the actor to meet the preceding criteria, and so on. Note that these criteria do not change based on cultural, social, historical or personal circumstances, and it is those criteria that determine whether an act is moral or not.

All,

One of the (many) problems with this thread is that so many different arguments are developing simultaneously, and on very different subjects. There is the argument as to whether torture is an amoral act, whether any government -- or the US government in particular -- should be empowered to torture, whether moral realism is reasonable, whether one can discern moral truth, etc, etc. It is becoming difficult to determine which argument each person is making, and whether that is changing from thread to thread. I am especially guilty of this, tho at least in part because so many people have responded with diverse objections.

I also wanted to say that none of my comments were meant to offend. I am sorry if my manner is indeed what led some of the readers to believe that I was "trolling".

In any case, I am probably not willing to here make the more general case for my moral philosophy. It would be a long, weary and likely fruitless task.

I hope everyone enjoys their upcoming weekend.

Folks, how's the air up in the clouds?

Any plans to ever come back down to Earth????

CurrentTV did a 10 minute segment on waterboarding, where correspondent Kaj Larsen gets himself waterboarded. I posted it on my site here.

Edited by SWJ Editors
Original comment was full text of this very long link, with no additional comment.

Jared, the Nuremberg trials were not an exercise in moral relativism at all, quite the reverse. Your entire argument is built on sand.

They were based upon the concept that certain things are absolutely evil, anywhere, anytime done by anyone, and specifically addressed the issue of legality, saying that legality - "just following orders" is NOT a defence.

This "gold standard" was subsequently enshrined in the international declaration of human rights. The USA was the prime mover in both the trials and the creation of the UN and the creation of the concept of human rights.

Torture is wrong, anyplace, anytime, no matter who does it, for whatever reason, and there is no way you can dress this up to make it smell morally sweeter.

Furthermore, as has been stated elsewhere, it fails in any utilitarian argument. It doesn't produce useful information and the threat of its application is well known to be generally perverted, as in at least one case currently before the courts, to manufacture false evidence to suit the investigators.

For people like me, who believed that the United States of America was beyond compare, the decent into detention in secret without trial, rendition and torture under the Bush Administration is simply shocking. It's exactly the same as discovering that your village priest is in fact a pederast.

"Jared, the Nuremberg trials were not an exercise in moral relativism at all, quite the reverse."

Oh man. How can you possibly have reached that interpretation from my comments?

Oh well.

Nuzzolillo:

Very briefly, no! I would never say that unethical action can be morally justified by circumstance. Instead, I am saying that most (all?) physical acts are amoral per se

Ah, my mistake. You don’t believe there are sordid actions, just sordid intentions.

and that judging their ethical status requires one to understand a greater context beyond the physical act itself, including, but not limited to the intent of the actor, the actor's willingness to subjugate his moral judgment to reason and conscience, the prudence of the actor in taking actions that include the application of force, the ability of the actor to meet the preceding criteria, and so on. Note that these criteria do not change based on cultural, social, historical or personal circumstances, and it is those criteria that determine whether an act is moral or not.

The point I was making regarding all your numerous contingencies is that there is no objective moral mathematical equation to calculate all your variables at play, many of these variables being impossible to know unless you can somehow read minds or intimately know a person’s life history. If there is a correlation between how evil the person being tortured and the level of torture allowed, as you assert, then how do you quantify this? How do you know the CIA torturer’s intentions are pure and that he does not get off on his sadism but is just good at hiding it. What if 50% of his intention is to get information, 20% is to get approval from his superior, and 30% is sadistic glee? How moral is the torture then? How do you possibly quantify how evil a person is? What if the person being tortured has saved many innocent lives in the past? Donated to charity? Does that count toward his goodness and subtract how much torture is allowed against him? Finally, do you really think torturers, American or otherwise, think in moral terms? Isn’t the amount of torture allowed usually the amount of torture that gets something out of the prisoner? Isn’t that really what you’re supporting here, not people expressing careful prudence and conscience? With every post it’s becoming clearer that you can’t answer my questions.

I wish to suggest to all the readers of this blog to connect to Dean L. Velvel’s comment (in his blog) the the SWJ’s Editors decided to move leaving the link to it as it is indeed a very long text. As Editors they cannot make comments, yet as reader I am free to do so and I thank Dean Velvel for this posting and the importance of his analysis of “Jack Goldsmith’s new book, The Terror Presidency (“TP”), which deals mainly with Goldsmith’s work as head of the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice. That is the office which opines for the government on whether actions it wishes to take are legal or not.” It is connected to the discussion about torture and waterboarding Malcolm Nance wrote about in his post.

I will copy here a couple of paragraphs to give an idea of the value Dean Velvel’s analysis adds to the whole discussion that at times here seems to be splitting hairs rather than going to the core of the problem.

“Goldsmith left the government and joined Harvard at a time when two generally separate streams of events were occurring and, because of Goldsmith, were joined together to some extent at the Harvard Law School. One stream was that, even though the mainstream media’s performance from 9/11 onward has generally been incompetent and dangerous to the nation, in 2004 a few reporters had discovered and were writing about horrible government misconduct including torture and renditions. From these reporters, and from cases filed by the ACLU, it became known that Americans were beating prisoners, sometimes unto death, were forcing them to kneel or squat for hours (these are “stress positions”), were administering and threatening electric shocks to the testicles, were threatening detainees with death and the murder of their families, were hanging them by their arms, were forcing them to lie on blistering hot surfaces, were keeping them naked in frigid cells, were denying them needed medical treatment, were threatening them with vicious dogs, were kidnapping people off the street in Europe and sending them to countries like Syria or Egypt to be tortured by authorities there, were operating secret prisons for interrogation and torture in places like Afghanistan, Thailand and eastern Europe, and were engaging in waterboarding, an ultimate torture used by the French in Algeria, the Argentines, and the Uruguayans. (A Uruguayan interrogator had said of waterboarding that ‘“there is something more terrifying than pain, and that is the inability to breathe.’”)

As all this became known, it also became clear -- from common sense, from the writing of a (now famous) CIA guy named Michael Scheuer, and from logical deductions -- that George Bush and others were blatantly lying when they denied that America was torturing people, and that the orders to commit torture came from the very top -- from Bush and Cheney -- notwithstanding denials. As well, though the media flatly refused to write about it, the torture ordered by the highest -- and culpable -- levels of our government constituted grave war crimes under international law, were felonious violations of two domestic statutes, and could be punished by up to life imprisonment and even by execution of the immediate perpetrators. As I say, the media flatly refused to write about that.
…………….

From early on people in the CIA had been worried that the techniques they were using on prisoners might constitute crimes under international law and felonies punishable by up to life imprisonment or death under two domestic statues, the War Crimes Act and the Anti-Torture Act; (The New York Times, October 4, 2007, p. 42 (hereafter NYT Oct. 4).) The CIA, and other government officials were not motivated by respect for law, as Goldsmith sometimes tries to say in his book (TP, p. 131), and as he seems to have said in recent testimony before Congress. Rather, they were worried about grand juries, lawyers’ fees, prosecutions, jail. (TP, pp. 12, 68, NYT, Oct. 4, p. 22.) They were seeking – they were demanding -- protection against these possibilities which arose under international and domestic laws which were created to protect against repetition of abuses which had occurred in the past. (TP, pp. 90-91, 162, see 98, NYT, Oct. 4.) The CIA’s lawyers wanted from OLC, and John Yoo gave them, opinions that provided protection. These opinions were called “a golden shield,” a ‘“free get out of jail card,”’ ‘“an advance pardon’” because the OLC authoritatively, bindingly, opines for the federal government and, if the OLC says something is legal, then in future it will not be possible, or at least it will be very difficult, to successfully prosecute for the act. (TP, p. 149, NYT, Oct. 4, pp. 42-43.) While Goldsmith doesn’t say so, and gives no sign of even having comprehended it although one is hard pressed to understand how such a smart guy could miss it, the hidden idea here is that the Nuremberg defense, which didn’t work for the Germans, can be used by Americans, so that we have reneged on what we maintained at Nuremberg. In other words, if the OLC says we can lawfully waterboard someone, then government officials given the task can rely on this and not be prosecuted for waterboarding even though the entire rest of the world knows damn well that by waterboarding people we have tortured them. Goodbye Nuremberg.”

Well, that's the problem Jared, really. You admit that you're "probably not willing to here make the more general case for my moral philosophy. It would be a long, weary and likely fruitless task", and that somehow this theory is supposed to be applied in a concrete way in the real world, even for merely assigning moral opprobrium? I mean, should everyone just study the history of moral philosophy for years until they develop the acumen to even approach the ability to discern true moral truth?

I'm afraid that moral realism is akin to its relative, modal realism. While philosophers may approve of it as a theory due to its philosophical utility, it has no practical application in the real world due to the natural human defect of fallibility.

So the firmer moral ground is that certain things are universal evils, like torture.

We can agree to disagree (that moral realism is useless in practice, especially relative to modal realism!).

Thank you for all of your interesting comments.

:-)

What immediately jumped to my eye in Mr. Nuzzolillo's first post was that notion that 'our servicemen' suffer undeserved torture, and that this cannot be compared to torture applied to the subhuman enemy who beheads Nick Bergs as a pastime. So what follows is that for being so evil the enemy deserves this treatment.

Any system trying to achieve a degree of justice where torture is applied is being perverted by the simple fact that torture turns on it's head the presumption of innocence to the presumption of guilt.

Mr. Nuzzolillo fundamental fallacy is that he confuses intelligence gathering and interrogation with punishment.

What is justified (on a he-deserves-it basis) to get, say, a paedophile to reveal the whereabouts of a probably still living victim? Whatever it is, an interrogator applying torture on someone he suspects to be a paedophile able to reveal the whereabouts of a potential victim will hold likely him to the same standard. When the object of the interrogator's interest has nothing to tell, is the wrong guy, there will be an increased interest in trying to crack that particularly hard nut. The torture will likely be more severe.

What Mr. Nuzzolillo also overlooks is that when a policy of torture is adopted, inevitably suspect evildoers will be subjected to it, for good measure because there will always be an expedient justification in the tactical situation for it. Proliferation of torture down wards is inevitable. As this increases, the instances where 'bystanders' get subjected to torture and the instances of accidental deaths will increase accordingly.

There is ample time for punishment later. I don't share a view that holds that it is justified to punish 99 innocents to get 1 guilty man. But that is exactly what we see here.

What is particularly disgusting to me is that in the US dispute the administration has mostly succeeded in pushing the dispute away from the immorality of torture, including waterboarding, to more practical aspects of avoiding later prosecution and question over the extent of executive power. The fate of the innocent 'tormentees' is beside the point. The dispute itself has degenerated to semantics games.

I suggest to read the novel, the "Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa", by Arnold Zweig, in English the title would be 'Dispute over Sergeant Grisha'. I don't know if there is a translation available.

Mr Nance:

Thank you for an insightful article. While I cannot agree with your black and white analysis of what seem to be moral issues that are grey areas, I appreciate your point of view. There was one passage, however, that seemed beneath you...

"This is not enough for our President. He apparently secretly ordered the core American values of fairness and justice to be thrown away in the name of security from terrorists. He somehow determined that the honor the military, the CIA and the nation itself was an acceptable trade for the superficial knowledge of the machinations of approximately 2,000 terrorists, most of whom are being decimated in Iraq or martyring themselves in Afghanistan. It is a short sighted and politically motivated trade that is simply disgraceful. There is no honor here."

Please consider the possibility that the President was weighing national security against the legal and moral implications and that - just maybe - he did not begin from all of the same assumptions that you begin with.

SCPO Nance,
*
As a former U.S. Navy SERE Instructor 1983-1986 at the East Cost Training Facility I am deeply disturbed at your discussion of possible SERE training techniques used to train our high risk of capture Sailors and Marines.
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Upon your Transfer from FASOTRAGRUPAC SERE I'm sure that you signed a non disclosure statement stating that you would not discussed the training techniques used during the SERE Training process.
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I'm sure you know the saying: What I DO here, What I SAY here, What I SEE here, It REMAINS here, When I LEAVE here..... Don't You??
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The question of whether a certain interrogation or torture technique is being used or not used by the United States Government is not the point I'm making.
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My point is that you may have put our Sailors and Marines at risk if they become Prisoners of War.
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Your disclosures made under the guise as a "Subject Matter Expert" ARE Unsatisfactory.
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R/ USN_RET (SERE Instructor)

USN_RET, in typical Republican fashion you have casually levelled ridiculous accusations of helping the enemy, against a patriotic American for telling the truth about an issue of grave concern to decent Americans.

Former SERE Instructor Nance is a hero to me, while you are not and never will be anything more than another Bush-loving Torture-Advocate. I am infuriated with torture-apologists who have stained America's virtues and I call on you to repent.

Hi Ax,
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Thanks for the warm welcome!
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You Wrote:
"USN_RET, in typical Republican fashion you have casually levelled ridiculous accusations of helping the enemy, against a patriotic American for telling the truth about an issue of grave concern to decent Americans"
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1) I am a conservative not nessesarily a Republican.
2) Nothing was casual about my statment(s) I am just expressing my concern.
3) I am a Decent and Patriotic American. I am sure that You and Malcolm are Decent and Patriotic Americans also.
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You Wrote:
"Former SERE Instructor Nance is a hero to me, while you are not and never will be anything more than another Bush-loving Torture-Advocate. I am infuriated with torture-apologists who have stained America's virtues and I call on you to repent. "
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1) Senior Chief Nance is a stranger to me an thus cannot be a Hero to me. LT Michael P. Murhpy and SFC Paul R. Smith on the other hand I have great respect and admiration for. Thier actions were selfless and heroic.
2) I WAS a SERE Instructor. Were YOU?
3) G. W. Bush was not my first Presidental choice a former POW was. Oh Well.
4) NO SERE Instructor advocates the use of torture. They do provide thier students with the tools to resist torture however.
5) I Feel Senior Chief Nance made an error in judgement that MAY have a detrimental effect.
6) Navy SERE Instructors pretty much go back to the fleet after thier tours and DO NOT talk about SERE as a rule. SCPO Nance is the exception.
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Repent? Only to God.
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Don't grind that Ax too long.....Ax
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Warmest Wishes, USN_RET

Malcolm Nance has advanced a useful post, and useful argument. Right up until this point, which is provable... well, foolishness is the kind interpretation, "lie" is the unkind one:

"Until recently, only a few countries considered it effective. Now American use of the waterboard as an interrogation tool has assuredly guaranteed that our service members and agents who are captured or detained by future enemies will be subject to it as part of the most routine interrogations. Forget threats, poor food, the occasional face slap and sexual assaults. This was not a dignified ‘taking off the gloves’; this was descending to the level of our opposition in an equally brutish and ugly way. Waterboarding will be one our future enemy’s go-to techniques because we took the gloves off to brutal interrogation. Now our enemies will take the gloves off and thank us for it."

Quick quiz: when was the last war in which Americans were treated per the Geneva Convention.

The answer? HALF of World War TWO.

The USA's treatment of enemy prisoners has not affected enemy treatment of Americans one jot, and it is hard to imagine that Mr. Nance, as a claimed expert in this field, is not aware of these facts. Yet he chooses to make an emotional argument that, if one accepts him as an expert, can only be called a deliberate lie since one finds it very difficult to ascribe to ignorance.

That's a problem with the article, which becomes a serious problem because it calls Mr. Nance's entire credibility into question. If he'll... I'll be kind... If he'll tell me something blatantly untrue on this subject, I must conclude either that his expertise may not be up to the level he presents it as, or that he is willing to lie to me about other things as well. Neither is reassuring.

Nuzzolillo advances what is, I think, a sensible and civil counter-argument and set of questions. If we are prepared to grant to a government certain levels of coercion to protect the innocent, why not others?

In answer, I respond by recommending Hayek's "Road to Serfdom," especially the parts that talk about the kind of people one must then recruit for certain jobs, and the effect this has when played out over institutional time.

I guess I fall into the category of people who will grant the argument that torture may be effective, and see circumstances under which one might legitimately consider the question of authorizing it... but have a level of concern about it over the long term, because the effects of authorizing it are different than the effects of authorizing guns and/or incarceration.

I'm also honest enough to realize that this will have consequences - one of which is that the response to a doctrine of total warfare (terrorism) is more likely to be one of total warfare, as the technology curve continues to fall. If that means we end up firebombing enemy cities, I'm Ok with that, because we can do that and not affect the powers considered proper for a government. Or the people we become. We've proven that to my satisfaction.

I don't kind myself that I can have my cake and eat it too on this one. I hope Mr. Nance doesn't, either.
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AX - you realize that your language mirrors quite closely the sort of language used by real torturers in civil wars and totalitarian governments, which begins by dehumanizing their fellow citizens. I mean, you get that, right?

Being a brownshirt wannabe who belongs to the leftist movement, Democratic Party, Republican Party, or what have you... still makes you a brownshirt at the end of the day.

Think about it.

"The USA's treatment of enemy prisoners has not affected enemy treatment of Americans one jot"

A. My parents taught me you do the right thing because it is
the right thing, not because you are going to be rewarded for it.
The USA should do the right thing because it is the right thing,
not because we will get anything for it.

B. I disagree that decent treatment of prisoners hasn't helped our
people when they fall into enemy hands. The treatment of US
prisoners improved dramatically in the later part of the VN war,
after we began to complain loudly and publically about the treat-
ment they received in North Vietnam. Our complaints had some
credibility with the world because we tried to treat our prisoners
properly. If our public policy had been "we torture when we
feel like it" there would have been no credibility.

It is true that our treatment of enemy prisoners has not stopped
abuse of our people in enemy hands. But that is an impossible
goal. I don't think it wise to give up the power to influence world
opinion to the benefit of our guys by torturing enemy prisoners.

USN_RET, you claim that SERE instructor Nance has endangered our troops by saying that SERE trains troops how to resist waterboarding.

Do you recall that it was Torture apologists on FOX News that revealed this, when they were downplaying waterboarding? "We do this to our own troops, so why shouldn't we do it to the enemy"

Besides, it is ridiculous, and it is in standard Republican fashion, to accuse good Americans of "helping the enemy". HOW does it help the enemy if they get tipped off that American troops are being prepared for waterboarding? WHAT is the enemy going to do? Use some other technique besides waterboarding, because they know that American troops have been prepared? What a bunch of nonsense.

However Nance's claim that when the Attorney General says that Waterboarding is OK - that does endanger our troops, because it gives the enemy an excuse. "I can waterboard Americans because Mukasey said under oath in the Senate that I won't be charged with a crime"

Americans, look at who we are dealing with!!!! Again and again, Americans who speak the truth are ATTACKED, ACCUSED of helping the enemy!!!

Nance has NOT helped the enemy in any way whatsoever. Nance is a hero, Nance has spoken the truth. He hasn't given the enemy zilch they can use that FOX News didn't already tell them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I just listened to the RadioTimes interview with Mr. Nance. I just have one simple question. Forgive me if this has already been addressed.
Mr. Nance, have you ever considered how you would respond if members of your own family were kidnapped and held by terrorists? If the only way to obtain their location was by water boarding, what would you do? Would the discomfort and duress of your detainees supercede the lives of your own family members in that case?

And to all of the posters who are so concerned about the welfare and discomfort of detainees, I have another question. These very same men come from the ranks of those who would slash your throat and then rape your children while you lie on the floor bleeding to death. Forgive the graphic description, but I think we tend to forget who we are dealing with here.

The goal of these people is to destroy us and our way of life, by ANY means neccessary. Go to http://thereligionofpeace.com/ and you'll see exactly what I mean. Yes, we have our reputation to consider, as well as our moral integrity, but let's bring this down to more personal terms. If a murderer attacks your family with a machete, do you quibble with yourself about what would be the better method of defense? Do you worry what the neighbors might think if you should cause harm to come to the murderer, or do you put all that aside and do whatever must be done to protect your family? Or would you rather feel satisfied with your moral superiority as you step aside and allow your family to be hacked to pieces?

I realize that I may be over-simplifying, but I do so for the sake of framing the debate in more personal terms that we may all be able to relate to.

"Please consider the possibility that the President was weighing national security against the legal and moral implications and that - just maybe - he did not begin from all of the same assumptions that you begin with."

If that was the case, then not only did he disregard the oath he took upon assuming office:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

but he also failed in his constitutional duty to see that the laws be faithfully executed (such as the Convention against Torture).

Also, what many are losing sight of is the difference between personal moral agency and the function of employees of the government. Those employees all take a similar oath to that of the president, which is an oath to uphold the consititution. They owe no similar moral duty to my family that I do.

So while the question of what I would do if confronted with some kind of one-in-a-million situation that for example Mr. Evans refers to, where I could save my family by committing torture, I can't honestly say what I would do in that situation. Perhaps I would commit what is undeniably a wrong in the hopes of saving my family. But if I did it would be because I believed that I owed such a moral obligation to my family.

But even in that case, I would also have no reason to expect legal immunity or even leniency. Seeking legal protection strips the entire exercise and justification of its moral profundity. Either you think your moral justification trumps the law or you don't. Having official and legal approval doesn't make your action a morally trenchant decision, it makes it following orders.

There is no evidence of a similar moral duty owed to citizens by employees of our government. They may believe it is so; but that does not make it so. They are acting in their capacity as our employees. If we wish to empower them with that ability, we should undo all of the laws on the books forbidding such behavior and withdraw from all treaties that do so as well. People may attempt to graft that moral obligation to MY family onto our servants in government, but that merely represents an attempt to win by visceral reaction, rather than logic. Yes, I would probably HOPE that some random interrogator would save my family by torturing a suspect, yet I have no legitimate reason for expecting it. In this respect the analogy to WW II Germany is apt: a German interrogator may have been able to morally justify torturing a captive in an effort to save his family (say by gaining information about a planned bombing raid in Dresden), but he should not expect to escape legal liability at Nuremberg.

As far as the practical results of torture, I would say that the use of torture could result in increase peril to our troops in battle because opposing combatants who thought they might be tortured would be more apt to fight to the death rather than surrender. There was a good reason why the understood rule among German soldiers in WW II was to run west not east if they found themselves behind enemy lines or separated from their unit.

Finally, also from a practical point of view, I would ask that people examine the case of Ahmed Ressam, the captured millenium bombing plotter:

http://corrente.blogspot.com/2005/08/terrorizing-judges.html

A sample:

"Ahmed Ressam became a terrorist turncoat.

On May 10, 2001, FBI Agent Fred Humphries questioned Ressam, the first of dozens of interviews. The information was invaluable — and terrifying. He explained how he was recruited in Montreal and funneled into the bin Laden camps. He talked in detail about training with Taliban-supplied weapons. He informed on Abu Zubaydah, Abu Doha and other top al-Qaida operatives. He provided the names of jihad fighters he had met in the camps. He revealed that he had contemplated blowing up an FBI office and the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C....

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Ressam's solitude has been broken by a stream of visitors, often FBI agents such as Fred Humphries, but also investigators from Germany, Italy and elsewhere.

With federal public defender Jo Ann Oliver at his side, he is told names and shown photographs of suspected terrorists and asked if he knows them.

On several occasions, Ressam has been flown to New York City for similar questioning. There, he is held in a detention center just blocks from Ground Zero.

Ressam did not recognize any of the 19 suicide hijackers from Sept. 11. But he was able to identify student pilot Zacarias Moussaoui of Minneapolis, now in U.S. custody, as a trainee from Osama bin Laden's Khalden camp.

Ressam informed on Abu Doha, a London-based Algerian who was the brains and money behind Ressam's Los Angeles airport plot. He identified Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who ran the Khalden camp, and Abu Sulieman, who taught bomb-making at the Darunta camp.

Most importantly, Ressam named the previously little-known Abu Zubaydah as a top aide to bin Laden. That helped smash the notion that Zubaydah, also now in U.S. custody, was little more than a travel agent for terrorist wannabes making their way to the al-Qaida camps.

Ressam is expected to testify at the trials of these and other suspected terrorists.

So it is that Ahmed Ressam — the boy who loved to fish in the Mediterranean, the teenager who loved to dance at discothèques, the young man who tried and failed to get into college, who connected with fanatical Muslims in Montreal, who learned to kill in bin Laden's camps, who plotted to massacre American citizens — has become one of the U.S. government's most valuable weapons in the war against terror...

Ressam's information was given to anti-terrorism field agents around the world _ in one case, helping to prevent the mishandling and potential detonation of the shoe bomb that Richard Reid attempted to blow up aboard an American Airlines flight in 2001"

carl,

Point "A" about 'the right thing to do' is irrelevant to the article's claims I am discussing. Nance made a specific argument re: enemy treatment of Americans that bears on his credibility. That is the question I am dealing with.

"Our complaints had some credibility with the world because we tried to treat our prisoners properly. If our public policy had been "we torture when we feel like it" there would have been no credibility."

As illustrated by the lack of credibility that al-Qaeda's treatment of prisoners earned them, because they torture when they feel like it, which is why issues of claimed torture generated no pressure on their behalf when they complained.... oh, wait.

Interestingly, one can point to other instances of prisoner treatment improving toward the end of a war. Read McNab's "Bravo Two Zero" for another, and note that Vietnam was fought in a Cold War world where the only significant foreign influences on Vietnam were Soviet and Chinese. Both of whom are known to care so very much about (a) the ethics of torture; and (b) American complaints.

I'm afraid your contention has no credibility, either. If you had reordered your response so that "A" was 'B', you would have sounded much less tendentious - since the point about doing the right thing would look less like a blatant diversion from a factual discussion, and more like a fall back that remains true even if Mr. Nance has in fact injured his own credibility.

Prisoner treatment tends to improve toward the end of a war (resources permitting) because it bears directly on one's ability to end hostilities, and helps ensure that the war does not start again immediately afterward. There are many examples of this phenomenon. I presume Mr. Nance is familiar with them since he was devising key training courses on the subject, and such awareness would be part of basic professionalism since it's an important 'edge' for US troops to spot.

Note that death cults may be exempt from this rule, however, vid. Japanese plans to kill all Allied prisoners if Japan was invaded.

A question. The enemy uses a number of techniques. Why was waterboarding picked for SERE, and not others?

High voltage electric shocks are a widely-used technique that leave no permanent marks, for instance, and can also be administered in a controlled way under a Doctor's supervision. Is there any reason that we might feel uncomfortable making them part of SERE training? What reaction would the military get if it did?

Bamboo splinters under the fingernails also cause no lasting damage. Is there any reason we should feel uncomfortable about making them a routine part of SERE training? What reaction would the military get if it did?

What were the specific criteria used when selecting the specific methods that would be used in SERE? What should those criteria be?

Mr. Evans, America does not torture. People have been convicted and sent to prison for slashing people's throats, raping people's wives, BUT America has not tortured those people. Furthermore, America has NEVER tortured those guilty of murder and rape, because America DOES NOT Torture, AND, America would certainly never torture those ACCUSED and not yet convicted.

The Government should not have the power to Torture, it is a power the Government will abuse.

Mr. Evans, people convicted of rape and torture are the kinds of people who would slash your throat - yet we don't torture them. Why? It's called American values.

Interesting article to say the least. And the discussion has been even better.

Either way, the principle that "perception is reality" is king on this subject, right or wrong. Most people consider it torture, and therefore it had might as well be torture.

Many have said "If waterboarding isnt torture, what IS? Where do we draw the line? And if waterboarding is torture, what ISNT? And when do the ends justify the means?" I believe this is the crux of this complicated issue, as it applies to the real world. Whatever your opinion, let's not jump on the guys who approach this, and perhaps support it, rationally and logically, rather than emotionally ("it just FEELS wrong!") They are trying to find that very same line. This is a subject which MUST be broken down into it's basic philosophical elements, no different than religion, abortion, etc. It's that complicated and that important. To do otherwise is to surrender to blind faith, the same disease afflicting many of those we are fighting.

PS: Shame on those of you who wrapped yourself in the flag with your comments. We can either have a rational discussion on a real world issue, or we can self righteously spew rhetoric about lofty ideals and impugn people's patriotism, citizenship, and humanity just because their opinions don't jive with your interpretation of "what right looks like". You're not helping anyone, least of all this discussion, O Noble Patriot.

SWJ Blog trivia!!!: If cut and paste into a Word document, Mr. Nance's original, firestorm creating, post (minus the links) extends to 7 pages. The comments eat up 92 pages! Bring it up at your next party!

My intention with the family-in-imminent-peril analogy is merely an attempt to whittle down the debate to a more digestible morsel. I find, in these kinds of debates, moral and political speculation replaces the real human core of important issues.

I am no proponent of torture. I have a hard time even watching torture scenes in movies. I do not revel in the suffering of others, even those who may hate me. I value all human life, and I believe that the value of human life is a hallmark of our American society. But what do we do when we encounter an enemy that clearly does not value human life, and that continues to attempt to inflict death and suffering on a massive scale. How do you deal humanely with men who will intentionally target schools and hospitals, and who operate under the assumption that their enemies do not deserve to live simply by virtue of the fact that we do not believe as they believe? How do you deal in good faith with an enemy who refuses to even acknowledge your own humanity? How do you reason with men who allow twelve-year-old boys to decapitate a human being and broadcast it on the web? Yes, you can attempt to engage them on an intellectual level, but you'd better have a back-up plan in case the olive branch gets slapped out of your hand.

Also, for all of the concern and anxiety about the comfort and welfare of these men, I rarely ever hear an acknowledgment that they are indeed evil, savage human beings who commit the worst kinds of attrocities. Should we waterboard them for that reason alone? Of course not. But we are fighting against men who use brutal tactics. We cannot simply assume that being nice to them and asking for their assistance will persuade them to offer up vital information. If you bring a knife to a gunfight, it's pretty clear who the winner will be. Again, I ask you to go to http://thereligionofpeace.com/

It is very easy for us all to sit back and armchair quarterback, from either side, while we remain safe in our homes. How many of us will ever have to make a true life or death decision in our lives? Those of you who, with such moral certitude, state that the American government is unnecessarily "torturing" people, you are the very same people who accuse our government of not connecting the dots before 9/11, and not doing more to prevent it. And what if they had connected the dots? What if they had someone in custody who had information about the wheres, whens, and hows of the event. Would you then have approved of waterboarding to prevent what happened on September 11, 2001? I'm not even talking about some horrific torture method, such as some of you have detailed. I'm talking about waterboarding!

Yes, these are all hypotheticals, one-in-a-million scenarios, but I am trying to understand where a certain threshold lies. Too many of us are framing this in black-and-white terms.

Finally, I will have to say that I appreciate the civility of most of the debate within this forum. It is extremely thought-provoking, not to mention necessary!

Mr Evans, you can't talk about waterboarding without talking about some horrific torture method, because waterboarding is some horrific torture method.

Mr Evans, you attempt to justify torture by pointing out that terrorists are evil people.

1. Ted Bundy was a serial killer, convicted of mass murder, convicted of multiple rapes, he was sadistic and sick. Was he tortured? NO.

2. The people you want the Government to Torture, are merely SUSPECTED of torture, absent some rock-solid evidence. Just because George Bush says you are guilty of having Weapons of Mass Destruction, does not make it true. Consider the source of the accusation.

The Government should not have the power to torture. Torture terrorizes the governments critics and makes monsters of the individuals illegally ordered to carry it out.

Mr Evans, Authoritarian Torturers are really really civil. They enjoy their smug attitude, calmly and confidently meting out suffering. I really wish that this was a less civil discussion, because frankly I have nothing civil to say to Americans who want to get rid of America's previously unstained commitment to Human Rights!!!

Mr Evans. Just so I'm clear on this, the best you can do to justify torture as US National policy is prop up a strawman? Nice use of the Rumsfeld scare tactic. Or do I have it wrong? I do live in Alaska and haven't seen much in the way of terrorists here in the Great White raping and murdering family members while the husband lies bleeding on the floor with his throat cut. Got a couple of concrete examples I could read about?

Strawmen aside, I will say you are spot on when you said "The goal of these people is to destroy us and our way of life, by ANY means neccessary (sic)" That's exactly what they're doing. Mr. Evans, with the help of people like you, the current American administration is turning us into them. It's dishonorable in the extreme, but I guess people like you wouldn't know much about honor then, would you? Revenge, that's what we need around here.

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Senior Chief Nance, one initiated Chief to another, well said. Keep saying it.

Ah, the hackles are rising!
AX and CWO, what I always seem to sense in arguments such as yours is a sort of empathy for the accused. It is the same mentality that drives the desire to excuse criminal behavior, while completely ignoring the rights of their dead or maimed victims. Does it betray a sort of guilt complex that seems to pervade those on the Left?

CWO, I'm glad to hear that you don't have to worry about being harmed by such men way up in the Great White North. Fortunately, you will never have to face having your ideals truly put to the test in that way. Unfortunately, there are those in other parts of the world for whom such atrocities are very real. Go to http://thereligionofpeace.com, and you'll see what I mean. There is nothing "straw" about the men that carry out those acts.

AX, you make a good point about government-sponsored torture. I do not want to go down that slippery slope. This is the part that I struggle with. Of course, it's very easy to make bold pronouncements when you yourself will never be in a position to directly affect the law in this matter. Again, I try to think of it in personal terms. In other words, what would I do if I was faced with making the tough decisions? What would YOU do?

But AX, while I agree with you that Human Rights should be our goal, don't kid yourself into thinking that we have an "unstained record"! Don't get me wrong, I tend to have a very idealistic streak when it comes to the principles upon which this nation is founded. However, unfortunately, the realities of world conflict make it exceedingly difficult to remain unstained and continue to exist. Like it or not, if we were not ready to back our rhetoric with agression (oops, I meant "aggression") during the Cold War, then we would very likely be having this dialogue in Russian. Actually, we wouldn't be allowed to have this dialogue!

My point is, it is good to have ideals, and to stick to them. Unfortunately, you have to at least be willing to meet aggression with some kind of physical force, or you're going to get your bell rung. Also, while it is good to be liked, it is sometimess more beneficial to be respected. When you are dealing with hostile enemies, "respect" is simply another term for "fear." I wish like hell that we could sit down with the leaders of Al Qaeda or Hamas and have a real working dialogue with them. In a perfect world, we would be able to. But these groups have made it clear, in no uncertain terms that they want only our death! If YOU think you can go over there and have a nice chat with them, then be my guest. By your own account, you are barely able to contain your civility with ME. How do you expect to have a working dialogue with someone who would rather just cut your head off?!

So yes, I struggle with all of this. Believe me, I'm not the kind of guy who goes around picking fights for no reason, and I find myself reluctantly accepting the fact that something like waterboarding may be a necessary evil. Believe me, it leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. Of course, I know that you pure-of-heart idealists will only scoff at that admission, and see it as an affirmation of your obviously superior views!

Finally, if you would like examples similar to the one that I stated, then I AGAIN direct you to http://thereligionofpeace.com/.

Mr. Evans,

Oh for crying out loud, save the whole "You don't know what it's like in the rest of the world" bit, would you? I just retired after 24 years on active duty, I fought on the ground and on the water in both this war and the last one. I've been just about everywhere in the Middle East and Africa it's possible to go. My ideals have been tested, many times, and you know what? Honor, Duty, Moral Courage, and Commitment carried the day, every time. It's real simple, lead from the front and uphold your oath as an Officer. And the best part? I can be proud of my service, I did my job, I upheld the Constitution, I led by example and trained the next generation - I don't have to hide any deep dark secrets, such as torture of enemy combatants. My ideals have served me just fine, Mr Evans, and I suspect they will continue to do so.

And for the record I've got no problem whatsoever with putting terrorists up against the wall following a lawful trial, but I do have a major moral issue with torture. I led my men through a lot of crap, but I never, not once, put them in a situation that they had to be ashamed with their actions after it was over. And that's what happens when you use scare tactics and strawmen as justification for dishonorable actions. Which is exactly what happened at Abu Girreib.

And strawman I said, and strawman it is. In your first post you implied that we are justified in our torture because these men intend to break into our homes and kill our families. In your reply to me, you shifted the threat to some unspecified "other part of the world." Please, knock it off, this kind of moving target logic is what got us into this idiotic mess in the first place.