Sorry, but that's a sick mind. Too many wingers use that tortured (no pun intended) logic, and it's a real problem in today's politics.

Of course, it always has been. McCarthy used the same logic, and I'm old enough to clearly remember "Kill a commie for Christ" as a slogan.

Got it.

And when that's all turned to hell, your friend will have no understanding of how such good motivations could have led to such horrible outcomes.

Reminds me of the Viet Nam era line, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

You know some sick sacks of shit, Mr. Drum. Funny how he can impugn absolutely everyone else's (anyone who disagrees with him) motives, but he thinks his own good motives are somehow self evident.

McCarthy used the same logic, and I'm old enough to clearly remember "Kill a commie for Christ" as a slogan.

One of the more disturbing trends lately in the right-wing blogosphere is to revise history and make McCarthy into a hero. They claim that the fact that there were communist spies out there makes his means justifiable.

Behind the argument for torture is pretty straight up utilitarianism.
If somehow magically, you could know for ABSOLUTELY certain that torture of one person would save millions of lives, then you would do it. I know I would do it. I assume anyone that doesn't follow an infantile version of Kant would do it.
The problem is that we will never know for certain that torture saves lives, and we can never trust the information we get from torture, and torture has so many morally corrupting side effects that go along with it, that in the end, the utilitarian calculus for routinized torture just isn't worth it.

"Terrorists" and the "enemy" are always evil in our eyes...but in their eyes, we are evil. They torture us to save what they, too, perceive to be innocent lives. Here the argument is that somehow or other we are GOOD and they are EVIL.

That is the difference between conservatives and liberals. Liberals ask does God really think we are the GOOD ones. Conservatives order God to make sure we are the GOOD ones regardless of what we do. Hence, conservatives believe they are Gods. I use this argument on purpose, because conservatives always babble about being religious.

For religious, or otherwise moral, people, the definition of evil is the belief that you are God and can judge others according to your desires.

...the conservative moral justification for the use of waterboarding, stress positions, etc. against detainees in American custody

And here I was thinking 'vicarious enjoyment of transgressive behavior'. Because in the real world, that's what a lot of torture supporters I hear in the classroom, in the hallways, in the cafeteria, sound like.

Do they also not understand why we recognize diplomatic immunity and merely send someone with diplomatic immunity home when they break our laws instead of prosecuting?

Your correspondent would be interested to know that in the same interview, Kiriakou says he now believes that the US shouldn't use torture, because "we are not like that."

I do not know what it will take for some people to realize the full extent of their own moral depravity.

What a petty little fucking brownshirt.

Second on jamie's point

I've yet to hear a conservative engage with the fallibility of institutions.

To accept the use of torture is to accept the torture of the innocent. The wrongfully accused are legitimate subjects for torture because the captors meant well?

I understand his argument, and it scares me. Simply: we are good, therefore we can kill and torture. They are evil, therefore their torturing and killing are evil. Two problems: 1)"they" make exactly the same argument. 2) If we kill and torture, are we not therefore evil?

As Molly Ivins once observed about a speech by Pat Buchanan, the guy's rhetoric would've sounded better in the original German.

I want our side to win. Or maybe more accurately, I don't want our side to lose....

Your conservative commentator lost his argument right there. If he really believes that than all that comes after it is just BS rationalization for a total lack of morality.

If we are to win this so-called war we must come out of the situation with our moral compass intact. If we torture we lose...it is that simple. Once we start down that road we lose the only thing that clearly distinguishes us from the other side.

As far as waterboarding being benign, that is a load of crap. It is the most effective form of torture known. It inflicts the maximum pain possible while still leaving the victim capable of talking. And that is the whole point of torture. It is not done purely for sadistic reasons...it is done to force individuals to "talk"...to give information, or to confess. That is part of the accepted international definition and part of the US definition.

And as far as the moral equivalence arguments go, while flawed, most certainly, they are far more accurate than the rationalization offered by this commenter. It is unfortunately true that people only commit the most dastardly atrocities for the best motives. A young Palestinian suicide bomber blows up a busload of innocent Israeli civilians not because he enjoys killing himself and others, but because he has taken it upon himself to try to rid his homeland of the invaders who came and took his family's land and made them refugees. And his rationale isn't different enough from the rationale espoused by your commentator to make any difference to the innocent vicitims. And make no mistake about it, innocent people have been tortured, and killed, in our names by our government.

So the argument is: "We are the good guys, and anything we do is good by definition." Funny, that's the same logic used by the bad guys.

I don't know any liberals who would argue that an innocent child being hit by a stray bullet and an innocent child being intentionally shot in the head as equivalent. One is a tragic accident, the other a cruel act of violence.
Routinized torture makes interrogators into lazy thugs and doesn't produce effective results. It is not an effective strategy unless you view it use as a deterrent (also debatable). Maybe as punishment it is effective.
If you make torture a morally neutral act, it is still a bad idea. The cost is too high and the return is too low.

When an argument like that gains credence, we've already lost.

You should ask your friend what role his religion plays in his beliefs on murder and torture.

To a Christian, and 83% of Republicans profess to be Christian, a cop shooting a criminal and a criminal shooting a victim are equivalent; they're both equally wrong actions.

Furthermore, the "Culture of life" Party chooses who gets to live and who doesn't. If they determine you're against them, then they have rationalized that they can kill you.

I suppose the only justice in this is that they will be judged in the afterlife by how they have treated their brothers and "the least of them."

Torture by the U.S. has NOT stopped dozens of attacks on the U.S. or its allies. After that, the entire argument falls apart. They put together press conferences when they arrest some paintballers and manufacture some story that they want to attack the Sears Tower. Torture is not only immoral, it's ineffective.

One question I have is whether the author recognizes any limits whatsoever to his "ends justify the means" defense of torture. Would it be OK to torture to death the 3-year old child of a terrorist in front of the terrorist if it would help us "win or at least avoid losing"? Would it be moral to launch a nuclear strike right this minute against the parts of the world that contain our enemies? I hope he would say no, but then he would have to explain the limitation.

If he would say yes, then I certainly hope he is not such a hypocrite as to call himself a Christian. In any event, I would also want to ask, among other things, why we didn't explicitly endorse these techniques during the Cold War, when it was also pretty important that we win against an adversary that had nuclear weapons targeted against our cities. Was it a mistake back then that we did not make a habit of torturing Russian agents?

And when conservatives use moral relativism to justify a position, it's moral clarity, but when their opponents use it, it's -- moral relativism.

Carol is wrong: ""Terrorists" and the "enemy" are always evil in our eyes...but in their eyes, we are evil. They torture us to save what they, too, perceive to be innocent lives. Here the argument is that somehow or other we are GOOD and they are EVIL"

I don't care if they think we're evil. They're wrong. Why is it so hard to recognize this?

I don't take a back seat to anybody in trying to figure out what moves the other guys, how they think, learning how to make their arguments. But, puh-leeze, let's not put the faintest credence in how bin Laden, et al, rationalize their crimes.

They are WRONG.

Kevin's guy's example about somebody who sees no difference between a kid killed by a stray bullet and a kid killed in front of his parents on purpose, is spot-on: just LOOK at the stoooopidity displayed in every thread here.

So when Kevin figures he's clinching his argument, with the taunting how ya gonna feel "when some enemy tortures one of our soldiers to save innocent lives", he is blowing off folks whom we shouldn't dis so easily.

It's not that the American military doesn't sometimes kill innocent people -- mostly by accident these days, but once upon a time, we did firebomb cities in Germany and Japan and we created free fire zones in Vietnam.

BUT -- torturing American soldiers will NEVER, EVER "save innocent lives".

WTF is WRONG with you people?

Your friend also seems to overlook how boundaries and justifications shift incrementally, until what at one time might have seemed beyond the pale becomes routine and acceptable, IOW the "slippery slope."

Also, like other comments upthread, I'm struck by how similar this is to the arguments the Nazis used to justify the most heinous abuse of Resistance fighters. One presumes that your friend therefore would approve of their actions.

And lastly, I'm struck by how "relativist" this argument is. I thought all these self-styled conservatives -- especially the Christianist ones -- were against this sort of situational reasoning. Funny how that works...

A very enlightening post.

I'm absolutely, positively certain Kevin's correspondent is a terrorist. No, I'm being completely serious. You don't believe me? You don't have to believe me. Ask Kevin's friend yourself. After we've tortured him sufficiently, he will also admit to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby. I absolutely guarantee it.

The Bush administration's own military tribunals expect to charge less than 10% of the "terrorists" ever held at Gitmo with any offense whatsoever. Many of the innocent 90% say they were tortured. That's where the rightwing argument begs the question.

Regards,C

If motivation is everything, why are the very same people so adamantly against bias crime laws, and extra punishment for those who kill and hurt solely because of the victim's race, color, accent, gender or perceived orientation? Why is it "murder is murder" sometimes, but not other times?

I guess expecting any coherence or consistency from rightwingers is foolish, tho.

The terrorists who torture and kill our prisoners

I haven't heard of any sudden rash of terrorists torturing and/or killing prisoners (I guess you could look back a couple of years to a couple of beheadings if you were scrambling for justification) - but does it not enter into your conservative friend's head that maybe this torture could occur because we've sent a signal that it's okay by doing it ourselves?

Conservatives never, ever seem to be able to think things through, because their ideology gets in the way. They have no idea how self-contradictory they are.

I for one, will argue that as far as the dead are concerned intent doesn't mean shit. We are far too used to dismissing "collateral damage" as some sort of accident or act of god. In reality, these deaths are the results or conscious decisions made by politicians. And the dead are just as dead. The evil is less personal, once removed, less assignable to the man who pulled the trigger, but no less real. It's ALL fucking evil. The tragedy of these times is that there is a willful effort to normalize conflict and death. That is unacceptable, perverse and dehumanizing.

... "evil," a term which makes many liberals intensely uncomfortable....

It is not the term that makes this liberal intensely uncomfortable, it's the possibility of becoming evil ourselves. Any "true moral analysis", as the commentator accuses us of avoiding, must recognize and include this possibility continuously. Strident certainty in our own righteousness should serve as a warning sign, not an imprimatur of serious moral thinking.

Your correspondent is scum. Completely apart from his warped, morally bankrupt mind, his loathesome character is revealed by his typically sneering right-wing-pig diction: "Get back to me." ... "Got it?" I'm sure he was waving his fist in your metaphorical face as he wrote it and wearing his metaphorical black shirt.

I'm sure the armed services and CIA and companies of hired mercenaries are littered with people who would consider it a giggle to torture other people. That's, unfortunately, human nature, as well as being a proven fact demonstrated by the small percentage of the outrages that we know about from the Iraq War.

And as a good conservative, your correspondent bandies about claims as loudly-proclaimed facts. Every time a man is tortured a thousand terrorist outrages are stopped and an angel gets its wings.

Wuss that I am, I do consider it pretty equivalent if a child is killed by either an intentional or unintentional bullet to the head. I'm sure your correspondent will translate his beliefs on prosecuting the Iraq War to the War On Crime in America. Let's go easy on various homicides. They didn't INTEND that bullet to go through that child's brain. No biggie, you librul whiners.

Seems to me that torture is somewhat (and I emphasize somewhat) analogous to the death penalty. Although there may be those few instances where someone's actions are so heinous that actions against his being are legally justified, how many times have we learned that many an innocent person has been put to death. Same with torture. Many of the persons turned over to us were done so for sectarian reasons and not because they were involved in some insidious plot against us. How do we justify their maltreatment? We took Saddam Hussein into custody, and using an interrogator to befriend him, were able to extract significant and relevant information, without torture. People will confess to just about anything if tortured, and in a "long term struggle," we do engender support by how we treat those who otherwise are against us. There is no way to prove this, but I've often wondered if the Bush administration's aggressive stance in all things anti-terror is a result of their having dropped the ball on things before 9/11. "Fool me once..."

Your conservative commenter has found a nice way to avoid the whole question of whether torture "works" in the sense of the evidence that it produces. He has to do this, or else the rest falls apart. That's why he outsources the responsibility for this question to Kiriakou. But why should we believe him, either? He asserts that torture has produced results that have saved coutless lives. But that's completely unverifiable. He gives no evidence, hiding behind "national security" as the reason that he can't divulge that information.

The fact is that Kiriakou is not just a former interrogator. He is a political actor making a political point. He doubtless gained TV facetime based on his willingness to make an argument that the administration itself has made. But without actual evidence to back it up, verified six ways to Sunday by independent voices, it's all meaningless. He becomes just another voice telling us to trust the government. As a conservative, he should be ashamed to be falling for this. Since when do conservatives EVER trust the government, even on national security issues?

Shorter conservative argument (exemplified upthread): I'M RIGHT, AND SAYING IT WITH CAPITAL LETTERS MAKES ME LOUDER AND THEREFORE CORRECT. HOW CAN YOU [obscene adjective] [derogatory nickname]S POSSIBLY NOT UNDERSTAND THIS?!?!?!?

I've yet to hear a conservative engage with the fallibility of institutions.

Which is ironic, since they are otherwise so mistrustful of the ability of government to analyze and solve problems.

Conservatives don't trust government to figure out how to efficiently provide quality health care to a whole nation of people--a problem (like national defense) of such massive scope and complexity that a non-governmental system has virtually no chance of succeeding. Yet they are perfectly willing to trust government to decide who, as an "enemy combatant," should be indefinitely detained and tortured on suspicion of terrorism. They are willing to vest government with the authority to invade the privacy of individual citizens and peaceable assemblages of citizens with no oversight whatsoever.

It is precisely this contradiction that leads anyone with a modicum of critical intelligence to suspect that they have ulterior motives--that their motivations are either mercenary or pathological. In the case of torture, I suspect it's mostly about 1) tribal solidarity with Bush, et al., 2) racial and religious prejudice, 3) sadism, 4) authoritarianism, and especially 5) fear.

Have I left anything out?

What every one of these arguments is based on is the erroneous idea that there is some finite number of terrorists: if we kill or stop x number of terrorists we win.
All the data point to heavy-handed actions like torturing people or invading sovereign countries as reinforcing the arguments that the Islamic terrorists have been using for recruitment (namely that the US is the "Great Satan" with no morality that wants to destroy the Muslim world).
If you torture one guy and actually do stop a plot (ignoring the data that suggests you are more likely to be sent on a wild goose chase), but by doing so you piss off 5 people enough that they scheme up their own ways to kill Americans, it doesn't sound like you are winning much of anything.
I want to stop things like torture so we can "win".

"Yes, it's good if we do it, when it's for the right reasons. So far, it's been for the right reasons. And no, it isn't good when it's done to us, for the reasons it has been done to us. Get back to me when some enemy tortures one of our soldiers in order to save innocent lives".

So, during WWII it would have been completely justifiable for a Nazi interrogation team to torture a downed American pilot in the hopes that they could glean some information that would help them to save innocent German lives during subsequent bombing raids. Simple straight forward and quite clearly justifiable. You get to tell your Gramps.

Get back to me when some enemy tortures one of our soldiers in order to save innocent lives.

for fuck's sake, you fucking fool: that's exactly what our "enemies" are thinking. they aren't killing people for fun, they're killing people because they think we're destroying their countries, corrupting their governments, slaughtering their innocents.

AQ/I sprung up after we killed a few thousand Iraqis. AQ/I is a response to our having killed a bunch of Iraqis.

AQ/9-11 was a response to what they saw our meddling in the affairs of their countries.

they're not some crazy super-evil mindless insect villains from space - they're people who think horrific violence will solve their problems.

Al Qaeda killed 3000 Americans on 9/11. They were
evil. The U.S. has killed potentially over
1,000,000 innocent Iraqis who had nothing to
do with that, but we are good, so it's ok.

This guy is a perfect example of how "defining
yourself to be good" can lead to you straight
into moral depravity.

This guy is totally excusing any horrible action
we engage in, from torture to murder to what
could be called genocide, all because "we are
good."

How pathetic, and deadly.

I'm confused. I thought conservatives were the ones who always accused liberals of "moral relativism." Now I'm told that as long as we're doing bad things with good intentions, it's all fine.

'Do unto others as you wouldst have them do unto you.'
--Jesus Christ

"A leftist I know sees no difference between a Palestinian child dying from a stray Israeli bullet during a firefight, and an Israeli child dying when a Palestinian terrorist puts the barrel of a gun to the kid's forehead and blows his brains across the back wall of the child's bedroom."

This analogy is fraught with political bias to begin with. Can anyone site a case where a Palestinian puts a gun to the head of an Israeli child and fires in the child's bedroom??? I've never heard of such an incident. And his assertion that the Israeli bullet is 'stray' is usually NOT the case. Palestinian children often have been killed intentionally by Israeli soldiers for throwing rocks, etc. So if you want a correct analogy, try the Palestinian 'suicide bomber' who kills innocent civilians vs. the Israeli AF bombing of apartment buildings, etc. in Gaza.

Right, TR. That occured to me too.

theAmericanist: "So when Kevin figures he's clinching his argument, with the taunting how ya gonna feel "when some enemy tortures one of our soldiers to save innocent lives", he is blowing off folks whom we shouldn't dis so easily"

I think that's a misread of Kevin's post. His correspondent says, "Yes, it's good if we do it, when it's for the right reasons....Get back to me when some enemy tortures one of our soldiers in order to save innocent lives."

That said, I take your point that not all cultures/points of view are equal. Some are just wrong-headed.

Still, I for my part, majun hits it when he/she posted up-thread, "If we are to win this so-called war we must come out of the situation with our moral compass intact. If we torture we lose...it is that simple. Once we start down that road we lose the only thing that clearly distinguishes us from the other side."

A leftist I know sees no difference between a Palestinian child dying from a stray Israeli bullet during a firefight, and an Israeli child dying when a Palestinian terrorist puts the barrel of a gun to the kid's forehead and blows his brains across the back wall of the child's bedroom.

That's a stupid analogy and just chock full of hyperbole. How often do Palestinian terrorists kill children execution style? Freaking never, that's how often. How often do Israeli soldiers engage in firefights in which they're maybe less than indiscriminate in their choice of targets?

John Kiriakou said that waterboarding a terrorist stopped dozens of attacks. Dozens. Not attacks on military targets, but attacks on innocent non-combatants.

That's what he said, sure. And a Bush administration loyalist would never lie about such matters, now would they? Their credibility is nil at this point, get back to me when they have some evidence to support these assertions.

And we haven't even begun to address the problem that torture is completely immoral.

Like your correspondent, I too believe that the most important thing is winning, and winning at any cost.

Yes, even at the cost of our pride, our machismo, and our honor. For doing the right thing, and bringing about justice, may involve giving up pride, machismo, and honor.

When your correspondent speaks of 'winning', what he means is keeping alive the deadly cycle of vengeance which is fed by feelings of honor and pride taken to inhuman extremes.

But that's not winning; that's making victory impossible, and putting it out of reach.

It must be nice to be a moral absolutist and see no middle ground. And to be so utterly convinced of our "goodness" ad their "evil." He must be one of those retards who really believes that they hate us "because we're free," and not because we've turned a blind eye to despotism (see our support of Osama when he was fighting the Russians, Saddam when he was fighting Iran, the Shah of said Iran and the Saudi Royal Family) and treated the middle east our like our own private fucking gas station.

I'm sure he thought Lieutenant Kelly was slaughtering people to protect our freedoms or that the Abu Gharib incident was just good people having some fun.

The reason America is loathed around the world is because of our arrogance and our insistence that we alone can determine absolute good and evil and that we insist on our right to violently exercise our self interest and refusal to be checked by any code, or treaty or sense of decency.

And why the fuck do we let them get a pass on the assertion that torturing a crazy person prevented "dozens of attacks?" Since when have those on the right told the truth about anything.

Tell your correspondent do go fuck himself, join the army and head to Iraq.

Bush has found his perfect stooge.

How many innocent Iraqis have we killed?

Consider the similarity between justifications of torture, and justifications of "collateral damage" in war. Wingnuts argue that you can't protect America from terrorists unless you're willing to torture a few prisoners. But even ostensibly-sane people make a similar argument: you can't protect America without killing a few innocent people with stray bombs and such.

Morally speaking, what is the practical difference between the wingnuts and the ostensibly-sane people?

-- TP

Get back to me when some enemy tortures one of our soldiers in order to save innocent lives.

Does this idiot not understand that this is precisely what terrorists think and this is how they rationalize their own actions?

He can mock liberal thinking as two-dimensional, but at least it has dimensions. As we've found out these past seven years, "HULK SMASH" isn't exactly sophisticated foreign policy.

The terrorists who torture and kill our prisoners (never something as benign as waterboarding) don't do it because they need information to save innocent people. They do it because they like it, because they want to hurt or kill someone.

And Private Lynndie England gives that statement two thumbs up!

Avoiding true moral analysis and motivations allows him to skirt the concept of "evil," a term which makes many liberals intensely uncomfortable.

Yes, because we're not three years old.

You may believe the infantile bullshit spewed out by Bush and his allies to justify their actions, but the grown ups in the world do not.

nepeta: "This analogy is fraught with political bias to begin with. Can anyone site a case where a Palestinian puts a gun to the head of an Israeli child and fires in the child's bedroom??? I've never heard of such an incident."

I'm sorry to say that I have heard of a similar incident. I'm not sure that it's ever been a common tactic, but I've heard of it. However, I'm not sure it's too far removed from bombing a busload of commuters or a crowded restaurant. That's been done plenty of times.

What I have always found particularly upsetting is that the torture supporters, the habeas corpus deniers, know they are dealing with someone who is a SUSPECT. It isn't even that they have certain knowledge this is a terrorist, much less that he has useful information. It is enough that the person has been accused.

Total illogic that presumes a high degree of effectiveness of torture at getting actionable and accurate intelligence. If you buy into a false premise you can prove anything to be true or moral.

Of course morality depends in part on motivation. The problem with that line of argument in this case is that our motivation in torturing supposed terror suspects is simply and clearly the sadistic pleasure derived from causing pain and extracting false confessions because we know with absolute certainty that the kinds of torture being used in the so-called war on terror and the conditions under which torture is occurring are good for only those things. The motivation for the U.S. to torture is as bad as they come.

Arguing about how motivation affects the morality of torture is like arguing about how motivation affects the morality of Nazi-style death camps; except under contrived circumstances that never happen, the motivation of anyone supporting such acts is plainly bad because there is no chance of a sufficiently good result from those acts to justify any good motivation.

Torture apologists who make arguments in the style of your conservative correspondent are avoiding the question of motivation, not addressing it. They know they lose on the question of morality, so they try to reframe the question as one of motivation, but they never actually discuss what motivations for torture might be because they know they lose that question as well.

Just as a beginning, and leaving out the amazing load of muddled thinking that the rest of this consists of, I would ask What 'dozens' does he refer to?

"John Kiriakou said that waterboarding a terrorist stopped dozens of attacks. Dozens."

Are these schemes on the order of the joke terrorists trials we have been witnessing lately, or is that 'Classified' also?

So: kill all you want or more
Make sure, do it right
Dead is dead, and doornails forget
And then you'll notice
How the waster and the wasted
Get to look like one another
In the end, in the end
In the end, in the end
In the end, in the end

-John Cale

As with any other form of violence, motivation is everything. A cop shooting a murderer is not the same as a murderer shooting an innocent victim, although both use guns, and at the end, someone is bleeding and dying.

You'd be amazed at how many people find these things nearly equivalent.

Yes, I'd certainly be amazed, because I've never in my life heard anyone say such a thing.

What's life like in the Land of Strawmen?

He says that liberals have a problem with the word evil. I don't. I've been calling Cheney evil for 4 or 5 years now. And I mean evil in the literal sense. I am not using the term lightly. I'm not talking about run-of-the-mill disagreement with his policies. Dick Cheney is a force of evil in the world, and if saying that makes non-liberals shake their head and say, "Look at that crazy liberal, calling the VP evil," that's too bad. He is.

Yes, it's good if we do it, when it's for the right reasons. So far, it's been for the right reasons.

Kevin,

Talk to this person about the case of Dilawar, the Afghan taxi driver who died in our custody at Bagram.

Basically, he was hung by his wrists from the ceiling of his cell, and kicked and beaten over five days.

By the time he died, the interrogators had figured out that Dilawar was who he said he was: an innocent. A taxi driver. Got kicked to death for driving a cab.

Ask your correspondent for me: what were those "right reasons" that this young man was brutalized, tortured, and killed?

Ask your correspondent for me: what were those "right reasons" that this young man was brutalized, tortured, and killed?

Simple. The "right reason" here was so that Johnny Pisspants and all the other terrified conservatives can sleep well at night.

Avoiding true moral analysis and motivations allows him to skirt the concept of "evil," a term which makes many liberals intensely uncomfortable.

Yep, evil makes me uncomfortable alright. And your buddy is pretty much the epitome of evil.

In fact, some of the most evil fuckers I know profess to be good pious Christians and patriots.

As for the the two dead kids, dead is dead and motivation doesn't mean shit.

That your buddy and the Americanist can't see that is why they are evil.

I really do think Authoritarianism is a mental disease and we won't get anywhere until we acknowledge that.

I don't want to round these sick fuckers up and send em to a concentration camp. I want to round em up and send em to the loony bin.

John Kiriakou said that waterboarding a terrorist stopped dozens of attacks. Dozens. Not attacks on military targets, but attacks on innocent non-combatants.

In a way, this really epitomizes the sham of the conservative argument.

There is absolutely NO evidence that any of this actually went on. We have heard about any number of potential terrorist attacks on US citizens, from Jose Padilla on down. Not one has stood up to the slightest scrutiny as credible cases in which torture has saved a single life.

Where are the cases Kiriakou describes? Why haven't we heard about them, even in the broadest possible strokes that might lend a particle of credibility to them? Why has the dog so steadfastly refused to bark?

If we had an absolute clear cut case of a "ticking bomb" scenario, then, in that case, I think conservatives might have an argument for those narrow cases.

Instead they use mere assertion alleging the value of torture as being sufficient evidence in favor of its use. Real evidence is absolutely unnecessary.

This can mean only one thing: the "ticking bomb" scenario means really nothing to them in their justification of torture. Unlike civilized people, they have no real, very high bar that must be passed before they will consider torture. They want to torture people because it otherwise makes them feel good about how they're treating alleged "bad guys", or because it supports larger fascist inclinations they harbor. And it is no more complicated than that.

"'Get back to me when some enemy tortures one of our soldiers in order to save innocent lives.'

for fuck's sake, you fucking fool: that's exactly what our "enemies" are thinking. they aren't killing people for fun, they're killing people because they think we're destroying their countries, corrupting their governments, slaughtering their innocents."

Cleek,

His point is that *they* are not innocent and never can be. In the conservative's world the conservatives are the only innocents. He says, "I don't care if they think we're evil. They're wrong. Why is it so hard to recognize this?"

We invaded the Iraq in a war of aggression against international law, and based on rationales that were lies, and we subsequently bombed them back to the stone age, killing hundreds of thousands, torturing anyone for anything, and then fucked up the occupation to avenge terrorism committed by Saudis. So *they* think we're evil, but somehow *they* are wrong about that, but that's because *they* don't have the Americanist and Kevin's buddy (if they are not one and the same) to point out that *we* (with the exception of liberals) are pure and good, at least by definition if not by deeds.

Avoiding true moral analysis and motivations allows him to skirt the concept of "evil," a term which makes many liberals intensely uncomfortable.

God that whole post reeks of moral superiority, or more precisely of the desperate need to feel morally superior.

It seems might makes right.

The School of the Americas has graduated many in the fine art of torture. All of that knowledge is pretty handy when you're the right wing dictator and the soccer field is full of "leftist" agitators who can be disappeared. One of them is bound to be a real 'commie.

We should be proud.

The "right reason" here was so that Johnny Pisspants and all the other terrified conservatives can sleep well at night.

Agreed. I'm stunned at how many of the he-man war lovers out there sincerely seem to believe that a few thousand insurgents with no state behind them, no army, no nothing, is somehow going to bring this country to its knees.

America beat back the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire at the same time. America faced down the Soviet Union over a 45-year Cold War contest. And yet you self-professed patriots think that this great country is going to be brought down by a scattered bunch of idiots hiding in caves? That's some incredible faith you have in your country. Sweet Jesus.

The only way this country will crumble is if cowardly idiots like yourself rob us of our moral high ground and weaken our society from within.

Sack up, Priscilla. We're America, and we're going to stay true to ourselves and stand tall.

If you value safety more than our values and our liberty, go join up with some Third World dictator. He'll keep your sniveling ass safe, and all you'll have to give up in return is your dignity and your freedom. Sounds like you don't have much of the former to begin with, and don't care much about the latter when push comes to shove.

America. Love it or leave it.

The terrorists who torture and kill our prisoners (never something as benign as waterboarding) don't do it because they need information to save innocent people. They do it because they like it, because they want to hurt or kill someone.

This guy can't be serious. When spoken by Iraqis, Syrians, Afghanis, (and apparently Canadians and Brits), etc., the statement is just as believable - just as descriptively accurate of the what the US is currently doing to others - and frought with exactly the same nationalism and narrow-vision as this supposed big thinker exudes. His entire argument to justify what the entire world views as immoral (and illegal) is that 'he wants our side to win'. Win what?

Furthermore, every government which has publicly sanctioned torture does it on the explicit premise that it does so to protect its citizenry from evildoers. History makes a great case for this otherwise obvious platitude. That some folks actually believe the rhetoric of their supposed leaders shows either an intentional ignorance or something more malevolent.

In reality the only thing that can make one person evil and another good are their actions in the hear and now. Ones end goal being good or evil is irrelevant if the actions taken to reach that goal are evil. So by committing evil acts such as torture we by definition become evil. It doesn't matter if the goal was to save lives or protect people, if you take immoral actions, you have crossed the line into evil.

The conservative commentators logic reminds me of the same logic used to condone the ultimate form of torture that we practice in the country, the death penalty. In the minds of these people the ends will always justify the means. We've even heard some of the most right wing extremists suggest nuking the middle east to a cinder. No doubt after a full scale nuclear bombardment we would have "won" and "they" would have "lost", so why stop at torture, let's just kill them all. Sickening logic...

Conservatives are such moral relativists.

In any war, both sides are convinced they are right, have God on their side, and that the other side is evil. That is why there are rules (such as the Geneva conventions) that EVERYONE has to follow.
Only an idiot would be unable to understand that. But, we know we're dealing with an idiot, because his argument basically boils down to: We're right because we say we are. If someone told him his logic is a tautology, he'd probably think it was a compliment.

Get back to me when some enemy tortures one of our soldiers in order to save innocent lives
You mean like when someone tried to find out which village was going to be napalmed next?

"John Kiriakou said that waterboarding a terrorist stopped dozens of attacks. Dozens. Not attacks on military targets, but attacks on innocent non-combatants."

Properly tortured, Kiriakou would say the exact opposite.

most have said it above in one way or the other, and I concur: the argument is absurd in that it justifies torture solely on the basic of the assertion that we are good and the tortured ones are evil. There is nothing in this reasoning that will not justify wholesale slaughter of innocents anywhere in the world just on the say-so of our security apparatus.

Bullshit. So, the torturers are supposed to decide the right reasons, as well as the right times, causes, suspects?

And, as McCain once said, this is about us. If we're torturing, we're not the same "we" that the torturers want to be winning.

McCain's plain was shot down on one of he's flying trips over Hanoi. Dropping bombs? Dropping Agent Orange? A few million innocent vietnamese were killed. How many by McCain? Who knows. According to the guy above, McCain should have been tortured. Yet, he was badly beaten, never tortured the way this guy wants. This guy and the likes of him is why America's image in the world is that of a degenerate bully.

Ugh!

Philosophy needs to be required of all high school students. The "ends justify the means" argument is at the heart of much philosophical thought, and it's routinely soundly rejected.

Let's assume that what this guy says is actually what he believes.

(a) We don't let policemen randomly shoot whenever they feel like it. We have intensive oversight of what policemen do, and everything that they do is SUPPOSED to happen in public view so that it can be controlled. Where is this same oversight regarding torture? We know insane things happen --- Abu Ghraib. We know innocent people have gotten caught up in this trawling.
I would have thought that people who claim to be conservative, who claim to be so worried about government powers, would be the first to insist that everything, EVERYTHING, related to torture be part of the public record so that we can see when, for example, "a few bad apples" (the supposed story at Abu Ghraib) start getting their kicks from torture, society can step in and stop this. Yet at every stage of this process, the US government, supported by the political apparatus of the GOP and people like our conservative here, has resisted this sort of oversight (and has refused to apologize or pay compensation to innocent victims caught up in the process).

(b) Since when was saving lives the sole benchmark for morality? If saving lives is so important, how about we institute a national speed limit of 55mph --- that will save a damn sight more lives than torturing terrorists will.
In other words, this is NOT about saving lives, and to pretend otherwise is intellectually dishonest.
Remember, it is conservatives who have, all the time, insisted on numerical analyses of, eg, environmental or health legislation, and have complained when such legislation, in their opinion, costs too much for the good done. (For the most recent example of this, read any conservative screed on the subject of global warming or CAFE standards.) It seems only fair to apply these same conservative rules of the game to this particular topic.

I'm sure that your correspondent really believes that what he wrote is sufficient justification to torture someone who was designated a terrorist. He would be a lot less certain if he also had to prove the guy really was a terrorist and make that decision first, then be held responsible if he were wrong. He won't have to do that, because that decision would be given to some leader who lacked the facts and never had to look the torture victim in the eyes.

The torture itself would also be farmed out to some other individual to conduct. The individuals who conduct the torture soon find that no one wants anything to do with them. It is a job like being a hangman that warps you and ruins you for almost any other job, especially when you begin to like doing the torture for its own sake.

But why does your correspondent himself approve torture? He is frightened by the strange angry men who want to kill him for no reason that he can discern, and he just wants to hurt them.

It's not about the information the victims might have and that is used to justify the torture. If it were, then the fact that studies show that torture doesn't work - it doesn't get actionable Intelligence and causes a lot more problems than it ever solves - would prevent its use.

In his fear, your correspondent will simply refuse to accept those study results. They're too rational and he's scared. fear trumps logic.

Torture is about punishing your correspondent's frightening enemies. He knows they are his enemies because he has been told they are his enemies by some authority figure he accepts - an authority figure who doesn't act weak. Your correspondent is reacting to his own fear with anger, and he is demanding that someone else punish his enemies - really hurt them.

That's the source of that piece of self-justification that was emailed to you.

What Charles (5:43) said, yes.

Joe (5:45) - I don't know any liberals who would argue that an innocent child being hit by a stray bullet and an innocent child being intentionally shot in the head as equivalent. One is a tragic accident, the other a cruel act of violence.

Excuse me, but this is mostly bullshit. There are those (Israeli and Palestinian) who have intentionally shot children, but what this crap about "... hit by a stray bullet?" The IDF was grouse hunting maybe, and they got "dusted"? The IDF bombed apartment houses and cars and scattered bomblets through farmer's fields. The children killed by those weapons were no more victims of "stray bullets" than the Israeli children on buses blown up by suicide bombers. The main difference is that with superior weapons the Israelis killed a lot more of them.

All war is murder, and the victims aren't victims of "stray bullets," they are victims of murder. Israel has an excuse, it's fighting for its survival. The Palestinians have exactly the same excuse.

The US in Iraq has no such excuse. We attacked a country which was neither a threat to us or an agressor against us. And we have killed a lot more than Israel and the Palestinians combined.

That pro-torture argument will be persuasive to a hell of a lot of people, unless it's pointed out that torture is almost always STRATEGICALLY counterproductive, and that it's disastrous to allow one man by himself to decide those extremely rare occasions on which it might be justifiable. Do NOT underestimate the political power of this argument.

Let me add, however, that I'd dearly love to know more about those "dozens of attacks" that waterboarding Zubaydah supposedly stopped. Maybe the Administration would be willing to tell the appropriate Congressional committees about them in classifed session? (I am, of course, joking...)

There are so many flaws with that 'reasoning' that it's hard to know where to start. Many have already been pointed to. I do think Kevin's correspondent may want to talk to John McCain before he again writes:
Get back to me when some enemy tortures one of our soldiers in order to save innocent lives.

His second to last paragraph contains a ridiculously false choice. If we have a known terrorist in custody, which we must if we are torturing him, then he is in custody, i.e., NOT being allowed to blow up a building.

The hidden false assertion is that torturing the one we have will prevent the activities of one we don't have - which is unproven despite Kiriakou's assertions, and against which we have plentiful evidence, since many absurd and unreliable things have been said under torture.

We also don't allow policemen to take murderers (or suspected murderers) to secret locations and shoot them in secret to prevent other criminals from shooting their innocent victims.) Nor would we accept without proof the claims about how dozens of murders had been prevented using that method.

But Mr. Kiriakou is lying when he says that abusing suspects has stopped dozens of attacks. If that had been the case, the Bush administration would be trumpeting the details of each instance to the skies.

Observe how the Bush Administration played up Jose Padilla and those 7 seven dweebs from Miami whose trials just ended in mistrials. Those are weak, weak, cases where the supposed perps never got close to pulling anything off or even demonstrating the competence to do so, yet the Bush administration has tried to play them up as much as possible.

Do you think that if the Bush administration had foiled dozens of real plots, they wouldn't be crowing about it and leaking the details like a sieve?

Kevin,

Your correspondent is a sadist. This is why he lies: because lying is a cheap and deadly form of violence. All of this is only to say that he is human, which in turn means that his environment cannot be blamed for producing him: but it can and must be blamed for tolerating him.

To theAmericanist 5:55 PM,

I don't care if they think we're evil. They're wrong. Why is it so hard to recognize this?

Conclusion: America' leaders are Evil.

4. We Americans have chosen our (Evil) leaders and we know what they are claiming to do (and we have reports that strongly indicate that they are doing it.)
5. We Americans have not removed our known-to-be evil leaders.

Further conclusion:

America as a whole is Evil.

6. America's evil leaders invaded a nation which was no threat to America. Greenspan acknowledges what we all knew - it was to some extent to control the supply and flow of oil from the Middle East.

7. There were other reasons for invading Iraq, mostly not expressed, but none that indicated that Iraq was a threat to America.

See point #5 above.

This supports the Further conclusion that:

America is Evil.

Simple enough for you?

The rest of the world recognizes the evil of Reagan's use of terrorists in Nicaragua to overthrow the legitimate government there, Reagan's invasion of Granada as a PR ruse to avoid the damage to his Presidency caused by the terrorist bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, or America's support of the dictator Pinochet or of the totalitarian Shah of Iran. America's support of Saddam in the war against Iran (which Saddam initiated)are other reasons for the rest of the world to question the strange idea that America is somehow inherently Good.

Most of the world recognizes the logic. Why don't you? Are you another conservative blinded by his fear and by American Exceptionalism so that you repeatedly ignore the facts?

Of course you are. You're an American Conservative. You know (without looking at the facts) that America is GOOD, so anything that America does MUST be good. Everything America does is good and moral by definition since it is America. All you have to do is find the right spin.

Your response to what I have written above, of course, will be the normal righteous indignation of the aggrieved conservative wrapping himself in the flag. You won't even question why the rest of the world doesn't buy your crap. You won't question it because you are not capable of questioning it.

Is the son, daughter, wife, brother, mother, neighbor, etc. of a "freedom fighter" innocent? Is blowing up a multi-family home causing the death of one or several non-combatants to kill "terrorists" alway justified? My guess is your answer to the first question is no while the answer to the second is yes.
Your world, as you present it, is really not very complicated. Unfortunately, I think the reality of war is a lot more messy than you would have us believe. If it wasn't, George W Bush would have been correct and we would have been out of Iraq in three months.

"I want our side to win. Or maybe more accurately, I don't want our side to lose...."

What? He thinks this is an effing game?!!!!!!

It's not a game! And, as far as I can tell almost all of the so-called terrorists who have been tortured have not been terrorists. How do you justify torturing innocent people?!

Conservatives in a nutshell: Moral relativism is bad, except when we practice it.

The twisted thing about this justification is... well just about everything actually.

How often have we had to put up with Conservatives sorrowfully shaking their heads over fuzzy thinking liberals who meant well but still were led into disaster by those good intentions? Pot, meet kettle.

Odd, you'd think a party that's been sucking up to the Fundamentalists for so long would remember what the road to Hell is paved with.

I think Terry Pratchett summed it up pretty well via Sam Vimes. (paraphrasing) If you do a bad thing for a good reason, pretty soon you'll find yourself doing it for a bad reason - or no reason at all.

Cleek>...for fuck's sake, you fucking fool: that's exactly what our "enemies" are thinking. they aren't killing people for fun, they're killing people because...

Actually, I'd bet half the combatants on either side *are* killing and torturing "for fun".

Estimates of the number of psychopaths in any population is 1-4% of males. In peace, they hurt people within the law. In war? When there's a cover of fear of terrorists? It's like christmas for such people; free license, just tack on a political excuse.

I have no doubt that at least half the insurgents, kidnappers, nutty fundis shooting women, and probably 3/4 of the self-selected "Blackwater" contractors, would test sky-high on a Hare psychopathy profile.

And hearing about this on the news, the sadist streak in closer-to-normal citizens gets a thrill, too. Lots of people *like* a good war, a clean cause to hate for.

Actually recalls that exchange in "Yes, Minster":
Hacker: You believe that the ends justify the means?
Appleby: Yes!
Hacker: Then you will go to Hell.

Anyway, I doubt the author of your comment in in any way of doing any harm to anyone. With intellectual powers and argumentative skills like that, the only violence he could do is to the ticket stubs in the parking shelter he mans.

I agree with all of the posters here who aggressively use logic to point out the fallacies in the argument. But why do we have to resort to juvenile name-calling and ridiculous over-exaggerations of everyone who would disagree with us? Because they would do the same to us? Why can't we in a public forum just be right? There is a place to wage battle against the conservative mind, but I feel no satisfaction in the assault on a person who responded to Kevin with more brains than the standard troll we normally read on these pages.

"Get back to me when some enemy tortures one of our soldiers in order to save innocent lives."

Oh, brother. So this character has just made the case that Iraqis and Afghans are perfectly justified to capture and torture American soldiers (or contractors) because, as it happens, we kill plenty of innocent civilians in both countries.

Now I suppose that the justification of the justification would be that when we kill innocents, we say "oops!" or "sorry!" or "you have to expect some collateral damage" or - if we work for a company like Blackwater, we just flip off anyone who dares question us.

There's clearly no way to talk to nutcases like this, but it's just sad to see America, a former beacon of freedom and decency and respect for human rights, competing with thugs and murderers to see who can reach the bottom first.

Correspondent needs to consider the questions:

1) how many people did we torture that produced no useful information?

2) how much time/money was wasted running down leads from bogus information obtained under torture?

3) is there no other (more moral) way to get the same information? There's published (New Yorker, hence fact-checked) cases of old-fashioned, legal, moral interrogation working, even on Al Qaeda; why are we so convinced that it will not work in this case?

4) what incentive does the torturee have not to lie? Since we cannot get the information any other way (else, why are we torturing?) verification could be difficult. A hardened AQ guy, might know the names of some moderate mosques he could finger, so as to create more ill-will when our jack-booted thugs mistakenly kick in the door. (If I were an evil international super-villain, that's what I would do.)

5) Long-run, how much do we lose by being known as torturers? Those Abu Ghraib pictures make some great terrorist recruiting posters. And before you say "but you're not supposed to do that", let me remind you that you torture with the army that you've got, not the army that you wish you had. People make mistakes, fail to follow protocols, "accidentally" kill someone they merely intend to interrogate in an enhanced fashion, take stupid pictures, etc.

Or to sum up -- ignoring the immorality of it, torture doesn't help us win. It's a ready-fire-aim reaction, and the moral gravity of it doesn't mean that it is effective.

I also object mightily to the assertion that "liberals" believe truly accidental death is no different from intentional, cruel death. That is a misdirection, intended to absolve us from all the "accidental" deaths we caused in Iraq. Those deaths are not accidental. When you destroy a country and its infrastructure, people die. Gangs take over, medical care becomes unavailable, public health goes down the toilet. Those deaths are not accidental, because any damn fool (except perhaps the one we mistakenly elected as our president) knows that this is what happens when you start a war. Credible estimates suggest that the Iraqi people were better off under Saddam Hussein, in terms of being senselessly killed at a lower rate.

And, further, there is the opportunity cost of the money spent on that war. That's money not spent on education, public health, sanitation, clean water, infrastructure, clearing mine fields, etc. There's many thousands of people who died because we didn't choose to spend that money saving their lives.

Stupid, stupid, conservatives. When you sell your souls, you're at least supposed to get something fun for it.

Um... if we've already got the terrorist in custody, how does torturing him stop anything from blowing up?

First of all, if I understand your friend correctly, he wants our side to win because we’re the good guys, right is on our side. A black and white mentality is pervasive in his rationale for torture, not to speak of an ignorance of U.S. foreign policy and the suffering our government has inflicted on other countries and its people for decades. To hold to the belief about our goodness and the evil of the other can be seductive, it allows us to feel righteous, and is a defense against seeing ourselves as we are, a nation that has abandoned the moral high ground, and embraced the basest in human nature.

He says torture is okay, even good because it saves lives. The “saving lives” is a fallacy because people who actually have worked in the intelligence business, a number within the CIA and one in particular involved in interrogations in three wars, have declared torture to be largely ineffective at obtaining accurate information.

I realize I am assuming your friend has no first hand experience with actual waterboarding because he’s accepted the notion being advanced now in the media that minimizes waterboarding no doubt at the administration’s behest. Your friend is a good example of a successful propaganda campaign to decouple waterboarding and torture. Apparently he is unaware that our government prosecuted a Japanese for waterboarding an American soldier in World Water II. No government that I am aware of prosecutes for engaging in “benign” interrogation.

I do agree that terrorists do want to hurt and kill large numbers of people, but to say they like it? How does he know? And what about Lindy England and the night crew at Abu Gharaib? We’ve got them on film smiling before the cameras. They were Americans, but that doesn’t quite fit into his scapegoat ridden mentality does it?

In his Palestinian terrorist example, he raises the issue of evil and implies that torture is justified because we are confronting an evil adversary. Yes, this is the old ploy of demonizing an enemy and then anything you do to them is justified “because they’re evil.”

There is a tragic blindness fueling his support for torture beyond the black the white thinking, and that is an unawareness of what the act of torturing does to a human being. But if the moral argument doesn’t penetrate, those who know say torture doesn’t work.

You know, I just had a great idea.

The overwhelming success of torture in fighting terrorism should spur its spread to other arenas... like everyday law enforcement.

I think drug dealers could be tortured to give up their suppliers. Surely that would win us the drug war almost overnight.

And we should definitely torture murderers. Oh, I guess that's "murder suspects." But if they hadn't done anything, they wouldn't be suspect, now, would they.

(Go back and add "suspected drug dealers to the past paragraph if you're really that soft on drugs.)

What else? Pedophiles, for sure. Rapists, check. Might as well throw wife-beaters in there. I never liked them. And drunk drivers. Not sure what kind of information those two could give up, but what the hell. Suspected, blah, blah, blah. What's the matter, you're going to go all blubbery over drunk drivers and wife beaters?

Kevin,
Two thought exercises for your correspondent.
One. It's the Civil War. I'm a Damnyank with Sherman. You're a plantation owner whose property I'm commandeering. Your children are shrieking abuse at me and maybe throwing rocks. I think I see a gun and shoot. I kill one of your children. Am I a cold-blooded murderer? Or do you shrug it off as one of those things that happen in wartime?
Two. I'm Dick Cheney. I bring you a suspicious person and tell you he's a terrorist and you have to torture him to get whatever information he has out of him. Not some soldier or operative somewhere, you.
You go to town on him. You waterboard him, tase him, put him in stress positions but can't get anything worthwhile out of him.
I (Dick Cheney) come back and say, "Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he was just a cab driver like he said. Tell you what. To even things out, he gets to do the same thing to one of your children."
Deal?

Your correspondent exhibits two characteristics common to addicts:
1) The sentimental and vulgar delight he takes in pornographically detailed descriptions of violence committed against people he arbitrarily assigns to be on "our side". 2)Rage against imagined enemies. The total destruction and degradation of the "enemy" must take priority over everything.
The screed is not so much an argument to be countered as it is the desparate behavior of a disturbed person.