I am still waiting for Sean Hannity to get waterboarded on camera. That will make for some great TV!Everyone seems to miss the point on torture, because they have some personal axe to grind. I have none. Maybe waterboarding is evil. Maybe it is effective. Maybe is it both. Maybe it is torture. Maybe it is just aggressive interrogation. I dunno. But I do know this: the treatment of prisoners is a matter of mutual agreement between warring parties. If we use extreme interrogation techniques, it is precisely the same as signing a treaty agreeing that the bad guys get to use the same techniques when they capture one of our kids. In other words, if you want to sanction extreme interrogation, you have to believe that what is gained by doing it the bad guys is greater than the harm caused to our kids when they face the same methods. Is it? I don't know that answer, but at least I know the right question, which is more than I can say for just about everyone else in the debate.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Gawker - Waterboarding Works! Conservative Recants After Being Tortured - Keith Olbermann
Conservative Recants After Being Tortured
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I am not sure that is the only right question. There is a question of morality that goes beyond whether or not it makes our troops safer. But looking simply at your question, I doubt that Al Qaeda would stop abusing its prisoners if we repudiated "enhanced interrogation." Ask Daniel Pearl's widow about that.
ReplyDeleteI do however, reject the idea that our water boarding a prisoner makes us the moral equivalent of the terrorists. They torture out of sadism and a desire to instill fear. If what we do is torture, we do it out of a desire to save lives.
Somewhat echoing what's already been said, we invariably end up picking up "our kids" in multiple charred pieces anyway, so there's not much point in wringing hands over the notion of turnabout. One can't turn one's back on morality one doesn't have to begin with.
ReplyDeleteThe big point everybody misses when it comes to this as it applies to the treatment of POWs, the Geneva Convention, etc., is that there has historically always been a distinction between members of legitimate warring army-states and indiscriminate vermin who do things like flying planes into office buildings and setting off car bombs in the streets. Legal tradition dating all the way back to the Romans does, in fact, outline the accepted treatment of renegades such as pirates and terrorists. It's called "summary execution."
The Gawker columnist claims, regardless of your opinion of him, Erich Muller (the conservative guinea pig who appeared on Keith Olbermann) “deserves a tip of the cap, as does Olbermann for donating $10,000 to a support group for veterans in return for Muller going through with the waterboarding and then appearing on [Olbermann’s] show to discuss it.”
ReplyDeleteDoesn’t that imply that a tit-for-tat agreement in which Keith Olbermann believes donating 10 grand to veterans is equivalent to being tortured?