It seems there is more than one way to defend the Bush administration against charges that it tortured prisoners.
For example, Condoleezza Rice, when challenged by a student at Stanford, denied that any of the "enhanced interrogation techniques," including specifically waterboarding, is torture. The analysis upon which this claim rests is that the techniques were authorized by the president and therefore cannot be illegal. Her argument is really no better than that. The video is accessible via Scott Horton, at Harper's, who is not content to demolish her argument regarding torture. She has a lot of other curious views, including that the threat posed to the United States by Nazi Germany was pale compared to the one we now face from Al Qaeda. The maturity of her judgment puts me in mind of my 6-year-old, who always thinks her worst day ever is today.
Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer, in a column available online here, does not deny that under President Bush the United States tortured prisoners. But, lo, torture, "an impermissible evil," is sometimes permissible. The asterisks are two in number. The first applies to characters on the TV drama "24" but not to the Bush administration, which was operating here on planet earth. Here is asterisk number two:
The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. This case lacks the black-and-white clarity of the ticking time bomb scenario. We know less about the length of the fuse or the nature of the next attack. But we do know the danger is great. (One of the "torture memos" noted that the CIA had warned that terrorist "chatter" had reached pre-9/11 levels.) We know we must act but have no idea where or how -- and we can't know that until we have information. Catch-22.
It is generous of him to allow that the second asterisk lacks black-and-white clarity. Yes, life is like that. You cannot be sure who has high-value information, or when they have divulged what they know, so that it is safe to stop torturing them. But the lack of black-and-white clarity gives the second asterisk a measure of utile flexibility. As Dan Fromkin points out, it amounts to the authorization of fishing expeditions with waterboards. When you consider who, besides the United States, might be permitted to invoke the second permissible exception to the rule against performing impermissible evil, you begin to suspect that Krauthammer, in a round-about way, takes the same view of it as Condoleezza Rice: it is not torture--or, alternatively, it is an instance of permissible torture--because it is the United States that did it.
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