Thinking About Torture
And while it still may be true that in some sense, the horrors of Abu Ghraib involved individual bad apples running amok, they clearly weren’t running all that far amok, since an awful lot the things they photographed themselves doing – maybe not the human pyramids, but the dogs, the hoods, the nudity and so forth – showed up on lists of interrogation techniques approved by the Secretary of Defense himself.
.. Yang describes this as one of “the genuine paradoxes of power that no nation-state aspiring to global leadership can evade.” And indeed, the most compelling and intellectually-consistent condemnations of the Bush Administration have come from precisely those factions – on the left, and also the small-r republican right – who believe that the United States should not aspire to global leadership, because such aspirations require unacceptable compromises with the bloody realities involved in power politics and empire.
.. But here, too, I have uncertainty, mixed together with guilt, about how strongly to condemn those involved – because in a sense I know that what they were doing was what I wanted to them to do.
.. But many veteran interrogators believe that the use of such methods to extract information is justified if it could save lives–whether by forcing an enemy soldier to reveal his army’s battlefield positions or forcing terrorists to betray the details of ongoing plots. As these interrogators see it, the well-being of the captive must be weighed against the lives that might be saved by forcing him to talk. A method that produces life-saving information without doing lasting harm to anyone is not just preferable; it appears to be morally sound.