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The Truth about Torture

Charles Kruathammer makes a very well reasonsed argument in The Weekly Standard for specific and extremely limited exceptions to the general "rule" that torture should be banned. I find two things praticularly convincing about Kruathammer's arguments:
  1. He forces us to deal with the question of whether any use of torture at any time is ever justified in any circumstances. His conclusion is that we must "be honest about [the necessity of sometimes] doing terrible things [like torture]" in those rare cases where by doing so, there is a high probability that we might prevent even more terrible things. Nearly everyone agrees that torture isn't necessarily always the best solution even in extreme circumstances. However, logically the problem is that there is clearly some probability that torture might sometimes be the only practical solution.
  2. Another thing that occurred to me was that we [Americans & British] have a tendancy to think of ourselves as being against torture in the abstract as a "matter of honor." Andrew Sullivan and others have suggested this and tied it [illogically in my opinion] to the otherwise quite sensible idea that tortured confessions in a legal system make no sense. I suspect that many of the ninty US Senators who voted for McCain's amendment [which says that torture is an absolute "no torture ever"] are really covering their political asses with "pieties about [being against] the evils of torture" while at the same time counting on the likelyhood that, in extremely serious cases, some "black ops" special forces or CIA guy somewhere will somehow do the dirty dead for us in secret and we won't have to know about it. In other words, we are just as hypocritical about this subject as we are about many others.

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