Krauthammer & The Continuation Of The "Torture Debate"

The left has demagoged the critical national issue of interrogation techniques. Obama put this issue in the center of debate by releasing carefully redacted memos and throwing the OLC attorneys as a sacrifice to his base. He has opened a Pandoras Box in so doing. That said, this issue is one on which we deserve a legitimate debate with all of the information on this made public. Right now, President Obama is deliberately preventing that by refusing to release documents that would show the public what resulted from the waterboarding of three al Qaeda senior terrorists. It is a travesty on which I've blogged here and here.

I seriously doubt this issue will go away. The partisan left is determined to establish, once and for all, their moral superiority on this issue and ensconce it as U.S. policy going forward. But as Michael Sheurer points out, the moral preening of the left is wholly misplaced - they turn morality on its head - and potentially suicidal. This is an issue with a very long shelf life that will only haunt Obama until he finally acts to allow the release of the documents requested by Dick Cheney.

And so the argument continues today with Charles Krauthammer, who addresses criticism from his last article on this topic.

Krauthammer's last article on this topic dealt with the question of when we would want to consider using enhanced interrogation on an enemy operative:

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy. Even John McCain, the most admirable and estimable torture opponent, says openly that in such circumstances, "You do what you have to do." And then take the responsibility.

. . . 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.

Under those circumstances, you do what you have to do. And that includes waterboarding. (To call some of the other "enhanced interrogation" techniques -- face slap, sleep interruption, a caterpillar in a small space -- torture is to empty the word of any meaning.)

Did it work? The current evidence is fairly compelling. George Tenet said that the "enhanced interrogation" program alone yielded more information than everything gotten from "the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together." . . .

Read the entire article. Also in that article, Krauthammer took Nancy Pelosi to task for her disingenuous and morally vacuous claims as to what she knew, when she knew it, and her justifications for failing to raise an objections.

The response to Krauthammer's positions drew a lot of criticism. One of the main criticisms is one I've addressed in two posts, here and here, the rather incredible - and intellectually vacuous - assertion that the ticking time bomb scenario does not exist. Krauthammer responds to that by showing a clear example of such a scenario:

On Oct. 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car. He was interrogated with methods so brutal that they violated Israel's existing 1987 interrogation guidelines, which themselves were revoked in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court as unconscionably harsh. The Israeli prime minister who ordered this enhanced interrogation (as we now say) explained without apology: "If we'd been so careful to follow the [1987] Landau Commission [guidelines], we would never have found out where Waxman was being held."

Who was that prime minister? Yitzhak Rabin, Nobel Peace laureate. The fact that Waxman died in the rescue raid compounds the tragedy but changes nothing of Rabin's moral calculus.

Krauthammer directs the rest of his article to those who have risen in defense of Nancy Pelosi, claiming that her massive hypocrisy on this issue is meaningless to the debate on waterboarding and torture.

My column also pointed out the contemptible hypocrisy of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is feigning outrage now about techniques that she knew about and did nothing to stop at the time.

My critics say: So what if Pelosi is a hypocrite? Her behavior doesn't change the truth about torture.

But it does. The fact that Pelosi (and her intelligence aide) and then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss and dozens of other members of Congress knew about the enhanced interrogation and said nothing, and did nothing to cut off the funding, tells us something very important.

Our jurisprudence has the "reasonable man" standard. A jury is asked to consider what a reasonable person would do under certain urgent circumstances.

On the morality of waterboarding and other "torture," Pelosi and other senior and expert members of Congress represented their colleagues, and indeed the entire American people, in rendering the reasonable person verdict. What did they do? They gave tacit approval. In fact, according to Goss, they offered encouragement. Given the circumstances, they clearly deemed the interrogations warranted.

Moreover, the circle of approval was wider than that. As Slate's Jacob Weisberg points out, those favoring harsh interrogation at the time included Alan Dershowitz, Mark Bowden and Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. In November 2001, Alter suggested we consider "transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies" (i.e., those that torture). And, as Weisberg notes, these were just the liberals.

So what happened? The reason Pelosi raised no objection to waterboarding at the time, the reason the American people (who by 2004 knew what was going on) strongly reelected the man who ordered these interrogations, is not because she and the rest of the American people suffered a years-long moral psychosis from which they have just now awoken. It is because at that time they were aware of the existing conditions -- our blindness to al-Qaeda's plans, the urgency of the threat, the magnitude of the suffering that might be caused by a second 9/11, the likelihood that the interrogation would extract intelligence that President Obama's own director of national intelligence now tells us was indeed "high-value information" -- and concluded that on balance it was a reasonable response to a terrible threat.

And they were right.

You can believe that Pelosi and the American public underwent a radical transformation from moral normality to complicity with war criminality back to normality. Or you can believe that their personalities and moral compasses have remained steady throughout the years, but changes in circumstances (threat, knowledge, imminence) alter the moral calculus attached to any interrogation technique.

You don't need a psychiatrist to tell you which of these theories is utterly fantastical.

Read the entire article. Moral absolutism meets the reality that moral questions must be answered within the context of surrounding conditions. The conditions in 2001 were dire. The conditions now are political - and for the far left, highly partisan. Indeed, many have dreamed of using this issue to destroy Bush and the right. Who is the more moral, and who is masquerading behind a mere facade of morality while pursuing an agenda best described as political opportunism? Easy questions for me at least. What say you?