Tortured logic exposed

When the George W. Bush administration’s CIA torture regime was first exposed several years ago, the better minds on the right tried to justify the abuses within the abstract framework of a ticking time-bomb scenario. If a terrorist knew crucial details of an imminent plot, the argument went, wouldn’t it be necessary, even heroic, to torture the information out of him?

Now that we know the details, we see that this ethics classroom thought experiment doesn’t even approach the reality of the situation. Some on the right still claim, implausibly, that the tactics described in the report do not constitute torture, but most are left trying to justify the use of torture on the grounds that it produced “useful” (significantly, not “crucial”) information on terrorist plots that turn out to have been months away from being operational.

What kind of justification is this for such a severe violation of human rights? If all we require to justify the use of torture is that the interrogators believe the suspect may still be withholding some useful (again, not crucial) information, even if only about some distant, unlikely plot, then what would prevent the use of torture from becoming standard practice?

Cameron Hauer

Spokane