When the Japanese tortured in WWII, they were doing it in the name of national security.
When the Germans tortured in WWII, they too were doing it for their national security.
When Stalin tortured dissidents, he said did it to protect his nation's security.
When Pol Pot's regime tortured its captives, it did it to defend the regime.
When Torquemada tortured heretics, he did it for God.
Even the Holocaust was justified in the name of defending the state.
Regimes that torture always believe themselves justified. To believe otherwise is to show a level of historical ignorance so complete that it is astonishing.
Unless you are willing to embrace a form of moral relativism, creating a world when good and evil depend wholly on the excuses and arguments we offer to one another, there must be objective standards against which all of us can be compared.
Keep all that in mind as you read this. NYT:
The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law.
The legal interpretation, outlined in recent letters, sheds new light on the still-secret rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. It shows that the administration is arguing that the boundaries for interrogations should be subject to some latitude, even under an executive order issued last summer that President Bush said meant that the C.I.A. would comply with international strictures against harsh treatment of detainees.While the Geneva Conventions prohibit "outrages upon personal dignity," a letter sent by the Justice Department to Congress on March 5 makes clear that the administration has not drawn a precise line in deciding which interrogation methods would violate that standard, and is reserving the right to make case-by-case judgments.
"The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act," said Brian A. Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, in the letter, which had not previously been made public....
"What they are saying is that if my intent is to defend the United States rather than to humiliate you, than I have not committed an offense," said Scott L. Silliman, who teaches national security law at Duke University.
The logic: So long as we believe we are right, what we are doing cannot be wrong. According to the Bush administration and its defenders, morality and the law are subjective, relative, and totally unmoored from any universal standard. Forget god, religion, natural law, or any other system of beliefs that you hold dear. Under this justification, none of them matter. The law is what the defenders of the state say it is. Ideals and beliefs are irrelevant.
When others use this logic to torture Americans, what will we say? When our enemies use our own words and logic against us, to whom will we turn? We will have no one to blame but ourselves. It is only a matter of time before this is turned against us. It is inevitable.
We cannot defend our beliefs by abandoning them.
We cannot protect our ideals by forgetting them.
Why are they doing this to our country? How can anyone defend this?
This is not who we are. This is not why so many struggled for so long to create this nation. We are dishonoring ourselves and our ancestors through these actions. All of their hopes, dreams, and ideals live in us, and if we abandon them, all that they lived and all that they dreamed means nothing. Nothing.
Why are we doing this? Why?
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