I was pleased as punch that Colin Powell decided to publicly spank our president for his continued attempts to circumvent the Geneva Convention on the treatment of POWs. All of this current rhetoric from the right about needing “clear guidelines” for our intelligence agents in the field is just an effort to reframe the issue so that the criminals here come off as victims. It is, in their flip-side logic, the framers of these provisions that protect the lives of our own soldiers who are at fault for being vague, rather than the torturers themselves, who clearly knew they were stepping over the line of human decency.
The pro-torture crowd try to defend torture, on pragmatic grounds, as the only method that works for getting useful information. The effectiveness of this has been debated elsewhere, but it doesn’t take a degree in philosophy to find the flaw in it: people are made of malleable stuff. If you beat a man long enough, he’ll tell anything you tell him to. But even if it were effective, it has an obvious cost: in employing the tactics of monsters to defeat monsters, we become monsters ourselves. Or, as Nietzsche put it, “when you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you.”