Saturday, February 12, 2005
How Tough Do We Have to Be?
Yesterday brought an Op-Ed detailing one of the darkest pages of our post-9/11 campaign. This is a program labeled "extraordinary rendition". It consists of secretly capturing people thought to be associated with Islamic terrorists, putting them in special executive jets which are in a service labeled the "Special Removal Unit" and transporting them to countries that agree to extract desired information from them. It is assumed that in these countries, such as Syria and Egypt, methods will be used that are forbidden in the United States itself. An example is given of a person returning to Canada who was intercepted in New York and, handcuffed, sent off to Syria, tortured and interrogated, and eventually returned after the Syrian said he had no information to give. The implication is that this is often repeated process. When added to all the other information about Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, it adds up to a terrible indictment of American behavior against persons given no legal chance for review or complaint. I have no idea whether this information is as reliable as newspaper accounts seem to suggest. But for the purposes of this discussion, let us assume that it is true, or true enough.
The difficulty with the case of the accusers is that they argue that this is all madness, occurring because of the pleasure it imparts to our enforcers, or perhaps simply because the agencies involved can get away with it. Morally the issues would be simple and straight-forward were this actually so. However, it may be that out of every ten cases of this sort that yield unimportant information, there is one from which vital information is extracted. Al-Qaida has not been able to mount a major attack in this country since 9/11 in spite of repeated threats. The general public really has no idea why this is so. One reason may reasonably be thought to be the result of the efforts of the FBI, CIA and other secret agencies since 9/11. If they have prevented another 9/11, then the moral case becomes much murkier.
This analysis reminds me of the arguments that we must go through in regard to capital punishment. It is also reminiscent of arguments about the possession of nuclear weapons, combined with threatening to use them under extreme conditions. We might ask, for example, whether the deterrent maintained against the Soviet Union and they against us during the Cold War was the primary reason that a major nuclear war (which would have eclipsed by several degrees of magnitude World War II) never occurred. Most people in the 1950s assumed it was bound to occur. C.P. Snow famously said in 1958 that if nuclear weapons were not abandoned they would be used in ten years. Today many countries, including North Korea, and by indirection several others, maintain that their only defense against aggression is the threat that they will use nuclears against any attack.
It seems to me that the only way to establish a strong moral case against the use or pretended use of nuclear weapons or the use or employment of torture, however this is arranged, is to say that we, that is the United States, will not employ such tools of policy regardless of what advantages we might get from their employment. We must face the fact that adopting such policies can have major costs, that we will be giving up useful tools. Yet in my mind these risks must be taken if we are to build a more humane world.
The difficulty with the case of the accusers is that they argue that this is all madness, occurring because of the pleasure it imparts to our enforcers, or perhaps simply because the agencies involved can get away with it. Morally the issues would be simple and straight-forward were this actually so. However, it may be that out of every ten cases of this sort that yield unimportant information, there is one from which vital information is extracted. Al-Qaida has not been able to mount a major attack in this country since 9/11 in spite of repeated threats. The general public really has no idea why this is so. One reason may reasonably be thought to be the result of the efforts of the FBI, CIA and other secret agencies since 9/11. If they have prevented another 9/11, then the moral case becomes much murkier.
This analysis reminds me of the arguments that we must go through in regard to capital punishment. It is also reminiscent of arguments about the possession of nuclear weapons, combined with threatening to use them under extreme conditions. We might ask, for example, whether the deterrent maintained against the Soviet Union and they against us during the Cold War was the primary reason that a major nuclear war (which would have eclipsed by several degrees of magnitude World War II) never occurred. Most people in the 1950s assumed it was bound to occur. C.P. Snow famously said in 1958 that if nuclear weapons were not abandoned they would be used in ten years. Today many countries, including North Korea, and by indirection several others, maintain that their only defense against aggression is the threat that they will use nuclears against any attack.
It seems to me that the only way to establish a strong moral case against the use or pretended use of nuclear weapons or the use or employment of torture, however this is arranged, is to say that we, that is the United States, will not employ such tools of policy regardless of what advantages we might get from their employment. We must face the fact that adopting such policies can have major costs, that we will be giving up useful tools. Yet in my mind these risks must be taken if we are to build a more humane world.
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