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cyn--how about we make this into a bit more formal a game for a minute? just play along. it's fun at least for the duration of this post. maybe.
only if you restrict the argument to the fact that you can say it. ethically condoning torture seems pretty close to reprehensible. and this is an area wherein ethical and political considerations intertwine in a wholesale fashion.
so let's assume that is the case--your arguments, cyn, are essentially of two types: expediency and utility. expediency doesn't hold up real well in a space where ethical and poltical arguments are tangled, so i assume that in order to make that argument you presuppose that you can hold the two apart. see what i mean? so you'd ave to move on to argue that torture can be understood as a problem that does NOT involve an ethical dimension. but if you make that move, you repeat something of the position of the bush administration--which is a problematic position to find yourself backed into i would think given that i don't have the sense you were heading in that direction.
the utility argument can be made on ethical grounds--it's a classic ends justify the means statement, really. the main counter to that is that torture practices are not and cannot be justified on utility grounds because of the nature of the information they tend to elicit. you'd have to be in a position to argue that's not the case in respose. there'd be no ducking the question either--and if you can't make that argument work, your position collapses. because the counter-argument really is that not only can torture not be justified as a legitimate practice, and not only can it not be justified as an interrogation procedure, but that its use is COUNTERPRODUCTIVE on utilitarian grounds because it's consequences call into question the legitimacy of the political order that employs torture.
want an example? think about the political turmoil that surrounded the end of the 4th republic and setting up of the 5th republic in france.
de gaulle found himself entirely boxed in by the political shit-storm that followed from books like henri alleg's that outlined the french military's systematic use of torture on the algerian population. his solution was basically to concede the conflict to the fln---that in turn triggered a radical rightwing counter-revolution from the oas. the political damage done by the fact that the french state used torture--and that it got out--was extraorindary. and later, in books like gangrene, the fact that for some prisoners the torture would happen in paris, in the same building that the gestapo had used to torture suspected resistance members---it's not good.
so there's a history that militates pretty strongly against any utility arguments, and without a utility argument, i think you're position is in serious trouble.
i run this stuff out because i really don't see a way to justify the use of torture at all, anywhere, ever.
this is why i am as irritated as i am that the decision about whether to prosecute rests with the obama administration and not with an international tribunal, frankly.
i already ran out the arguments for such a tribunal...
anyway--your move.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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