From a reader re my column on torture:
The issue regarding torture is to answer the question: What are acceptable interrogation tactics? You are arguing that the end justifies the means but, that argument can always be made. If the interrogation tactics like water boarding, etc. are so effective, why not use them to interrogate leakers of classified documents, kidnappers (especially of children), Gary Condit. I guess you see where I’m going with this. I believe that we need to establish acceptable practices and adhere to them rather than say, like you, that the ends justify the means. In addition, what about the innocent man that Canadian and U.S. officials sent to Syria (I thought they were the enemy) to be tortured. Was that justifiable? Finally, Al Qaeda was no more murderous than Nazis, Vietnamese, or the Confederacy but we didn’t advocate torture then.
Me: I agree with the reader’s central point, which was the central point of the second half of my column: that we need to figure out what torture is, what it isn’t, and when we can do what.
One place where I disagree with this reader is the idea I am making an ends justify the means argument. Indeed, I grow weary when I hear people hide behind this cliché. It is often used as way to say, “You must conform to the rules I specify so long as those rules prevent you from taking action I don’t wish you to take.” If — for example — breaking the law is never justified by the ends intended a great number of noble deeds and movements would have met with failure. Here’s how WFB dicusess the whole ends and means issue back in 1984:
Do you believe that the end justifies the means?” I was a schoolboy when a professor of philosophy, overhearing this logical barbarism, announced that he would leave the room if ever he heard it again. The proper formulation, he told us, is: “Do you believe that the end justifies any means?” It is just this simple: Ordinarily, you would not push violently an old lady, steal a piece of bread, or fire a gun into the face of a human being. Bui each of these things you would do if a) the old lady would otherwise be hit by a bus; b) your child would die of hunger; c) the human being would plunge his knife into your heart. What you would not do, if you agree that the end does not justify any means, is fire a gun at the bus driver as the alternative to pushing the old lady out of the way; shoot the baker for putting a price on a “loaf of bread; trigger fusillade fire at a row of people knowing that one of the bullers will nail your assailant.
A second place where I’d object to the reader’s criticism is the idea that these are new issues. I’ve been meaning to research this for a very long time and I’ve just never had a chance. But I am very skeptical of the notion — repeated constantly — that American troops and intelligence agencies behaved like summer camp counsellors afraid of being sued by the campers in regard to the Japanese, the Nazis etc. My guess is that much of what we today consider the height of civilized behavior is a releatively new phenomenon and we retroactively imagine that it was ever thus. I don’t know if, as a matter of written or unwritten policy, the OSS beat the stuffing out of the occasional SS officer or spy, and I don’t think that if such things happened it would automatically justify similar behavior today. But I am profoundly dubious of this argument that Bush is behaving in fundamentally unprecedented ways in pursuit of national security. I know enough about what Woodrow Wilson did and FDR did on the macro level that I suspect behavior at the retail level wasn’t what Bush’s nostalgists claim today either. Wilson and FDR’s duplicity with the public, their use of military censorship, their clampdowns on dissent all dwarf anything Bush has done (this is particularly so with Wilson). Wars are ugly things. And the notion that we never had to accomodate that reality until now strikes me as unbelievable and naive.
Update: Lots of folks offering similar objections:
Dear Mr. Goldberg: I must have missed where the Confederate army slaughtered Northern civilians during its invasions of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Down here, we have the distinct impression that it was Sherman who targeted targeted civilians, not the Army of Northern Virginia.