Much has been written about the ills of torture over at Donklephant, so I figure my first REAL post here should take it up.
Personally, I don’t think those who condone torture as a means to an end, actually realize what that “end” really is. They think it’s actionable intelligence that will keep us safe. However, I think many are now beginning to understand that it could actually put us in greater danger.
Here’s why:
Speaking at a College of William and Mary forum last year, for example, Burton L. Gerber, a decorated Moscow station chief who retired in 1995 after 39 years with the CIA, surprised some in the audience when he said he opposes torture “because it corrupts the society that tolerates it.” This is a view, he confirmed in an interview with National Journal last week, that is rooted in Albert Camus’s assertion in Preface to Algerian Reports that torture, “even when accepted in the interest of realism and efficacy,” represents “a flouting of honor that serves no purpose but to degrade” a nation in its own eyes and the world’s. “The reason I believe that torture corrupts the torturers and society,” Gerber says, “is that a standard is changed, and that new standard that’s acceptable is less than what our nation should stand for. I think the standards in something like this are crucial to the identity of America as a free and just society.”
The moral dimensions of torture, Gerber adds, are inextricably linked with the practical; aside from the fact that torture almost always fails to yield true or useful information, it has the potential to adversely affect CIA operations. “Foreign nationals agree to spy for us for many different reasons; some do it out of an overwhelming admiration for America and what it stands for, and to those people, I think, America being associated with torture does affect their willingness to work with us,” he says. “But one of my arguments with the agency about ethics, particularly in this case, is that it’s not about case studies, but philosophy. Aristotle says the ends and means must be in concert; if the ends and means are not in concert, good ends will be corrupted by bad means.”
Cheney is fighting to keep torture on the table, and yet these CIA heavies (and more in the rest of the post) are saying it simply doesn’t work.
Whose opinion are you going to go with?
Definitely read the whole thing (same link as above).