National Security, Round 3

I was told that Round 2 was somewhat convoluted and so I reread it, AGAIN, and agree that it was difficult.  I was trying to cover too many points and the end result was a bit muddled.

So I am going to come at it from another angle.

There were two arguments I was trying to address.

One was that no matter how you look at it torture is indefensible and the United States shouldn't engage in it.

The other was that the information gathered from the interrogations might or might not have been as a result of torture.  This is actually beside the point.  The end does not justify the means.  Torture is unacceptable.  The information gathered is also highly suspect.

The criticisms I have read seem to focus the second point claiming that the information garnered wound conceivably not have been obtained without torture.  They also then focus on the fact that that the time "enhanced interrogation techniques" had been deemed legal.

They claim that one of the major weaknesses in the Senate's report was that no one from the Senate interviewed anyone from the CIA  so how would the Senate know if valuable information had been garnered from the torturing of detainees or not.

That is moving the argument away from one of principle and turning it into a question of facts.

It misses the most important fact which is that on principle torture is unacceptable.  Regardless of the information gathered.  It's called ethics.  It is the first question a student is presented with in Philosophy class.

Not that I expect soldiers to be angels.  Nor do I expect CIA operatives to be angels.  There is good and bad in everyone, and how and when it manifests itself can be very dependent on the circumstances.  But excesses in the heat of the moment, when discovered, are both recognized as such and prosecuted accordingly.

But in this case the excesses were condoned at the highest levels of government.  They were signed off by the Executive Branch, by the Attorney General, the National Security Committee, and by the Legislative Branch in the form of Senate Intelligence Committee..

They are making a mockery of our enlightened democracy.  Facts are facts.  What is of critical importance is that we maintain our values in the analysis of facts.   Renaming a fact doesn't change the fact.  Legalizing an immoral act doesn't make it moral, even if it suddenly gains legality.

Facts don't change our values.