Viewpoint has argued before (6/6/2004) that much of what is being written and said about the awfulness of the Bush administration with regard to the matter of torture is hard to credit. Not only are his critics using this issue in a disingenuous fashion to hurt the president politically, but Bush himself is hard to take seriously when he says that he would never order torture.
If it is true that he would never permit someone to be tortured then what would he do in the very plausible scenario of a nuclear bomb hidden in a major city set to go off in ten hours. Suppose one of the terrorists has been captured but will not divulge the location of the bomb. If the President would not order him to be tortured to extract the information needed to save millions of lives then I suggest he is profoundly wrong and is derelict in his responsibilities as president.
Some readers may blanche at the suggestion that torture might ever be the right thing to do, but the question of torture is not as simple as sound bites on the evening news would have it.
For example, the terrorists in Iraq have recently kidnapped an American Marine. Suppose they threaten to behead him as they have done to others. Suppose further that the Marines have captured an insurgent they have good reason to believe knows where the kidnapped Marine is being kept. He will not divulge the information. Should he be subjected to physical or psychological coercion in order to get the information out of him?
That would be an interesting question to pose to the critics who are trying to skewer the president with this issue. If their answer to the question is no, would they say the same thing if the kidnapped Marine was their brother, or their son? If the critic knew that his/her son's life could be saved from the horror that befell Nick Berg and Paul Johnson and Daniel Pearl, but it was not because American forces were prevented from using methods which might cause pain for the terrorist, would the critic not think that something is out of moral kilter? If he would still say that torturing a terrorist would be wrong even if it were necessary to save his son's life then is he not saying that the physical and psychological well-being of a murderer is more important in his hierarchy of values than the life of his son?
In other words, the questions we should be asking about torture are precisely the ones which so shock the president's opponents. We should be asking not whether torture should ever be used, but rather what constitutes torture and under what circumstances, if any, is it morally permissable. Perhaps some pacifists would still insist that torture is never justifiable, but I suspect that most people would agree that if we found ourselves in either of the scenarios mentioned above torture would be not only morally right, but the refusal to use it would be morally appalling.