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Not to offend, but I find some of the moralist grand-standing here to be rather irritating.

Let me put you folks in a room.

In this room with you is a known terrorist. He has planned, and in some cases carried out, intentional attacks on helpless civilians in many countries. His motto is "Conversion or Death for the Infidel, and Nothing Else."

Furthermore, you know that he has vital information pertaining to an attack that will kill a group of people who's safety is your personal responsibility. Perhaps they are family or friends. Maybe employees. Either way, all that stands between them and a horrifying death at the hands of this religious madman is you. No higher authority is going to intervene; either you get the necessary information, or your people are going to die (if their lucky; they could spend the next twenty years in a miserable hell of skin grafts and repeated reconstructive surgeries).

This terrorist is a hard man, and he hates you and everything you stand for. To him, the people who you are trying to defend aren't really people; they are merely chits on a map of his mad objectives, willingly sacrificed to further the fantasy ideology of a global Caliphate. Concepts like "reason" and "compassion" are so far removed from his morality that he actually straps bombs onto children and sends them to blow up other children.

How will you proceed?

Each person must answer that for themselves, of course. But I'll willingly tell you what I would do: I'd tell the terrorist the exact, precise truth about my moral position.

I'd tell him that I hate - hate with every last fiber of my being - the idea of torturing a prisoner. I'd tell him that the mere thought of it sickens me beyond the abililty of words to describe. It stands against every last ethic that I hold as a rational and compassionate human being. Cruelty and murder are his tools, not mine. Using them is a crime against the very fabric of civilization.

And then I'd take out my hunting knife and tell him he has 30 minutes to tell me what I need to know, or I'm going to make the 24 hours that follow such an unendurable bloody mess that Mengele himself would turn away in disgust.

And I'd mean it. Every last word.

But you all aren't in that room, and neither am I. We're sitting on comfy office chairs, typing away on clean plastic keyboards, far from responsibilites that involve the lives of a thousand innocent people. As much as I tried to put you in that place, I am certain that I was unable to muster up even one-tenth of one percent of the dire reality of such a situation.

But those situations do exist, and there are people who must deal with them. It does not matter one whit how much we all wish it wasn't so; the universe cares nothing for our wishes, it merely sits dumb and blind while men do what men do.

It is so very, very, very easy to sit there in your comfy office chair, in front of your clean keyboard, and moralize about we-can't-do-that-to-the-enemy-or-we-become-the-enemy bullshit. It costs you nothing at all. In fact, it makes you look wise and compassionate to your fellow BookTalk posters. You're planting a flag on moral high ground that sits completely undefended.

But it is quite different for the people whose sacred trust is the defense of helpless civillians numbering in the hundreds of millions. They're not typing on clean keyboards, they're trying desperately to avert the next close encounter 'twixt flying bomb and skyscraper-full-o-office workers. It is not a moral exercise for them, it is a hard-and-fast physical reality.

Is it morally correct to despise torture and the people who willingly - even gleefully - use it? Yes.

Is it morally correct to spare one evil man such torture, after you've given him ample opportunity to cooperate, and condemn hundereds or thousands of innocent people to an agonizing death?

My answer, I think, is obvious. But it's something that each person will have to decide for themselves; I would only ask that you think carefully about the real-world implications of your position, instead of simply defaulting to the one that looks like the correct and easy answer.


G