On Torture and Exceeding Speed Limits

The news today is that another "detainee" was tortured, at least according to a Bush administration official. Except for the fact that someone in the Bush administration is admitting to it, from my point of view, this is sad news.

While I consider myself a right-leaning individual, (something of a libertarian), I have never accepted the rationalizations of torture from the right, or attempts to parse the meaning of torture so that waterboarding skirts that definition.

Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, enforced nudity and other coercive acts all strike the average person as acts of torture - physical and mental. Yet, national security-minded media outlets like the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, and others on the right, continue to dance on the heads of semantic pins, and invoke situational ethics to defend these practices. (The fact that Congress may also have been aware of these acts and supported them, only to turn into hypocrites about it later, is completely beside the point. Sorry, WSJ.)

I have no doubt that you can get some good information from torture. Sometimes. And, from that you can "do good." What is forgotten -- ridiculously, embarrassingly and conveniently forgotten on the right -- is the distinction between means and end - and the so-called "unintended consequences" that flow when you skirt that distinction.

Conservatives are highly skilled at pointing out the unintended consequences of all sorts of other policies, such as income redistribution, unfunded mandates, etc.

But when it comes to the so-called "blowback," or the codependent political responses that will be generated by acts of torture, rendition, subversion of governments and more, many conservatives degrade into so-called political "realists."

Conservatives know that every law can be twisted, pushed beyond its normal limits. Just like we all drive 60 in a 55 MPH zone. Henry Paulson's TARP has been a mockery of legislation - leaving aside the fact the constitution bars any of this kind of intervention by the federal government. As TARP could "morph," so can waterboarding and rendition. You stay away from the edges, so the edges don't get closer to the norm. That's the point of having a constitution and limits on national security practices.

Yet, somehow for the right, foreign policy remain hermetically sealed from these kind of considerations, buried in a mayonnaise jar at Foggy Bottom. (Sending out a horse laugh to Hillary Clinton today, and her absurd claim that she will make American foreign policy "smart." Just like smart urban planning, eh? All we need is some "smart" people and everything will be great. $&^#*#*!!!)

I got my first taste of the right-wing "realpolitik" blind spot when, as a junior editor at National Review, I made the argument that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with the indiscriminate bombings of Tokyo and Dresden, were immoral acts, contrary to thousands of years of natural law tradition. (You know, the kind of tradition we Burkean, Judeo-Christian conservatives are supposed to defend?)

With a few exceptions, I was met with intransigence and utilitarian rationalization, befitting the likes of Jeremy Bentham and Joseph Fletcher.

And while today, I don't find the world as "neat" as I did then, I cling to the distinction between means and ends as I do the love of my children and my own sanity. If there is no such distinction, there is no meaning at all, and nothing worth protecting.

A lesson long understood by some conservatives, somewhere.