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You argue that Guantamino Bay should be illegal. Even if we assume that you’re right, the fact remains that right now it is *officially* legal. The courts have ruled so. It they had ruled otherwise, then the Bush administration would have been forced to close it down or they would have been impeached for not doing so. Also, when you consider that Barrack Obama has not closed it down, wouldn’t that make him part of the crime if he is continuing Bush’s “illegal” policies? I think it would.

I still believe you’re not grasping the idea that the rules are different in a time of war. I think it’s strange that it’s acceptable to kill terrorists on the battlefield, yet if we capture them then we have to treat them so delicately. I just think there’s a certain lack of logic in that argument.

You fight a war to win. One of the keys to winning any war is getting intelligence. If you fail to get the proper intelligence, it means that American soldiers could die.

“Others’ immoral actions (hypothetical or otherwise) don’t justify one’s own immoral actions.” As far as invading Japan in World War II, you seem to be suggesting that there was a moral equivalence between the United States and Japan. To me, that is just absurd. We had every legal and moral right to do so after all the atrocities Japan committed, including the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Rape of Nanking. This is even moreso when you consider that Japan was only a month away from developing it’s own nuclear weapon which it certainly planned to use against us. If we had backed off and not dropped the bombs, we might well have lost the war or at least suffered incredible catastrophe.

Let’s say you’re walking down the street, and a mugger comes out of an alley and hits you. Then you hit him back in order to defend yourself. Are your actions immoral? Absoutely not. But the logic of moral equivalence that you employ would suggest that they are.

In my view, the biggest mistake that the left tends to make is that many of them believe there is a moral equivalence between us and the terrorists. You have said that the terrorists are despicable, so I don’t think you believe that. And yet your arguments still use the same logic of moral equivalence.

Because the United States is fighting for freedom against terrorists who would slaughter the entire world if they could, we can use coercive interrogation methods without losing the high ground.

“But we should not sacrifice basic morality in the name of hypothetical safety.” Hypothetical? There is nothing hypothetical about the dangers we face. These terrorists want to kill Americans, and they will unless we stop them. Period.

I don’t know how else to put it. The problem with most debates on the War on Terror seems to be one of context. People fail to understand that you live by different rules in a time of war than you do in a time of peace.

And war unforunately presents one of the great paradoxes. Sometimes, the only way to preserve longtime peace is to go to war. And war is often brutal, something that many of the left simply aren’t willing to accept. They seem to think that war should be humane. Maybe it should be, but it’s not. We all need to learn to accept the world the way it is rather than pretend that it’s something it isn’t. This often leads to underestimating dangerous enemies and has resulted in disaster throughout human history.

“You say the rule of law should stand. Well, the courts have ruled all of this to be legal.” Not quite. What has mostly come before the courts are questions of jurisdiction and habeus corpus rights. It’s no mistake that Guantanamo is located outside of US territory proper, on a military base–the Cheneyites knew the endless legal challenges they’d face in the US.

“In war, you are often forced to choose the least of two bad options (making a terrorist suffer in order to break him or allowing innocent people to die)” Agreed. And I choose the latter, knowing that it’s not unfair but it is just.

“Considering all the facts, it would have been immoral not to drop the bombs.” Again, accepting your statements as given, I still disagree. Others’ immoral actions (hypothetical or otherwise) don’t justify one’s own immoral actions. In fact, this is the rationale used by AL Qaeda–the injustices perpetrated by their enemies’ governments justify the targeting of otherwise innocent civilians. Assuming that A, we HAD to invade Japan and that B, the estimates are accurate, sacrificing 1 million Americans would have been horrible. But they would have been American *troops*, not civilians. Failing to make that distinction is, again, the same thing we abhor terrorist for.

“If you honestly believe that you could sit down with a terrorist like KSM and convince him to give out information using mere logic, reason, and persuasion, I think you are incredibly naive.” I didn’t say *I*, but I believe there are professionals capable of just that. And while we might not crack the top-level guys, surely some of the more fringe ones might have been susceptible. If you can’t crack some of the guys except by torture (a proposition I’m not willing to concede) I still say we should not do it. We should have real airport security, we should proactively disrupt terrorist organizations around the world, we should bribe, blackmail, and threaten our way into HUMINT, we should have a powerful, coordinated, domestic/international counterterrorism agency, we should do any number of things to make our citizens as safe as possible. But we should not sacrifice basic morality in the name of hypothetical safety.

If you honestly believe that you could sit down with a terrorist like KSM and convince him to give out information using mere logic, reason, and persuasion, I think you are incredibly naive.

You can’t reason with people who are not reasonable. And these terrorists are not reasonable. It may be true that “many subjects” have given out information under these circumstances, but I’ll bet you a million dollars that not a single Al Quaeda terrorist ever has (at least no info that’s true).

There are many experts that say that coerced interrogation DOES work (waterboarding, etc.). If you need proof, KSM was broken with waterboarding and he gave out information that proved to be true and helped us to stop a number of planned attacked (one such attack involved flying a plane into the main tower building in Los Angeles).

If a terrorist gives false information, he knows that eventually it will be discovered that he lied, and thus he is likely to punished again for lying. So there is the motivation for telling the truth. This seems pretty obvious to me.

I can’t deny that it’s possible that a person who is waterboarded or suffers sleep deprivation might suffer some psychological effects. But the way I see it, if you decide to become a terrorist and murder innocent people and you wind up getting captured and waterboarded and you suffer psychological trauma as a result, that’s just too bad! I don’t feel sorry for these people in the least. Actions have consequences. Deal with it!

You say the rule of law should stand. Well, the courts have ruled all of this to be legal. You can argue that they are wrong, but you cannot say that the law has been violated because it hasn’t.

Finally, the rules of war are different than the rules that apply to peace. In war, you are often forced to choose the least of two bad options (making a terrorist suffer in order to break him or allowing innocent people to die).

A good analogy would be a military leader who must decide if he should risk his entire regiment in order to save the life of one soldier. These decisions have to be made. It’s similar to the decision to drop the two atomic bombs on Japan. The bombs killed 450,000 people. Yet if we had not dropped them, then we would have been forced to invade Japan, and it’s been estimated that 7 million people would have been killed, included 1 million US troops. Also, it was revealed recently by a History Channel documentary that Japan was only 30 days away from developing its own nuclear weapon which it definitely would have used against us. Considering all the facts, it would have been immoral not to drop the bombs.

It’s an ugly situation, and I personally take no glee in waterboarding terrorists. But I’ll do it if that’s what to takes to save your life or the life of any other American.

I wrote quickly and sloppily earlier, and you are right to call me out. On the numbers, I should have said “more often” rather than “longer”–those prisoners were waterboarded dozens and dozens of times. And I conflated two facts–prisoners were waterboarded at Guantanamo, and innocent civilians were wrongfully imprisoned there and at other detention centers and later released–as far as I know, none of the waterboarded prisoners were among the wrongly imprisoned.

In any case, you’re right to identify the definition of torture as our fundamental difference. I’ll point you to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding#Mental_and_physical_effects It’s not clear to me how you can say it does “not inflict permenant damage.” Sleep deprivation (often provoked by playing loud music) will literally drive a person insane in a matter of days of weeks. Again, I don’t know how you look at that and don’t see torture.

I don’t want to occupy the gray area of near-torture. I don’t want to do anything that sniffs of torture. As for what I would do instead, I would refer you to the many excellent articles the New Yorker and The Atlantic have featured on torture–I don’t have the source at hand, but I’ve read from an experienced interrogator (I believe he was a military trainer of interrogators) who had practiced being humane to prisoners. Expecting torture and instead being treated as humans, many subjects developed a bond with their interrogator and revealed all. I realize that’s not going to work with everyone. Tough. The rule of law should stand.

Re: 4. Yeah, why *wouldn’t* I believe everything George Tenet wrote?

Re: 6. I imagine I’d be full of rage. But that’s why the decision isn’t, nor should be, up to me. I feel the same way about capital punishment. We don’t make policy to assuage the grief and anger of victims and their families. We pursue what’s in the best long-term interests of our nation. And when experts that I trust say that torture is counterproductive (because a man will say anything under when tortured, and there’s no good way to sort out the false leads), I believe them (shrug).

Questions for you: if you think none of the acts you describe are torture, would you be alright with police using them on an american citizen? Suppose it was a kidnapper and you were trying to locate a still living victim? Or perhaps a domestic terrorist? Where’s the line for you?