We all seem to want to discuss this as some dry, legalistic issue. I doubt that many of us can really emotionally visualize a situation where we and our loved ones are at risk. The question to me is would we condone the use of torture to protect our friends and families. I have heard from some that even if the results of torture would save a million lives it cannot be permitted. I find this troubling and probably not completely honest. Would the person that would prohibit torture be willing to trade places with some future victim whose death is preventable by information obtained by torture? Are those principles so strong as to say I am willing to become that victim? The answer when you are dry, safe and warm is probably very different than when you are faced with the reality of a situation.

Try as we might we cannot sanitize war and all that goes with it. It comes down to killing as many of the enemy as possible and minimizing damage to your side. Life loses value and the bounds of behavior loosen. Are we be willing to vilify and prosecute those that use torture that results in information that prevents a future 9/11. The vast majority of the time I do not believe that the ends justify the means. At some point I am willing to accept that they do.

I despise our being in Iraq and believe that at best our leadership was incompetent and at worst we were lied to. I blame all those elected officials that initiated or approved legislation permitting that invasion. You cannot be absolved of blame by changing you stance when your original position is no longer popular.

I can envision it. My grandfather was deemed a "danger to national security" and tortured to death because of it. His crime? He was the editor of the annotated works of the government that came previous.

My Mother and her mother had to escape from a forced labor camp.

My Father and his brother - displaced refugees - were coming back from fishing for the family dinner. As young adolescents it was believed it would be safer for them to be moving about rather than adults. But that didn't keep them from being strafed by a US fighter.

Sure you can goad anyone into the anger and fury that makes them desire vengence in the moment. What makes a person someone of integrity is the willingness follow the beliefs one has formed in a lifetime of experience no matter the duress. What makes a nation one of integrity is that it stays true to the principles of its creation and core even in the face of a dire threat.

So yes. I stand with Benjamin Franklin in vilifying those that would torture to prevent a future 9/11

Those who would sacrifice any of our precious liberties for a temporary measure of security, deserve neither liberty nor security.

It is precisely the willingness to forego the above that makes the United States of America appear cowardly and self-serving to the eyes of the world. On 9/12 the world looked at how we reacted to the previous day's tragedy and said

We are All Americans We are all New Yorkers, just as surely as John F. Kennedy declared himself to be a Berliner in 1962 when he visited Berlin. Indeed, just as in the gravest moments of our own history, how can we not feel profound solidarity with those people, that country, the United States, to whom we are so close and to whom we owe our freedom, and therefore our solidarity?

Do you really believe that your willingness at some point to accept our use of torture is in keeping with this?

degsme,

I support and agree with everything you've said (so eloquently) about the moral evils of torture. I agree that, ESPECIALLY at this time in history, the US (and all other civilized nations) MUST stand up for what is civilized and moral and just--even if at grave risk.

But seeing you mentioning the founders again (who ARE founts of unending virtue), I wonder: How quick those hard old men might have been to put the thumbscrews to the right Tory...

Any thoughts or observations on that question?

The idea of deciding that torture is somehow appropriate under circumstances of great fear and apprehension is not some "dry, legalistic issue". It is a manifestation of panic. The actions of Bush and Cheney under the threat of terrorism, for me, are the equivalent of a front line soldier deserting. When the time came to hold the the convictions held by the founders of the United States and the people of America, to protect the moral principles we held dear; this president and his associates folded and crumbled. They began to write laws that are secret, they justified to themselves their own lawbreaking, much as I have heard criminals do in movies. Today, the administration, the Justice Department and the "Intelligence" Community have corrupted from the top down and collapsed into a heap of hair splitting, word parsing, paranoia and utter hypocrisy.

For example, how could anyone respect NIE Director Mike McConnell after his simpering and sniveling about water torture? "...water going up the nose...for me it would be torture..." He reminds me of Eustace on Courage the Cowardly Dog saying, "but I have a condition." He is apparently unable to grasp that many human beings might have the same condition, some might be al Qaida.

foertschdg, your statements regarding "the end justifying the means" show your "melting point" - the point of abandoning your own beliefs. If you abandon your beliefs and win that war, what do you have left? If we win in Iraq do we say, well, we didn't torture as much as Saddaam did? Now that Saddaam is dead, what are we fighting for? How would you describe this "victory" in Iraq to your grandchildren? These also are not dry, legalistic issues.

You did read about the trained chickens the American revolutionaries had? To suss out the spies among them they trained chickens who could sniff out allegiance to the Crown. Similar to our modern bomb-sniffing wasps, these chickens would use smell. Upon the command Chicken Catch-a-tory, they would.....

Sorry couldn't resist. Yes some revolutionaries retaliated against Tories (collaborators) with the infamous Tarring and Feathering. But this did not involve hot tar and hence was not fatal. And even Thomas Paine - that most ardent of revolutionaries - eventually came to argue against it.

So in terms of putting the thumbscrews to a Tory - remember that when Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga it was a very civil and ceremonious affair, and after being disarmed, both he and many of his officers were released "on parole" to return to England (a Parolee could continue to be a member of the enemy's military but could not lead men against those he surrendered to).

So I think the evidence is that Franklin, Paine, Jefferson, Henry, Hancock et. al. would be shocked and dismayed by the kind of weasel logic that even Scalia is now engaged in. And these were men who's lives and fortunes really were on the line (about 10% fof the DoI signers gave up one or both).

Thanks for the response, Degsme.

I've read with interest your family stories of government repression--and it depresses me to think that (judging by so many posts) a passion for liberty like yours apparently requires that sort of recent history. Seems Americans with a longer history of freedom care MUCH more about ipods than liberty.

I have to say simply that I'm SHAMED by the idea that my government so easily finds excuses to torture people, and I'm profoundly depressed that so MANY Americans find it so easy to support that.

But I'm NOT surprised that Scalia is becomming a bigger hypocrite with age...

Both my parents are refugees from Latvia. Both families arrived in the USA by separate paths. And while it is true that the USA of today is not the Soviet Union or Germany of the mid-1940s, the blithe willingness of average citizens to surrender their "essential liberties" for that sense of "security" that is at best temporary, if not simply illusory is very very very reminiscent of the mood that is described in Hitler's Willing Executioners.

You have said it very well. And you've managed to quote Eustace from Courage the Cowardly Dog, which puts you into a class by yourself!

The only thing I would add to the words of degsme and yourself is to ask, as I have done elsewhere, that we reflect on the true meaning of the words "give me liberty or give me death" at the time they were uttered.

Reflect first on the relatively marginal difference in liberty between being a colonial subject of the British Crown vs. being a citizen of the independent US of A. Think about the striking similarities between what Bush has done to the US and what King George was accused of in the Declaration of Independence.

Then realize two things about the "death" Patrick Henry was speaking of in his words to the Continental Congress. First, Patrick was far more likely to die at the hands of his enemy than you or I or any of our loved ones are at the hands of ours. But second, it isn't merely a matter of likelihood. In fact, by setting this country on the course to war with England, Henry and Washington et al. were guaranteeing that, at a minimum, tens of thousands of residents of this continent would die. In the actual event, it was far more. And if you translated that into our current population, I venture to say it would be the equivalent of millions.

Millions of deaths to defend a principle. A principle no more valuable than the marginal difference in liberty that was at stake in 1776.

"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

I go to work every morning in Rockefeller Center, New York. My last job was directly across the street from the New York Stock Exchange. I'm probably in the top .01% of Americans at risk of getting killed in a terrorist attack.

Nonetheless, I'm very much against the use of torture, even to prevent a terrorist attack. I realize that the life the torturers are saving might well be my own, but it's ok. . . really. . . I'm not so desperate to live that I'll willingly sign on as a party to crimes against humanity.

There are misfortunes greater than death. The knowing abandonment of one's humanity is definitely one of them.

Not only has my family suffered at the hands of governmental torture, but WRT 9/11, the older of my two sisters was slated to be on one of those planes. She cancelled the night before because her customer in CA was being a jerk.

And my father used to take the subway to the station that got collapsed, at just about that time. Except that for some inexplicable reason, he was running about 1/2 hour late that morning and instead got stuck in the subway around 35th street when the tunnel collapsed.

Even if they both had died on 9/11 - and I very much have contemplated that possibility- I could not accept torture.

Thrasymachus:

I go to work every morning in Rockefeller Center, New York. My last job was directly across the street from the New York Stock Exchange. I'm probably in the top .01% of Americans at risk of getting killed in a terrorist attack.

Nonetheless, I'm very much against the use of torture, even to prevent a terrorist attack. I realize that the life the torturers are saving might well be my own, but it's ok. . . really. . . I'm not so desperate to live that I'll willingly sign on as a party to crimes against humanity.

There are misfortunes greater than death. The knowing abandonment of one's humanity is definitely one of them.

Patrick Henry is smiling, somewhere.

I'm not sure if it's a quirk of demographics, an effect of the experience, or something else entirely; but literally every single person I've ever met who either witnessed or was in some other way touched by the attacks of 9/11 attacks has been opposed to the use of torture as an instrument of interrogation.

I spent the afternoon of 9/12 on the upper edge of a gently sloping lawn in Central Park, sharing a bag of crisp green apples and a bottle of Spanish Merlot with my dearest and most beautiful friend. I kept stealing glances at her ankles, her bracelets, the golden labyrinth of her hair, exactly as if I'd never looked at her before. And then I realized, with a tiny catch in my chest, how trivial everything seemed, next to the joy of knowing that both of us were still alive. And down the long slope in front of us, the grass was full of students, couples, circles of friends, kids flying kites, and parents with babies in strollers.

That's how civilized people beat terrorists.By not being afraid.

My airporter had arrived just after the first plane hit, and I was in the car headed for the airport when the second one hit. My wife called and told me everything was grounded, so we turned around.

I was so stunned that all I could do was sit on the back porch in the sun literally wringing my hands. So I finally decided to create somethng - took my sculpting clay and made a sculpture of my foot. Initially there was no intent behind it other than to do something creative, but I quickly realized that I was creating something that represented not just humanness, but the basis upon which we humans stand up tall in the world.

Three months later when work took me to Ground Zero I was struck by the coincidence that the advertising above the steps to the subway was for a horror movie (Resident Evil).

OK -- we've agreed we can't torture people. Assuming we've achieved a definition of torture upon which we can all agree (this has not, at this point, been achieved in the real world but we can postulate): What do we do instead?