Honestly, a great article, right on target, and wonderfully spare but direct in its argument. I wish you hadn't diminished its force for me by your comment at the end, about President Bush's government being the kind of government Yahweh would establish. I am among probably billions of faithful who would believe that President Bush's government is precisely NOT the kind of government that God would establish, if God established governments on earth.

To many people who call themselves liberal, it is enough to make sactimonious statements without regard that terrorists and use of torture to stop them is not a clever hypothetical discussion. For the real people who must deal with the devil's bargain, there is no glib solution. Thank God I am spared from that horrible choice and thank you to the people who make the absolutely real and necessary choice in my and all American's name. These are the choices that go with the Oval office and with those who serve us all by carrying out the orders of that office. God bless you all.

...or so they seem to think.

If integrity requires a "devil's bargain" then I suspect you aren't the kind of person that really represents the values of the United States and hence you have no business being in a position of authority. There is nothing glib or sanctimonious in saying

WE WILL NOT TORTURE NO MATTER THE COST.

Because that is completely consistent with the values upon which this nation was founded. Unless you find glib the sentiments of Patrick Henry, Nathanial Hawthorne, Ben Franklin and the rest of the signatories of the Declaration of Indepenence, then your accusation of "liberal hypotheticallness" rings hollow.

For this liberal, its not hypothetical at all. I am a 1st generation American. My family has suffered at the hands of governments who were all too willing to sacrifice the rights of the people in the name of national security:

• My great uncle was summarily shot by a firing squad and buried while still alive
• My maternal grandfather was tortured to death for being a "national security risk' - because he editted a book of the collected works of the president of Latvia
• My grandmother and mother were placed in a forced labor camp because as DPs they were "undesirable". Their escape is nothing short of miraculous
• My father and his brother were strafed by an allied airplane even though they were clearly kids. They lucked out and froze up as the bullets walked by on either side of them

Growning up, the thing my dad kept reminding me was that America is DIFFERENT because the basic rights of ALL people are protected by the Constitution.

So to remind you of the words that those "glib liberals" I mentioned earlier used to describe what sacrifice is in keeping with American Values:

Give me Liberty or give me Death

I regret I have but one life to give for my country

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

We pledge Our Lives, Our Fortunes, and Our Sacred Honor

I'll leave it to the interested conservative to look up which "liberal" said which or those phrases.

I am very sorry that terrible things happened to you in your former country. However, there are devil's bargains and the devil must be paid.America's founders were people who accepted war and its consequences . The war of independence lasted almost 8 years and included violent acts and all the activities that make war so bad. There has never been a nice war and war is harder on those who defend freedom because to win, one must do things that are counter to regular freedom. Lincoln, FDR, the Continental Congress all compromised their ideals to win. The measure of America is to do as little compromising of ideals as possible and to accept that to fight evil one always brings some evil into oneself. The choice is to see whole cities destroyed rather than to do cruel things to the enemy who would destroy the people of that city. Are you so secure in your choice not to act that you could tell the dead you chose to let terrorists kill them all?

While spies like Nathaniel Hawthorne were executed, the American colonists largely resorted to tarring and feathering. And on the battlefield, combatants like General Bourgoyne were treated to a "devil's bargin" of being sent back to their own lines under parole.

Yes, I am secure enough in my belief in the founding principles and actions of the "Founding Fathers" as well as in the indistinguishable similarity between what was done to my family by the Soviets and Nazis and the assertions being made by folks like Scalia, Gonzalez and GWB, that I would have no problem whatsoever talking to the families of the dead.

None. Some ideals are worth dying for and risking death for.

We Shall Not Torture.

PERIOD

The end does not justify the means, and that's not just a liberal dogma. It's a fundamental part of our theory of government, more fundamental than the written constitution and all the books of law. When you start rationalizing "just a little evil" as necessary or even desirable, you have rejected the moral guidance that God gave us. It's a bright white line, not some shadowy border region.

The existence of terrorists is fact, but the assertion that torture is or was effective in stopping them is not. It may or may not be true, and we may never know which it is. On the other hand, it is fact that civilized nations have prohibited torture internally and by treaty for several hundred years.

Tonto,

I hate disagreeing with you, because your broad strokes are all excellent and true, but one small quibble:

Of course ends justify means. Otherwise, what does the word "justify" mean? I think it's more to the point here that collectives should not be allowed more license than individuals. States and their agents routinely do things that shock the conscience when done by individuals acting on personal self-interest.

Siempre's claim that war is hell and has to be played by demonic logic is precisely the claim that there is no such thing as collective guilt. We confuse our soldiers by telling them that in some instances they are acting as members of a presumably guiltless collective (an army at war) and at other times they are acting as individuals with individual moral and legal responsibilities. Thus, we excused the designers of the "rural pacification" programs in Vietnam because they were, as military bureaucrats, not subject to laws that govern individual conduct, but we arrested and tried Lieutenant Calley for what he did at My Lai.

The whole reason for designating enemy combatants as "terrorists" is to shelter those who deal with such "terrorists" from individual responsibility. As the agents of an endangered collective battling rogue individuals, they have a kind of presumptive innocence, like the Conquistadors who went off to New Spain armed with documents of preemptive forgiveness for whatever crimes they might commit in advancing the collective footprint of the Church and the holy state of Spain. Now, all states do the same, though they don't assume their powers of forgiveness extend into the next life.

The Standard of Nuremberg, that states and their officers are as accountable as individuals are to universal and multinational standards of conduct (for example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the United States signed in the 1940's and which American Conservatives repudiated then and now), is a relative novelty, and is not applied consistently, at all. It is applied, generally speaking, to the heads of states (e.g. Milosevich)that lose wars. The question of national guilt for American war crimes in Southeast Asia is only interesting to those of us who think we lost a war there. That's how the Nuremberg Standard works. As long as you never admit you lost, they can't hold you responsible for what you did. It worked for Nixon, and it will work for Bush.

"The Standard of Nuremberg, that states and their officers are as accountable as individuals are to universal and multinational standards of conduct (for example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the United States signed in the 1940's and which American Conservatives repudiated then and now), is a relative novelty, and is not applied consistently, at all."

That is a fundamental misunderstanding (backwards) of the Standard of Nuremberg. Nations are not tried for war crimes. The standard is that an individual (officers or foot soldiers) can not use the "just following orders" defense for reprehensible acts during wartime. That standard is exactly why Lt. Calley and several other officers with him were held responsible for their actions. The standard was used extensively against former Nazis when they were recovered worldwide and extradited to the US, Germany, and Israel.

So Nazis were held responsible for their war crimes, and Germany as a whole was held responsible for reparations to he victims of the Holocaust (though in such minor matters as returning property stolen by party members before and during the war, German courts began dragging their feet almost immediately, and the Swiss, oh, let's not go there).

But was Henry Kisssinger held accountable for what his subordinates did in Cambodia, Chile, Guatemala, and Mexico? No. He was given a Nobel Prize. And regarding Vietnam, Calley was tried but not Westmoreland. It was a model for the sleazy way the Pentagon handled the Abu Ghraib situation. A designated scapegoat is named, the buck stops there (Captain Medina, General Karpinsky) and it's over.

And have we ever paid reparations to Vietnam for the damage we did there, pouring thousands of tons of toxic agents into their ground water, leaving them with generations of stillborn and deformed children? Do those children matter to us any more than the children in Lebanon maimed by the cluster bombs we gave to Israel? Apparently, as I said, our sense of collective guilt extends only to the losers, and we have decided not to be losers, so logically, we can't be guilty, QED.

The tragedy of Nuremberg is that it was designed as the first of a series of trials in which the collective guilt for war crime was to be defined in ways that would be an inescapable model for future conflicts. Then the Cold War happened and we shelved Nuremberg, along with lots of other enthusiasms of the postwar idealism. The followup hearings never happened.

The Cold War might be what caused the US to apply the Nuremberg principle on a selective basis, but maybe it was just the arrogance of people who felt like they had "won". So low-level Nazi prison guards were still tried and deported, and the likes of Westmoreland (and Colin Powell who served on Westmoreland's staff as a young major), Medina, Karpinski, and Kissinger, somehow got cleansed and forgotten.

It makes me wonder if the Bush administration figures who created this fiasco would have acted more cautiously if the realistic chance of war crimes trials existed for them.

It is apparent that most on this thread do not read much military history. The post WW2 trials had to do with war crimes-the killing of non-combatants in cruel and unnecessary actions outside normal warfare. Terrorists are non-uniformed combatants and are considered spies or sabateurs in warfare with no protections under Geneva or any other warfare code. Geneva and other war codes actively distinguish between uniformed and non-uniformed combatants to keep warfare from deteriorating into chaos. Also, Vietnam started with the invasion of South Vietnam by communist North Vietnam. There was no war till the north invaded the south. The people of the south were systematically murdered by the communists AFTER the North won the war -murders of 10's of thousands of people who were killed for political reasons. If you are going to talk of crime against humanity,then that was the cost of the West losing in that war-but it was the communist north that rounded up those people and killed them not anyone else. Vietnam was fought by the North largely with nonuniformed terrorist style tactics such as the Moslem terrorists are now using. It is sad that people on this thread bring their displeasure against the US and not the terrorist nations that daily murder indiscriminately. Only in Old West movies can the Good Guys win by shooting the guns out of the Bad Guys hands-that is fantasy. The real world requires real killing and ,horribly, even rare use of torture to stop terrorists and terrorist regimes.

Siempre, things you don't know a thing about include:

The history of US-sponsored terrorism,

The history of the Vietnamese civil wars, and the distinct histories of the colonial powers (France and the US) who engaged in and expanded those wars.

Apparently, anything more complex than the back copy of a Wheaties box defeats you. You especially should stick to simple moral principles and not play situational games with them. Even if it could be done reliably (and it can't) you aren't up to the job.

When he insists on an example, start with the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia.

We now know that the majority of Gitmo detainees were innocent of the charges leveled and that they were not caught on any battlefield or engaged in any acts of terrorism. Instead most were like the Uighurs who ended up now exiled to Albania: Innocents accused by someone with a grudge who also wanted the $25,000 bounty the US was paying

These weren't terrorists but non-combatant civillians. EXACTLY the same class as we tried the Nazis for