TORTURE….Responding to Andrew Sullivan, Reuel Marc Gerecht defends his defense of torture:
I take it from your post that if you had been confronted on 7 September 2001 with a captured Khalid Shaykh Muhammad or Abu Zubaydah and you knew that a major, mass-casualty terrorist strike was about to go down in the United States, and you had plenipotentiary authority for the nation’s security, you would not have used any physically coercive techniques against the gentleman? Okay, but I do believe that moral men can go the other way, and I strongly suspect that the vast majority of Democrats and Republicans elected or appointed to high office would go the other way.
….Would that the Clinton and the Bush administrations — especially the Bush administration — had started a public discussion of what we do with holy warriors who live to slaughter thousands….You might not like what America’s legislature would have decided (Andrew, what was your position on this in 2001/2002?), but it would have carried the approval of more of the American people’s representatives.
Sadly, I suspect that Gerecht is right: if torture had been put to a vote back in 2001, it would have passed. The language would have been prettied up, of course, but the intention would have been clear enough and the public would have approved. Even today, I’m pretty sure that a majority of Americans are basically OK with torture as long as it’s mostly kept out of sight and they can go about their business.
But even for torture apologists like Gerecht, I wonder how far they’re willing to go. He must know that over the past few years we’ve tortured a steady and sizeable stream of people who were either decidedly small fish or else just completely innocent. How many of those people is he willing to brutalize on the slim chance that once, someday, we’ll just happen to have someone in our custody who knows about a terrorist plot scheduled for tomorrow and can be successfully tortured into giving it up in time? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? Where exactly does he draw the line?
