When is it permissible to torture?

Larry Evan's in his column, "Laws governing warfare: Coercive but not "Communist", discusses torture and its application. Larry has written about torture before and is clearly against any form of "coercion".

Larry's column is interesting because he spends almost the entire article talking about the "Binderman Chart of Coercion". He tries to link Binderman, a sociologist working for the U.S. Air Force, and communism. A stretch at best. Studying the enemies coercion techniques is most useful and common place. The military have been doing this for centuries. Is Larry surprised by this?

Of course Larry takes the usual swipe at America by stating, "Here is the story in a nutshell: Chinese Communist techniques that don't work and that are morally repugnant and against American values were used by Americans on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and in Afghanistan."

What Larry does not want to address are two fundamental questions: When is torture permissible? And is it effective in certain circumstances? The answer to the first question is "to save lives". The answer to the second questions is yes!

Let's take a look back at some discussions on the use of torture. On November 5, 2001, Jonathan Alter wrote an article for Newsweek titled, "Time to think about torture". In the article Jonathan said, "In this autumn of anger, even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to ... torture. OK, not cattle prods or rubber hoses, at least not here in the United States, but something to jump-start the stalled investigation of the greatest crime in American history. Right now, four key hijacking suspects aren’t talking at all."

Jonathan pointed out that, "For more than 20 years Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz has argued to the Israelis that this [policy of Israeli police to use torture] is terribly unfair to the members of the security services. In a forthcoming book, “Shouting Fire,” he makes the case for what he calls a “torture warrant,” where judges would balance competing claims and make the call, as they do in issuing search warrants. Dershowitz says that as long as the fruits of such interrogation are used for investigation, not to convict the detainee (a violation of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination), it could be constitutional here, too. “I’m not in favor of torture, but if you’re going to have it, it should damn well have court approval,” Dershowitz says.

Jonathan states, "Some torture clearly works. Jordan broke the most notorious terrorist of the 1980s, Abu Nidal, by threatening his family. Philippine police reportedly helped crack the 1993 World Trade Center bombings (plus a plot to crash 11 U.S. airliners and kill the pope) by convincing a suspect that they were about to turn him over to the Israelis. Then there’s painful Islamic justice, which has the added benefit of greater acceptance among Muslims."

Jonathan concludes, "We can’t legalize physical torture; it’s contrary to American values. But even as we continue to speak out against human-rights abuses around the world, we need to keep an open mind about certain measures to fight terrorism, like court-sanctioned psychological interrogation. And we’ll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that’s hypocritical. Nobody said this was going to be pretty."

In a November 6, 2001 New York Times article by Jim Rutenberg he writes, "The historian Jay Winik, in an opinion article on Oct. 23 [2001] in The Wall Street Journal, detailed the reported torture in 1995 of the convicted terrorist plotter Abdul Hakim Murad by the Philippine authorities that led to the foiling of a plot to crash nearly a dozen U.S. commercial aircraft into the Pacific and another into CIA headquarters in Virginia.

Mr. Winik went on to write: "One wonders, of course, what would have happened if Murad had been in American custody?" He did not, however, endorse the use of torture but suggested that the United States might have to significantly curtail civil liberties, as it had done in past wars.

Mr. Alter said he was surprised that his column did not provoke a big flood of e-mail messages or letters. And perhaps even more surprising, he said, was that he had been approached by "people who might be described as being on the left whispering, 'I agree with you.'"

If only we had listened to and taken seriously the plot outlined by convicted terrorist Abdul Hakim Murad in 1995 about crashing planes into the CIA building. Could we have learned more about 9/11 by continuing to use "coercive techniques" on him?

I pointed out in previous articles here and here that key Democrat leaders in Congress in 2002 had knowledge of CIA interrogation techniques (including waterboarding) and asked if they were harsh enough. Some questioned if we should be doing more. In these same articles I pointed out that the 5 1/2 minutes that we spent waterboarding three top Al Qaeda terrorists was time well spent. History also tells us that in certain circumstances "coercive techniques" are in fact effective.

I believe that using "coercive techniques" to save lives is both moral and logical. America cannot be defenseless when dealing with such a vicious enemy. Our radical Islamic enemy uses torture to strike fear in our hearts. They use beheadings, torture leading to death, to strike fear in all of us. This fear is a form of torture, psychological torture put upon us all.

Finally, some will argue torture is evil. Torture is not evil just as killing is not evil so long as it is used to save lives and protect Americans.

The President of the United States must have this option on the table. As former Chief Justice Robert Jackson said, ”The Constitution is not a suicide pact”. On this issue I disagree with Larry, Senator McCain and Senator Obama.