Letter sent to the Inquirer, 4/26/09:

It is remarkable to find conservatives like Kevin Ferris (Currents, 4/26) arguing moral relativism — after their constant denunciations of that philosophy over many years with regard to abortion, and other beginning-of-life/end-of-life issues. Those of us who criticize the Bush invocation of torture come at the position from many points of view. There are those who argue that torture is a moral wrong, which has no justification in any circumstance; but it is hardly the only position being raised against its use, six months after capture, against Khalid Shaikh Muhammed. There are those like former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan, who argue that traditional interrogation was in fact producing valuable intelligence (NY Times, 4/22).

There are others like myself, who argue that the major problem was that Bush refused to take responsibility for these exceptional activities with a “presidential finding” and instead tortured the logic of the law and the constitution, so that he could have plausible deniability, and pass responsibility down to the lower level operatives whom he assured had the legal authority to perform  such questionable acts, so long as they did not cause organ failure. (Obama’s Nuremburg defense of these actions, that our operatives were “only” following orders, is equally baffling to me.)

Ferris has vastly oversimplified the situation so that torture can only be considered a moral good when compared with the evil of 9/11; or it is a moral evil, which can never be considered. In fact, the Constitution’s prohibition on the use of cruel and unusual punishment had precedent going back to the Magna Carta’s prohibition against Star Chamber tortures — an absolute right of British citizens which the founders demanded in the Bill of Rights for all Americans.

It is less clear how this applies to non-citizen prisoners of battle (not war, since Al Qaeda is not a state). Ferris and other conservatives are ignoring their best arguments, so that they can whitelist their actions as legal and moral goods. Yet they cannot avoid their own moral relativism, by comparing their dictatorial darkness, to the dark side of the foreign radical Other.

Ben Burrows
Elkins Park