Mark Bowden on Water Boarding and Torture

Mark Bowden has written a sensible article in defense of Water Boarding. Here's an excerpt:

Opponents of torture argue that it never works, that it always produces false information. If that were so, then this would be a simple issue, and the whole logic of incentive/disincentive is false, which defies common sense. In one of the cases I have cited previously, a German police captain was able to crack the defiance of a kidnapper who had buried a child alive simply by threatening torture (the police chief was fired, a price any moral individual would gladly pay). The chief acted on the only moral justification for starting down this road, which is to prevent something worse from happening.

The one thing I disagree with is that Bowden argues that while necessary, methods such as water boarding should be illegal. I'm more inclined to agree with Alan Dershowitz that we should establish appropriate legal conditions for its use rather than ban it and hope that people will be willing to sacrifice themselves for doing what's right and necessary.

Alan Dershowitz on Torture

I have recently finished Alan Dershowitz's excellent The Case for Israel. The book will make you mad with the injustice that the Arabs (with frequent cooperation from much of the rest of the world) have perpetrated against Israel over the nearly 60 years of existence, and before. I highly recommend it.

In today's Wall Street Journal Dershowitz has an op-ed worth reading. Torture, much like war, is a terrible practice. Nevertheless, Dershowitz is one of the few liberal intellectuals out there who recognize that it is sometimes necessary:

Although I am personally opposed to the use of torture, I have no doubt that any president--indeed any leader of a democratic nation--would in fact authorize some forms of torture against a captured terrorist if he believed that this was the only way of securing information necessary to prevent an imminent mass casualty attack. The only dispute is whether he would do so openly with accountability or secretly with deniability. The former seems more consistent with democratic theory, the latter with typical political hypocrisy.

I really respect Dershowitz for openly putting to rest some of the myths that people who, understandably perhaps, are opposed to torture continue to propagate:

There are some who claim that torture is a nonissue because it never works--it only produces false information. This is simply not true, as evidenced by the many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives.

I am also strongly sympathetic to the legal framework that Dershowitz wants to impose here. If we agree that torture is sometimes necessary then let's specify, as much as possible the exact conditions for it and have appropriate legal responsibility so that it is not abused.