"Notes and Quotes"

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Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Tortured Logic

04/21/09

by Matt Schwartz


Below is a piece I wrote approximately three years ago, but it is extremely timely now in light of Obama's release of reports about the CIA torturing terrorists, and the door he is leaving open to prosecute members of the Bush administration.


I think it debunks the moral argument against torture of any kind that the liberals are so insane about. I think torture (in its most commonly understood sense) is in most cases an abomination, but also that you cannot take it off the table under all circumstances. There are narrow situations under which it is completely justified, and this is what Dick Cheney is now talking about with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and how his waterboarding prevented a 9/11 type catastrophe in Los Angeles.


(By the way, waterboarding is only a psychological torture, and in any event, defining torture is such a slippery slope to begin with that by banning it altogether, it would prevent us from taking anyone captive since capitivty itself (separation from loved ones and society in general) would constitute torture -- at least to most liberals.


Tortured Logic


The witty Bill Maher recently appeared on an installment of Hannity & Colmes to discuss his criticisms of CBS programming decisions. Predictably, however, Mr. Maher soon changed directions and targeted the Bush administration’s efforts to defend our citizenry. Specifically, he claimed that the administration’s tacit approval of mildly torturing terrorists for the purpose of extracting life-saving information would cause the United States to lose our “moral high ground.”


While this position enjoys the pretense of saintliness (and probably curries favor among many decent-hearted Americans) it is itself based on tortured logic. A cursory analysis of this untenable premise will show that anyone who insists on adhering to such cookie-cutter parameters should consider relocating to Paris and stockpiling white flags.


If torturing a known terrorist for the purpose of foiling a deadly plot to mass murder our fellow Americans is immoral, then surely anything the United States does which will knowingly result in the deaths of numerous innocent people is much more immoral. Put even more simply, torturing one guilty person to save American lives cannot be considered nearly as immoral as killing many innocent people for the same purpose.


It is difficult to fathom Bill Maher and his myopic, self-righteous ilk arguing otherwise. But if America had restricted herself to such foolhardy rules of engagement, we would all be speaking German today, and Bill Maher’s Jewish mother would most likely have perished in a Cyclone-B shower well before he was born. The United States emerged victorious from World War II because it used weapons of mass destruction against its enemies. The consequences of these decisive measures were the deaths and untold suffering of hundreds of thousands of people who were quite arguably “innocent.” Did we lose our “moral high ground” because we won that war?


Bill Maher’s attempt to identify the moral characteristics of our nation completely misses the mark. A country’s moral high ground is not determined so much by how it decides to fight a war, but instead by the reasons why it fights a war. If we fight a war to protect liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and all the other pillars of our great American society, then we have retained our moral high ground.


Those who oppose these ideals and seek to wrest them from us have taken leave of their moral sensibilities (assuming they ever had them in the first place). For what would be the more perverse result? Killing and maiming a few hundred thousand “innocents” or sacrificing the last bastion of freedom on Earth because we are reluctant to do harm to others in defending ourselves? Would it be better for mankind if an Islamofascist regime prevailed in a conflict with the United States because we would not have harmed either the innocent or the guilty among them?


Is it preferable that the United States disappears while stubbornly clutching the so-called “high road” -- thereby giving carte blanche to a global Jihad which, by open and notorious admission, will oppress mankind with Islamofascism? The answer lies in Senator Barry Goldwater’s famous principle: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.”


One of the problems with Bill Maher and other pragmatically-challenged liberals is that they simply cannot stomach the realities of war. It is axiomatic that we cannot defend Western civilization by remaining civil. World War III has begun. Like it or not, we are now engaged in a war that threatens our very existence. It is a war with new paradigms to which we must adjust. It is a war wherein our enemies do not require a large standing army to defeat us.


It is a war wherein just a few assaults by our enemy will kill many of our people, ravage our economy, cripple us and cause us to implode. It is a religious war that pits religious totalitarianism against religious freedom. If Bill Maher values his freedom of religion, his freedom of speech and indeed his life and the lives of his compatriots, he should be willing to get his hands a little dirty. If you want to eat meat, you have to kill a cow. Wars are not won by being nice. They are won by using superior force and decimating the will of one’s opponent.


The first question in this moral inquiry is not whether we should employ torture. It is whether we should win this war. Do we have the moral justification to win a war against Islamofascist terrorists? Who fights for good and who fights for evil in this conflict? It is astonishing that liberals raised in the United States do their best to resist acknowledging this painfully obvious dichotomy.


The party who fights to preserve individual rights, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, private property and equal justice under the law is the party who fights for good. The party who forces its religion on others with violence, who prosecutes genocide, who butchers homosexuals because of their sexual orientation, who canonizes pedophilia, who brutally oppresses women and who sends its own children to their explosive deaths as they murder other innocent children – is the party who fights for evil. It is truly this simple.


It is this clear. The United States has the unquestionable moral authority to win this war. Therefore, the use of any force for the sole purpose of furthering this well-defined objective -- let alone for merely saving the lives of our own people -- is morally justified. And while indiscriminate torture for the sake of sadistic pleasure or even revenge is an abomination by any reasonable standard, we should not shed any tears in response to the use of force on guilty terrorists for the narrow purpose of saving the lives of our fellow citizens. This helps us to win the war against an enemy that unambiguously intends to destroy us and that seeks to erase the hallmarks of freedom from the annals of recorded history.

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  • **“Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence.” – Justice Tom C. Clark (1899-1977) US Attorney General, 1945-1949
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  • **"Fathom the odd hypocrisy that Obama wants every citizen to prove they are insured, but they don't have to prove they are citizens." ~ Ben Stein
  • **“America is the greatest, freest and most decent society in existence. It is an oasis of goodness in a desert of cynicism and barbarism. This country, once an experiment unique in the world, is now the last best hope for the world.”--Dinesh D'Souza
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  • ** An ideal Federal government in our country wouldn't take much from you, do much for you, or get in your way . --John Hawkins
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  • **Since torture doesn’t work but waterboarding did work on KSM, doesn’t that prove that waterboarding isn’t torture?
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