A reader asks

A question has been perplexing me; feel free to print this in the blog if you like. This question of the “waterboarding” issue and the what is considered morally (and practically) acceptable. Let me say this at the outset of the conversation: I’m sure getting waterboarded was torturous. It had to really suck, no doubt. So did someone’s relatives getting threatened. All the discussion as to whether or not it was torture is indeed a waste of breath. However:

Let’s say your on a crowded subway train. You’re standing up. There’s a man standing next to you, a big strong guy. He’s sweating and twitchy for some reason; you’re trying not to notice. All of a sudden, he pulls out a gun and points it at a person standing next to him and screams “I’m gonna kill you all, you M***** F*****s”, or something like that. You notice that, if you raise your hand and throw a punch, you’ve got a clear shot to the side of the guys neck if you take it. You’ve got access to him because of your positioning, no one else does. Because of where you stand, you are the only one who can save the people in this train car. Because of whatever reason, it becomes your responsibility. You’ve got a certain window of time to do this, probably a quarter of a second or so. After that, he fires.

That shot to that neck is going to be TORTUROUS (take it from me, I’ve felt it, albeit lightly. Karate sparring gone bad; yowch…). It’s going to suck really bad. You’re going to hurt this man, bring great pain to him, might even impair his breathing momentarily. Now, note that you don’t want to, say, crush his windpipe. Because of where you stand, you could if you want to, but you don’t want to do that. You just want to stun him by hitting him in the side of the neck, and, while this will be torturous to this man, due to where you stand, you can.

What is the right thing to do in this case? If you do it and subdue the man, you save about seventy five people from death or injury. If you do not, people will die. They will die.

Does it not mirror the “waterboarder”, or CIA operative? Now, I’m not speaking of the Abu Ghraib wanna-be hard guy who gets off on hurting and/or humiliating a captive. I’m talking about the CIA operative who, because of his “position”, can “take the shot” and save lives by making the detainee uncomfortable without actually causing debilitating damage or killing him, quite possibly in the nick of time? If, by doing this, the CIA operative saved tens of thousands of lives (which they did), Was it any more wrong than picking up a gun and shooting an oncoming Iraqi soldier,or killing a Nazi in WWII? You can probably tell which side of the issue I find myself leaning towards.

This is a serious question to me, Mark. At this point in my life, I consider myself a Roman Catholic Christian before anything else. This issue is a “biggie”. Got to get a grip on whether or not what I feel about this issue is right, or if I’ve just become hardened by the whole Islamo-fascist Terrorist thing (a distinct possibility given the fact that both my wife and I made it through September 11th within inches (in different ways), and also the fact that our present Administration and House leadership are acting like the death of my friends & family members in the Towers was because “America is Bad”). If I am in fact just hardened, I need to find my way out of that.

Let me say first that I applaud your serious attempt to work through this matter, especially in light of the trauma you have endured. God bless you!

Re: your scenario. I would (assuming I knew karate), take the guy out. If it hurts or kills him, oh well. Too bad for him. He needed to be stopped.

The problem is: this does not map to torturing prisoners at all, precisely because prisoners no longer present a mortal and immediate danger. Once the guy at the train station drops the gun, grabs his neck, says, “Ow!” and puts up his hands, it stops being self-defense and starts being a sin and a crime if you, for instance, pick up the gun and kneecap him while demanding to know if he has any other terrorist friends in the train station or other train stations. Same deal for CIA torturers. Prisoners are prisoners, not maniacs with guns in train stations.

What you really wind up with when you have a security state that adopts these methods is a) a lot of crappy intel (because you get victims who say anything and send your law enforcement guys off on wild goose chases for non-existent threats) and b) you get a security system that you can’t trust because they *have* to say that “torture works” (even when it creates tons of bad intel) and they have to lie and tell you that every victim they tortured was a threat, even when he was perfectly innocent. Also, and the sciences are starting to attest to this now that we have kindly provided them with enough victims, torture does things to the body and brain so that the victim just can’t think straight. That makes for bad intel too. Bottom line: We have a right to defend ourselves against an immediate mortal threat in war. But the moment the threat becomes our prisoner, we incur an obligation to treat him humanely, not to pretend he is still an immediate mortal threat. That’s why we have always made the common sense distinction between shooting a guy who is shooting at us and not shooting that same guy when he drops his gun and puts his hand up.

By the way: note the way in which the most recent plot was foiled. No torture necessary. Just good solid police and investigative work. That’s the ticket. I hope they put these guys away forever.