Is Torture Ever Acceptable?

Pat Buchanan is making an argument for the torture of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad as a moral necessity to save lives. I would love to see Muhammad start talking, but I believe we need to do it without resorting to torture.

Buchanan makes, what on the surface appears to be a fairly solid argument that torture is acceptable by Natural Law. I want to put aside US law for a moment and focus on this argument.

Buchanan asks if the deliberate infliction of pain is always immoral. He also answers it correctly- that it is not always immoral. But then he supports his argument with examples like twisting an arm to find a stolen bike and spanking your children. Believe me, if twisted Muhammad's arm was all it took or putting him over my knee for a butt whoopin', I'd be the first in line to mete out the punishment. The real question is one of degree. Arm twisting and spanking won't work in this case. It's going to take something more - like permanent disfigurement or massive physical pain like that associated with electroshock of naughty bits. The deliberate infliction of pain is not in and of itself immoral. It is the infliction of massive pain where the act becomes immoral.

He also throws out the gratuitous argument of Civil War doctors who performed amputations without anesthesia. Were these painful? I cannot even begin to imagine the pain. But they were to directly benefit the person suffering through the pain. It is a different situation not at all related to the question at hand.

Now we'll bring US law back into the equation. Buchanan asks why it is ok for a US soldier to kill Muhammad to save 50 hostages if we cannot torture him. Simple, if he is caught in the immediate act of threatening the lives of others, he can be killed. But if we only catch him conspiring to plan the murder of others, we no longer have the right to kill him, but instead we must give him due process.

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution provides that no one shall be subjected to cruel or unusual punishment. The Supreme Court and the court of public opinion have held that extreme torture, like required here, is a violation of the Fourth Amendment. So far as I am aware, we have not put Muhammad on trial yet. Therefore he has not been appointed to a military tribunal and is still entitled to the protections of the Constitution. The fact that he is a foreign national does not automatically exempt him from due process protection. Until such time as he is tried and convicted, we have no right to punish him.

I have argued several times before that the US needs to hold itself to a higher standard simply because we are the US. This is another case where we need to act in a more moral manner than most other nations would. We should not resort to torture, even if the rest of world would understand and would turn a blind eye. We are the United States. We're above that. And that's not fuzzy liberal thinking - that's principle.