To the Editor:
“Interrogations’ Effectiveness May Prove Elusive” (news analysis, April 23) claims that the value of harsh interrogation methods used by the Bush administration will be hard to determine. Yet the testimony you present strongly indicates that those methods did yield very valuable results that did deter attacks and save lives.
You write that “even President Obama’s new director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, wrote in a memorandum to his staff last week that ‘high value information came from interrogations in which these methods were used.’”
You add that former Vice President Dick Cheney has repeatedly said these methods worked, as have four consecutive C.I.A. directors.
Against that, you have only Obama aides and other Democrats in Congress who say it didn’t work, or that it might not have worked.
These people are political operatives, not intelligence insiders. The people on the inside know that it worked, and the political operatives want a witch hunt.
Mark R. Godburn
North Canaan, Conn., April 23, 2009
To the Editor:
The debate about aggressive interrogation techniques like waterboarding now centers on their effectiveness.
It is frightening to think that we, a nation that has long believed that principle mattered and that human rights applied to all, would now be open to assuming that such values need not apply when we are frightened or at risk.
Has it all been a fiction? Are there no lines that we, as a nation, will not cross no matter the cost to us? If every value is negotiable depending upon circumstance, we have no true values.
Anne-Marie Hislop
Davenport, Iowa, April 23, 2009
Note from KBJ: The second letter writer confuses an act's being intrinsically wrong with its being wrong all things considered. It is perfectly coherent to hold the view that torture, like the killing of the innocent, is intrinsically wrong, but that in rare cases it can be justified by the amount of good that it produces (or the amount of evil that it prevents). Is the letter writer an absolutist, like Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)? Is she saying that no amount of good produced or evil prevented could justify an act of torture? If so, then she is condemning herself and her family to death should authorities ever need to torture someone to get information that would defuse a bomb planted in their vicinity. I also wonder whether the letter writer is an absolutist about the killing of innocent human beings. Is she opposed to abortion? If not, why not? Isn't it perverse to be an absolutist about the infliction of pain but not about the destruction of innocent human life? Is she an absolutist only when it suits her convenience? How convenient! We can call this view "opportunistic absolutism." (I'm tempted to call it "disingenuous absolutism," but that would be cynical.)
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 