The Reverse Nurenberg Defense
The Editors sum up the state of play:
It’s funny that when torture was all the fault of poor, ugly hillbillies of the sort David Brooks writes about in his Adventure Stories for Young Aristocrats, we had to throw the book at the evil-doers. Now that important figures in Washington have admitted to directly ordering more and worse, however, the question of even investigating whether some sort of crime may perhaps have taken place is fraught with all sort of beard-tugging brain-twisters which no man can untangle, even with the help of modern computer technology. How can we investigate if we don’t know all the facts? How dare we enforce laws against things which might possibly be permissible in some highly artificial thought experiment? What if ‘24′ is FOR REALS?!? These are the sorts of questions which need to be shrugged at for 50 billion news cycles before we can even think about OH MY GOD A SHARK ATE A WHITE LADY AT HER WEDDING!!!!! We’ve got what amounts to a reverse Nuremberg defense, where Bush administration officials are let off the hook because they were only giving orders. I’m not sure that’s such a great idea.
Brutally depressing, yet true. Although it must be noted that if you stipulate that torture has a 100% chance of stopping millions of deaths and also stipulate that all other methods will have a 0% chance and stipulate that we have perfect advance knowledge of all of this then torture is a great thing and how could you be the kind of immoral deontologicist who would say otherwise?!?!?!?!?!?!?