Now that it’s been definitively established the Bush regime tortured terrorism suspects, conservatives are rallying around a theme that goes roughly like this: Torture is, at worst, morally ambiguous; and using it is sometimes okay to prevent greater harm.
It sounds like a talking point manufactured in a rightwing propaganda shop, and probably is, because it’s now being mouthed by conservative editorial writers, politicians, and public figures in remarkably consistent language that makes it look like they’re reading from crib notes.
You can tell when people are doing that. Thoughtful debate makes a solid thumping sound. This has a tinny, hollow feel.
Until now the Republican approach has been to deny torture happened. Some time ago, when they got caught waterboarding detainees, they tried to redefine waterboarding as something other than torture. But when their efforts to suppress the Senate report failed, their denial options ran out. Now that it’s clear they did, in fact, torture people their rhetoric has shifted from denying it to justifying it. In typical GOP circle-the-wagons style, they’re deploying platoons of speakers across the country, all delivering the same message.
They were, now they say, protecting America from additional terrorists attacks and saving innocent lives.
“Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says torture … isn’t necessarily off limits. … [He] condemned the ‘self-righteousness of European liberals’ who oppose torture ‘so easily’ Friday in an interview with Swiss National Radio. ‘I don’t think it’s so clear at all,’ Scalia said. ‘I think it is very facile for people to say “Oh, torture is terrible.” … You posit the situation where a person that you know for sure knows the location of a nuclear bomb that has been planted in Los Angeles and will kill millions of people. You think it’s an easy question? You think it’s clear that you cannot use extreme measures to get that information out of that person?'”
One must assume GOP Propaganda Central dispatched Scalia on this errand because they believe he, as a Supreme Court Justice, possesses enhanced gravitas (and, therefore, credibility). They could have picked a better water carrier, because this one has a habit of sticking his foot in his mouth, and he didn’t disappoint this time (again).
The fallacy of his argument is that the CIA torturers weren’t looking for a nuclear bomb. They used torture to get other kinds of information. For Scalia’s premise to hold water, forget about nuclear bombs, the information that was actually sought by the torturers must have been important enough to justify the torture. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, assuming you believe some information is important enough to justify using torture to get it (and a lot of us don’t believe that). But by hypothesizing a different (and fanciful) threat, Scalia has inflated the actual threat and overstated the justification. It’s a dishonest way to argue, and no first-year law student would get away with it, much less any lawyer arguing a case anywhere in our court system. Such tactics are beneath a Supreme Court Justice.
There are additional problems with his argument. Even if you are looking for a nuclear bomb, you’d never know “for sure” that one had been planted, or that a detainee you’re questioning knows where it is. At most, you’d have indications that a nuclear bomb might have been planted, and reasons to believe the detainee might know where it is. So, a situation that qualifies for Scalia’s justification would never arise. Second, if they wanted to find out if Al Qaeda had a nuclear bomb, all they had to do was ask. Granted, we don’t know for sure they didn’t, but the odds are so small any reasonable person would dismiss the possibility. They didn’t have to torture Al Qaeda prisoners to get this information. They’d tell you.
Scalia, as noted above, is one of those garrulous people who don’t know when to shut up. He could have made his point and stopped. There really was nothing more for him to say. But he soldiered on with this:
“‘What are human rights is not written up in the sky, and if it were written up in the sky, it would not be up to judges, lawyers, just because they’ve gone to law school, to know what human rights ought to be and therefore are,’ Scalia said. ‘And therefore each society’s perception of what it believes human rights should be ought to be up to that society, and I think it’s very foolish to yield that determinations not only to a foreign body but to a foreign body of judges,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why anyone would want to do that.'”
This is moral relativism at its worst. If you believe this, then morality doesn’t exist at all. If you believe this, then North Korea’s system of governance is moral simply because they say it is. If you believe this, Hitler’s extermination camps and Stalin’s gulags could be rendered moral simply by those worthies issuing proclamations declaring them to be the legitimate social policies of their respective societies.
When I read stuff like this, I can’t help asking myself, this guy is a Supreme Court justice? What was Reagan thinking? (He probably wasn’t. He probably was already senile by then. At least, I can’t think of any other explanation.)
Oh yeah, if you’re wondering what Scalia thinks of unlimited campaign spending, here’s what he said about that topic:
“The amount of money that is spent on all elections — state, local and federal — in the United States, is less than what women spend on cosmetics for a year, OK?”
http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/12/politics/scalia-on-torture-death-penalty/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
That, of course, does not address the issue. It doesn’t matter to the survival of our democracy that some people spend more money than others on cosmetics. It does matter that corporations and a few wealthy people can buy elections and politicians if they’re allowed to do so.
(Image from Wikipedia)