Today's not so surprising, but shocking in its details, report on CIA torture employed as part of the "war on terror" raises the very cliché and also very rhetorical question: can it be a justified in any way? One still hears opinions that well, terrible but used against terrible people. Latter is just... well, I at least don't have words for it. It is a mere side-detail, that the torture has not yielded, in the report's own admission, any useful information that would have prevented any subsequent terror attacks.

However, what made me bring this up is that a regime I knew all too well used to protect itself against a faceless, ubiquitous enemy that was threatening the "way of life". It protected itself (and of course claimed to protect us...) via methods that were, to put it very mildly, questionable. At present, we have a very different political system, a very different "regime", using similar methods for protecting us (?) from a very different enemy that has, in essence, the same characteristics as that other enemy referred to by some beyond the Iron Curtain. Only the specific ideology and geo-politics differ, but as in Eco's "neo-war" that he discussed in an astute essay, there is no essential difference.

Not sure when, if ever, we in the UK will find out what our own various agencies/organisations have done in the name of the "war on terror", kudos for the report that came out in the USA... but, experiencing a bit of a nasty deja-vu, I'm just wondering about whether these methods (that of course are illegal under international and any relevant/respective country's law) could have been hinted as justifiable in obtaining oh-so-crucial information.

It is one heck of a legacy for W's presidency, but I am dreading to think what is buried in thr archives that were filled during the war on terror launched by Tony Blair (Middle East peace envoy and philantropist of the year 2014!) on this side of the Atlantic.

If there were an ideal, such as what we see in episodes of 24, then perhaps some torture is justified. But it's the very fact that the real world does not match up to our ideals that there is no justification for torture. Unless the pain given to one man is absolutely guaranteed to eliminate similar pain in hundreds of others, I can't see how it's justified. The thing is, the future cannot be absolutely guaranteed.

There is also the point you raise about self-serving bias. With a longer view of the future in mind, how do we know the American position is healthiest for the world?

Indeed, it will be interesting to see whether the report, too, manages to further antagonise some, or it is seen as a commendable attempt to come to terms with the excesses that happened.
With the long-standing issues surrounding a number of foreign policy fiascos (and the Rumsfeld-style institutionalised psychosis that the late R. Williams parodied as "I don't know when... I don't know where... but something bad is going to happen"), such "glasnost" may actually backfire... and some extremists could use it in a "told you so" campaign.

lehelvandor wrote:. . . However, what made me bring this up is that a regime I knew all too well used to protect itself against a faceless, ubiquitous enemy that was threatening the "way of life". It protected itself (and of course claimed to protect us...) via methods that were, to put it very mildly, questionable. At present, we have a very different political system, a very different "regime", using similar methods for protecting us (?) from a very different enemy that has, in essence, the same characteristics as that other enemy referred to by some beyond the Iron Curtain. Only the specific ideology and geo-politics differ, but as in Eco's "neo-war" that he discussed in an astute essay, there is no essential difference..

Note the use of ambiguous language—protect our "way of life" or "War on Terror." Such terms are so loose you can use them to justify almost anything. It's easy to justify heinous behavior if you get to use weasel words that are in every politician's toolbox.

Once you lose the moral high ground, it begins to make little difference who did what to whom first. It puzzled me that our leaders kept saying that the terrorists wouldn't win by forcing us to change our way of life, when in so many ways that's exactly what we did willingly.

geo wrote:Such terms are so loose you can use them to justify almost anything.

Absolutely - and they increasingly acquire an ideological overtone. In that sense it never seemed to me far-fetched to draw a parallel between these expressions' use by eminently different political regimes. It just depends what "way of life" is - and the cult of paranoia comes in easily, when the threatening enemy is faceless and geographically not well-localised.

DWill wrote:in so many ways that's exactly what we did willingly

Excellent point... At the same time and the same people & organisations that have been stating "we shall refuse to change our way of life" have also been justifying the often truly freaky "security" measures introduced (and some deemed illegal by the European Court of Human Rights) with protecting that way of life.
The self-contradiction would have been funny, if it had not been so creepy...