The City on the Hill

With the release of the "torture memos", two debates have begun spreading across America. The first is whether the actions by the CIA and other agents acting on behalf of the United States Government should be considered torture. This debate has many legal ramifications and will greatly affect future intelligence gaining operations. It will likely be settled in the judiciary after many long precedings. There are many questions about what constitutes torture and how close we should come to that distinction. Even though this debate has it's share of demagogues and partisan hacks on either side that are more concerned with scoring political points then the truth, it is still a debate that must be had.

Unfortunately, there is another debate that threatens to do even greater harm to what's left of the remnants of America's ideals. The new question that is increasingly being posed is if it is ever alright for the American government to torture. The answer is and should always be emphatically no. It does not matter if these "enemy combatants" are not American citizens or don't fall under the Geneva Conventions. We are America, the shining beacon, the city on the hill, and we should never torture. A human life, no matter how terrible, is still a human life and, at the very least, should be respected. No matter how angry we are for what was done, or how much we hope to prevent by our actions, it is never acceptable to cross that line. We are not our enemies. If we have fallen so far as to question whether we can tolerate torture then it is likely that we have crossed the line past being redeemable.

Furthermore, if supposedly the nation with the best military, technology, and intelligence gathering in the world cannot use the means that it already has (many of them crossing various bounds as well), then how will torturing someone change that? The question is often posed as: "Should the government torture someone if it save 1,000 lives?" Who then should the government have tortured to prevent 9/11 or the first WTC attacks? What do we have left to say that the government cannot do? Another argument is that there are still more memos that prove the effectiveness of these techniques. If any technique is determined to be torture, then that should not even come into play. There is no doubt that when Saddam attacked the Kurds, there were some that had plans against his life. What he did was still wrong. Is that really what we want to become?