Noemie Emery
Why the 'whys' have it
By: Noemie Emery
Examiner Columnist
May 27, 2009
Journalists will tell you that the great key to knowledge is getting your mind around the five central critical elements: The “who, when, what, where, and why.”
On the current debate about ‘torture’ inflicted or not upon terrorist suspects, most journalists have been clear on the who - evil conservatives, up to and including former President George W. Bush and former Vice-President Dick Cheney. They have overdosed on the what - water-boarding, insects, and other indignities. They’ve been somewhat informative on the when and the where, both of which have been less important. And they have ignored or elided the why.
The ‘what’ matters, as we ought to know what went on, and realize that it has been ugly, and violent. But skirting the ‘why’ deprives it of context, and our view of the morality of the uses of violence has always been colored by the context in which it is done.
The key to the way we judge the morals of violence is that, while the impact on the victim always is similar, force used offensively and force used defensively have always been two different things. Shoot someone, or failing that, fracture his skull with a fire tong, and you inflict pain, harm, and possibly death on your victim, but the reason you do it determines your fate.
Do it for a grudge, or for kicks, or to take someone’s money, and you will be imprisoned, or pay with your life for your efforts. Do it because he is trying to kill you, and it becomes self-defense, and a whole other story. Do it while risking your life to save someone else - a neighbor, a child - and you are a hero, a concerned model citizen, an example to all.
Stand at the top of a hill with a rifle, and spray shots at the people beneath you?
If it’s campus, you’re a monster, and serial killer. If it’s a battlefield, and you’re facing an enemy onslaught, you’ll get a medal, if you survive. Charge at someone with bayonet fixed and pointed? If you’re an Axis soldier impaling civilians, it’s an act of the utmost depravity. If you’re a Union soldier at Little Round Top at Gettysburg, fighting off the oncoming Confederate army, you’re a national hero, saving the last, best hope of mankind.
In the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln was offered the use of a bullet that exploded inside the body, doing the victim incredible damage. Lincoln approved it: It would shorten the war. For the same reason - to shorten the war – President Harry S Truman incinerated not one but two Japanese cities. Neither man is considered a war criminal (except by Bill Maher), as they took some lives to save more lives, specifically those entrusted to them, and to preserve a political system less unjust than the ones they were fighting.
Their guilt is absolved by their intent, which was to save lives, and a more benign social order. Yet liberals, who apply the motive defense in trying to exonerate perpetrators of criminal violence - the accused was stressed out, he ate Twinkies, he was deprived as a child, etc. - seem strangely unwilling to extend this to those who made use of ‘harsh’ tactics to forestall further attacks after thousands had perished in the most torturous manner on Sept. 11, 2001.
“The horror of Sept. 11resides in me like a dormant pathogen,” writes Richard Cohen, shortly before comparing George Bush to a Nazi for trying to make sure such a horror would never recur. “Here, once again, were the squalid efforts of legal toadies to justify the unjustifiable,” as he informs us. “I know it is offensive to compare almost anyone or anything to the Nazis, but the Bush-era memos struck me as echoes from the past.”
But the Nazis’ intent was to invade countries and subjugate and degrade whole populations, set up death camps where as many as 11 million civilians would perish, and orchestrate the elimination through starvation and torture of the ethnically impure from the universe. The intent of Bush and his people in water-boarding three hard core terrorists was to prevent another 9/11, that was sprung on his unaware and his innocent country.
Surely, even a liberal, from the height of his rarified thinking, can wrap his brain around that.
Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
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