what is torture and what is morality?

And how are they related?

A nice piece by Joseph Lelyveld in the Sunday NY Times Magazine section.

This one is worth reading and talking about with friends and family. Some of us have very different definitions of morality than others and some value morality more than others.

an excerpt:

...

Viewed through an Israeli prism, the United States still has a lot to learn about the uses and consequences of coercive force, of torture lite, in interrogations. A lot to learn as practitioners: Israeli security specialists are amazed by the multiplicity of commands engaged in the American interrogation scramble, by the short tours of duty and high turnover of interrogators, by the reliance on interpreters and outsourcing to contractors and foreign governments. ''Unprofessional'' is the mildest word they use.

And a lot to learn on the judicial side where, it might be said, we're a decade or more behind the Israeli experience. Cases that may lead our courts to confront the issue and decide whether they have jurisdiction are still only in preparation. If eventually some federal court asserts its authority, the government can be expected to appeal. It could be years before such a case made its way to our Supreme Court. Israel, by contrast, upholds a clear legal standard, which it makes some effort to observe, at least more than it did in the past. Is this really a difference? Perhaps only to the degree that the Israeli service is now looking over its shoulder at the court, knowing that recourse to the judges is readily available.

Had my journey then taught me anything?

It taught me that democracies are more than likely to evade the basic question of whether torture lite can ever truly be justified for as long as they feel threatened. So they shrink from authorizing it by law, as Professor Heymann's Harvard group proposed that Congress do and as the Supreme Court in Israel invited the Knesset to do. Democracies' self-regard as communities that are supposed to be on the side of human rights inhibits the candor such statutes would require. Even if the intent is actually to limit the use of coercive techniques, what government wants to be the first since the Enlightenment to proclaim such a draconian code? And what politician wants to shed his carefully maintained ''deniability'' in order to secure the antagonistic value of accountability? By definition, that could be personally costly.

Still, it seemed to me that the idea of legislating standards for the application of torture lite is one of the two available positions that meet any test of intellectual honesty. It offered a form of due process for torture lite (the lawyerly prescription, it might be said, of people out of power brooding on the authoritarian temptation facing people now in power). But if intellectual honesty were the only test, the more satisfying position would be an insistence on obeying existing legal standards of due process, an absolutist refusal to stretch the law in order to legitimize torture lite. Any time the authorities then felt that a compelling national interest left them no choice but to sanction the use of force in an interrogation, they'd know they were breaking the law and could conceivably be prosecuted. Very rarely, upholders of this position conceded, breaking the law could be the right thing to do. The Israeli example can be taken to show that the threat of prosecution would then be largely theoretical.

I found myself bouncing back and forth between the two positions -- the unattainable ideal that brooked no compromise of the law and the unattainable compromise. Since both were unattainable, it didn't seem to matter where I came out. I preferred the ideal, but if coercive force was inevitable under both regimes, I had to admit, not being a lawyer, to a sneaking regard for the one that acknowledged as much. But, of course, the position that rules doesn't get hung up on intellectual tests. It says we'll do what we have to do: don't ask, don't tell. Even when clear evidence of the effectiveness of torture lite is hard to come by, democracies threatened by terrorism shrink from laying down the weapon. Should the threat ever pass, we can be expected to repress any memory of its use as we now try to do in daily life while it persists. Then we'll discover how much gratitude or resentment has accrued to us in the places where we've operated, among the descendants of those we've detained.

meanwhile...