The first and only formal debate I ever took part in was in high school and was on the subject “The end justifies the means” and I was on the con side. Our side won convincingly.
The principle that the end does not justify the means was one in which I believed then and I have not changed my opinion since.
There has been a lot of debate in the last few years with respect to some of the techniques used by the US in the name of security. Almost anything can be justified on the grounds of security and almost anything can be condemned on the grounds of human rights. How is a man to judge? To quote Gandalf “As he has always judged”.
There are several problems with the techniques that the CIA have used. I have written about rendition before so I will move over that one. In this blog I want to briefly address the more extreme techniques that they have used to extract information.
The two principle issues are the reliability of the information and the human rights issues. Of course it is being argued that the discomfort and endangerment to the individual is outweighed by the protections to the greater population. This is the old argument of the end justifying the means. Note that I am not going to address the argument of the ends justifying the means per se – I will leave that for another time – although the issues are related.
Any information obtained under duress is inadmissible as evidence in a court of law – at least in most western countries. This is because what is said when a person feels threatened is not to be relied on as being the truth. People have a strong motivation to lie if they think that their treatment will be abated if they tell the interrogator what they think they want to hear. For the same reason information gained under duress is unreliable for the conduct of further investigation. It is easy to be led astray or sidetracked by false evidence and the success of an investigation can be seriously impeded if techniques are used that are likely to produce tainted information which is relied on to direct the investigation. Of course this alone is not sufficient justification since the investigator may still consider the risk of the accused escaping conviction and the unreliability of their evidence as being worth it against the possible outcome of maybe avoiding a terrorist act or bringing other people to justice.
There is however a more compelling argument. Either constitutionally or legislatively we have a protection from eiter excessively violent punishment or bahaviour from law enforcement. One of the reasons is to protect the individual from the abuse of power. The state has effectively limitless power with respect to the individual and this power has to be moderated using checks and balances to avoid its abuse. That is why we have laws against assault and battery regardless of who carried them out. This is as it should be. Everybody has a right to be free of abusive treatment regardless of their situation. It is of little use in a civilised society to replace one form of terrorism with another – however it is justified. What is the difference with a radical religious extremest carrying out acts of terror and the security service of a western nation suing violent methods on a suspect to extract information?
I think the best parallel we have for the behaviour of the CIA interrogators is the inquisition. The very things that made it wrong then make it wrong now.