Tortured justification. The ends do not excuse the means, & Congress should challenge the Bush admin

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Tortured justification
The ends do not excuse the means, and Congress should challenge the Bush administration's rationalisation of torture
Michael Washburn

Today US representative John Conyers hosts a hearing on the Bush administration's love affair with torture. Conyers, who appears to be one of the only US politicians actively pursuing the question of the government's torture policy, has called the hearing in order to discuss the now infamous "torture memo", penned in 2003 by then Bush attorney John Yoo. Yoo, as well as several other former and current administration water carriers, declined Conyers' invitation, but even if Yoo had managed the trip from his Berkeley Law School office he likely wouldn't have said anything worth hearing. What he undoubtedly would have done, however, is reaffirm one of the most telling lessons of the Bush administration: never mistake sobriety of tone for sanity of thought.

Let's look at the most recent torture revelation. Last week a previously unreleased letter from United States deputy assistant attorney general Brian Benczkowski soberly stated: "The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of an act."

The acts alluded to are, of course, the still shadowy interrogation techniques that the Bush administration permits the CIA to use against its adversaries. Let's bracket the slippery language of the statement - "threatened", "reasonable" and "outrageousness" are all promiscuous words easily parsed for convenience's sake - and look at the US government's not so muted reliance on intention, something that has long been a component of its rationalisation for using "coercive interrogation" (which has evidently become the American English pronunciation of the word "torture"). For many people incarcerated by the US, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The Bush administration hopes that the intentionality of its interrogators actions will diminish the criminal nature of the acts should any CIA operative ever be called into court. This is a vigorous, pre-emptive washing of hands - a rhetorical exculpation and mitigation of responsibility. Given the crooked timber of international law, this may fly, legally. Morally, logically, though, it's corrupt.

more:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/michael_washburn/2008/05/tortured_justification.html