Torture Memo

Aric, the raging squirrel, has a long post about the torture memos with the promise of more to follow. Personally I think torture is wrong in almost all circumstances. The only exception might be if a terrorist had hidden something like a nuclear bomb in a city, the authorities had caught him and they new they had a limited time to find the device. In this circumstance I don’t think torture would be ‘right’, it would just be less wrong then the alternative. That being said, just because something is wrong does not make it illegal. I would fully expect the Justice Department to examine all applicable laws and give the President the best advice on where the legal limits are. Then I would expect the President to behave in a manner that is both within the law and moral. If I believed that President Bush had authorized the abuses at Abu Ghraib I would not vote for him and actively support John Kerry. So far, I have seen absolutely no evidence that this has happened. Update: After posting this I read this article by John Yoo, a Berkeley law professor who worked on these memos. He makes a lot of the same points I did, but does so better.