Now I first saw this in the Dirty Harry movies, but I got reminded of it when I went to see Liam Nesson’s new movie “Taken”. The basic premise is that torture is, in some cases, morally justified. Of course the question is who decides on which cases torture is warranted and when it is simply immoral.
In the movie some group has kidnapped Nesson’s daughter to sell her as a prostitude…why would anyone pay millions for a kidnapped girl when parents will sell you their little girls for 20 bucks is beyond me, but that is the movie’s premise, and as always, I recommend when going to the cinema to leave your brain at home. In any case, as any good father would, he sets out, with his unique “talents”, to find the kidnappers and his daughter. he gave them a choice and they chose to try their luck, or test Nesson’s. In a certain scene our hero or anti-hero, depends on whom you ask, has the man that spoke with him on the phone…you know what I am talking about if you saw the movie…and has him strapped to a chair with cables that connect this guy to the building’s electric grid.
I am seeing all of this, with whatever part of my brain I forgot to leave at home and thinking of those pictures from Abu Ghrabi. And I thought:"I bet you that is how the Bush administration saw it all.
What is sad about today’s politics is that an administration always has to apologize for something which I am pretty sure, they feel no guilt for. It was done with the best of intentions, with a clean conscience, with a moral right. Given what they were convinced of regarding these “suspects” (really? A suspect may stand trial but those at Guantanamo could only dream of a trial by a Bush administration.) torture was a justified course of action. If I want to torture a person, a human being, or for that matter poison him to death, all I have to do is to convince a jury about the character and acts committed by the “suspect”. We can toughen the guidelines by which we are said to be convinced, we can raise the qualification of reasonable doubt, but once that level has been reached, once we are convinced, any and all levels of violence can be justified. Those opposed to the death penalty simply increase the suffering of those convicted, as death simply meets them in jail at a later time.
As easy as torture can be seen as moral we should be weary of it’s use, just as we are of sentencing a man to death. Which brings me to Dirty Harry or Dirty Harry in “Magnum Force”, where the roles are reversed and all of the sudden Callahan is faced with the slippery slope of his own vigilante style. The rule of Law can be unjust, allowing the guilty to go free on the ideal that better to let the guilty go free than to excecute an innocent man. But the reverse is just as unjust. In that movie Callahan has a memorable line: “A man must know his limitations.” …and that is the difference between just and unjust. Any course of action applied to it’s extreme is bound to become unjust.
So would I torture Scorpio or the kidnappers? Why certainly! These are unredeemable characters whose actions are presented to the viewer as clear as day…if only Bush could have done the same then he would have been spared from having to apologize. In reality, in this unscripted world we live in we don’t have that luxury, so the question is: "Would I torture some inmate I know nothing about who some else, of whom I also know nothing of, says it is the moral thing to do? Not in a million years. Why? Because I agree with the ideal Justice: better to be wrong about a guilty man being innocent than to be wrong about an innocent man being guilty, especially when the course of action is the infliction of suffering.