Interrogation comes clean

This was really an interesting update on interrogation as it cleans the hands of the people who did it. I believe there was an example case in the interrogation readings we read that questioned the morality of a claim such as "I followed all of the rules at the time, so why should I be punished?" To my understanding, this is what the justification in this case is. The people involved in the cases released are not to be punished on the grounds that they were following orders and "following the rules". This obviously is a weak argument because it basically takes out morality from the picture. If you think that something is torture, to stand by it, practice it, even though someone says it is OK, is not moral. Then again, our courts to not punish on the grounds of immorality.

I was channel surfing yesterday, and to my surprise I saw a news report on ABC about this same topic. Another justification given was that of Abe Lincoln's policy after the U.S. Civil War. They said that Lincoln was unwilling to prosecute the confederate leaders even though they committed treason. The thought is that if Abe Lincoln was able to look past counts of treason, we should be willing to look past what these people did. I find this argument weak as well as it is comparing apples and oranges. We are talking war vs. crimes against humanity.

Another issue in this case is whether it was justified to release -in such detail- the interrogation tactics used, even against key players and hard to crack detainees. A fear as we hinted at in class is that this will weaken the U.S. interrogation tactics by giving "the terrorists" a chance to train to these standards. I think that a fear like this is unwarranted because it is not likely that we will use these tactics again, or at least not to this extent. Even if they are used again, it is likely that they will be mixed with other methods unknown to the public, and thus the terrorists. My personal worry is not that they will lighten up on the torture, but use even worse tactics seeing as these ones did not work to the extent they wanted. Another thing that ABC special said was that the information gathered from the people interrogated was "valuable, but not essential to the war on terror or our current goals". If what we are getting out of these people is not what we are after, obviously there is a problem, and it's not in the severity of our 'interrogation' tactics. *cough* torture tactics *cough*