Indecent realities 2

As a piece of public argument, and putative 'clarification', this is pathetic:

In an important clarification of President George W. Bush's earlier statement, a top White House official refused to unequivocally rule out the use of torture, arguing the US administration was duty-bound to protect Americans from terrorist attack.

The comment, by US national security adviser Stephen Hadley, came amid heated national debate about whether the CIA and other US intelligence agencies should be authorized to use what is being referred to as "enhanced interrogation techniques" to extract from terror suspects information that may help prevent future assaults.

The US government is indeed duty-bound to protect Americans from terrorist attack, but that doesn't warrant doing so by violating the most fundamental norms of civilized behaviour; and 'enhanced interrogation techniques' is, in this context, a barbarism that only a public spokesperson could utter without embarrassment. (Check out the picture that accompanies the report; whether intended to be or not, it is entirely apt to Hadley's utterance.) We learn further:

... Hadley elaborated on the policy, making clear the White House could envisage circumstances, in which the broad pledge not to torture might not apply.

"The president has said that we are going to do whatever we do in accordance with the law," the national security adviser said. "But... you see the dilemma. What happens if on September 7th of 2001, we had gotten one of the hijackers and based on information associated with that arrest, believed that within four days, there's going to be a devastating attack on the United States?"

That's always the sort of example wheeled out - torturing to avert an imminent catastrophe. But in matters of this gravity the law has to be formulated to embody, not the exceptional case, but the fundamental norm, general policy. And even in the exceptional case - when the heavens are about to fall - to torture is to commit a wrong and a crime. Those who represent and act for us, in democracies, need to know that. They are less likely to know it if they prevaricate over what the basic norms actually are.