As Jeff Jacoby details in an op-ed column in today's Boston Globe, some Republicans have been treating the success in finding and killing Bin Laden as a vindication of the use of torture. His answer to this is:
I don't know whether waterboarding was indispensable to rolling up bin Laden; for every interrogation expert who says it was, another expert argues the opposite. But the case against waterboarding never rested primarily on its usefulness. It rested on its wrongfulness.
Exactly so. The result of the action in Abbottabad doesn't even have the 'advantage' - imaginary advantage - of the example more usually deployed on this terrain: namely, the ticking bomb scenario. There it's a matter of torturing a terrorist suspect to save the population of a city or suchlike - virtually never what torture is used for and so not true to life. But in the Bin Laden case the consequentialist balance doesn't stack up as one-sidedly as in that invented example (which is precisely why the example is used - to skew the argument). Although the getting of Bin Laden was a consummation devoutly to be wished, what the US sacrificed through the use of waterboarding and other 'enhanced interrogation' methods during the Bush administration was of very great negative consequence; putting a grave mark against America's moral reputation. So even in purely consequentialist terms, the pro-torture argument in the case of Bin Laden is a dubious one. The bottom line here, however, is not about consequences. The moral prohibition on torture is without conditions or qualifications. Jacoby again:
[T]orture is something we refuse to engage in, despite its potential effectiveness, on the grounds that it is fundamentally immoral and uncivilized. Our repudiation of torture is absolute - the international Convention Against Torture, ratified by the United States in 1994, allows for "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever." That unconditional repudiation is one of the lines that separates us from the barbaric jihadists with whom we are at war.
(Hey, you didn't think you'd be agreeing with Jeff Jacoby now, did you? No, not you - you.)