Letters

TORTURE 'OFF THE BOOKS'?

Cambridge, Mass.

William Schulz, in his respectful but selectively critical review of "less than two of [Shouting Fire]'s 550 pages," misses the point of my proposal regarding torture warrants ["The Torturer's Apprentice," May 13]. I am against torture, and I am seeking ways of preventing or minimizing its use. My argument begins with the empirical claim--not the moral argument--that if an actual ticking bomb case were ever to arise in this country, torture would in fact be used. FBI and CIA sources have virtually acknowledged this. Does Schulz agree or disagree with this factual assertion? If it is true that torture would in fact be used, then the following moral question arises: whether it is worse in the choice of evils for this torture to take place off the books, under the radar screen and without democratic accountability--or whether it is worse for this torture to be subjected to democratic accountability by means of some kind of judicial approval and supervision. This is a difficult and daunting question, with arguments on all sides. In my forthcoming book Why Terrorism Works, I devote an entire chapter to presenting the complexity of this issue, rather than simply proposing it as a heuristic, as I did in the two pages of Shouting Fire on which Schulz focuses. Schulz simply avoids this horrible choice of evils by arguing that it does not exist and by opting for a high road that will simply not be taken in the event that federal agents believe they can actually stop a terrorist nuclear or bioterrorist attack by administering nonlethal torture.

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