Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia will be speaking on the campus of the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 4th in Hendricks Hall. I plan on attending. (Note: all of the free tickets have been snapped up – there’s an overflow site on campus which will have a video/audio feed, also free, at the Nahm Auditorium in the W.C. Morris Science Building. Seating there will be on a first come basis).

I’ve written on the subject of torture a number of times. Justice Scalia has been discussing this subject lately, too. It will be interesting to see if he addresses this in his speech or if the issue is brought up in the audience questions.

Justice Scalia had this to say in justification of torture in a BBC interview broadcast on February 12, 2008:

(via Think Progress)

…BBC: It’s a question that’s been raised by Alan Derschowitz and other people – this idea of ticking bomb torture. It’s predicated on the basis that you got a plane with nuclear weapons flying toward the White House, you happen to have in your possession – hooray! – the person that has the key information to put everything right, and you stick a needle under his fingernail – you get the answer – and that should be allowed?

SCALIA: And you think it shouldn’t?

BBC: All I’m saying about it, is that it’s a bizarre scenario, because it’s very unlikely that you’re going to have the one person that can give you that information and so if you use that as an excuse to permit torture then perhaps that’s a dangerous thing.

SCALIA: Seems to me you have to say, as unlikely as that is, it would be absurd to say that you can’t stick something under the fingernails, smack them in the face. It would be absurd to say that you couldn’t do that. And once you acknowledge that, we’re into a different game. How close does the threat have to be and how severe can an infliction of pain be?

There are no easy answers involved, in either direction, but I certainly know you can’t come in smugly and with great self-satisfaction and say, “Oh, this is torture and therefore it’s no good.” You would not apply that in some real-life situations. It may not be a ticking bomb in Los Angeles, but it may be: “Where is this group that we know is plotting this painful action against the United States? Where are they? What are they currently planning…?”

[emphasis added]

Ah yes, the ticking time bomb.

On March 1, 2008 Scott Horton wrote in Harper’s  Magazine – “How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the (Ticking) Bomb”:

In the last eighteen months, Antonin Scalia, one of the most influential judges in American history, has twice suggested that he would turn to a fictional television character named Jack Bauer to resolve legal questions about torture. The first time was in a speech in Canada, and the second, only three weeks ago, in an interview with the BBC. This is evidence of the unprecedented influence of a television program on one of the most important legal policy issues before our country today. And it is, or should be, very troubling…

Go. Read the whole thing.

Horton quotes from Camus’ Chroniques algériennes:

…Though it may be true that, at least in history, values, be they of a nation or of humanity as a whole, do not survive unless we fight for them, neither combat (nor force) can alone suffice to justify them. Rather it must be the other way: the fight must be justified and guided by those values. We must fight for the truth and we must take care not to kill it with the very weapons we use in its defense; it is at this doubled price that we must pay in order that our words assume once more their proper power…

[emphasis added]

The Israeli Supreme Court said the same thing on the subject in a 1999 ruling:

…This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it, and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it. Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand. Preserving the Rule of Law and recognition of an individual’s liberty constitutes an important component in its understanding of security. At the end of the day, they strengthen its spirit and its strength and allow it to overcome its difficulties…

[emphasis added]

Over a century ago the United States faced similar questions in the Phillipines, as Paul Kramer wrote in “The Water Cure: Debating torture and counterinsurgency-a century ago” in the February 25, 2008 issue of The New Yorker:

…The public became inured to what had, only months earlier, been alarming revelations. As early as April 16, 1902, the New York World described the “American Public” sitting down to eat its breakfast with a newspaper full of Philippine atrocities:

It sips its coffee and reads of its soldiers administering the “water cure” to rebels; of how water with handfuls of salt thrown in to make it more efficacious, is forced down the throats of the patients until their bodies become distended to the point of bursting; of how our soldiers then jump on the distended bodies to force the water out quickly so that the “treatment” can begin all over again. The American Public takes another sip of its coffee and remarks, “How very unpleasant!”

….”But where is that vast national outburst of astounded horror which an old-fashioned America would have predicted at the reading of such news?” the World asked. “Is it lost somewhere in the 8,000 miles that divide us from the scenes of these abominations? Is it led astray by the darker skins of the alien race among which these abominations are perpetrated? Or is it rotted away by that inevitable demoralization which the wrong-doing of a great nation must inflict on the consciences of the least of its citizens?”

Responding to the verdict in the Glenn court-martial, Judge Advocate General Davis had suggested that the question it implicitly posed-how much was global power worth in other people’s pain?-was one no moral nation could legitimately ask. As the investigation of the water cure ended and the memory of faraway torture faded, Americans answered it with their silence.  

[emphasis added]

Go. Read the whole thing.

Over 100 years ago Americans didn’t have the excuses that a bad television melodrama on the Faux network offers us today.

Though like our countrymen over a century ago, I fear we will again answer with our silence.