Severe Pain and Good Faith: Just War Theory’s Right Intention in the Bush-Era Torture Memos

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1. “Enhanced interrogation techniques” are maneuvers that “incorporate physical or psychological pressure beyond Standard Techniques” (Miles 1).2. The much-decried “Gloves Come Off” MON, in effect, continues to authorize the CIA’s (and later the Department of Defense’s) drone strikes with disturbingly little congressional oversight (Mazzetti and Apuzzo). While the drone program maintains a different orientation to human bodies—we kill people from afar, rather than up close—drone strikes are justified by disturbingly similar means.3. Also known as the Islamic State, ISIS is an offshoot of al Qaeda that emerged around 2014. The militant group quickly took over large swaths of Syria and Iraq.4. See, for example, Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; Article 3 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms; Article 5 of the American Convention on Human Rights; Article 5 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights; the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions; and the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.5. Skolnick qualifies Scarry’s suggestion that torture is typically employed when “power is ‘highly contestable’ and the regime ‘unstable;’” he references the cruel treatment of IRA prisoners by British authorities in Northern Ireland as an example of torture by a stable democracy (110). Abu Ghraib provides yet another example, though perhaps the fact that these examples of torture were situated in unstable locales (i.e. Northern Ireland and Iraq, respectively) qualifies Skolnick’s point.6. Walzer in “Political Action” invokes a similar scenario to think through how political leaders make tragic decisions; he determines that a leader who decides to torture in order to save others must understand that they have done wrong and accept the moral burden of their decision.7. For ease of reference, all memos and reports are cited in Greenberg and Dratel, where they are published in their entirety.