In an
interview with NPR, the former deputy director of the CIA, John McLaughlin, summed up the
torturous methods CIA interrogators used this way:
"We may have made a few terrorists uncomfortable for a short period of time in order to get information that we felt was essential to protecting the United States."
That's a bit of an undersell. But it's okay. As McLaughlin reminded interviewer Audie Cornish, "We had the equivalent of a ticking time bomb here."
Oh. So if we go through a horrific national event then it's perfectly okay to engage in overzealous brutality and then excuse it later based on the context of the times. Torture is torture. Pre 9/11, post 9/11 … it's all torture. Except when the Department of Justice says it's not. McLaughlin explains the distinction between "ethical" and "legal" torture:
"We went to the Department of Justice at least four times to make sure that what we were doing was not torture in a legal sense."
So I guess the CIA was just torturing in the "ethical" sense. Legally speaking, it was totally passable to do any number of inhumane things that I honestly don't care to enumerate. That makes me feel better.