How has the war on terror changed our views on torture?
Our officers and soldiers in Iraq also seek to prevent further casualties among U.S. personnel or innocent Iraqis by interrogating people suspected of being insurgents or terrorists. We are a signatory to an important international convention against torture, but in practice there is a fine line between intense interrogation methods and torture–one that our domestic police also face in questioning criminal suspects. Recently, both our government and citizens seem to be willing to allow our military and CIA to push that envelope to avoid another 9/11. But then we’re horrified when we read what some of our soldiers have apparently done in our name. So we haven’t clearly determined as a nation which kinds of interrogation tactics are acceptable and which are not. On the other hand, as some of our officers and soldiers have said in reaction to the Abu Ghraib photos, our people shouldn’t need a training session or a specific command to know that some ways of treating prisoners are clearly
