Correspondence
Correspondence RUMOR, SWIFTEST OF EVILS A PROVOCATIVE RANT attributed to me by Vanity Fair writer James Wolcott and mentioned in The Scrapbook (Dec. 19) is inaccurate. I never wrote it. A...
...A TAKE ON TORTURE TALK ALTHOUGH Charles Krauthammer's "The Truth About Torture" (Dec...
...Before the manufactured paragraph could be struck, Wolcott papered it around the web without as much as an attempt to verify its source...
...A "monstrous evil," then, would at times be moral, even while it remains monstrously evil—but that would be a contradiction...
...McCain would have us ban "torture," by which he means any sort of "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" treatment, without any exception...
...How could any good person oppose that...
...Sorry to disappoint, but the Nation imposes neither a speech code nor a loyalty oath on its writers...
...Holding this position amounts to saying that while evil is wrong all the time, it may at times be right...
...additionally, its editors, with nary a grimace, have graciously weathered some stormier gusts that I really did write...
...5) exposes the fundamental incoherence of John McCain's torture ban, Krauthammer muddies his otherwise careful analysis by taking a position that is also incoherent...
...A prankster put the passage up on the comments section of my personal blog and maliciously pinned it on me...
...If we use Krauthammer's view of "torture" as applying coercion per se, then, after setting proper boundaries for moral use, we should without apology defend our obligation to exercise justified coercion within those restraints...
...MARC COOPER Woodland Hills, Calif...
...Reich was positing that the government might have the power to give but that there were limits on its power to take away...
...but then Krauthammer falls into incoherence by saying, "there is no denying the monstrous evil that is any form of torture," while claiming that torture can nevertheless be "a moral duty...
...They are referring to "torture" in different ways—one that is immoral by definition, and one that is not...
...When Charles Reich was still a young man, he wrote an article called "The New Property" in the Yale Law Journal that suggested there was a property right in government grants such as licenses to operate radio stations...
...The Scrapbook, understandably eager to chuckle at real and imagined divisions on the left, has now followed suit with equal disregard for veracity...
...We should not, though, confuse moral categories by declaring good evil, or by declaring evil good...
...19) was spot on, especially where he suggests that the word "greening" means rather something like the opposite of "maturing...
...THOMAS F. BERNER Yonkers, N.Y...
...DANIEL R. HEIMBACH Wake Forest, N.C...
...He rightly criticizes the senator for arguing "no torture ever" while praising Israel, which uses physical coercion as standard practice...
...To move from something so original and important to claptrap such as The Greening of America really does require a perverse sort of development...
...And so McCain's amendment sailed through the Senate by a vote of 90 to 9. Although McCain views "torture" as immoral by definition, Krauthammer's definition seems a bit more expansive and benign: using coercion to get someone to divulge information he would not otherwise divulge...
...Law school students are still reading this article, nearly fifty years after it was written...
...I do not think Krauthammer and McCain are using the same definition of torture...
...GREEN MONSTER DAVID SKINNER's "The Graying of the 'Greening of America'" (Dec...
Vol. 11 • January 2006 • No. 16
