"It is all relative," says the Queen of Hearts U.S. Justice Department.
"The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act," said Brian A. Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, in the letter, which had not previously been made public.
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In one letter written Sept. 27, 2007, Mr. Benczkowski argued that “to rise to the level of an outrage” and thus be prohibited under the Geneva Conventions, conduct “must be so deplorable that the reasonable observer would recognize it as something that should be universally condemned.”
Sandy Levinson pinpoints the weakness of this claim:
There is, of course, a certain logical paradox here: The very fact that the some US interrogator would suggest that some particular conduct is "reasonable" in some situation would, by definition, mean that there is not "universal" condemnnation of the practice.
The easy test for such arguments as Mr. Benczkowski puts forward is of course to apply them to the other site. When the U.S. threatened war on Iraq would Saddam have been justified to nuke New York? "Yes," says the Justice Department.
The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act.
Levinson again:
Once one allows what might be termed "purity of utilitarian motive" to dominate the analysis, the game is over, for there will always be those who will argue that it is worth doing practically anything to forestall any "terrorist attack."