Responding to a “stupid” critique of his May 1 column defending the use of terror in “ticking timebomb” scenarios, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer (5/15/09) asserts that there has too been a real-life example of such a situation:
On October 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car. He was interrogated with methods so brutal that they violated Israel’s existing 1987 interrogation guidelines, which themselves were revoked in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court as unconscionably harsh. The Israeli prime minister who ordered this enhanced interrogation (as we now say) explained without apology: “If we’d been so careful to follow the [1987] Landau Commission [guidelines], we would never have found out where Waxman was being held.”
Who was that prime minister? Yitzhak Rabin, Nobel Peace laureate. The fact that Waxman died in the rescue raid compounds the tragedy but changes nothing of Rabin’s moral calculus.
Krauthammer’s column leaves out a key point of his argument, which is that Hamas was threatening to kill the captive unless Israel released 200 prisoners–that’s the ticking time bomb.
It’s certainly true that the fact that the Israeli prisoner was killed does not change Rabin’s, or Krauthammer’s, moral calculus. Because the calculation is this: The value of the life of one individual from a group we identify with so far outweighs the human rights of a disfavored group that even the chance of saving him justifies torture.
Hamas made the same calculation from the opposite perspective: For them, threatening the life of one Israeli was worth it if it meant a chance of freedom for 200 Palestinians. And though Krauthammer is sarcastic about people who charge him with “moral deficiencies,” I don’t think his pro-torture ethics give him much ability to explain to them why they’re wrong.
Is there an original source for the claims made by Krauthammer? I can’t find one. What happened to the driver, for example? Did the Israelis end up killing him during the “interrogation,” as the U.S. did with 100 or so of its captured torturees?
I may be wrongly interpreting your writing as dismissing the “ticking timebomb” argument because the prisoner release wasn’t time-sensitive. If so, I don’t know if this changes your perspective: I think the “ticking time bomb” Krauthammer refers to was Hamas’s threat — conveyed in a video of captive Waxman — to very quickly murder him if Israel did not agree to the demand to release 200 Hamas prisoners. http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-wosold024804627jul02,0,1051004.story.
With the information it obtained through torture, Israel mounted a rescue operation 30 minutes before the murder deadline http://articles.latimes.com/1994-10-15/news/mn-50378_1.
It appears the torture wasn’t so terrible as to be fatal. The “unrepentant” driver was sentenced to 30 years in prison in 1996 http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/3783/islamic-militant-gets-30-years-in-waxman-killing/.
So, Hamas “kidnapped” an Israeli soldier, but the Israelis “captured” a Hamas member?
Interesting distinction, don’t you think?
To the main point: Who has the “right” to defuse “a ticking time bomb”? Does any government or opposition group have the moral right to engage in torture to that end, regardless of their record of brutality?
What if the Jewish resistance had “kidnapped” a Nazi soldier, and the Nazis tortured a resistance member to save him?
Aren’t the Israelis brutal in their treatment of the Palestinians? Is there a difference?
Aren’t the Americans brutal in their treatment of the citizens of the countries they occupy? Is there a difference?
As I’ve said before, faced with the choice of torturing someone to save an innocent person … if that were the only possible way to do so … I’d despise being in that position, but if I could bring myself to do it, I would.
What if it was your mother?
But can that be extrapolated to the real world?
You tell me.
not to be totally clueless here but do the human rights of the Palestinians include not having 200 terrorists sent back to live with them?