Jacob Sullum on Torture As an Absolute Wrong

In an interview on
Sunday, NBC’s Chuck Todd asked former Vice President Dick Cheney if
he was “OK” with the fact that a quarter of the suspected
terrorists held in secret CIA prisons during the Bush
administration “turned out to be innocent.” Todd noted that one of
those mistakenly detained men died of hypothermia after
being doused with water and left chained to a concrete wall, naked
from the waist down, in a cell as cold as a meat locker.

Cheney replied that the end—to “get the guys who did 9/11” and
“avoid another attack against the United States”—justified the
means. “I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective,” he
said. Jacob Sullum considers a a bracing alternative to Cheney’s
creepy consequentialism.

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