The Frontiers of Violence

So...the United States flies military personnel from an airfield in a foreign nation that we have been fighting in for years without a declaration of war, across an international border without permission, lands on foreign soil and kills several unarmed people--two of the killed are citizens of the country and one is not--and leaves, returning back across the border to the foreign country they originally came from.

And in The United States there is a debate over the morality of how the information was obtained to target this raid?

The main argument seems to be torture doesn't work, it doesn't give good information. (A terrible argument--it must work on some people. And the Nazis refined it; they tortured the suspect's family. That worked.) But Panetta and Tenet and Rumsfeld say it does work. If it works, does that make it O.K.? Another technique that worked for the Third Reich was killing all the family members of anyone involved in partisan activities. Would that be O.K.?

It is reminiscent of the old ecclesiastical argument: If committing a venial sin would save all the souls in hell, would it be right to do?

We are exploring serious boundaries here. The terrorists are not really at war. War has objectives. War has people you can negotiate with. War has combatants on both sides. The terrorists have not declared war, they have issued a declaration of hate. There is no obvious circumstance under which they would stop. Their targets are specifically people who are not combatants and who do not think of themselves as involved in any conflict. These people cannot surrender nor can they sue for peace. The terrorists are always looking for more ways to do damage; they never look for a solution. There is no solution: "From hell's heart I stab at thee."

What has emerged here is a self contained engine of destruction. It is not a predator, not a partisan, not a revolutionary. It is closest to a rogue animal that resembles his fellows but has lost its purpose and hunts and kills without hunger or competition. And he has stimulated a terrible reaction, a terrible hunter. This new hunter recognises no national borders, no mitigating circumstance and experiences no remorse. Of all the industry the United States has offloaded, none will influence the culture the way this new hunter will, a calculating hard-wired killer acting as the agent for a culture that sits at home and dissects interrogation techniques.