He Says Yes to Legalized Torture

As the debate over torture intensified earlier this month, Charles Krauthammer hit a nerve. In a Dec. 5 cover essay in The Weekly Standard, the conservative magazine, Mr. Krauthammer argued that torture is not only defensible in certain very limited circumstances, but in fact morally necessary - if, for instance, it would save thousands of civilians by squeezing information about an imminent attack from a captured terrorist.

He was not the first to say so, but in his 4,000-word polemic, Mr. Krauthammer crystallized the case for keeping torture legal in a way that the Bush administration had not, ridiculing the "moral preening" of his critics and taking apart an amendment sponsored by Senator John McCain, point by point, while assailing the administration at the same time.

"Once you have gone public with a blanket ban on all forms of coercion, it is going to be very difficult to publicly carve out exceptions," Mr. Krauthammer wrote. "The Bush administration is to be faulted for having attempted such a codification with the kind of secrecy, lack of coherence, and lack of strict enforcement that led us to the McCain reaction."

.......

In some instances, as in the torture debate, he has arguably articulated the administration's stance better than President Bush or his cabinet secretaries. And after years of opposing neoconservatives in their quest to spread democracy abroad, Mr. Krauthammer is now among the firmest supporters of the war in Iraq, so much so that he is occasionally a lightning rod for the war's critics.


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/weekinreview/11kornblut.html

it's taking a rethorical example to make it a rule (and thus opening the door to all kind of abuse).

since the "imminent" attack cannot be proven (or very seldom), the theoretical "right" is only theoretical.

With that kind of logic, you could justify the nuking of several countries - "just in case..."