is torture ever justified in military interrogations of terror suspects?
Accusations of torture and the highly publicized prison abuse in Iraq have cast a shadow over the US military’s treatment of detainees. Harvard Law School is offering a spring semester course, “–>Torture, Law and Lawyers” on the ethics and legality of torture. This leads to a question: Can torture in military interrogations of terror suspects ever be justified? We asked Alfred Rubin, professor emeritus of international law at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and Charles Knight, co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives at the Commonwealth Institute in Cambridge, to address it. RUBIN: If you’ve caught someone and you know that person has information, then torture for tactical information is justifiable. But if it cannot produce useful information, it is morally reprehensible. Legally speaking, the UN Convention Against Torture requires every state to forbid torture, and that [enforcement] is really up to the states that practice it. Many states that have signed the con
