Mark Washofsky
National security is not an end in itself... If in the cause of the struggle for survival we sacrifice the principles of liberty, justice, and peace on the altar of national security, no victory can be more than delusory. There is a form of survival that is not worth the effort.”
Others responded to the Landau Commission report as follows.
[The] license to employ physical pressure in interrogation constitutes a victory for terror, which has succeeded in causing the State to stoop to quasi-terrorist methods. The belief that the ends justifies the means, the willingness to harm fundamental human values in order to attain a goal... are salient characteristics of terrorism... An ever-present danger faced by a state confronted by terrorism is that in the course of combating threats... its character as a law-abiding state will suffer... When the state itself beats and extorts, it can no longer be said to rest upon foundations of morality and justice, but rather on force. When a state(employs) torture, it reduces the moral distance between a government act and a criminal act...*
Since World War II , progress has been made internationally to mark the perpetrators of(torture as) outlaws... Any claim by a state that it is free to inflict pain and suffering upon a person when it finds the circumstances sufficiently exigent threatens to undermine that painfully won and still fragile consensus... Lost would be the opportunity to immediately condemn as outlaw any state engaging in these practices.*
We would be curious to see the Israeli legislature— or any legislature of a country laying claim to legitimacy— attempt to draft such a“justification”[i.e., for permitting physical pressure in the interrogation of suspects—-MW] in its criminal code, even along the“moderate” lines drawn by the Commission in its Report. We are certain it would not display such arrogance. Such an act would constitute an affront to the fundamental values common to all civilized peoples and which cannot be bent.*
My point in bringing these quotations is not to claim that all
decent people necessarily share this negative reaction to the