Herein lies an important distinction: a man may, owing to the severity of his crimes, lose his right to live; he should never lose his right to be treated humanely, to die with a measure of dignity. His punishment is that he lose his life—not his humanity. This holds even for the wicked, who have not themselves been humane to their victims.
An extension—and arguably a perversion—of this principle may well account for the sharp rise in drone strikes against terrorist targets under President Obama, more than six times as many as his predecessor. In light of the barbarity that a place like Guantanamo requires, so the thinking goes, perhaps it is better if we do not apprehend these men in the first place. In a recent column, Victor Davis Hanson asked whether the next Senate Intelligence Committee will “charge that in the topsy-turvy morality of the Obama presidency, his administration preferred to bypass Guantanamo by choosing to kill suspected terrorists rather than capture them?” Maybe that’s precisely what the president was thinking—rid himself, and us, of the greater evil in favor of a lesser one.
Christopher Hitchens once told an audience of liberal college students that Guantanamo was an outrage. Asked what should be done with the detainees, he replied—to the students’ horror—that if it were up to him he’d have the terrorists lined up and executed by firing squad. That shouldn’t be so difficult to understand. In the wake of the Taliban’s slaughter last Tuesday of 145 people at a Pakistani school, most of them children, one mourner at a recent vigil for the victims in Lahore held up a placard that declared: “Terrorists should be publicly executed.”
Perhaps they should. They should certainly not be tortured.
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