Informant38

Niall Ferguson in the LATimes poking at Harold Pinter
through the bars of his cage:

"First, a few truths about torture. Torture is bad. It's bad because it's wrong to inflict pain on defenseless captives. It's bad because it breaks international conventions. And even if you don't give a damn about either of those things, it's bad because the costs outweigh the benefits of any intelligence it may elicit.
[...]
First, the true part. Thousands of people were killed by U.S.-backed dictatorships, especially in Central and South America. What's demonstrably false is that this violence is comparable in scale with that perpetrated by communist regimes at the same time.
It's generally agreed that Guatemala was the worst of the U.S.-backed regimes during the Cold War. When the civil war there was finally brought to an end in the 1990s, the death toll may have been as high as 200,000. But not all those deaths can credibly be blamed on the United States.
By comparison, the lowest estimate for those killed on political grounds in the last seven years of Stalin's life is 5 million, and the camps of the gulag - which only a fraud or a fool would liken to U.S. prisons today - kept on killing long after his death."
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First the true part. It's wrong to inflict unnecessary pain on anything.
The swamp of rationalizations that opens up once that's been pretty much agreed on isn't central here, but it's a vital part of the currently dominant ethical system. Anything not specifically against the letter of the law is permissible.
This seems to be because humans are supposedly incapable of moral sight and action on their own. We can only receive the law and act accordingly.
So men like Ferguson and his masters will say publicly that some heinous act they or their friends are accused of is technically not illegal. This is a defense because being heinous has nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of anything.
Secondly, torture isn't wrong because it "breaks international conventions". Those international conventions are there because torture is wrong. Even if they weren't there it would still be wrong.
Ferguson's third term, the erstwhile liberal rationalization against torture - that it isn't effective - is morally bogus and immaterial. The "costs" of torturing anything, let alone fellow human beings, are immeasurable and can't be weighed against the benefits of elicited intelligence, or scientific knowledge, or pleasure, or any other gain. The loss of humanity, of human-ness, can't be offset by the survival of the thing that results from that loss.
This is a human perspective on things, though, and will sound like gibberish to the non-humans amongst us.
Ferguson throws his viscid stool at Pinter and dances around gleefully because the "U.S.-backed Latin and South American dictatorships" didn't kill as many individuals as "the communist regimes at the same time".
There's something grotesque about comparing body counts as a test of virtue. Pinter's not doing that, Ferguson is. Pinter's offering an "example of America's view of its role in the world, both then and now" and proving that it's false - untrue and hypocritical.
Someone pretending to be morally innocent who isn't is a hypocrite, and their pronouncements on morality are suspect because of that, whether or not there are worse people around. It's the pretending, Niall, not the numbers.
The point is that invading another country in order to bring them "freedom" - and killing thousands of them while you fail to bring them anything close to actual freedom - looks even more empty when the freedom you're attempting to bring them has bloodstains all over it.
Blood that was shed for the preservation not of liberty but economic license, and by the innocent poor. Greed, not freedom, is what America has been exporting to Iraq.