Torture as a tool to make a better world

United States has adopted a policy in which torturing of those suspected for terrorism is acceptable if carried secretly in foreign countries, such as former Soviet countries. Anyone with the amount of ethical intelligence making it possible to realize what the notion of mirror symmetry in ethics means, certainly wonders who is the rogue state. The irony is strenghened as one realizes that this principle is one of the basic teachings of Christianity and that George W. Bush appears in publicity in the role of a deeply religious leader.

People in USA taking seriously basic ethical values certainly feel deep shame. I believe that in most European countries people feel deep disgust against this policy. The former president Carter wrote about the catastrophic situation an article published also in the leading Finnish newspaper. In today's Cosmic Variance there was article titled "What we have become". The all-intelligent Lubos Motl, the proud Neo-American, saw in his posting "Secret prisons of CIA" the torture as necessary for the survival of his new home country. It should not need too high emotional or ethical IQ to realize that replacing Soviet totalitarism with US totalitarism or terrorism with the free torture of terrorist suspects is nothing but a symmetry transformation which changes nothing (using the language Lubos should understand better). But somehow this challenge seems to be too difficult for Lubos.

Speaking of ordinary intelligence, if we are able to learn anything from history, we should learn that we can afford only the most capable and intelligent (with intelligence understood in the most general sense and including also its emotional and spiritual aspects) persons at the top of the power where power-greedy psychopaths surround the lonely leader. Without this prerequisite the worst forces easily take the lead. It was like a bad dream to see a technological, political, and military mega-power to elect George W. Bush a president: he might be quite nice as a private person but he simply does not have the qualities needed in this job. The bad dream transformed rapidly to a disgusting reality and situation has been compared with a good justification to what happened in Nazi Germany.

Matti Pitkanen