I echo everything Andy has said (and thank him for his spirited defense!). I will add just one additional point: I do not “disregard the Catholic Catechism” as Mike suggests. Indeed, I devote an entire chapter in Courting Disaster to the morality of enhanced interrogation and why what the CIA did is fully consistent with Catholic just war tradition.
As Andy points out, “Officers of the executive branch have a solemn obligation to protect the American people. It is their highest responsibility. They are not good Samaritans. If there is a serious threat of a mass-murder attack, they are obligated to take all reasonable steps to stop it.”
Andy must have gone to Catholic school, because this is precisely what the Catechism of the Catholic Church asserts (emphasis added):
Legitimate defense can not only be a right, but a grave duty for one who is responsible for the lives of others. The defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm.
In traditional war, when you capture an enemy soldier, once he is disarmed and taken off the battlefield he has been “rendered unable to cause harm.” But that is not true of senior terrorist leaders like KSM. They retain the power to kill many thousands by withholding information about planned attacks. A captured terrorist leader remains an unjust aggressor who actively threatens society — targeting innocent civilians in violation of the laws of war — even when he is in custody.
Before his capture, KSM had set in motion a number of terrorist attacks, which I recount in my book. When asked about his plans for attacks, he replied: “Soon you will know.” By withholding this information, he held in his hands the lives of thousands of people. Even while sitting in a CIA black site, he remained an unjust aggressor who still possessed the power to kill. The government had a moral responsibility to “render him unable to do harm” by compelling him to divulge this information. If we had not done so, and the attacks he planned had gone forward — if we allowed him to withhold that information — we would have abdicated the “grave responsibility” assigned to us in the Catechism to protect the innocent from unjust aggression.
The Bush administration met its responsibility to protect society. And it did so without resorting to torture, by using methods that were lawful, moral, and just.