When we are young, most of us envision a world where everything runs as it ought and mistakes rarely occur.
If only.
As we become adults, some of us realize that this almost-perfect world is nothing more than a rosy fiction. Life too often is filled with minor to catastrophic mistakes, people with oodles of flaws and disasters that cannot be avoided. Too often, choices must be made between items that range from bad to incredibly awful.
Some of us never shed that "rosy-world" view. And while I am a strong believer in optimism, optimism must always be tempered with realism. For those who understand we must face the real world, here is a very good read.
Did “enhanced interrogation techniques” help us find Osama Bin Laden and destroy al-Qaida? Were they torture? Were they wrong? Yesterday, three former CIA officials grappled with those questions in a forum at the American Enterprise Institute. The discussion was supposed to be about Zero Dark Thirty. But it was really a chance to see in person the thinking of the people who ran and justified the detainee interrogation program. It’s also a chance to examine our own thinking. Do we really understand what the CIA did and why? Was the payoff worth the moral cost? And what can we learn from it?
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