I'm not quite sure why I'm posting this. It was brought on as an oblique response to the general discussion about debating strategy on the Torture question. To me the short stubborn answer is that the issue is undebatable. There are no open moral questions to ponder, just horrendous details to go over and over again. The longer answer is somewhere in the following.

This is a story about my father. He was a daunting figure when he was alive, and even now he remains a big part of that voice in my head I call my conscience. He had funny principles and not too many of them at that. Mostly he laughed. He laughed when he picked me up from a police station one afternoon when I was ten after a bit of experimenting with mail-boxes and firecrackers. Boy was that laughter a relief. A couple of years later he laughed as he woke me bright and early in honor of my first hangover to take me outside for a day of hard labor chopping trees in the garden. I could half-see the humorous side through my aching eyes. He laughed again when he picked me up at another police station one morning during my high school years after I had tried dabbling with politics and spray paint. That time, the laughter disturbed me. I had spent half the night getting pummeled black and blue by a group of bored police officers, which struck me as deeply unfair. Other times he laughed less, as when on a couple of occasions in moody teen moments I got seriously out of line with him or my mother. He had been a boxer in his army days, so the correction was swift and to the point - the point being my jaw, which turned out to be a quick study in certain core values. I don't mention this because of lingering issues with his educational techniques, but just to illustrate his tendency to care about few things, but then care intensely. I don't know whether you'd call him a 'man of principle', but that in any case was his general outlook.

He had been a government man since the day he stepped out of college, a hardy old-school conservative who admired Churchill, Thatcher, Reagan, knew his Hayek inside out, and initially supported Bush Jr, though he started having doubts in his dying days. He wasn't a big talker, avoiding 'society' when avoidable - to my cheerful chattering mother's great annoyance. Yet he was always popular and had an uncanny ability to hold a room with a certain genial authority, an aristocratic aura which seemed half innate, half acquired through meticulous training. He also generally avoided discussing his work with us kids (except once, which I will get to), but he gave the impression he didn't get too hung up about ethics when doing his job. When I was old enough to catch on, I realized he often dealt with unsavory characters making unpleasant deals, but it didn't bother him - I never quite established whether it was through some form of compartmentalization or fierce faith in the 'big picture' or broad indifference. He was just good at what he did without attaching any intrinsic enthusiasm.

At one point when us kids were grown up and had flown the coup, he was assigned to a temporary posting before the big promised promotion that was to crown his career. The office he moved into and its affairs turned out to be a mess, and my father was apparently being brought in as a trouble-shooter/cleaner. When summer came and I and my siblings arrived to visit, he wasn't laughing. He brought us into his office and sat us down in front of a big box of papers. Slowly and painstakingly he explained its contents which documented some quite serious illegal (and unbelievably profitable) activities of his predecessor, explosive enough to cause a diplomatic incident if made public.

My brother initially tried laughing it off, but this one apparently fell in the 'principles' column for my father. He had notified the section head at the department and the affair had gone all the way to the top (whatever that was). Then word had come back that he was to destroy all the papers and keep it quiet; his predecessor, who had moved on up the hierarchy, was to face no consequences. My father tried to get an internal investigation going, but they didn't want to hear of it. Leaking it was just out of the question, and would do more harm than good. Finally he settled on a course of action: he sent the whole box with a detailed explanation of its contents by courier to some unhappy section chief back at head office who would then have to take responsibility for it. Not a popular decision, and utterly pointless - we never heard about the affair again.

Then there came the payback. My father became the pariah of the department, lost the promised promotion in a sadistically humiliating way, and was packed off to the bureaucratic equivalent of Siberia. The next time I saw him he had aged 10 years in a few months, he was broken and tired. He eventually took early retirement, my parents' marriage suffered, and he died not long after. My mother received no call or letter from the department to which my father had dedicated his whole working life. Nor from any ex-colleagues. Only his last adoring office assistant sent condolences.

Why do I tell this story? My father was no born rebel. He was no idealist. And he certainly wasn't an effective whistle-blower. He was a 'company' man (no, not THE Company) to the bone. He understood, all to well for my tastes, that the business of state is often a messy business. He wasn't a stickler for rules. He had no problems with crossing or fudging certain lines, sometimes rationalizing it in terms of the greater good, sometimes simply offering the signature shrug of the realist. Did he make the right decisions in these cases? Maybe not. One could argue both sides, yadayadayada. But that one time he found a line drawn out too brightly to be ignored. I remember being puzzled at first as to why he was going through all the details for us that day in his office. But it was by laying out detail after detail that he made us see that there was no way he could avoid disobeying the order. He knew the consequences, I guess, and wanted us to understand. The affair - and his eventual quixotic gesture - wasn't to be judged by any simple one-dimensional principle. The moral clarity of the issue just shone through; at least for us, knowing my father. There was no room for 'on the one hand...on the other'.

What he did was not deeply important. There were no great stakes. There were no pragmatic issues. There was no 'greater good'. It 'achieved' exactly nothing. There was just my father and his sense of integrity, which was perhaps rough around the edges and bulged in bizarre places but it had a hard immovable core. Some decisions don't get reasoned out or justified, they just reflect who you are and what you will let yourself do. All moral and prudential questions are closed off. I remember in his last days sitting with him in the hospital and the topic came up as he was reading some whistle-blower story about the Bush administration. He didn't so much express admiration for those sounding the alarm. He felt deeply sorry for them. Some decisions to his mind were not really choices. They're just things you have to do. And his pathetic little story was peanuts compared to what these people would face. But he didn't regret doing it. He did however regret with a hollow rasping laughter that he had been obliged to do it.