The price of safety
So does this mean that Barack Obama agrees me? Or do political circumstances only create the illusion? The LA Times reports that the President has acknowledged that voluntarily refusing to employ certain forms of coercive interrogation may make it harder to obtain intelligence from enemy captives. However, he is willing to pay the moral price.
In a strikingly defensive explanation of his stance on Bush-era anti-terrorism tactics, President Obama on Wednesday acknowledged for the first time that the harsh interrogation techniques he has banned might have yielded useful information, but that he was nonetheless willing to rule them out on moral grounds. …
He conceded that “it may be harder” to get information, but what “makes us, I think, still a beacon to the world is that we are willing to hold true to our ideals, even when it’s hard, not just when it’s easy.” …
Obama did not dispute Cheney’s assertions about the memos but appeared to try to blunt their potential impact by shifting the argument.
The assertion that the CIA’s methods worked doesn’t answer what Obama called the core question: “Could we have gotten that same information without resorting to these techniques?” Obama asked. “And it doesn’t answer the broader question: Are we safer as a consequence of having used these techniques?”
Having had to equivocate on the notion that coercive interrogation is useless, he is now asking the “broader question”. I think the honest answer to this question is that one always forgoes certain advantages by voluntarily restraining one’s self. In the past people understood this and righted the ship in other ways. The American way of compensating for self-imposed restrictions was to acquire a decisive overmatch in technology and material resources to offset the losses due to restraint. Precision guided weapons are an example of this. The US can now afford to largely renounce the tactic of area bombardment, so widely used in World War 2, because technology makes it possible to be equally if not more effective using highly advanced targeting systems. America is now able to fight a war of restraint, even in urban settings, because it can afford to be restrained.
But what one cannot do is cut back or constrain everything across the board because then there will be no way to compensate for the things you are giving up.
As I’ve repetitively argued, a person or a society is entitled to run any degree of physical risk it chooses in order to uphold its moral values. But never blindly; never without understanding the costs. Given that survival trumps magnanimity and restraint, it is important that policy makers never let things come the point where desperation dominates all considerations. The only way to be permanently or consistently restrained, as a practical matter, is to retain a very large margin over one’s foes. Only by maintaining an overwhelming superiority can a consensus on restraint be maintained. Once the President fritters away American superiority or allows it to become inferior, then the requirements of survival will almost certainly destroy any political support for restraint. Necessity knows no bounds.
One of the reasons that restraint may now be possible is because al-Qaeda has been hurt so badly, as suggested by the lack of any further large scale attacks on US soil since 9/11. But that happy state is not a permanent condition, only the result of the margin of superiority that US forces have established over the enemy. Remove the margin and how long can the restraint be sustained?
President Obama must preserve that margin and increase it if possible, and not attack it at every turn, if he sincerely proposes to accept the risk to civilian lives that arises from a policy of restraint. Right now he can “afford it”. The adage qui desiderata pacem, preparat bellum can also imply that if you want to be magnanimous, make sure you can afford to be. Ironically many of the favorite hobby horses of the Left, when actually implemented, build not peace but the foundations of future brutality. One of the key ideas in the essay The Three Conjectures was that if the West left fighting terrorism too long it would eventually be forced to fall back on its nuclear superiority to survive; and that is no kindness.
Who knows whether the President really believes that principle always exacts its price or whether he is simply getting ready to deflect the impact of memos which may show that life-saving intelligence was extracted by coercive interrogation. But maybe it doesn’t matter as long as the public knows the tradeoff and accepts it. Then it can say, like Ivan Karamarzov, that having been given safety through coercive interrogation, “I respectfully return him the ticket”. But it’s not for the President to do without explaining the situation to public. He cannot return the ticket of others without their consent. Ivan’s famous argument that heaven is not worth the price of admission is reproduced below. It is one of the purest expressions of rebellion in literature; but it’s an argument as Dostoevsky is fond of saying, “that cuts both ways”; if we have no right to forgive the injustices inflicted on others, we have no right to risk the lives of others. Least of all if we don’t tell them we’re risking them.
When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can’t accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child’s torturer, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ but I don’t want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don’t want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don’t want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering of her mother’s heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer, even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don’t want harmony. From love for humanity I don’t want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.
Wretchard,
As always thoughful and thought provoking. Let us hope that the “one” understands this, I fear that he does not and as a consequence the “Three Conjectures” will ultimately be the fruit of his labors.
Obama has a penchant for throwing people under the bus while reserving for himself the “high moral ground”.
In this case the folks getting tossed are the American public, those on the front lines defending said Americans and the intelligence community, upon whom the former depend for guidance and strategy.
Everybody keeps reminding us of how intelligent the man is. While he may be, he is certainly unwise to betray the trust of so many – And the very ones he should be committed to supporting.
It has long seemed to me that people of the leftward political stripe are prone to ignoring problems that they can clearly see coming, but have no will for the hard work of preparation for a resolution. Like a college student that knows that final exams are set for the last week of the semester they “party on” heedlessly, wilfully ignoring the impending test. Defense can be ignored if we are not being attacked RIGHT NOW, Social Security isn’t bankrupt just yet, thus it is not a problem. Two trillion dollar debt; let the kids pay for it down the road. Don’t Worry, Be Happy.
Obama’s denial of coercive measures is possible only because of the safety that the use of those same measures have provided. With that threat gone the enemy can be much bolder in their planning, knowing that if an agent is captured the likelihood of the plan being discovered is much lower. With the decline in their security risks they can afford to be less careful of who they recruit and what they let them know. Thay may not be any more successful, but they are far more likely to be encouraged to try.
All it takes is one success on their part.
BTW Richard. Heaven can’t be earned by doing; none of us are adequate.
The old Hebrew Day of Atonement didn’t work for them; it only foreshadowed the actual event.
I am no longer as scared of snakes as I used to be. I have encountered so many in the yard of my present home that I finally found a website that enables me to identfy them. None I have seen were poisonous. I now greatly regret killing the one that I misidentified some 15 years or so ago. When one gets into the pool either by accident or on purpsoe I even regret the fear I instill in them when I dip them out.
When my neighbors say they killed one in their yard it distresses me.
But that does not mean that if I find a moccasin or rattler or coral snake in my yard that I won’t very carefully kill it as quickly as possible. I may not be very scared of it myself, but I have an 83 year old Mom and a 4 year old Rhodesian Ridgeback/Labrador mix to worry about.
Maybe Obama does not like snakes but it appears that he doesn’t like the people who need protection from the most dangerous of them very much, either. I make no equivalance between a ribbon snake and poisonous one, but I make no equivalance between a poisonous threat and the people who depend on such as me, either.
One of the interesting things about the torture or coercive interrogation debate is that it highlights the Problem of Evil in a secular way. The classic formulation of that classic problem was how to reconcile evil acts with existence of a beneficent God. The secular equivalent it turns out, is structurally the same. If coercion is ‘useful’ to protect society; then how can you justify the use of those acts to sustain the liberal vision of the earth, without arguing like Ivan, that Paradise on earth stands partly on suffering? If protecting gays, lesbians and even atheism from the al-Qaeda requires force and the survival of those social goods required ‘useful’ acts could one accept the social ‘goods’ knowing what their preservation entailed? Or would you refuse it at the price? Come to that, why shouldn’t warfare itself come under the same moral cloud, because it too requires the use of evil to protect a good? Surely water boarding is far less damaging to a human body and much more transitory in effect than firing a .50 caliber round at it. If it is alright under Geneva, to shred a man with a machine gun to defend the social ‘goods’ then why not through simulated drowning?
The answer must be: ‘because we choose not to under any circumstances’. Otherwise we are only haggling over the price, but not the principle. The real problem must be how to preserve the principle or else the whole debate is really about seemingness and appearances, however we may pretend otherwise. The only way to save the principle is to say, as Ivan does, “I most respectfully return him the ticket.” If evil is the price of God, then Ivan doesn’t want God; similarly, if BHO means what he says, then if torture is the cost of saving a city, even his child was in that city, then he should not save the city. That was Jeff Jacoby’s argument, and it’s a good one. In fact, I kinda like it myself. But the hitch is practicality.
I seriously doubt, when the chips are down, the ‘because we choose not to under any circumstances’ argument will stand up for long. Once the costs are sufficiently high, I think most people, including myself will throw principle out the window. Even if you don’t believe that BHO would make an exception if his own kids were at stake, I think it’s fair to say he would be sore tempted to do what he said he would not do.
Personally, I don’t think there is any logical way out the problem of evil without throwing in extra terms like freedom or other arguments that allow us, like Obama to recast the issue as a “broader question”. That allows us to squirm out, but it really suggests there’s no unimpeachable answer to the question. We can only resolve to try and uphold our ideals, but in the end let’s hope the cup will pass away. “Deliver us from evil”, otherwise things get really hairy.
Boom!! Boom!! (Sounds of double barreled shotgun being reloaded). You guys think too much.
I wonder what the view was like from the “high moral” terrain of Rev. Wright’s church… Good word on “works”, Enscout.
You guys think too much.
On the contrary. Most of the time we don’t think at all. Human behavior has been driven by the same things for thousands of years. It’s all very well, when debating coercive interrogation, to talk about laws and beacons and ideals, as long as we never forget how powerful the survival instinct is. The “success memos” have reintroduced the unpleasant animal facts into the debate, like the devil at prayers; and I think Obama is unsure whether to exorcise their presence or include them as tame familiars into his writ.
Wow, irresponsibility personified.
HE is willing to pay the price for future attacks and all those lost lives and damamges?
Does he realize the buck stops at his office, he is no longer just one man lecturing us on moral high grounds? What have we done, America?
but it always takes more thinking to realize when you’re overthinking
There have been even more extreme forms of faith that sought to remove the suffering caused by violence and desire than Buddhism does. The reductios of Pacifism in a community are found among the Jains of India and were the Shakers of America. The Shakers identified the source of suffering in desires of the flesh and choose to forgo propagation except by adoption. You will not find any Shakers to discuss these matters with. The Shakers survived as craftsmen, modifying goods for merchandise. The Jains expend their energy in not killing even the smallest living creature. They prosper as a merchant group. Essentially for both their particular moral superiority is funded by their specialization in a wealthy subset of society. They live off the design margin of the surplus wealth generated by others. Neither could function as a universal creed. In that they resemble Stoicism, which was a fine philosophy for aristocrats.
Survival is not a moral issue.
“Truth serum” may be ineffective, but we have the world’s greatest pharmacologists and biological psychologists at our beck and call. Certainly we could find some formula, or painless electronic device, to use on these “suspects” without invoking medieval imagery, and obtain the desired result. That would be a “stimulus” project in the Pavlovian sense.
Following which, we would have the much more sophisticated debate over violation of free will, and the lasting inner scars of involuntary disclosure. And we could still quote Dostoevsky for examples.
How disingenuous! He would not pay anything, other than to trash his political persona and reputation. We, the people he has sworn an oath to serve and protect, will pay the price for his moral posturing. Massive ego. Notable intelligence. Terminally low street smarts. He is a disaster waiting to be mugged, and can’t be gone too soon, imo.
Obama creates situations that he is not to be held accountable for…
He votes present…
Now as our Commander in Chief? He does NOTHING, letting events play out and then either claiming credit when good, and blaming others when bad…
From the pirate situation (where the Captain threw HIMSELF into the waters twice and BHO did not order a rescue!) to the current fiscal deficit (all Bush’s fault, 600 billion in deficit became 9 trillion in 4 months, Bush’s fault) to the concept that waterboarding might have worked but it’s never to be done again and HOW DO WE KNOW THAT WE COULD NOT HAVE GLEANED SUCH INFORMATION FROM OTHER MEANS…
What a joke…
As Israel is tossed to the wolves (BHO taking the concept that no timetables on Iran should be used, 200 million in gaza aid squeezed in, Syria relations on track (forget the Hariri murders, nuke plants and killing GI’s in iraq) bHO will sit back and let “things” happen
he will not take any credit if anything bad happens and if for some reason, Israel can actually pull it off without AMerica’s help he will say I told you so
He is ONE slick mutherf*cker…
He makes Bill Clinton look like a stutterer
Beware the “nice” persona that is lifting your wallet and destroying all that America USED to stand for…
Forget Japan, S Korea, Poland, Columbia, Israel & Georgia your on your own…
America now has new friends named Hugo, Fidel, Ortega, Mr Dinnerjacket & Assad…
I’m not so much interested in how much thinking we’ve given this issue, but how much has Obama been thinking about it. Did Obama reach this decision fully understanding the consequences and potential consequences or was this decision made back in, say, 2002 and not open to change, consequences be damned?
i think the problem is encapsulated in Wretchard’s comment that there is likely “no unimpeachable answer” to the problem. yes – because the problem is Evil itself. the only true resolution is the Christian metaphysic: submit to Evil – but know that it shall be no true submission, and that you shall be Saved by a Loving God. it is a neat and satisfying response to many.
a good illustration of the quandry is in the Decalogue, episode 5 – “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” the short Polish film contains virtually no dialogue. it is split into to two narratives which converge near the end. in the first, a young lawyer is interviewed for appointment as prosecutor. the only dialogue in the film takes place between him and his interviewer (who we never see), and it concerns the lawyer’s thoughts on the death penalty, which under Polish law he may be required to impose. he is full of passionate mercy, expressed within the terse lingual requirements of the law. eventually he succeeds, and is appointed to the bar.
in the other narrative, the camera watches an unhappy, squirrelly young man as he maunders through a city, making furtive gestures in cafes. his loneliness and isolation is palpable. he keeps a photograph of his kid sister, long dead, in his wallet, and glances at it occasionally. eventually he hires a taxi to take him to another city. while they are driving over the highway, he tells the taxi to pull over. while they idle there on the side of the road, the young man suddenly makes a rope into a garrett and strangles the taxi driver from behind. after he stops breathing, he wraps the driver in a plastic tarp and drags him to a nearby river. close to the bank, he sees the driver struggling, not quite dead, beneath the tarp. the young man frets for a minute, then picks up a large rock and pounds the driver through the tarp until he stops breathing. i can’t remember whether the young man takes the taxi or simply walks away.
in any case, he is arrested, and the prosecutor has to bring the case against the young man, which he recognizes as insensate and unmitigated by earlier family difficulties and private sorrows. the prosecutor is required by state procedure to watch the execution. his case is convincing; it looks as though he himself recognizes that there is an unanswered human brutality for which the law provides the only remedy, and that death may indeed be appropriate here in this concrete case and its particular facts. the taxi driver’s family looks mournfuly on. the young man is convicted and receives the death penalty. in the execution chamber, the young man struggles; he is terrified, hopeless; his eyes beg for salvation, but none comes. the prosecutor’s eyes too look hopeless, but they also look resigned at the moral symmetry of this man’s act and this punishment. the young man is executed.
the final scene after many minutes in the dark courtroom, prison, and execution chamber, is of a wild field, the sun blinding on the horizon though the trees. the transition is one of the most beautiful and evocative i have seen. the camera pans to the prosecutor, who is standing by a car on the side of the road, and the last words of the movie are him shaking and gazing into the distance: “I abhor it! I abhor it!”
I think I think
vicariously through yall.
Oft it is too much and
not enough
but rarely not at all.
Dont worry Walt…because you have nothing to worry about, well other than the troubles of the world.
Here’s Wretch’s opener – “So does this mean that Barack Obama agrees me?” – Consider the tone – (won’t make much of missing “with”) = but ME seems to be the operative word…A true Son Of Buckley.
The rest of Wretch’s deep thoughts earn Programmer’s rejoinder because W. refuses to get all up in the details of this issue (Where God and the Devil are!) The blogger who has been driving this story is Andrew Sullivan. That’s who OBama came close to agreeing with in his comments on torture last night when he invoked the example of Churchill and the Brits during the Blitz – Here’s the Sullivan post on Church and Cheney that clearly inspired O’s lines –
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/04/churchill-vs-cheney.html
Obama probably owed Sullivan a shout-out, but he wasn’t bowing down entirely – He’s not as extreme re Sullivan re the “monstrous” nature of Dick (and co.)The wages of bipartisanship…
One more quick – O did not speak to the ticking timebomb scenario because – Dick and Fox news notwithstanding – there is no evidence that’s been in the equation…He, ah, graciously allowed that some toturers might have extracted some information – but underscored there was no way to tell if it could’ve been attained by other means. (Obama is surely aware of the case against torture-mongers made by FBI interrogators like Ali S. early on…- an argument that led the FBI to steer clear of all “War on Terror” interrogrations.
I believe someone a few posts back quoted “A Man for All Seasons” (paraphrasing): When we cut down all the trees in the forest of laws to get at the Devil, we are left with no shelter if the Devil turns on us.
While I wholeheartedly endorse these words, Sir Thomas is speaking about an intergovernmental dispute, kingly law v. ecclesiastical law. If you believe, like many of us here at the BC, that we are essentially waging an existential war for liberty and survival, the stakes are necessarily much higher than a dispute about marriage laws.
Like W said, when fighting for existence, many of our cherished moral beliefs must fall to the wayside as our instincts surge to the forefront. “Nature can’t evolve a species that hasn’t the will to survive.”
While I would have to say I agree with most of what’s been said here, aren’t we really saying that The Ends Justify the Means? Have we finally rid ourselves of those troublesome priests?
Obama is our first inside out president, or perhaps more accurately, our first “outside in” president. He clearly thinks that America’s moral foundation comes not from a unique value system internalized within and expressed in action, but that our worth derives superficially from without in the primary currency of “what others think of us”. This is a fundamentally flawed psychic outlook. Perhaps it has worked in his surprisingly superficial poseur life, a life which (until his meteoric rise to our highest office) was unmarked by genuine, deep, or significant accomplishments. His single claim to any kind of executive accomplishment is his totally failed sojourn into extreme left political hackery distributing foundation dollars to radicalize Chicago school children — and the team Obama/Ayers operation was a complete bust.
It is malignant to believe that our worth as a nation emerges solely or primarily out of the opinions held by those outside, especially when those outsiders comprise a motley and vile crew of hideous international freaks and throwbacks like the festering fascist “Muslim World”, morally bankrupt and floundering socialists like many of those in Europe, outright communist tyrannies like China, kleptocratic oligarchies like Russia, and most of Latin America, or myriad other utterly failed cesspools and sewers like most of Africa, et al. This walking travesty and the morons who installed him grievously harms our fine nation with his gargantuan narcissism, arrogance, and cluelessness. I mourn for my country.
Wrethchard, I totally disagree with your copping to a “moral” stance on torture, dissmissive of the value it has not only on the immediate target but in the effect it has on those subsequently captured in any engagement. I personally have witnessed soldiers give up information based on what we had previously done to their comrades; treatment they did not want to endure. This “moral” position you are championing you are applying to men who do not belong to any nation, do not wear uniforms and who kill babies,old women, and anyone else who happens to be in the path of their destruction. To be generous I find your position to be repugnant.
Whose moral code are you applying? How many times do you want to bind our nation into a weakened position by self imposed legalism with a non state band of terrorists who have signed no treaties and do not recognise civil society?
Your position will get thousands more killed and maimed. To everything there is a season. Would you rather us simply give up the intelligence and kill them immediately?
I suggest a trip To Arlington and a deep contemplation of those who have given all and their families suffering before you continue to support the indefensible in a terror war.
Morton Doodslag/22
I mourn for my country.
Don’t yet. The moonbatis sinistrae virus is quite nasty, but after the feverish nightmares are over and some recovery time, the health will be restored.
The pivotal issue with Sir Thomas More was, of course, the divorce of Henry the VIII, and his subsequent re-marriage.
But there were deeper philosophical and metaphysical questions (the perogatives of Man’s government, Parliament, and God’s government) that caused Sir Thomas to resign as Chancellor, and then later be executed.
God’s Laws are few, but they are profound. Man’s laws are many, some derivative of God’s Laws, some thoughtful, many banal.
We try to make into law that which is our deepest convictions of right and wrong, or that which also protects our wealth, property and livelihood. Law is weak in countries that care little for the outcomes and justice for the average citizen. Law is strong in countries that do care for the average citizen.
The perception with some is that we are slipping down a slope if we tolerate harsh interrogation techniques (some call it torture) against people identified as our enemies, that are not strictly identified as such by the Geneva Conventions (another one of Man’s Laws). So by “standing up” to “torture”, noble souls are protecting the Rule of Law and the value(s) of the average citizen.
But there is also the pragmatic case that those self-identified enemies have no scruples or Classical Liberal values regarding rights, justice, democracy or popular rule. They are obsessed with imposing a harsh theocracy on the World (if they can get away with it) and feel TOTALLY justified in their actions based on their own religious understandings, and the gain in peer approval in their own society. I doubt that KSM or Ramsi Yusef will someday have an epiphany and embrace that which we call Western Culture.
So, do we defend our society and culture by, at times, using harsh methods that we are uncomfortable with, but remaining moral Men that can still distinguish between Right and Wrong, against men who would eagerly destroy this society and the values we cherish?
Or do we stand on the altar of incorruptible principle, with a willingness to sacrifice the innocent in the name of high-mindedness and moral rectitude, regardless of the tangible damage that can (and has) been done to our country and people?
And it is interesting (though not exactly re-assuring) the President Obama seems to be reading Andrew Sullivan, and channeling his thoughts.
The country is in the best of hands, isn’t it?
The hitch is not practicality. The hitch is that not all principles are moral; not all principles are equally moral.
Not all principles are moral. The Nazis had strong principles, and were even willing to sacrifice their national survival to protect one of them. That one was the destruction of every Jew within reach. That policy cost them a great deal of productive capacity, and may have shortened WWII by several years.
Not all principles are equally moral. Some hew closely to fundamental virtues; others apply those virtues in certain circumstances but not in others. My favorite examples are consideration and courtesy. Being considerate means looking out for the needs, wishes, and desires of others and not putting yourself first. Being courteous means following certain conventions of communication and action. One can use courtesy to be very rude indeed. (See Miss Manners’s Guide for some excellent examples.) Consideration, then, applies the cardinal virtue of Justice and sometimes the virtue of Charity. Courtesy may do that, and it may make things more pleasant, but it may also be use for other purposes.
It is not enough to be principled. Those principles must stand up to a serious moral analysis. Letting an evil man or movement have his/its way because you are not willing to use violent or forcible means to resist it does not stand up to serious moral analysis. Limited torture whose purpose is to get information to prevent an atrocity is different from the kind of torture practiced by the North Vietnamese on American POWs, which was unlimited and so wholly uninformed about what it was trying to find out that it would be a farce were it not for the seriousness of the harm. That torture was, of itself, an atrocity. Putting the fear of death into someone who is trying to commit, advance, or protect an future atrocity is not.
America’s enemies will bury us on that “High moral ground” one day.
Survival:
Man against Nature – necessity
Man against Man – ethical
Man against Himself – moral
Let me go a littie further with this point. We recognized the issue of morality in warfare (see Moral Clarity in a Time of War for an excellent example of a serious discussion). We recognize that there is a moral use of armed force. We do not use it against those with whom we have standing and effective treaties, nor against those whose action or inaction will do us no harm. A similar calculus, with perhaps tighter restriction, can be applied to torture. The Laws of War prohibit “unnecessary” cruelty. “Unnecessary” includes “ineffective.” Punative torture of POWs is ineffective. Torture in the ticking time bomb scenario stands a good chance of being effective, and torture that involves reflexive fear may be the most effective of all.
In the unlikely event that an innocent suffers permanent harm (and I do not consider a driver or clerk for terrorists to be wholly innocent), so long as there was a strong effort to ensure that the innocent were excluded from torture, I apply the same principle that I apply to capital punishment: So long as the prosecution did not cheat (and too often it has) and examined the case fairly (and sometimes it has not) the guilt for the death of the innocent lies with the person who committed the murder in the first place, who could have prevented the prosecution at any time by a full and public confession.
If terrorists who plan atrocities want to avoid torture of their leaders when the leaders are captured, they can renounce terrorism and give themselves up.
There are other moral considerations here: an attack against soldiers that would be a legitimate act of war (even if the war itself is not ‘legitimate’) is probably an atrocity when committed against civilians. Attacks against police probably fall in between these two categories, as do attack against government installations.
The attack against the World Trade Center was an atrocity. The attack against the Pentagon was an act of war, which should have resulted in a declaration of war by the USA, even though the enemy is not a state. But that would have been unprecedented, and would have caused a lot of interesting diplomatic problems. It’s not clear, given the present situation in Pakistan, that we are not facing those problems anyway.
If waterboarding saves the life of a single US soldier in Iraq (say for instance by revealing the position of an IED or the whereabouts of a high-value AQI operative) then I tend to think it’s justified.
Obama, the blogger Fabius Maximus, Andrew Sullivan , Typical Liberals all, meaning:
They’re generous to a fault so long as they have a pile of someone-else’s-money to throw around. And moral perfectionists as long as they themselves aren’t directly affected by the consequences of their ethical pedantry.
As someone pointed out over 60 years ago you could almost tell where someone spent their days during WWII by their attitude toward the Atomic Bomb: the more disgusted they were at it’s use, the further they were from the actual fighting.
sorry, but I read that Andrew Sullivan post, he’s wrong.(As is the above poster linking to it.)
“Stephens used every trick, lie and bullying tactic to get what he needed; he deployed threats, drugs, drink and deceit. But he never once resorted to violence.”
We are being told by the Obama administration, and others, that these things are still torture. Waterboarding is in a way violent, but it leaves no physical lasting harm. Same with load music, sensory deprivation, etc, things we’ve been told are torture. Yet they do not resort to violence.
Stephens’ tactics are only ok for Sullivan in this instance because he can use them for his real goal, which is to go after Cheney.
#21 Buckets,
I am the one who quoted Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons. I am not particularly devout in any tradition [I will say the fault as such is my own. I'm just not built that way.] What I was trying to say, if I remember correctly, was a criticism of the Lightworker and his minions for their willingness to tear down the structure of law [which they are doing in every sphere of our live right now] for the sake of immediate power and political expediency. The character Roper in the play would destroy any institution in the country [secular or eccelesiastical] for the sake of the King’s favor. Leaving aside the battle between Canon law and Parliamentary and Common Law; what we face here with the possibility of yet more ex post facto activities in the form of the threatened Show Trials is just such a divide. Under our own law, no crime was committed by the use of the interrogation techniques in question. Every step in the checks and balances was taken, with approval at every level properly accounted for. Even the Congress was informed, and the leaders of the political opposition were fully briefed and approved. The Democrats are attempting to make an excuse that they did NOT approve, but could not argue the matter because it was a classified briefing.
The specific reason the Congress is briefed, is so that they can ensure that the Executive is operating inside the law, and are able to tailor legislation to match the reality and needs of the time. They could not [and cannot now] change what has happened in the past. What they can do, and could have done then, is to legally charge the Executive with violating the law. This could be done even if the briefing was classified, as classification is not supposed to be a protection for violation of the law. If they believe that the law was obeyed, but that the law itself was wrong, they could have written new legislation to change the law. They did neither, and have not done so outside the Lightworker’s executive orders. The statute still stands.
Their inaction in the face of an affirmative duty indicates approval. For all that, they proposed kangaroo courts for those who defended the country according to our laws. There are still Democrats calling for the Show Trials. They may yet happen.
Now, to return to the topic at hand, the Lightworker’s expressed willingness that WE pay the cost of his moral qualms [and I have to admit from my point of view, also his apparent sympathy for the enemy] about anything beyond asking them politely if they will tell us their plans to kill Americans.
It is the American people alone who will pay the price, unless the next equivalent of Flight 93 gets through. I’m sure that he will express sorrow, mourning, and claim sympathy for the survivors of whatever next mass death is inflicted by our country’s enemies. And the media will let him get away with it without a hint of it being the price of his claimed moral superiority.
I admit that I did not watch or listen to the latest primetime worship session. Watching him, and watching the media “fluffing” that takes place before, during, and after is not good for my temper. The after action reports are bad enough. But I offer a suggestion to BC’ers.
If you can, save copies of his statements on Tivo, or on your own computers, or perhaps transfer them to a DVD. For you can be sure that if we are hit again, the informal Ministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda that performed in a supporting role at the press conference will ensure that all mention disappears down the memory hole, in records and online.
We may need to have possession of physical evidence, after the fact; albeit possession of such may make you an enemy of the State.
I will close with a quote I just found from Josef Goebbels:
Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.
You may find an appropriate analog today.
Subotai Bahadur
Thou Shall Not Kill ?
That does not exist as one of the 10 Commandments…
It’s literally “no murder”
something COMPLETELY different….
as for what is torture?
Let’s ask my burnt relatives from the Concentration Camps what torture is?
Let’s ask American soldiers returning after captivity by the Japanese what torture is…
waterboarding may not be love making and it sure can scare the crap out of someone….
and dont compare that point that others in ww2 waterboarded (since the DURATION was never the same in our hands as those of the Nazis)
Selective, Specific, HIGH risk TERRORISTS that have been captured?
go at it….
and when your through?
bury them in a PIG skin and UTUBE it…
Scare the CRAP out of the ENEMY…
I second Habu’s comment. These men have absented themselves, extravagantly, from laws of nations; they expressly repudiate that order and carry armed out and other subversion of it. They butcher and terrify the citizens who an conceive of them. Their attacks, among other things, have completely debauched the US body politic. But more or less than that, they have withdrawn themselves – they have done what the authors of the Conventions might have believed not possible: they have found a way around even the most broadly conceived extension of liberal civilization.
You know what really lies outside those documents? Not just jihadis. Fire. Thermonuclear Fire.
If they don’t talk, break their teeth with a hammer. If they still don’t answer, impale them, then ask the next guy. Think it’d be so hard? But then that’s what the 20th century shows: it is not at all hard. We are not in danger of becoming a KGB state because of just punishment meted out to pirates.
And everyone reading this knows it.
Would a public deserved to be defended when it votes for political leaders who come into power on a platform of refusing to ensure a common defense?
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that torture is highly effective as a means of defense. Given such an assumption, should a public that votes against torture be allowed to benefit from it?
One of the problems in ascertaining the effectiveness of any technique is to remember that spin can make ineffective methods appear effective. Carthaginians thought that sacrificing children to their gods would ensure victory in battle. Some plains Indians thought they could make it rain by dancing; once they started a rain dance, they kept on dancing until it started to rain. A rain dance could last a long time.
We need to keep this in mind when we ask ourselves whether torture works or not. Does one’s prejudice, one way or another, get in the way of ascertaining its effectiveness? It would appear that one’s bias for or against torture may skew the accuracy of one’s information. There are many ways to elicit information. We need to not merely ask which interrogation techniques are effective, but also ask which interrogation techniques are not morally repugnant to our own culture, the enemy’s culture be damned.
Listening to heavy metal may be torture by the standards of al-Qaeda. I don’t regard it as torture. Setting the thermostat at 60 degrees Fahrenheit may be torture by the standards of al-Qaeda. I like that temperature. Lacking access to weight lifting equipment may be torture by the standards of al-Qaeda. I disagree. Listening to bagpipe music may be torture by the standards of al-Qaeda. I like bagpipe music. I think there is a reasonable standard of interrogation that allows us to impose our culture onto the enemy without any regard whatsoever to the enemy’s standards of decorum.
Also, we may wish to consider whether we want al-Qaeda prisoners to think that their information is useful to us. One problem with torture is that it shows how desperate we are for the enemy’s information. Perhaps a better approach could be to give the enemy the idea that we aren’t even interested in anything he has to say. He may keep on telling us more and more, and our interrogator looks bored. If an al-Qaeda prisoner is taught to regard giving us information as a privilege rather than regarding himself as wielding power over us, that might help us elicit information in the long run.
Beyond any information that can be extracted from an enemy, we may wish to find a way to impose our culture onto him in such a manner that he will be unable to emotionally relate to anybody on the outside. If it can be made clear to our enemies that capture by American forces would lead to massive cultural alienation from their former selves, this may become a form of cultural deterrence.
“Did Obama reach this decision fully understanding the consequences and potential consequences or was this decision made back in, say, 2002…”
If you look at Obama’s opinion as that formed by a populist revolt against anything G.W. Bush, it becomes more clear. The problem arises that contrarianism works great against pure evil but falls short when countering mild ineptitude. A broken clock is right at least twice a day.
For all of you folks who justify the use of torture to extract information to protect society – i.e. the greater good argument, why not allow local law enforcement to use it as a standard method of investigation?
Alexis – have you read the testimony about what was done? I think you’re keeping a certain emotional distance from fact. I remember a few years ago reading – and publishing in FIRST – “torture” emails by FBI guys on what they’d seen in Iraq and at Gitmo in the summer of 2004 (Long after Ali S. has left the scene nad the FBI was out of the “WAr on Teror” interrogations…emails re Iraq included account of “strangulation, beatings, placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees ear openings”.outside Abu G…Here’s a full email abouit Gitmo by an FBI guy obtained by ACLU with the to/from “redacted”
“Subject: GTMO
Here is a brief summary of what I observed at GTMO. On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floow, wtih no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more. One one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temp was so cold in the room that the barefooted detainees were shaking with cold. On another occasion, the A/C had been turned off, makeing the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over a 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floow with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been pulling his own hair out throughout the night…”
This was dated August 2, 2004 – not sure about the process by which Gitmo folks were evaluated, but I think everybody acknowledges there werw some people there who were “swept up” in Afghanistan…So you can’t be sure that the fellow pulling his hair out was guilty…
“why not allow local law enforcement to use it as a standard method of investigation?”
Good one Ash, but then, why not let law enforncement wage foreign wars? They can handcuff and detain the Taliban for that matter…
When I have a hard decision to make it has been my habit for many years to go to the Frick Museum in NYC. There on either side of the living room fireplace hang Holbein’s portraits of Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell. Looking in their faces helps when the choices are difficult.
Now, please indulge me fellow Clubbers, I face a hard decision. I have no job and money and my four footed friend of the last 10 years is unwell. An MRI and an operation would cost $8,000, cash that I do not have. What would these learned and subtle men schooled in lessons of power and duty do?
“After all, we’re not just talking about “enhanced interrogations.” Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has testified to Congress that more than 100 detainees died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, with up to 27 of those declared homicides by the military. They were allegedly kicked to death, shot, suffocated or drowned. Look, our people killed detainees, and only a handful of those deaths have resulted in any punishment of U.S. officials.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/opinion/29friedman.html?_r=1&em
Not to open another can of worms, Oh! what heck. Has anyone looked at the US DOD approved interrogation methods.
How do they stand up to the international and US laws against torture.
Additionally, I would like to know if Obama reserves the right to use other than the US Army approved techniques in the even of special circumstances. I rember seiing this written somewhere but cannot find the statement (If true, I wonder why?)?
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the – Web Reconnaissance for 04/30/2009 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often.Web Reconnaissance for 04/30/2009
Benj and Ash,
Will you each please answer the following question for me?
Would you approve the use of waterboarding on an AQ member if you believed it was the only way of getting the necessary information available to save American lives? An underlying assumption would be that this information would save at least one American life.
Yes or no is all I need to know.
Steeple
PS LOTM I’m sorry to hear about your situation and I’ll pray for you and your pet.
Before one goes too far in condemning George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney for their part in promoting “harsh interrogation techniques”, one ought to ask whether these two men ever went through sleep deprivation, waterboarding, and stress positions themselves. I am reasonably sure that the answer is yes.
I don’t approve of these methods, but then I also don’t approve of the hazing that has been so common in preparatory schools and college fraternities. Although it has been highly fashionable on the Left to condemn the Bush administration as a bunch of evil torturers, it would be wiser to take more of a nuanced and historical approach. The Bush administration’s policies on torture must be understood as an extension of a culture of hazing that has been passed on through the centuries on college campuses.
George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney both likely went through much of the same abuse in their early adulthood that they later ordered upon terrorists. It would be helpful to compare and contrast treatment of fraternity freshmen at Yale to various abuses at Guantanamo Bay. One needs to understand this situation as a sociologist or an historian. There was once a time when college hazing was actively sanctioned on prestigious college campuses throughout America, and this hazing could be quite brutal. To this day, college freshmen sometimes die because of their desire to be initiated into a brotherhood.
Perhaps the most effective argument against torture is that using torture is far too multicultural of a response to our common enemy. Torture is standard in the root culture of al-Qaeda. The September 11 attacks should be seen as an episode of mass torture as it forced hundreds of millions of people to watch snuff video. Against such an absolutely evil foe, we ought to use cultural imperialism as a weapon of war, imposing our rules, our standards, and our worldview onto them rather than meeting our enemy halfway on anything. Furthermore, it is part of al-Qaeda’s playbook to accuse us of torturing them whether we are doing so or not. So, every second of their captivity must be videotaped – single second. Ostensibly, this would be to protect the prisoners, but it would really be intended as a protection to the prison guards against any false accusations of torture.
It is not easy to do basic historical research on hazing. It is not easy to go through the record to find that high collegiate authorities mandated such behavior toward “frosh” or “freshies”. It is not easy to be aware of the history of torture throughout history. To keep one’s sanity, it often helps to keep a certain emotional distance from what is going on.
42. ash
“Secretary of State Colin Powell, has testified to Congress that more than 100 detainees died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, with up to 27 of those declared homicides by the military. They were allegedly kicked to death, shot, suffocated or drowned. Look, our people killed detainees,(what no allegely here?. We go from allegely to surity in one simple leap?) and only a handful of those deaths have resulted in any punishment of U.S. officials.”
First off Colin Powell testified about a great many things that proved to be inaccurate. But that begs the major question of the detainees deaths.
So what? If we milked them dry why not kill them? Heck they we’re luck to have survived a few more days anyway given their status in a world of international legalisms that exist as vapor in a tornado.
I mentioned to Wrethchard that an Arlington visit might be in order. Ash, why don’t you review the pictures of the people in the Twin Towers who had the choice of broiling, burning or bailing out of a room destroyed and full of burning jet fuel. Justify that the best you can and then post about 100 terrorists who were allegely killed in captivity. Or review Uday and Kusay’s chipper/shredder they used for enjoyment. These terrorist are “people” only in the most perverted sense of the word and deserve worse than they received.
I want a world that knows the United States will provide wonderful aid to them, but also a world that knows we will give no quarter on the battlefield. I want them to cower at the very sight of the US Military. If we can achieve that we will have far fewer troubles.
Our military know one thing now. Any intel that might save someone in your families life, my life or Wretchard’s life isn’t worth the hassle so just kill everyone. The intelligence agencies no doubt will respond differently by having all interrogation done by others.
The thread opening includes this.
“The LA Times reports that the President has acknowledged that voluntarily refusing to employ certain forms of coercive interrogation may make it harder to obtain intelligence from enemy captives. However, he is willing to pay the moral price”
This “moral price” the Resident is willing to pay is one he will never come close to having to pay. It will be paid in blood and destroyed lives by our men and women in uniform and intelligence people who risk much for this country for very little pay.
The Resident will forever have Secret Service people guarding him. He lives in a cocoon of safety and no doubt has never fire a gun.
He works from a zeit·geist developed outside the continental United States and thus never internalized the meaning of America. His idols are racists and Marxists revolutionaries (how many of you know that his idol Saul Alinsky spent two years hanging with Al Capone, Frank Nitti, and the rest of that Chicago crowd in the Thirties?)
So why shouldn’t the Resident find it easy to elevate terrorists to the moral equivalent of the most honored citizen in your home town?
obama is a clear and present danger to this country.
Benj I’m confused. How is it that the detainee mentioned in your e-mail who is “chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor” has pulled out his hair? Are there details missing?
benj:
I think room temperatures for prisoners should be reasonable; no lower than 60ºF; no higher than 90ºF. However, al-Qaeda should not control the thermostat.
That said, I once had to take a final exam in junior high in a sweltering room without ventilation over 100ºF. In college, the rooms were so cold (probably around 50ºF) with overdone air conditioning that I was shivering, and then it was 105ºF outside. It wasn’t fun, and it didn’t help my health.
For that matter, my locker in high school was right next to a warning for asbestos. (The school was doing asbestos removal one year.) The workers wore gas masks, but there was nothing for me. For that reason, I lugged my books around rather than using my locker. When I was teased about it, I called it “weight lifting”.
My point? There is a limit to how far one can convince people who have gone through hard and stressful lives that the lives of al-Qaeda prisoners should be comfortable. Although I do have some sympathy for those prisoners who didn’t do anything to deserve to be at Guantanamo, my sympathy for al-Qaeda’s hard core is distinctly limited.
Would you pro-choice liberals approve of waterboarding a pro-life doctor in order to force him to perform (against his conscience) a partial birth abortion, if but one and only one infant life would thereby be snuffed out? (by crushing its brain)
Or, would you only approve of waterboarding the same pro-life physician if he agreed to become a full-time abortionist, and ultimately snuff out the lives of hundreds of partially birthed infants? (by crushing their brains)
In other words, should you take the “moral high ground” and be unwilling to waterboard even once to force only one partial birth abortion to crush the brain of one infant, would you be more willing to waterboard only once if it would result in a greater “benefit” to society, that is, many hundreds of partial birth abortions via hundreds of crushed infant brains?
I suggest you carefully weigh your response, but don’t torture yourself over it. A few hundred crushed baby brains, what is there not to like to the Zero/Hillary/Sanger crowd?
Good lord Benj. If your paragraph of “torture” is supposed to shock us, then try again. Left in a 100 degree room? My kitchen is often 100 degrees in the summer. And I still bake bread. Big deal. Shaking with cold? Oh my! Just like a typical eight year old American kid used to do before they were sissified, because they were having so much fun playing in the snow. How many times did I come home with blue lips?
But this is “torture.” Discomfort is torture. Annoyance is torture (by that standard, Benj, you frequently torture others here at Belmont). Then what in the hell do you call what jihadists do to their victims?
Yeah, shivering with cold and, umm, having your head sawn off. Same thing!
As for O’s motivation, I find it pretty simple. If it weakens America, he likes it. If it strengthens America, he doesn’t like it. See how well that fits everything he has ever said and done. God damn America indeed. We’ve known all along he was totally on board with that particular program.
Wretchard, I’m sorry but respectfully you don’t get it.
This has NEVER been about “Morality” and never will be.
Obama and his followers WANT Average People killed, incinerated, nuked, or otherwise massacred. What ASH and BENJY are really saying is “let’s make ordinary people the easy targets of AQ and other terrorists.”
Because like Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy outraged at her servant’s cars “What’s the point of being rich if ordinary people have nice things too” the elites and would-be elites and hangers-on desire the people to be miserable and punished.
Otherwise what’s the point of being “special?”
This particularly plays into the brutal sexual marketplace, where any advantage in status/power gives immediate pay-offs to men in a marketplace dominated by short-term affairs (longer term questions of character/suitability no longer apply).
Obama SURELY would burn off the body parts with a blowtorch (by ordering it done) to learn more of a plot against himself, his wife, and children.
But he would let American cities die without qualms because they are filled with “little people” who’s lives are mere playthings and toys, to be disposed of by the “special people” as they will.
The question is not that of a ticket. It’s not good or evil. Moralistic nonsense or other twaddle.
It’s about power. The pure exercise of power by a degenerate, debased, debauched, and corrupt elite that hates and fears it’s own people and sides reflexively with any enemy of the people that slaughters them regularly.
Obama’s big gamble is that he and his followers WANT an attack. They believe an attack will be on the order of 9/11. That it will allow them to institute aggressive, Vichy-like surrender measures to submit to Islam that will eradicate the people who are their true enemies and threats to their power. They believe they have enough Women, Gays, Blacks, SWPL Yuppies, and so on to make this happen. The key being SWPL Yuppies and Women, both of whom hate/fear/loathe the middle/working classes, do everything in their power to make social distinctions against them, and who embrace killers of the people no matter what their stripe because they are broadly allied with them like Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy was with anyone who killed her servants or made them miserable and thus lower than she was.
Obama’s problem is that we are likely to lose several cities. That Men, and the few remaining Married women (most women are now single), along with impoverished and scared SWPL former Yuppies, will choose survival rather than abasement and wondering when they will die.
This isn’t morality any more than Liberals who live in patrolled and gated communities and rail against “anti-Black police brutality” care about being “nice” to non-Whites. It’s all about inflicting pain and misery on the people who threaten the rich and powerful, not the least of which is by having nice things too. The nicest being physical security.
Everything Obama and his followers do, is motivated by hatred of ordinary people. Once you realize this everything falls into place.
38. ash:
For all of you folks who justify the use of torture to extract information to protect society – i.e. the greater good argument, why not allow local law enforcement to use it as a standard method of investigation?
Ash your a nitwit….
Waterboarding aint TORTURE… and even if it was…
By changing the argument you VOID the issue…
SPECIFIC Ticking time bomb terrorists was and IS the issue…
benj:
Clarification: When I referred to the workers wearing “gas masks”, I wasn’t referring to any classic gas mask or hazmat suit. They were wearing dust filters over their mouths and noses. And dust (presumably including asbestos) was everywhere in that basement (where my locker was) at the time.
It ought to be a basic principle that if a situation would be torture for an al-Qaeda prisoner, no child should be forced to put up with it. So, if it would be torture to stick al-Qaeda prisoners in a toxic waste dump, no child should be living or playing there either.
Would it be torture to send al-Qaeda prisoners to a new facility in La Oroya, Peru? Children live and play around the lead smelter every day, and yet any human rights organization would (accurately) regard it as torture to put terrorists there! This leads to a question of whether al-Qaeda terrorists are due more rights than Peruvian children.
Please permit me to take exception to the way the debate has been framed by virtually everyone up until now. The issue here is not morality, but sovereignty.
The fundamental question is “What does the sovereign state have the right to do to its enemies?” The answer is starkly simple: Caesar may dispose of his spoils the way he pleases. He must hold his actions before his own conscience and his own prudential judgment; there is no earthly law that can bind him.
To simultaneously insist upon the broadest definition of torture and the strictest application of moral proscriptions against it, during a time of war, accomplishes little more than the emboldening of enemies abroad, fifth columnists at home, and other less sordid political opposition in the opinion pages of the world. No state could function under that kind of scrutiny, which raises in my mind the suspicion that those who demand the impossible from the state are motivated not by the pure desire to see it conform to the image of Christ, but by some benighted instinct that the the entire eartly order of things is somehow ipso facto illegitimate. This cannot be squared with any proper understanding of Catholic social doctrine, but it remains a constant temptation within the religious life of man, for those who misunderstand the statement “my kingdom is not of this world.”
The question should be considered whether abortion ought to be seen as a form of torture.
A few years ago, there was a call in the United Kingdom to mandate uterine anesthesia during abortions. Why? As a rule, a fetus is sufficiently sensitive that killing it would effectively be a form of cruel torture without anesthesia.
So, why hasn’t the United States mandated uterine anesthesia during abortions? Why not? Why isn’t there much moral outrage on either side of the aisle toward the gratuitous torture of millions of fetuses?
Perhaps if fetuses were involved in more terrorist attacks, there would be more sympathy for the feelings of fetuses whose lives are about to get snuffed out.
This is all utter nonsense. It’s ok to kill teenage pirates and send drones to knock off whomever we please, but causing anxiety is out of bounds.
WiO,
The ticking time bomb terrorist argument is a simple tautology and hence doesn’t tell us much. It is a circular argument with the conclusion embedded in the premise.
Torture is indeed illegal for US military folk to perform and there does seem to be some disagreement as to whether waterboarding constitutes torture. It would be interesting to see what a US court of Law had to say about that particular practice. Many here argue that torture shouldn’t be illegal and that we should institutionalize it as a standard means of interrogation. It is to those who argue that the benefits of torture outweigh the drawbacks, that the presumed guilt of the captured individual warrants the treatment. It is specifically to that argument – that the good of torture outweighs the bad that I ask the question, well, if that is true why not use it for domestic interrogation as well? Surely the same arguments can be made about public good and the need to protect it, no?
Ken – “Waterboarding is in a way violence…yet they do not resort to violence” – Why don’t YOU figure out what you think before telling me I’m “wrong” – I know you’re upset that Sullivan has gone after Cheney – Feel your pain but you gotta take a position before we can have an argument!
Alexis – . Take your point re “life is hard” and that fact is often lost on liberal imaginations – I’ll assume you’re taking mine when you allow “to keep sanity, it helps to keep a certain emotional distance from what’s going on.” – Espescially when in some cases the enhanced interrogation techniques were used on folks who were innoncent…BTW – a couple months after OIF – the Brit journalist David Aronowitch – a firm supporter of the invasion – started zeroing in on Gitmo. He was about the only mofo on OUR side of the IRaq War argument who had a right to be easy when Abu Ghraib jumped off. He’d sensed things were going to hell on the Dark Side and he’d called attention to that fact early and often and in between posts blasting apologists for the Iraqi Resistance…
49 – “Benj I’m confused. How is it that the detainee mentioned in your e-mail who is “chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor” has pulled out his hair? Are there details missing?” – OF course there are details missing! Though there’s a lot more to be had in various reports that have come out in the past 10 days. Just so we’re all clear – the FBI guy is talking about multiple instances and more than one detainee, right? – And you could have your hands shackled in such a way that would allow you to get your hands to your hair, no? BTW – The REd Cross report (from 2006?) indicates some guys had their hands shackled OVER their heads and were hung up to stand for days at a time…- the FBI guy didn’t see that in 2004…
PETERIKE – Know you’re tougher than moi. Though I’m a New England boy and I liked my winter times too. Like body surfing too! Doubt I’d confuse that with getting waterboarded.
Peterike – I liked to play in the sno
The problem is that he isn’t the one paying the price for moral purity, dead victims of a terrorist attack are. This whole debacle makes him look (if such is possible) more narcissistic than ever.
There is a moral chasm between those that initiate the use of force, and those that answer it also with force. Think of the gangster that wants to take your wallet and rape your wife, and the policeman that puts a bullet between said gangster’s eyes.
To paraphrase Ayn Rand, to answer force with force is not sink to the level of the initiator, but to answer him in the *only terms possible*. Just try reasoning with the gangster. And when reason is out, answering with force is the only option that’s not suicidal.
So too is there a moral chasm between Jihadi torturers, who torture because they love *torture*, and our military “torturers” (to grant the assertion) who torture to save that which we love.
The distinction seems so obvious to me I am amazed at the navel-gazing and handwringing I see all around.
Rand also stated that, in a properly constructed moral system there is no difference between the moral and the practical. If the jihadis sing when they’re waterboarded, and it protects freedom, my rights, my life, good Lord, break out the water and the boards.
“The key being SWPL Yuppies and Women, both of whom hate/fear/loathe the middle/working classes..”
Yo, Whiskey…
I googled “SWPL” and got “Stuff White People Like”.
Hmmm, I guess bologna sandwiches on Wonder Bread with Miracle Whip and yellow mustard. But that seems a pretty low-grade offense to get you into such high dudgeon.
Lifeofthemind said:
“Now, please indulge me fellow Clubbers, I face a hard decision. I have no job and money and my four footed friend of the last 10 years is unwell. An MRI and an operation would cost $8,000, cash that I do not have. What would these learned and subtle men schooled in lessons of power and duty do?”
Well, that certainly threw my mind off of the torture debate I must say. If you are asking for contributions then I would need a mailing address. I couldn’t post at your blog since I don’t have a google account. Can you get my email address from Richard or do I need to post it here?
“There is a limit to how far one can convince people who have gone through hard and stressful lives that the lives of al-Qaeda prisoners should be comfortable.”
Agreed. And the limit was reached many years ago. After all, any information that might have been gleaned from said prisoners is years out of date.
The lives of al-Qaeda prisoners should not be comfortable. They should be over.
FYI:
An interesting quote I came across:
“Whatever else is right, it is utterly wrong to employ the argument that we Europeans must do to savages and Asiatics whatever savages and Asiatics do to us. I have even seen some controversialists use the metaphor “We must fight them with their own weapons.” Very well; let those controversialists take their metaphor, and take it literally. Let us fight the Soudanese with their own weapons. Their own weapons are large, very clumsy knives, with an occasional old-fashioned gun. Their own weapons are also torture and slavery. If we fight them with torture and slavery, we shall be fighting badly, precisely as if we fought them with clumsy knives and old guns. That is the whole strength of our Christian civilisation, that it does fight with its own weapons and not with other people’s….
The elements that make Europe upon the whole the most humanitarian civilisation are precisely the elements that make it upon the whole the strongest. For the power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination. It is imagination that makes a man outwit his enemy, and it is imagination that makes him spare his enemy. It is precisely because this picturing of the other man’s point of view is in the main a thing in which Christians and Europeans specialise that Christians and Europeans, with all their faults, have carried to such perfection both the arts of peace and war.
They alone have invented machine-guns, and they alone have invented ambulances; they have invented ambulances (strange as it may sound) for the same reason for which they have invented machine-guns. Both involve a vivid calculation of remote events. It is precisely because the East, with all its wisdom, is cruel that the East, with all its wisdom, is weak. And it is precisely because savages are pitiless that they are still–merely savages. If they could imagine their enemy’s sufferings they could also imagine his tactics. If Zulus did not cut off the Englishman’s head they might really borrow it. For if you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.”
–G. K. Chesterton, “All Things Considered”
http://www.classicreader.com/book/2281/27/
by way of Mark Shea’s CAEI blog:
http://markshea.blogspot.com/2009/04/boy-do-i-get-sick-of-having-to-say-same.html
BTW, another item I came across on Shea’s blog:
“Against Waterboarding”
by Jim Manzi, NRO’s “The Corner,” 4/29/09
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWZhNjg4MTQzZjUxNjBiNjczNzVmNmMxMTMzOGI2YWY=
http://markshea.blogspot.com/2009/04/bravo-to-jim-manzi.html
by way of
http://markshea.blogspot.com/2009/04/bravo-to-jim-manzi.html
(This one might interest you, Mr. Fernandez–briefly references your homeland.)
Be a sinner and sin boldly.
Benj,I have figured out what I think. I just can’t type what I’m thinking apparently. And I’m not really upset that Sullivan has gone after Cheney. I think Cheney can defend himself from Sullivan.
When I said, “Yet they do not resort to violence,” I was trying to point out that some of the things that were done, Sullivan and his like have called torture. Yet like some of the methods used by Stephens, they don’t cause physical harm. When he can use an example to attack Cheney, he says it’s not torture. Without that example, Sullivan would still call it torture.
Not to mention the fact that people have since pointed out that his example is incorrect. Briton did use physical violence there.
“The paper described the facility as a “torture centre” and quotes one detainee — an SS officer — alleging “that he was doused in cold water, pushed down stairs, and beaten with a cudgel. Later, he says, he was forced to stand beside a large gas stove with all its rings lit before being confined in a shower which sprayed extremely cold water from the sides as well as from above. Finally, the SS man says, he and another prisoner were taken into the gardens behind the mansions, where they were forced to run in circles while carrying heavy logs.”
Perhaps I have missed this but I do not recall the question being raised as to whether or not obama has
AIDED AND ABETTED
our enimes by releasing methods our country employs in gathering intelligence. I believe he has. I realize he can declassify what he wants but that does not allow him to be a traitor in doing so.
Guarding sources and methods is as close to the Holy Grail as it gets in intelligence and he has just given our enemies exactly what we do and how far we can go.
Does that help us or the bad guys?
@LoM 41. It is a difficult situation; I’ve been there. Have a good friend take your pet for a walk, and have him do the necessary as painlessly as possible.
Weep in private.
Stuff White People Like Yuppies put status, in a never-ending competition for careers, mates, etc. like and episode of Seinfeld that never ends, above the lives of their fellow citizens or even their own.
Lost in this is that competition for status among a fairly inbred group of yuppies, over-rides everything else. Your immediate short term romantic, career, and life prospects all rely on a share need to distinguish yourself from the masses.
Hence Puffy Shirts on one end and nuked out American cities on the other. Both because of concerns for short-term status over long term safety.
ETA: note the arguments of Obama, Benjy, and ASH: “I am morally superior and therefore higher status than you.”
“Never strike a man. It is unintelligent, for the spy will give an answer to please, an answer to escape punishment. And having given a false answer, all else depends upon the false premise”
from Sullivan place
that sounds right, spies are trained and aware of what they can expect if they are catched.
While a “fighter” and or a terrorist are likely not, or less prepared to resist, and or to give falsh infos under “torture”
as I said before, torture is only useful for a precise situation, in a current battle, where your enemis are not practicing war rules, but guerillas and ambushes (also tortures), and that urgence for infos is necessary.
But in any case practicing torture advocates of your will for power, subugating a population by torturing some of its members (and or raping women, ie the Russians in Germany, the french in Algeria…
)is part of the volition to break a population proudness and its moral volonty to fight back.
It never will be seen as a “moral” behaviour, but have wars ever been a sport contest ? there were such imitation of a war in knights tournaments, with sets and rules, tha we could call sport
In a real war, it’s a question of life, to win is absolutly the goal, otherwise your get killed and your country looted.
So in spite of all the conventions, there will always be actions that are not defined, and or reproved in them.
as far as torture is the concern, comes to my mind Fofana, that tortured I Halimi, because of his race, because he was a whitey, because he was supposed to be of a rich family…
His case can’t be measured with a torture that is an army practice in a given war.
Fofana has nothing to hide, he isn’t even worth of backing himself with torture too, such persons are predators, that must be eradiced of the earth.
may-be in regard of what the notion of torture is for a Fofana, and what it is alike for a defense, the similitude is that it is a physical harm, and this is where it looks shocking, though never motivations would be morally defendable for a perverse murderer, and in the qualification of a physical harm we should keep in mind a scale of valors, as soon as someone take pleasure to torture a person (or an animal), even on a defense duty (like for an army), these persons should be taken out of the ground, and or eliminated
hunh, Wiskey? You really have stepped off into la la land. That is the whole premise behind the justifications offered here for Torture – ‘we stand upon the moral high ground’ ‘the good outweighs the bad’ ‘they are just pesky low life immoral Al Qaeda twerps who are guilty as hell and deserve all that has been wrought upon them’.
Whiskey,
note the arguments of Obama, Benjy, and ASH: “I am morally superior and therefore higher status than you.”
And that is the “american hubris” people of other nations speak about. Not patriotism and being proud of being an american (in leftospeak jingoism). That anyone can understand as they are proud of being their own nationality.
The elitist superiority smugness combined with hypocrisy–the people that would be oh so highly morally superior yet they would not lift a finger to help those oppressed by highly immoral.
I just got it explained by my ex-palestinian friend Khalil, so passing on as I got it.
Ken – the Brit situation/comparison cited by Sullivan seems still on – check his site – he cites the Wiki piece on the “rogue” Scott – sounds slightly abashed – but later points out how the higher authorieties in UK made an example of that Scot – A far piece from Bush Admin, no?
LarryboyColorado – Try Whitaker Chambers – fount of modern American conservatism – on Ayn Rand – Chambers’ final sentence from his classic 5o’s review in Buckley’s rag (which incensed the young Alan Greenspan as well Ayn herself) – “From almost every page of Atlas Shrugged a voice can be heard, from powerful necessity, commanding -’To a gas chamber, go!’”
It does make sense for Randians (i.e. incipient fascists!) to ID with torturers – but, as we’re seeing, there are a fair number of authentic conservatives who ain’t going there. At least not with Cheney’s or your VERVE – As someone once said re fellow travelers’ lines on the Soviets – “what brings me to the puking point is the fine feelings! ” (Or in the case of Wretch – the deep theocon thumbsucking!)
John,
It would never occur to me to ask for money in Wretchard’s house. A job on the other hand….. Really all that I seek is prayer and a good ear.
Old Chief,
When it is time his Vet is waiting. I expect to be there and hold him. The thing is that while he cannot walk he is not visibly suffering. Yesterday he ate well, today less so, Friday to Monday before the steroids kicked in he ate almost nothing and I thought it was over. Recently he sat up on command and can stand with a little support for a couple of minutes. Sanitation is an issue and after a week the steroid dosage is due to decrease. I see dogs with mobility aids and wonder if that is an option or is it just whistling?
To try and move from the personal to the general the men of power I referenced made hard choices with real consequences. While one became an official saint they were closer than their rivalry may indicate. Cromwell saved Erasmus who was a friend of More and Cromwell arranged the execution of More.
My brother, who is very wise in these matters, asserts that torture is what a girlfriend does to you when she makes up rules every five minutes to prove to you that any thing you do is wrong, while needling and taunting you to buy her things you can’t afford, and she refuses to spend any time with your family or friends, but holds her breath and falls on the floor kicking and thrashing until you agree to go with her to visit some second cousin’s baby shower even though she doesn’t remember the cousin’s name and… and…
A few days of that and you could break most any Islamic fanatic.
anyhow…
Thanks, njcommuter, maybe other commenters have expressed similar thoughts, but in your post (number 29) you have done an excellent job reminding us of a crucial distinction that most people have ignored.
It’s been widely agreed that the legitimacy or criminality of violent coercion depends upon whether the resulting pain and misery is an end in itself or the means of preventing further misbehavior by the prisoner. (i.e., riot, attacking guards, scaling the walls.)
comatus @ 14: “Truth serum” may be ineffective, …
Have any of you ever had one of the modern hypnotics? The ones they use for colonoscopies or I had for the lumbar blocks before the back surgery? Add versed (MIDAZOLAM) to it and they will tell you whatever you want them to. Not remember it either. Use that! Or I am sure that the anesthesiologists can come up with something effective.
Dan @ 34: “We are not in danger of becoming a KGB state because of just punishment meted out to pirates.
Exactly. The terrorist is by definition outside of the protection of civil society and may be treated as such. Any other discussion is just moral posturing – seeing how many angels may dance on the head of a pin, as it were.
ash @ 38: “For all of you folks who justify the use of torture to extract information to protect society – i.e. the greater good argument, why not allow local law enforcement to use it as a standard method of investigation?”
Not the same thing and you know it. The common criminal is not outside the protection of the civil society. Nonsequiter….
Here is the deal as I see it. We must let the rough men who we ask to defend us, defend us, as they see fit. If there are to be penalties for that protection they offer then they will either accept the penalties or decide not to offer their protection. IOW, let the sheepdogs be sheepdogs.
Lifeofthemind, my heart goes out to you. I still long for my old girl, Elly.
Are you sure we can not help?
LotM, all my sympathies, too.
Benj, Rand is fascist? Rand? Is there an argument there, or was that just name-calling? Correct me if I’m wrong, but if she was not at the opposite pole from fascism, then i’m severly wrong on my definitions of stuff.
The Left is famous for its love of nuance. How strange that suddenly we must all bow before a rigid absolute: torture is always wrong. Whatever happened to extenuating circumstances and shades of gray?
Wretchard: Ivan’s famous argument that heaven is not worth the price of admission…
Human suffering is not the price of admission to heaven, for suffering we will have whether the final destination is heaven or hell. Suffering comes with the package of life on earth.
May those who add to the suffering, whether by acts of commission (like KSM) or omission (like our morally superior Dear Leader), be thwarted by those who are still able to discern the difference between good and evil.
About Stephens and MI15
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6201378.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6201333.ece
umm, would you think that some alliees are morally acceptable ?
Benj, your quote re: Ayn Rand is not the last sentence of Chamber’s review. And his review is more nuanced than you are making him out to be.
Anyway, for those interested, you can find it here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/flashback200501050715.asp
Robohobo wrote:
“ash @ 38: “For all of you folks who justify the use of torture to extract information to protect society – i.e. the greater good argument, why not allow local law enforcement to use it as a standard method of investigation?”
Not the same thing and you know it. The common criminal is not outside the protection of the civil society. Nonsequiter….”
The fact that no one has stood up and supported the use of enhanced interrogation techniques domestically points to the bankruptcy of their ‘greater good arguments’ for surely the greater good argument applies locally as well as internationally. No it is not a “nonsequiter”. In fact we have prosecuted the Japanese for water boarding US. The Geneva Conventions, to which we are a signatory, specifically apply to all captured. Aside from actually case law there is the ethical nature of dealing with those removed from the field of battle – that does make a difference on how one treats them.
84 – Peterike – thanks for correction and link – but I certainly didn’t misrepresent Chambers utter disdain for Rand’s tone and her implicit politics of force) – One exemplary graph from what amounts to relentless (and brilliant) attack on the book…
” Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!” The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture-that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house. A tornado might feel this way, or Carrie Nation.”
Buddy – I’m assuming – maybe wrongly – Chambers’ line on Rand will have more resonance than mine. He explicitly cites her supermanism, reverence for FORCE and anti-democratic imaginng of a heroic, technocratic elite…Don’t think he’d make me take back the “incipient fascist” – though any such labeling has a slightly Stalinoid ring.
Benj and Ash, I’m still awaiting your response to my question in post #45.
Benj, you’re right about Chamber’s tone. I was writing quickly before setting off to work and didn’t pause long enough to think.
Anyway, I agree that Chambers’ review is a brilliant take down, though in it he shows a bit of what he accuses Rand of being. Most of what Chambers wrote was excellent, and we could use his ferocious and brave insight these days. Lord, can you imagine one W.Chambers writing for the NY Times Book Review? The pages would burst into flame.
At the same time, I might add that a line you quote from Chambers is a perfect description of Team Obama, far as I’m concerned. Not just the O, but the whole sordid crew.
Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house. A tornado might feel this way, or Carrie Nation.
A release of power and passion in smashing up the house. Ex-freakin’-actly.
Another bit of Chambers, where he nails the mindset of the Leftist. Another perfect depiction of Team Obama.
The ex-fellow travelers had certainly come a long way. In the U. S. of the ’20s with its humming factories and workers who were too busy raising families, buying radios and automobiles to think of striking, they had seen little to admire. Dolefully they clumped together in circles like the New Republic and The Nation. Substituting a good deal of intellectual inbreeding for organic contact with U. S. life, they developed a curious cultural provincialism. The Depression came to them as a refreshing change. Fundamentally skeptical, maladjusted, defeatist, the intellectuals felt thoroughly at home in the chaos and misery of the ’30s. Fundamentally benevolent and humane, they loved their fellow countrymen in distress far more than they could ever love them in prosperity. And they particularly enjoyed life when applause began to greet their berating of the robber barons, president makers, economic royalists, malefactors of great wealth.
From this it was but a step to supporting the Communist Party, especially when Marxists pointed out that while under capitalism, a writer is either a wretched hack or a vulgar best seller, under Communism he is a privileged employe of the State.
And to think this was written for Time magazine!
The first half of the description is spot on, though the intellectual set these days is far darker and no longer “fundamentally benevolent and humane” as they may have been then. The humanity has been bled out of them and replaced by the will to power exclusively.
Anyway, didn’t mean to thread hijack around Whittaker Chambers. Anyone interested in more can find ample samples here:
http://www.whittakerchambers.org
LoM – got a little boy who’d love a pooch one but dogs aren’t domestic animals in my wife’s country of origin so he’s probably gonna miss out on the kind of love and loss you’re experiencing. I only wish he could have it all…even the pain.
steeple, your question was:
“Would you approve the use of waterboarding on an AQ member if you believed it was the only way of getting the necessary information available to save American lives? An underlying assumption would be that this information would save at least one American life.”
This is basically the terrorist ticking time bomb question where the answer is embedded in the premise. So, as formulated above, if you waterboard subject AQ it will yield information which will save 1 or more subjects “US”. Simple math, or the greater good argument tells us that yes the waterboarding of 1 which saves 1 or more (with the saving of 1 simply outweighing the watering of 1 i.e. dead is worse then traumatized (or fingerless for that matter).
It is with respect to this argument that I then suggest you take it one step further and apply it domestically.
In the real world, though, the details of this equation are not known and you are stuck with your belief, which very often is wrong. It becomes particularly troublesome if you are then looking at institutionalizing such actions – i.e. legalizing it, making it standard interrogation practice ect. The simple equation does not apply because you have no way of knowing any of the particular steps will yield what your hypothetical proposes i.e. the tortured actually knows what you want to know, that the torture when applied will yield the desired information, and that the desired information will save the lives.
So, in short, if I believed that I could save the life of my child by water boarding a person I would. I also would be willing to accept the punishment that came with doing such an act to save my child. Don’t do the crime unless you can do the time. It is still a crime though and my belief may have been mistaken making the crime all that more heinous.
Whiskey, keep up the good work friend. Someday the bears will come to redress the wrongs against Elijah again.
Habu, dead right again sir. There are no methods or tools that should not be utilized. The days of the Zulu saluting the holdouts at Roarke’s Drift or of Allied airmen dropping wreaths at Von Richthofen’s funeral are long gone. These opponents can not be reasoned with, this next conflict will be primal at best. A harsh boot camp if you will, but the child will melt away and the man remain, if at all. Humankind might even be the better for it?
LOTM, talk. They can hear you as they pass. There’s a point where being selfish needs to fall behind being responsible, I’m sorry that you have to make the choice but you’re doing right. I fully believe you’ll be seeing each other again.
LOTM, if possible, I suggest having your vet come to your house to send your dog off to his higher reward (I don’t really believe in heaven, but if heaven there be, there are dogs in it). From my experience, most dogs hate the vets office. It’s a place of great anxiety for them. Why make those last moments stressful and unhappy?
I was lucky to have a vet that was willing to come to my house and send my dog off while he was peaceful and at ease and with his human pack around him. It’s the best way if you can get it done. It’s worth shopping around for a vet that will agree to do it this way.
BTW, for dog lovers out there (esp those who believe dogs can genuinely communicate with humans), a fantastic book is “Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Free Thinking Dog,” by Ted Kerasote. Warning: you will cry reading this book. You will also smile and laugh.
PEterike – It would be GOOD to hear Whit nowadays. I want to find his 40′s piece on Marian Anderson – But I don’t think you’re on it re Obama’s tone – EVen if you think his persona is JUST that – he’s all about the presenation of sweet reason, no?..He’s cool not a passsion-monger…The antithesis of the Carrie Nationists. From my pov, that can be a prob. I’d like MORE fire from him when it comes to condemning, say, Taliban beaters, Saudie billionaires and some of ours too. But – he doesn’t go for the gut (in public)…He conmes on not as a prophet of rage/force but as a canny…Witness to our time. His political persona isn’t much removed from the “I” in his books. BTW O’s reading “Netherlands” right now – do you know it? I’ll probably give it a look but AFTER I read some more on that Chambers site you sent me to. Just read a long book on Chambers and Trilling – dry but comprehensive – that’s where I got the impression that the gas chambers line was the last one in that review..
Steep – Ash’s answer will do for me. With the add-on that I’m probably less worried re the LAW than most folks…And I also figure that extenuating circumstnaces sometimes extenuate – but there’s also Billy Budd to consider!!!!!!!!!! Wonder if Dich Cheney has ever read that?
Benj, not to belabor a small point, but even given Chambers’ characterization, those seemingly fascist motifs are her preferred qualities of an individual, most pointedly and specifically beyond a good government’s list of traits. IOW, inside/out, not outside in, or bottom-up not top-down. So disqualified is she as a fascist. As Lincoln said, you can’t called a tail a leg and then say a dog has five legs.
Benj thanks for your clarification. I’m sorry for the late response but I haven’t had a chance to get back to the computer until now. I see that I made a mistake in reading this as a narrative regarding a single person. My bad for trying to graft some kind of internal coherence and logic to a sloppy, hysterical rant not worth the paper it is written on. Really Benj, you’d believe anything.
quick note re Rand, she was all about how the collective routinely savages the individual, how the collective’s advantage is not in the truth but in the organization. I’m not a student of Randianism, but it seems she points to the central problem: the individual has to join a counter-collective in order to fight back, thus mooting a large component of an individual’s natural orientation.
This is of course ever tougher in an ever more secular age, one might add. However if anything CAN organize the right, it is the left.
Well Benj, we’re never going to agree on O’s personna. Your take: he’s all about the presenation of sweet reason, no?..He’s cool not a passsion-monger…
I couldn’t disagree more. Granted, his demeanor is “cool” (though I would lean toward “oleaginous”), but sweet reason? He lies at the drop of a hat. He blames everything on others. He stirs contempt for his own country and its history. He slyly flips the bird to his political oppenents (I mean literally gives them the finger) and pretends nothing is going on. He disparages all those not on his team (Bible clingers, etc.).
He is a classic passion monger even if he’s not ranting and raving from the podium like a Hitler or Mussolini. I’ve never seen an American politican quite as adept at putting everyone into two camps: my team, or the evil team.
To the gas chamber, go, indeed. He is laying the groundwork for exactly that sort of scenario. Which is not to say he’s planning such things (and not to say he’s not). He just has no other way of thinking about the world.
I thought this would come in handy, posted on your corkboard, or taped to the computer so that a comparison can be made between obamas political moves and his hero Saul Alinsky
………. cut along line ……………
ALINKSY’S 13 RULES OF POWER TACTICS
In his book, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, Alinsky recommended “power tactics” to solve the kinds of problems that organizers and stewards often encounter. “Tactics are those consciously deliberate acts by which human beings live with each other and deal with the world around them,” wrote Alinsky.
1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the experience of your people. It may result in confusion, fear and retreat.
3. Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear and retreat.
4. Make the enemy live up to his/her own book of rules.
5. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8. Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.
I’ll see your 13 Rules and raise you 10 planks of a Communist Manifesto!
“I am no longer as scared of snakes as I used to be” RWE@5
Being scared of snakes is nothing to be ashamed off, as there is good evidence that it is instinctive in all primates, including humans, and that we are born with the fear of snakes embedded in our brains to help us to stay alive. (The same may be true the fear of spiders).
For most of the time that primates have been on earth, the majority of primate species have been relatively small, and have lived in tropical regions where snakes are common, frequently venomous, and sometimes extremely large. Snakes hunting in dense vegetation are difficult to see, especially at night, and so even the sound of the movement of an unseen snake triggers an instinctive reaction.
In the modern world, at least as regards snakes, we can afford to balance instinct against knowledge, learning that some species pose no threat to us at all, some are venomous but will seek to avoid us, and that a very few species are both aggressive and lethal, either by venom or constriction.
We describe some people as having “good instincts”, and perhaps some of us are more instinctively favoured, but I think we all have good instincts built in, it is just that some of us are much better at listening to those instincts and acting appropriately.
Time and chance happen to all men, but when they do it is those who can react the fastest who are most likely to survive.
obama applies Alinsky
Immediately after the Democratic National Convention in Colorado, the Boston Globe published a letter from L. David Alinsky. He boasted about how Barack Obama had made extremely effective use of his training in the methods of David’s late father, the famous Chicago radical, Saul D. Alinsky.
David Alinsky gloated: “I am proud to see that my father’s model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing to affect the Democratic campaign in 2008. It is a fine tribute to Saul Alinsky as we approach his 100th birthday.”
What was Saul Alinsky’s model that Barack Obama used so successfully to defeat the Clinton machine plus the Republican Party in a dramatic one-two punch never before seen in politics? What is known today as “the Alinsky ideology and Alinsky concepts of mass organization for power” are fully set forth in Alinsky’s 1971 book called “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals.” Alinsky’s worldview was that mankind is divided into three parts: “the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.” His purpose was to teach the Have-Nots how to take power and money away from the Haves by creating mass organizations to seize power, and he frankly admitted “this means revolution.”
He wanted a radical change of America’s social and economic structure, and he planned to achieve that by creating public discontent and moral confusion. Alinsky developed strategies to achieve power through mass organization, and organizing was his word for revolution.
He wanted to move the United States from capitalism to socialism, where the means of production would be owned by all the people (i.e., the government). A believer in economic determinism, he viewed unemployment, disease, crime and bigotry as byproducts of capitalism. obama has got us there.
“Change” was Alinsky’s favorite word, used on page after page. “I will argue,” he wrote, “that man’s hopes lie in the acceptance of the great law of change.”
obama’s mantra…change
Alinsky used what he called “general concepts of change” to move us toward “a science of revolution.” What he called “change” meant massive change in our socioeconomic structure, and what he called “organizing” meant pursuing confrontational political tactics.
Alinsky taught the Have-Nots to “hate the establishment of the Haves” because they have “power, money, food, security and luxury.” He claimed that “justice, morality, law, and order, are mere words used by the Haves to justify and secure their status quo.”
Alinsky didn’t ignore traditional moral standards or dismiss them as unnecessary. He was more devious; he taught his followers that “Moral rationalization is indispensable at all times of action whether to justify the selection or the use of ends or means.”
To achieve his goals, he sought local community organizers who projected confidence and vision as well as change. Barack Obama fit the profile.
Alinsky didn’t want just talkers; he wanted radicals who were prepared to take bold action to organize the discontented, precipitate crises, grab power and thereby transform society. He taught his organizers how to infiltrate existing institutions such as churches, unions and political parties, gain influence in them, and then introduce change.
The qualities Alinsky looked for in a good organizer were ego (“reaching for the highest level for which man can reach – to create, to be a ‘great creator,’ to play God”), curiosity (raising “questions that agitate, that break through the accepted pattern”), irreverence (“nothing is sacred”; “detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality”), a sense of humor (“the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule”), and an organized personality with confidence in presenting the right reason for his actions only “as a moral rationalization after the right end has been achieved.”
The organizer must “rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. … An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent.” obama does this with great deftness through misrepresentation and obfuscation.
Alinsky trained his community organizers to adopt a “middle-class identity” and familiarity with their “values and problems.” After achieving “the priceless value of his middle-class experience,” he will “begin to dissect and examine that way of life as he never has before.”
Alinsky’s trainees are instructed to return to the suburban scene of the middle class with its variety of organizations from PTAs to League of Women Voters, consumer groups, churches and clubs. Alinsky boasted that, “With rare exceptions, our activists and radicals are products of and rebels against our middle-class society. … Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life of the middle class.”
Put “Rules for Radicals” on your must-read list if you want to understand much of contemporary politics.
(Washington Times,Wiki,Rules for Radical)
What’s all this gibbering about “returning the ticket”?
One does what one can within what is right…and that’s all. One does not do wrong.
Otherwise one not only fail to forgive the torturer, one becomes a torturer oneself.
One is not responsible for saving oneself or one’s loved ones ANY ANY PRICE.
You are so darn ligical; I only wish our government officals could see issued so clearly.
You know, in a static society, Alinsky would have a point. In a society with upward mobility, where the poverty rolls skew neccessarily to very young ‘starters’and very old ‘pensioners’, the turnover is 20% a year, the basis moves steadily upward, and the roll itself is comparative and relative, Alinsky is nothing but a coach for tyrants smart enough to understand his rules. “Economics” is just the front –as socialism’s invariable poverty has proven over and over and over.
Dynamic analysis defeats Alinsky. Intellectually that is –the streets are a idifferent matter –organizing young have-nots and all.
The young have always been have-nots –that’s the secret of incentive –so Alinsky’s dirty little secret is that such incentive has to be removed from the society. Destroy property rights. See Chrysler yesterday. and so much else –going backwards in time.
So, we have elected REAL communists this time –not washed out semi-quasi commies, like Carter and crew.
S’okay –we gonna fix that.
Bud – maybe you’re right re bottom-up – may make more sense to keep to a tight def of fascism…Still the Nietch connection makes me resist your point a bit – And it’s over if Rand liked Wagner! Just kidding…
Peter – you’re surly right re Obama’s knack for defining friends and enemies that MOST Americans agree on…-But that’s a sign of moral imagination and democratic insticnt’s…Sure He’s a liberal – and he’s out to press his agenda – but he doesn’t have a fanatical bone in his body! No fear no die!
Habu – FYI The IAF guy/s who mentored Obama had a little distance on their mentor Alinsky. And OBama, in turn, actually spelled out the limitations of the IAF model of Community organizing in the late 80s – There was a piece about all that in the New Republic during the campaign. Makes more sense to see O as King’s heir than Alinsky’s…O is always careful about taking up that mantle but he did famously – and prematurely – tell his IAF “rabbi” that the first book – “Parting the Waters” – of Taylor Branch’s trilogy on “American in the King years” – was HIS story…Good book – check it and you’ll see why the heroic traditions of Afro Am organzing would spoke to him…
Well, Benj, O kinda snuck the socialism in, don’t you think, with the “peanut butter sandwich”? Of course, his press suckups never asked, “fine, share your sandwich –but do you get to force me to share mine –your way –too?”
Re Nietch, the large majority of us have been taught of his fascism (as well as Rand’s) –but sometime when you have a free hour, look deeper –Neitch was warning against fascism –it was the rise of education and mass rights that he thought would bring it on –and result in tremendous bloodletting. I guess he was more an advocate of a ‘natural aristos’ of character and knowledge than the goose-steppers he is so identified with. i’d call him a royalist rather than a fascist –except he was agin bloodline politics per se, too.
You’re right re Nietch – I was just shortcutting to easy intellectual history of Huns – Hiel Heidegger has more to answer for!! Birth of Tragd and even Genealogy of Morals are pretty amazing things – Worth arguing with/against…hmmmmmm Out of here for the Weekend – MAYBE I’ll ge tthat damn Chambers thing written on sunday – how apt from his pov…
But it’s not for the president to do [safety through coercive interrogation] without explaining the situation to the public.
Wretchard, I guess what you’re saying here is that Obama has no right to risk the lives of citizens unless he gets their permission. But isn’t that part of what Americans elected Obama to do? To make these kinds of hard decisions on their behalf?
Well, he HAS made his decision. And it was the WRONG one! I’m amazed that you don’t see it that way.
What sense does it make to say that Obama must first consult the public before risking their lives? What if he did explain and the public responded with an unequivocal NO! How would that square with the morality of his position? Would he be acting morally by standing fast and ignoring the public? Or would he be acting morally by changing his policy?
A Nyquist quickie on Nietzsche, here’s a snip (lengthy, sorry):
“What I relate is the history of the next two centuries,” wrote Nietzsche in The Will to Power. “I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of Nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here.” Nietzsche knew what was coming because he understood the radical intellectuals of his day. Nietzsche called them “the tarantulas,” the “secret revengeful ones,” envious preachers of equality whose ambition is tyranny. Nietzsche even foresaw the day when Marxist professors would advance his writings for the sake of their own malignant cause. “There are those who preach my doctrine of life,” Nietzsche explained, “and are at the same time preachers of equality, and tarantulas.” Do not be fooled by them, he warned. They preach life in order to harm life.
The madness of the tarantulas permeates the broad world, with nihilist Russia as their goad. The death of 100 million in the 20th century was merely a foretaste. The call of envy assures that the noblest are slandered, that the greatest are demeaned, and the prosperous brought to ruin. America is in the crosshairs of this grand metaphysic. The world sinks into socialism because nobody knows the secret of defending what socialism was devised to annihilate. We’ve come to think that economics will save us. We know how to make money, after all. As long as the shopping mall regime continues, who cares about the rest? But our economic principles, warned Burke, developed under the protection of aristocratic and religious ideals. Economic science will not survive the decline of aristocracy and religion. “With you,” warned Burke, “they all threaten to disappear together. Where trade and manufactures are wanting to a people, and the spirit of nobility and religion remains, sentiment supplies, and not always ill supplies, their place; but if commerce and the arts should be lost in an experiment to try how well a state may stand without these old fundamental principles, what sort of a thing must be a nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and, at the same time, poor and sordid, barbarians, destitute of religion, honour, or manly pride, possessing nothing at present, and hoping nothing hereafter?”
We can, like Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, see “what sort of a thing” is coming. We need only consult the same oracle they did. If Western Civilization is not yet poor, it has nonetheless become gross and destitute of religion. The interior mind of our contemporaries is an oracle that anyone might read. The political speeches at the Republican and Democratic conventions are tea leaves. You only have to know how to read them. For that matter, the hundreds of emails I’ve received since the Russian incursion into Georgia offer the clearest preview imaginable of the Winepress of the Wrath of God. For here, above all other signs and portents, that which is stupid and ferocious unmasks the fatal impulse of a civilization that blames itself for the skullduggery of its own enemies.
(close the quote from the link)
Ibid
In 1996 Boris Yeltsin commissioned a poll within Russia. He wanted to know what the Russian people actually believed. Some Russians believed in democracy, some remained Communist, and some were apolitical. But the largest group believed in nothing at all. “Nihilism stands at the door,” wrote Nietzche. “Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?”
(close)
I dunno. Chicago?
Good point Whiskey.
Morality is survival. Anyone peddling morality that is disconnected from survival is a conman, a snake oil salesman selling phony bromides.
Fletcher Christian said:
Another good point from Fletcher Christian. Why bother with the extra step when one can go all the way to the final step. It reminds me of a story from WWII where German spies and sabotouers (terrorists) who didn’t answer the Allies’ questions were simply killed.
East Asia has proved this statement false since it is powerful and imaginative as well as it is cruel.
After a days reconsideration of the question, I can only remain steadfast in my conviction that it is the Leonard Birchalls* of the world that require us ultimately to be smarter, faster, stronger and wiser than our enemies.
It’s how we advance.
And remain able to understand that we have.
(*posted here perhaps a year ago, before Belmont went completely pajamas.)
Only a pagan philosophy/religion would put the purity of the ideas/ideals above the protection and enhancement of human life. I’ve read and absorbed everything that has been written to date in this ongoing contest of urination stream, and when I filter the logic of each respective camp in this war within our own civilization this is what it comes down to. My answer to those neo-pagans (including some within my own Catholic tradition who have inserted Kant’s categorical imperative into our moral theology)who insist that aggressive interrogations up to waterboarding are “torture”: Jesus, in many episodes, castigates the Pharisees for insisting on the purity of the law over doing good to those suffering or those who were sinners. However “noble” they claim their motives to be, the real result amounts to a devaluation of life. These moral cretins really think that once we “go there” we become like our enemies, which is extremely absurd.
I believe that a liberal would eventually reach the same conclusion as a conservative in regard to torture or going to war, but only after a much larger number of people died. So the results would still be the same, the only difference being the size of the body count that preceded the action.
LOTM;
Being attached to an ailing pet does us good in some strange way I think, even though it is painful for us. Mine was not much past a pup, though a huge Great Dane. He adopted me before I adopted him. He used to run out to jog with me, wagging his tail so hard that it would break my stride when it hit me (I was a smaller woman then.) But his owner across the street beat him. So I got her to give him to me.
Took him right in for his shots, and the vet told me he was in the last stages of distemper and would die in weeks, though he seemed healthy. Nothing could be done.
The last day, 6 weeks later, when he could no longer get up, I sat on the floor with his head in my lap while the vet put the needle in his leg, and he was looking up, glad to see me. He went happy and instantly, no pain.
Afterward I surprised myself by crying – well, bawling – so hard that I used up an entire box of kleenex. I hadn’t known I was that attached to him. In fact, for about 6 months I would tear up when I heard a song that reminded me of him. I mean, he was just a big, clumsy, dumb, affectionate dog that I only had 6 weeks. He even looked dumb, with his head coming to a little point on top. How come I got that attached to him? I don’t know. Maybe being with them in their illness makes us closer somehow.
And I do expect to see him again, along with my other pets. As the Bible says, “And the lion shall lie down with the lamb.” There will definitely be animals there. You will be in my prayers.
Permit me to thank everyone for their kind words. We are taking it day by day, I suggest investing in paper towel equities. He was unwell possibly unrelated or tangential for a couple of days but ate some tonight and is resting comfortably. Today I was told not at this time to stimulate him by getting a mobility aide and taking him out. Pity because the sight of a pretty girl perks him up remarkably, and helps his Dad too. He actually has always liked going to the Vet, remarkable beast.
dogs are better people than most people.
>this is all utter nonsense. It’s ok to kill teenage pirates and send drones to knock off whomever we please, but causing anxiety is out of bounds.
I think the real issue here is what happens next. Arguably the techniques and organization and direction from the Bush administration were successful in pushing back the jihadists. Obama has quite a bit of wiggle room here, probably less than he thinks he has, and is throwing a bone to his base.
But if anything is to be learned over the last few years is the resourcefulness and tenacity of the jihadis. The lead up to 9/11 showed that even if the officials of the US government had the information they needed to prevent the attack, focus was lacking and artificial walls and secondary priorities were more important. There is some value when a small group of people are allowed to follow their noses and hunches.
So what is now happening within the FBI, CIA? Is the focus as strong and direct? I would doubt it. How much slack has been handed to the jihadis, and how will they take advantage of it?
It can be argued that the Bush administration in the early days ignored the Clinton appointees warnings. At great cost.
This whole thing is simply moral preening. A good way to demonize the opponent. And normal for the American political back and forth. As long as no one gets killed.
Derek
Wretchard, I guess what you’re saying here is that Obama has no right to risk the lives of citizens unless he gets their permission. But isn’t that part of what Americans elected Obama to do? To make these kinds of hard decisions on their behalf? Well, he HAS made his decision. And it was the WRONG one! I’m amazed that you don’t see it that way.
They didn’t give him a blank check. The voters elected Obama because they believed he could deliver on a set of promises. One of them was to make them safer. And his line — until now — has been that safety could be achieved by reaching out, engaging, being the nice guy. That way people wouldn’t hate them any more. But as even he now admits, things aren’t that simple. Like his checks from the government, it turns out that there’s a price. And so now’s the time to say what exactly is the price? How much safety are we trading off for how much coercion? Is it a lot of safety? A lot of coercion?
I think these are good questions to ask because a society always draws the line based on a balance of interests and values. Maybe Bush drew the line in the wrong place; may he drew it in the right place. But that’s a conversation the public ought to have. If you think back to the Geneva Conventions, its framers wrestled with the same questions and drew the line where they thought it should be. They were no wiser than we, but had the confidence to do it.
“Confidence to act”: very complex underpinning –the higher the stakes, the greater the need, the greater the need, the lesser the failure-recovery, the lesser the FR, the higher the stakes.
Wretchard @122, thank you for answering, at least partly.
But what if we did have this conversation about where society should draw the line and society clearly demanded whatever was necessary to extract information? Would Obama be acting morally by standing fast and ignoring the public? Or would he be acting morally by changing his policy?
This part you didn’t answer and I can only guess it’s because that question is deemed irrelevant. Accordingly, @122, the only relevant matter to be determined is what level of security for what price. If somehow the public COULD reach a consensus (impossible, probably) on product and price, are you really telling us THAT’s what makes it moral?
But the whole issue has been presented to the public as: we’re moral, we shouldn’t do that period.
Sorry, I’m not trying to be confrontational, just trying to understand. So far, your position seems to be: Harsh interrogation is immoral, unless you potential victims don’t agree. What about all the little babies in the pool of potential victims – how can we get their consent?
You know I luv ya, Wretchard, but really this I do not get.
You mention “balance” and “harmony.” When you’re weighing things out, don’t you think a key might be: innocent lives on one hand and the lives of those committed to death and destruction on the other? Don’t you think that would decisively tip the balance in favor of the innocent? Regardless of their degree of agreement/disagreement?
“Obama has a penchant for throwing people under the bus while reserving for himself the “high moral ground”.”
This will be Obama’s undoing: he’s obviously betting that he’s too smart and too “moral” to ever end up under the proverbial bus himself.
My money says he’s betting WRONG.
Uh, Ash, The Japanese practiced waterboarding in this way: Open mouth, insert funnel, pour in much water, jump up and down on prisoner’s stomach.