The Boston Globe editorial of today is about “Pelosi’s silence on torture”. The editorial says:
It now seems clear that top Democratic leaders like Pelosi knew about the policy, and chose not to challenge it. … The country should have access to all explanatory memos and other backup information about the interrogation policy. That way Americans will know exactly what Bush officials were thinking and what lawmakers – Republicans and Democrats – were told. The country needs to hear the truth.
Here are a few questions that might be asked. Why did “top Democratic leaders like Pelosi” not choose to challenge the decision? What other “top Democratic leaders” knew? Was it an open secret in Washington that certain things had to be done but on the quiet? Is there any relationship between the Barack Obama’s current reversion to the policies of his predecessor and the reason “top Democratic leaders like Pelosi” chose not to challenge them? The country needs to hear the truth not only about who lied, but why they lied. Because it bears on why they may still be lying. Were the campaign promises on which Barack Obama ran designed to truly make the country safer, or was it just another piece of spin to be conveniently abandoned when the time came?
Does Washington want to know the truth or would it be happier if it all just went away? Nancy Pelosi, for one, would be glad to just move on. Jake Tapper reports: “The combative Nancy Pelosi was gone this week, replaced with someone on-message who wants to move forward from talking about Bush-era torture techniques.”
She said: “I have made the statement I’m going to make about this. I don’t have anything more to say about it… what we are doing is staying on our course and not being distracted from it and this is a distraction… moving forward in a bipartisan way for jobs, health care, energy for our country.”
“On the subject you asked, I’ve made by statement,” Pelosi again said. “I don’t have anything more to say.”
Perhaps some part of the electorate actually wants to be lied to; to feel safe yet be spared the knowledge of what tradeoffs might have been necessary to achieve it. It wouldn’t be the first time. Ceremony has always been used to hide hard choices from the public eye, or at least to veil, with incense, the awesome mysteries which lay behind. The marching bands, dignified bearing and usages of military service are all designed in part to conceal, or to momentarily obscure, that the profession is all about killing the nation’s enemies. The awesome spectacle of justice, the black robes, the sonorous language, conspire to make us forget that it deals with the business of taking away the freedom or ending the life of a criminal. Just as in the hospital ward a curtain is drawn across the sickbed, on both sides of the aisle politicians must have feared that there were some things the public did not want to see. In 1989, Alan Sorkin wrote a play, ironically enough, about a group of Marines being tried for an offense in Guantanamo Bay called A Few Good Men. In it, the antagonist, Colonel Jessep, put the prosecutor on trial, for the crime he alleged, of intruding on their self-esteem.
Kaffee: I want the truth!
Jessep: You can’t handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives…You don’t want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.
In the movie, Jessep is convicted and sentenced. It is interesting to consider, as a thought experiment, if Kaffee’s own life depended on Jessep, whether he would act differently. He might not and actually choose to prosecute Jessep regardless of the consequences to himself. But that would be a different movie. The The Globe is right. The public needs to know the truth, however much it may hurt. But it’s just possible that some of them may not want to.
“And none so blind as they who will not see”
Tip Jar or a $5 Subscription
where did you find the clinton photo? describes the jackasses to a t
On this subject I am torn. The extreme left would love to set up the apparatus of Truth Commissions. Like with a Constitutional Convention the conservatives should be very careful of what they wish for. We live in a Republic and that means that a panoply of elected and appointed officials in the three branches of the federal government and in the States are supposed to be keeping an eye on each other for us. The idea that operational intelligence and confidential advice could be disclosed to settle a partisan political dispute offends me. The lawyers who gave the advice should face no risk of exposure. The only question regarding Ms Pelosi is whether she has been economical with the truth. It should not be necessary to disclose any secrets in an open forum to arrive at an answer to that question.
Pelosi is entirely beyond the point in which a politician in a more civilized age would have been left alone in a room with the knowledge that there was a revolver in the desk drawer. She has the nerve to say that she is
as if the Republican party was a sock puppet that she could drag out or a dog with a penchant for eating her embarrassing garbage.
A part of me, ok most of me, wants a street fight between the parties to occur. I suspect that imperfect as the results were after 9/11, Cheney and Rumsfeld would rip the heads off the Pelosi, Reid, and Durban in an open debate over the issues boiling below the surface.
The hiding place of the Anthropoids was discovered through torture, and it highlights the pros and cons of argument about the unreliability of information acquired under duress. Back in the underground days, our drill when captured was to buy time under duress. This could be done in several ways. One was to betray only those, after a seeming struggle, who couldn’t be reached (say they were in exile), or who were dead (the enemy didn’t always know who was dead). If pressed, you would tell a truth which took a long time to verify. Hopefully by then people would be away. The cycle was they would ask you a question and check from collateral sources, if you were telling the truth. The problem with concealing a safe-house was that they could check, often within a half hour, if you were telling the truth. From this, it will be abundantly clear that tactical interrogation is different from the so-called “forced confessions”.
Suppose you were being tortured for the PIN number of your ATM card. That’s a very specific piece of verifiable information and it’s a good proxy for the safe-house problem. They’d have a guy at an ATM on the end of a cellphone. How long could you hold out before you told them the PIN number? You probably have three chances to tell the truth. After that, the PIN locks out and the last door closes. My guess is that if your fingers are being smashed in a vise that most people will disclose the PIN number rather quickly. This is the reason why protecting safehouses (or the whereabouts of someone) and other tactically verifiable information under duress is so hard. This is also the reason why the use of torture poses such moral dilemmas: it is actually most useful in prosecuting tactical situations.
But notice that duress also produces lies. You can incriminate dead people or innocent people who are, for the moment, beyond the reach of the enemy. Now a trained interrogator (suspend all moral judgment for a while and just consider the job qua job) knows how to screen that stuff out. He doesn’t credit answers he can’t confirm to be true. So to some extent, interrogations with the least collateral damage are performed by the professionals. Now consider rendition.
In rendition, not only is the subject tortured beyond anything conceived, authorized or actually performed in US custody, but the information derived thereby (by foreign intelligence agents) is often unreliable. Consider what that means. It means that all the desperate admissions, misdirections, and even garbled utterances of the prisoner may be misinterpreted. The reason why some people in the CIA wanted prisoners in US custody is that they got junk information from those they had to turn over captives over to. When you have bad information, one consequence is that all kinds of innocent, or at least wrong people are fingered. So the cost of rendition is actually higher, in human terms, that it seems at first. So in this terrible calculus, the sweep-under-the rug approach isn’t humane it all. It is significantly more brutal. But you don’t see it if it happens in Egypt and out of sight, out of mind.
If all of this make you sick, it should. But this is how the world works. One solution to the moral dilemmas is to take the process in hand and make hard decisions about what to do or not to do, accepting the cost both ways. But I think it is somewhat less than honest to act as Nancy Pelosi seems to have done. She wanted to have her cake and eat it too. Well she didn’t have to eat the cake, yet she did because, I think, she was hungry for power. And she is not the only one.
Any producer of third-rate musicals knows it can be tricky to replace someone in the chorus line who starts showing up drunk.
Especially if the lead actor is all time forgetting lines and making stuff up, and the box-office receipts from Wednesday matinee are curiously unaccounted for.
Pelosi stumbled, but she’s back up and tap dancing. Put away that pistol.
But I think it is somewhat less than honest to act as Nancy Pelosi seems to have done. She wanted to have her cake and eat it too. Well she didn’t have to eat the cake. But she was hungry for power. And she is not the only one.
The question I want answered is whether she will choke on the cake — but not too fast. We need her around through 2010, so she can be held up as the token to run against for the opposition. Just as the Democrats ran against Newt, it would be delicious to see the same campaign against her.
What happened here was very simple. The Democrats and their pet scoundrels had been hurling accusations of lying at the Republicans for years now and not only got away with it but had Scooter Libby convicted for no good reason and got control of the Congress and the Presidency as well. One more little accusation would get Pelosi out of a little jam, and couldn’t hurt could it?
Problem was now, the CIA is part of the Executive Branch – THEIR Executive Branch and is headed by noneother than Pelosi’s good pal and fellow California flake, Panetta.
And regardless of what you think about the attitudes and capabilities of the CIA, I can tell you from personal experience that if they can do nothing else, intelligence agencies keep damn good records and know how to grab the files fast.
It is amusing to see that the Republicans have seized on the “Investigation” idea. Of course, they say they want to investigate the CIA to see if they lied. And they known darn well what the investigation will show.
Can anyone give a good answer to John McCain’s “torture never gives good intelligence”? The Left has adopted this as gospel to stop any further discussion. My sense is that McCain is using his own experience at the expense of what is reality in other circumstances.
Wretchard, I’d believe you before I’d believe anyone else.
Two things to know about torture:
1) Everybody breaks. The key is to know your limits and work within your knowledge.
2) It is good to hate the enemy, contempt is even better.
At one point the Navy pilots in the Hanoi Hilton were puzzled by the interrogators interest in the swimming pool off the hanger bay in the Oriskiney class carrier. Assuring them that there was no such amenity only resulted in more severe torture. The Navy men figured out that the North Vietnamese were being fed a line by the Air Force crews they had captured. So they started feeding them information about the wet bar on the B-52 that was staffed by Playboy Bunnies. Once you realize that you are going to suffer anyways you can work within that limit to influence if not control the situation and feed your life giving contempt for the enemy.
To go back a few threads WWBD, What Would Bombadil Do?
The real question is how the Pelosi-Obama feud with the CIA will play out.
Pelosi just doubled down, with Hoyer backing her up, that the CIA lied to her and lies all the time.
Obama has voted present, and so has therefore made a permanent enemy of the CIA. Which has every reason now (fear of Pelosi/Hoyer/Obama show trials) to want him removed from office through selective leaks and scandals, or at least permanently wounded. See: GWB.
No one in the CIA will trust Obama, his past promises to people he threw under the bus guarantees this, and no one believes he has not really sided with Pelosi. To gain the CIA’s trust he would have had to publicly rebuke Pelosi and demand she resign. He did not, choosing to vote Present and has now guaranteed the eternal emnity of the CIA because they face an eternal Democratic threat.
The Republicans, and particularly Dick Cheney, have defended the CIA and gained a critical ally. One well positioned to leak every embarrassing secret, mis-step, and illegal activity that Obama makes.
This includes, but is not limited to, any questions or lingering problems with his birth certificate and status as a natural born US citizen, any problem he might have in associating with Muslim radicals in mosques in NYC during his Columbia years, and any problems he might have with documented hanging around of Muslim radicals and jihadis in Pakistan during his trip there between semesters at Columbia. A curious choice of destinations anyway. Pakistan not being a tourist destination.
There are probably other embarrassments. “Secret deals” with terrorists, a “secret agreement to OK Iran’s bomb,” or Iran nuking Israel, or what have you. Anything akin to the Reagan Administration’s “Arms for Hostages” will be fair game.
The Press can protect Obama, but only to a point. The “Undernews” as Mickey Kaus put it, what people know to be true on the internet, vs. the overnews makes Obama’s fight politically far more difficult. That’s particularly true if we get hit, hard, and the CIA leaks like crazy with proven “arrangements” with various jihadis.
In other words, the American Second Civil War proceeds apace. Yuppies, Gays, Women, Blacks, Hispanics, vs. Republicans, the CIA, Married Women, White Guys.
The CIA is small, but has information dominance.
But if *I* were the producer….
A minor quibble Wretchard. Jessup was taken into custody and informed that he was the subject of charges.
The two Marines were convicted IIRC of a less serious charge but convicted they were.
Regards
alfa6 ;>}
Does torture give good intelligence? I think the answer to the question, as I’ve indicated in my post above is both yes and no. My guess is that it is useless for extracting honest admissions of guilt, good strategic intelligence and anything else that can’t be verified within a tactical cycle. But in specific situations as I’ve illustrated above, I think it can be a terrifying weapon.
Consider the famous BAT 21 rescue mission in Vietnam. An Air Force officer who knew too much had been shot down and because they feared he might reveal information under duress, an unprecedented rescue mission was mounted.
Abrams was prepared to keep him out of the hands of Cuban, North Vietnamese and Warsaw Pact interrogators at practically all costs. Now, if torture were useless, why would Abrams bother? If we credit the Left’s argument then nothing would have been risked by letting Iceal Hambleton fall into enemy hands.
So the answer I think is that torture can give lots of bad information, but in certain circumstances it can be a very useful weapon of war. The crazy thing I think about the current system is that it allows torture to take place — in allied countries through rendition — in circumstances where it is most likely to produce bad intelligence. The horrifying thing is that it might actually be most useful in “ticking bomb” situations. To the North Vietnamese, the next US air raid was a ticking bomb. If they could get Hambleton, they’d ask for frequencies, and other technical data which the vast US air machine could not simply change in an instant. His loss would be very much like the safehouse or ATM problem.
I hope that I’ve clearly conveyed that I think torture is reprehensible, but I am not so stupid as to imagine that in denying myself a weapon of war it doesn’t come at a cost. Back in the day there were debates in the underground about whether it was licit to target the children of the Marcos era officials. It would be be operationally useful to do so, but by common consent, people decided not to. Yet they were under no illusions they were “giving up” something. They knew they were giving up an advantage, but they were willing to pay the price to keep their moral standards. Torture is the same way. It can be forsworn, but understand that you will have to give something up. With rendition especially it seems, you get the worst of all worlds.
Some readers commenting here are already living in places – may be just working somewhere – that actively monitor posts made to blogs. It is easy enough to do searches of the internet finding occurrences of a person’s name. This why so many people use an ‘internet name’ and try to find ways to create internet identities that are not directly linked to their nationally-issued citizen identification.
In USA, people have good reasons to be very careful, when the government issues alerts to its own security people telling them that military veterans it has sent overseas might be potential terrorist threat, and sizeable portions of the population are also possible terrorsit just becasue of how they answer some questions on a poll or survey.
Obama met with human rights groups this week and one of the attendees leaked that O had revealed his intent to get authorization to use ‘preventiv detention’ against potential terrorists.
Compare that datum with the lists of people Obama has defined as potential threats, and those he has dismissed as threats.
I apologize for my typography errors. I am very upset to see how Obama and his people are turning USA into a land where citizens are defined as threats while known murdering terrorists are given full protection of US laws that only exist because American Citizens fought and died to bring those laws to be.
I have heard the Left invoke McCarthy-ism for decades, but it is the LEFT for the last thirty years that blacklists people and tries to destroy them for opposing their agenda.
You think it can’t happen in your country, but there are so many places where special police come in the dark of night and take people away, just because some one reported them for saying the wrong thing.
It may be that we can’t handle the truth about politicians.
You write about the truth value of information obtained through interrogations when the falsehood value is in play in the world of mirrors and misdirection.
Not of the prisoner but of the inquisitor.Can they lie well enough to bury the truth of what has been done.
Pelosi in her own way probably can handle the truth but part of her job is to bury it before the public. She wants to share the blame with others and move on. I don’t think the Grand Inquisitor would keep her on staff. She makes the masses uneasy.
With regard to the “weapon of war”, it is at times better to think of war as a weapon of terror. And terror is a last resort of politics. This is so far from the brie and Pinot Noir of San Francisco but the watchers are obliged to watch.
Yes! Where did that picture come from?
According to the FreeRepublic, it was originally posted by PBS and subsequently it went down the memory hole. However, it is still available on various private servers and if you do a Google image search, you’ll see it easily enough.
One source is at the University of Texas (http://www.cah.utexas.edu/photojournalism/detail.php?nickname=walker&picid=6). It’s an amazing picture.
Because none of us truly know how we would react under dire circumstances, it is best to leave bragadocio aside.
My experience tells me that, in the final analysis, what you will do to win depends in large part on how badly you want to win and how high the cost of losing is perceived to be.
“But what would it profit a man, should he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”
Hard questions with no easy answers.
Having put in place a gent who caused a number of employees to resign, or take early retirement, all the while kicking and stamping on the way out, the Bush Administration did not achieve a perfect relationship with its intelligence professionals. That said, however, respect for those battle worn certainly showed in the former Vice President’s address.
I would only suggest if anyone wanted someone to know the contents of any confidential material they could just share them with the current Vice President. Or perhaps with Former Sec. Powell.
Review of the Department’s Patterns of Global
Terrorism – 2003 Report (SIO-S-04-18)
In response to a joint letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell from six members of the U.S. Senate,
OIG reviewed how inaccurate and incomplete data and statements came to be included in the Patterns of
Global Terrorism – 2003 report, which was released April 29, 2004. Although the Department has overall
responsibility for producing this annual report on international terrorism, the report’s Appendix A –
Chronology of Significant Terrorist Incidents, relies on data adjudicated by an Incident Review Panel that
includes members of the Intelligence Community.
OIG found that omissions and apparent inconsistencies in the database were due to a number of
factors. The shift of the responsibility for the maintenance of the database of terrorist events from one
organization to another, along with the lack of trained, long-term personnel working in that office, also
probably contributed to the lack of supervison of the database. In addition, the process for assembling
the report at the Department, while differing little from that of previous years, lacked sufficient oversight
and coordination.
Of course this is what the stuff looked like in 2001 as found here:
http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.state.gov%2Fs%2Fct%2Frls%2Fcrt%2F2000%2F2466.htm
Bureaus/Offices Reporting Directly to the Secretary > Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism > Releases > Country Reports on Terrorism > 2000 (Patterns of Global Terrorism)
Appendix E: Extraditions and Renditions of Terrorists to the United States, 1993-1999
Patterns of Global Terrorism
Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism
2000
April 30, 2001
Date
Name Extradition or Rendition From
March 1993 Mahmoud Abu Halima
(February 1993 World Trade Center bombing) Extradition *
July 1993 Mohammed Ali Rezaq
(November 1985 hijacking of Egyptair 648) Rendition Nigeria
February 1995 Ramzi Ahmed Yousef
(January 1995 Far East bomb plot,
February 1993 World Trade Center bombing) Extradition Pakistan
April 1995 Abdul Hakim Murad
(January 1995 Far East bomb plot) Rendition Philippines
August 1995 Eyad Mahmoud Ismail Najim
(February 1993 World Trade Center bombing) Extradition Jordan
December 1995 Wali Khan Amin Shah
(January 1995 Far East bomb plot) Rendition *
September 1996 Tsutomu Shirosaki
(May 1986 attack on US Embassy, Jakarta) Rendition *
June 1997 Mir Aimal Kansi
(January 1993 shooting outside CIA headquarters) Rendition *
June 1998 Mohammed Rashid
(August 1982 Pan Am bombing) Rendition *
August 1998 Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali
(August 1998 US Embassy bombing in Kenya) Rendition Kenya
August 1998 Mohamed Sadeek Odeh
(August 1998 US Embassy bombing in Kenya) Rendition Kenya
December 1998 Mamdouh Mahmud Salim
(August 1998 East Africa bombings) Extradition Germany
October 1999 Khalfan Khamis Mohamed
(August 1998 US Embassy bombing in
Tanzania) Rendition South Africa
* Country not disclosed
So, I guess we can know some of what wasn’t on the tape drive.
Wretchard,
Not knowing any more than I do about “Bat 21,” the obvious question is:
Given that Hambleton, in particular, knew his potential intelligence value to the North Vietnamese, why didn’t he simply bite down on a cyanide capsule hung around his neck or shoot himself? Doing that, as Hambleton would have known all too well, would have certainly “saved lives.”
Case in point: Captain John Phillip Cromwell (1901-1943), U.S.N., R.I.P.
http://www.valoratsea.com/cromwell.htm
Now let’s try and talk about the hardest subject of all. What is torture? This is what the Bush era memos that were declassified were all about and while one may disagree about where they drew the line, you can’t assume that the line naturally exists or is self-evident to everybody.
What are we willing to accept as morally justifiable to prevent a given consequence? Let’s imagine a situation where you could recover a kidnapped child from a terrorist where he has been buried, with an hour’s worth of air, if they could get a suspect to speak. Now he might not be the right suspect, but you have reasonable circumstantial evidence to believe that he is.
Here are your choices:
1) gouge his eyes out;
2) waterboard him;
3) use drugs to induce him to speak;
4) force a bottle of whiskey down his throat;
5) beat him with a rubber hose
6) threaten to kill him.
Some might argue that it is morally acceptable, in these circumstances to ply him with whiskey. Or use drugs. Or waterboard him. After all, they’ll argue, he’ll recover. Then someone comes into the room and says, forget it, all of these are torture or illegal. There are three options at this point: challenge the existing rules, go ahead and waterboard him, swearing everyone to secrecy, or do nothing.
I think the moral thing to do as a society is to challenge the existing rules. I’d say, the current regimes are inadequate. We’re going to debate the rules which we think are acceptable to deal with terrorists and ticking time bomb problems and take responsibility for them. But its hard to rewrite the rulebook. The easy way out is to throw out the rulebook and swear everyone to secrecy — while pretending we’re adhering to it — or do nothing. The politicians are all going to pretend you can have it all. But in reality I don’t think you can.
there is nothing in the world as costly as losing(in war that is).the people that think otherwise have been rendered complacent by 60 years of safety.and if the others score ,they’ll be the first to reach for the big red mushroom head button.
Given that Hambleton, in particular, knew his potential intelligence value to the North Vietnamese, why didn’t he simply bite down on a cyanide capsule hung around his neck or shoot himself?
Maybe he would, if were absolutely cornered. But you can’t blame him for giving the old escape and evasion a try. He was entitled to that. But as in the case of Cromwell, the mere existence of the proverbial “cyanide capsule” is an admission that yes, torture does sometimes yield results. That’s why the “capsule” exists. For those who are unfamiliar with Captain Cromwell’s Medal of Honor, it was awarded when he chose to go down with his submarine rather than be rescued by the Japanese destroyer crew. The reason? He knew the secret of Purple, the US ability to read the Japanese code.
Now if you believe the Left, the Cromwell was an idiot. After all, everybody knows the Japanese couldn’t extract any information under torture. There are real moral dilemmas in this area. I’ve been tempted to call it an area of moral singularity. But to me the idea that ‘there is a false choice between safety and what you might do to ensure it’ is political snake oil. It’s a lie. There is a choice. The thing is to make the choices with the full knowledge of the price to be paid. I think Cromwell knew very well what price he was paying and if his Medal of Honor means anything, it can only achieve a meaning in the rejection of the Lie. Lots and lots of people through history have given their lives to resist divulging information under torture. Some of them were in the underground that I knew, for people to blithely say that they could never have revealed what they guarded at great cost because “torture never works” is to cheapen and degrade their great sacrifice.
I wish that I had known the definition of Torture in grade school. But that is too easy an answer, the inclusion of physical discomfort into the list as being torture is unfortunate but the idea that we may or may not stick bamboo under a captives fingernails is at least informative. I do not think that it is the policy of the US under this or any previous administration to approve aide abet or in any way condone the use of torture for tortures sake alone. And even at that the current definition of torture reaches the point of being nearly ridiculous.
If these guys were wearing uniforms when captured, or were in their own home countries when snagged or even if it could be shown that they were visiting a relative, I would hesitate to label them as criminal combatants. As no rules apply to such folks they ought to be treated just as criminals on the high seas, for they are indeed beyond national recognition much less the salvation of anything civilized.
Perhaps its always been this way, and I’ve only noticed its prevalence increasing (for reasons unknown to me) but “morality” has become the new weapon of choice. Its cheap, easy, and all you have to do to deploy it is open your mouth. Just denounce your opponents for their lack of it. Its the rhetorical equivalent of a tactical nuke if its amplified properly by the media.
The thing that perplexes me is that, like Nancy Pelosi, the people who are most prone to use such verbal WMD’s are the ones who would be most vulnerable to such assaults themselves. There does seem to be a bizarre inverse relationship here whereby the more one suffers from the lack of personal morality the more likely it is that you will accuse someone else of such a failing.
I know I’m mangling the lines but in that old 1976 movie The Bad News Bears the character played by Walter Matthau tells the young girl (Tatum O’Neal) that he can’t do what she wants him to do because of his scruples, to which she responds “I don’t know what scruples are, but if you got ‘em I bet its ’cause you stole them from somebody else.” A charming scene from the past that describes the political reality of the present.
Wretchard #`13
An Air Force officer friend of mine told me of the loss of a T-39 piloted by a friend of his in the 1960’s. The aircraft had been “meaconed” into Warsaw Pact airspace, intercepted by Migs, and was going to be forced to land at a Warsaw Pact airbase. On board was an officer with detailed information on the U.S. SIOP. He apparently told the pilot that he could not afford to be taken alive. The pilot pulled the wings off that T-39 rather than be captured.
And we are talking a T-39 Sabreliner. A business jet, commercially available. No secrets in the aircraft to protect.
In the case of BAT-21, the evader was a backseater in an EB-66. That meant he knew procedures and methods for electronic warfare and the methods the US was using to defeat the SA-2 Guideline missiles that also constituted the USSR’s main air defenses.
Let us not lose sight of the fact that our adversaries torture people for ideological reasons – or just for fun. Let us not equate us with them.
Also, there is the matter of the tactics used by our current enemy. In WWII, a formally declared war fought under Treaty of Westphalia rules, so to speak, the US captured a German sabotage team that came ashore in North Carolina and executed the men, including I believe, the one who revealed himself. Our current enemy refuses to play by the rules, and not just those of the Geneva Convention. We should make clear that given the types of tactics they employ we owe them nothing. They talk or get butchered like the animals they are. Right now they have nothing to lose; that must change.
With a hat tip to William of Ockham, torture exists because it can produce results. Not always, not always reliable, not with everyone. But the possibility of gaining any edge on the opposition when the stakes are at their highest is worth the endeavor. The final conclusion I suggest has been alluded to here but simply put: “If you think you can get it, try it- but I don’t want to know about it.” As reprehensible as we may believe it to be, I can say honestly if the life of a loved one was hanging on what a specific individual knew- God help him. The real loss here is the myth. The threat of ‘that which shall not be named’ may be enough to elicit information. Now that we are flogging it all in the international press the bad guys feel more secure. Does anyone remember when the CIA actually acted like the CIA?
Wretchard wrote:
That’s the wrong metric.
It’s easier to be a martyr oneself than to martyr one’s child, parent, sib or spouse — whichever one is most dear — for your principles.
The real test is: would you sacrifice the one you hold most dear for your principles?
I’ve often wondered how extensive the rendition program really was?
Maybe it is more effective kept as an “open secret” to let any captured jihadi know that it is possible to wind up with an extended stay at the Amman Hilton.
There’s one thing that always bothered me about the movie.
Jessep’s true crime was never discussed. They blamed him for the Code Red, blamed him for Santiago’s death, and ended it there.
Santiago’s death was an accident, and Jessep was guilty of little more than a violation of regs that resulted in the manslaughter of one of his troops. Fairly straightforward.
But, since he knew that such an event becoming public knowledge would ruin his career, he conspired to not only conceal the truth about his order, but to place two Marines under his command into a situation where they faced a murder trial that could have resulted in their execution.
Jessep’s true crime was not in ordering the Code Red; his true crime was in betraying the men under his command, displaying cowardice in the face of danger (and not even to his life, only to his career), and breaking faith with his brothers in the Corps.
That is the lesson that *should* have been taught by the ending of the movie.
“Now let’s try and talk about the hardest subject of all. What is torture?”
Is this the time to lay out the carpet of the “slippery slope” ethical construct? Are we going to espouse the categorical imperatives and have a dialogue with the author of the Sermon on the Mount.
He might say that his last day would suffice. That torture is rooted in maliciousness. It is mindless. It is claimed by evil to do evil and perpetuate evil.
It is not torture when it is done with a higher purpose such as the release and rescue of innocence. You may say that when a demon is driven out into the open and flung into the brain of a swine true intellectual extermination has occurred. Holding a “ticking bomb” secret in the mind of a misguided thoroughly brainwashed terrorist is a reason in itself to extract it. You may see it as a cure for the sick terrorist. “Forgive then for they know not what they do”- and drive out the demon into the light of truth.
There is no simple answer to W’s question about torture. But is is something that can be discussed. It is something that we can talk about. We do not have to pass over this in silence. I did not know of the story of the Sculpin and Captain Cromwell. I am stuck silent by it. It is beyond anything I would expect of a man. I should have known better. Thank you.
The problem with “truth commissions” and “special prosecutors” is their tendency to expand or go outside their writ.” For example:
When Janet Reno became Attorney General she dismissed about 100 federal prosecutors, some who were in the middle of case investigations. The MSM mentioned it briefly and moved on. The Bush administration got jumped for letting go a much smaller number. I think it only fair if the Bush administration gets investigated that the Clinton administration gets investigated.
“You don’t gouge out both eyes at once. You use your sharpened soup spoon to take out one eye. You wait for the shock to subside, the pain to set in, and the subject to get a good look at himself in a mirror. In their culture a one eyed man can be a man, a warrior, a blind man can’t.” Quote from some German who worked the Middle East.
wretchard: “Does Washington want to know the truth or would it be happier if it all just went away?”
Two things have happened this week:
1. Interrogation memos and Pelosi’s lies:
The 0bamanation at first wanted to open that can of worms, then later found out that there were other messy secrets that would be exposed that would drag down lots and lots of others – Pelosi, Reid? Who knows. One smarter than I would most likely know who and what. As long as the debate could be used to vilify the Bush admin it was all well and fine but when they discover there is backsplash —- OOPS! So, the Pelosi critter took her bullet for the team. She got out in front of the debacle that was shaping up. Then her fellow Congresscritters when faced with the request for an investigation into the whole thing act. And how do they act? They say that they do not want to open it up but will just move on – “…for the good of the country…”
2. Closing GITMO and The 0bamantions shifty intentions:
The Won comes out of the gate and says he wants to close GITMO within a year. Now, The 0bamantions are not stupid, malign maybe, but not stupid. They know that closing GITMO was at best a rhetorical ploy to curry political favor and votes from the Nutterroots of the far Left. So they offer it up. THEN they discover that it is a complex and really, really hard problem that will cost lots and lots of money (which we don’t have) and they now have to ‘ask’ the bought and paid for Lefty Congresscritters for the money to ‘study and implement’ closing GITMO. Congresscritters say, it a fit of rare, rare fiscal piety, ‘…well, we just cannot in good faith and judgment, in this fiscal climate authorize that money to close GITMO…’. OOPS! Sorry your esteemed Lightbringerness, we cannot do THAT! And The 0bamanation says to the Nutterroots of the far Left, ‘… well, I tried, I really, really did! But the obstructionist Rethuglicans, well, they just will not let us do what is right. They truly are evil!’ And the tonguewashers of The 0bamanation in the Lame Stream Media and the Nutterroots of the far Left can get a good two minute hate on the GoP, once again.
And America, one more time, you have been Hoped and Changed, Hoped and Changed! How was it for you?
[I know it sounds a little paranoid but the more I look at this stuff, they less it does. ]
Brian writes:
It’s easier to be a martyr oneself than to martyr one’s child, parent, sib or spouse — whichever one is most dear — for your principles.
The real test is: would you sacrifice the one you hold most dear for your principles?
I think you’re on to something, but I would go one step further–would you sacrifice the one you hold most dear for what you claim to be your principles if no one else would or ever could know that you did such a deed?
“Principles” are often nothing more than fashion statements. The shallow end of the moral spectrum obnoxiously flaunt them because its the cool and popular thing to do within the social sphere they inhabit, not because they really believe them.
And usually, the strident are clueless.
Now let’s try and talk about the hardest subject of all. What is torture?
Perhaps I am amoral, but I don’t really care what is or isn’t torture. I care about who is being tortured. If there’s little doubt that the prisoner is complicit in terrorism and may have useful information, I’m okay with pretty much any technique that is likely to extract accurate information (pure sadism though is out).
JMH:
I agree with you. It is torture when pain is inflicted only to satisfy some maniac’s desire to watch someone suffer. It is not when there is an attempt to extract crucial information (provided it is performed with necessary safeguards against permanent injury).
And this maybe slightly OT, but…..the ACLU stands for the AMERICAN Civil Liberties Union, right? Why the hell do they care so much about a bunch of Afghans, Pakistanis and Iranians taken on the battlefield?
It is very hard to believe that what we are allowed to see from the Cabal at the apex of the DNC is anything other than a carefully choreographed and scripted performance.
Otherwise, the handlers of O (for surely he has neither the experience or juevos to command) would be sufficiently foreskinned by Pelosi-as-Loose-Cannon as to arrange a swift retirement.
Anyone recall the Congressional elections immediately following the House Banking Scandal? (Remember Dan Rostenkowski?)
A surprising number of prominent DEMOCRATIC members of the House and Senate abruptly announced that they would not be seeking re-election.
It was hard to imagine those greedy, self-righteous miscreants abandoning the banquet without some severe admonitions from some source… like maybe a quiet visit from some highly-placed law enforcement official, pointing out that certain off-shore bank accounts had come to light, et cetera.
Or does someone else know why the supremely intelligent and unimpeachably ethical Patricia Schroeder left off serving in the House after seven easy elections, to take up insulting conservatives from her new plum job as head of the American Association of Publishers.
I give credit to the Dems for not exposing the methods early on through leaks. Apparently even they can be sensible on occasion.
That being said, we all know the amazing hypocrisy and lies that followed that short period of responsibility. I have no problem at all with Pelosi and others not objecting to it when briefed. I’m even happily surprised about it.
I hope that once Obama and the Dem congress are gone we can return to doing what is necessary. If we are lucky, we won’t take big hits before that happens. But then again, there may not be much of a free nation left worth fighting for after Obama.
Personal perspective: You have to live with yourself. What can you live with?
I think it best to select and train interrogators in ethics as thoroughly as possible, and then rely upon their judgment.
What do I consider torture? Is it INTENDED to create physical damage?
Also, what is the status of the person being interrogated. If I had been able lawfully to execute them on the spot, then the restraint I would place on my treatment of “it” would be what I could live with. I would know full well that the more I took actions some might construe as “torture”, the more I would warp my own soul, and the more easily I could live with such actions.
I hope that after enough of that descent, I would retain the sense of honor sufficient to account for my deeds in writing, and execute myself.
I think that I am the only commenter on this thread who has actually had the job of interrogating prisoners. If I am not, will the rest of you please speak up?
Our confusion seems to be that “torture” is
ass u me d to be a precise synonym for “coercion”.
Actually, while all torture is coercion, all coercion is not torture. This is no different from the fact that while all murder is homicide, all homicide is not murder. Also that while all aggression is intervention, all intervention is not aggression.
In my book: To qualify as torture, the procedures used have to be coercive in nature
AND either (a) provide a likelihood of death, permanent injury, disfigurement, etc or (b)
be done primarily for the emotional gratification of the torturer(s) or (c) both
(a) and (b).
Thus, torture can be seen to be likely to produce confessions and specific bits of information (such as a PIN number). However,
the larger body of information that can be
refined into useable intelligence is unlikely to be forthcoming in an intelligble, coherent and useable manner. Note that I said “unlikely”, not “impossible”.
Coercion that does not qualify as torture generally does produce the kind of information desired, provided sound judgement
is used as to when, where, upon whom and so forth and so on.
I fail to see what either The Company or The Boys have been doing wrong.
And I certainly second Wretch about rendition, especially as was practiced by some
Whorehopping Hillbilly whose name eludes me at the moment. Rendition is legit if and when
the receiving party is both a reliable ally
and better capable of extracting the necessary information. Other than that it gives me the distinct impression of being a yellow-bellied cop-out.
Hopefully, these comments will help to clarify matters. And again, any Dogfaced
96Cs and/or Jarheaded ITTs are urged to join in.
Back in the day there were debates in the underground about whether it was licit to target the children of the Marcos era officials. It would be be operationally useful to do so, but by common consent, people decided not to.
Re-reading this, and thinking over my own statement that I’m more concerned with who is being tortured, I think I’ll ammend my comment slightly to say that I’m concerned with who is suffering.
Take those Marcos era officials. Whatever responsibility they had for the wickedness perpetrated by the Marcos thugocracy, their kids were innocent. Targetting the kids would have been useful but immoral. Targetting their parents would have been useful and legitimate.
Wretchard and his friends made the right choice. Yes, they sacrificed something, but any struggle is one of sacrifices. You have to make wise choices about what to sacrifice and what you purchase by that sacrifice. All may be fair in love and war, but fair (or fare) is what you give the bus driver. The question is, where are you paying him to take you? Or, if you refuse to pay the fare thinking it too steep, where have you left yourself when the bus pulls away?
Peolosi? Looks like she just wants to ride the bus for free. I seem to recall Guilaini made turnstyle-jumpers one of his first targets when cleaning up the corruption in NYC. Perhaps there’s a lesson for us.
“Perhaps its always been this way, and I’ve only noticed its prevalence increasing (for reasons unknown to me) but “morality” has become the new weapon of choice. Its cheap, easy, and all you have to do to deploy it is open your mouth. Just denounce your opponents for their lack of it. Its the rhetorical equivalent of a tactical nuke if its amplified properly by the media.”
Tcobb, I too have taken note of their rhetorical strategy. As you observe, particularly apparent is the belief that assumed moral superiority assures the destruction of your opponent.
But it goes well beyond that.
Mr. Obama told graduating midshipmen on Friday that it is adherence to our values and principles that keeps us safe. So it is not only the fighting men and women, but anyone who adheres to our morals that is keeping us safe. By this line of thinking, what you call cheap and easy talk is really an act of national defense.
But it goes even beyond this.
Recall the post here about why the Tigers lost. It was because they ceded the “moral high ground”, yet another military/combat metaphor. So now you see, the people whose unimpeachable integrity and moral superiority that you impugn, these are the real warriors. And they stand therefore, their loins girt about with truth (as verified by the mainstream media), having on the breastplates of (self-) righteous (indignation), and their feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace (in our time).
You, tcobb, owe them an apology
Starling –
I too read the text of Obama’s speech to Annapolis. Two thoughts occurred to me: (1) ripe for fisking, and (2) Spencer Tracy.
In “Judgment at Nuremberg,” when Spencer Tracy’s Judge Haywood delivers his verdict, he makes this great speech about how a nation is “what it stands for … when standing for something is most difficult.” Here’s the relevant excerpt:
There are those in our own country too who today speak of the “protection of country” — of “survival.” A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then, it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient — to look the other way.
Well, the answer to that is “survival as what?” A country isn’t a rock. It’s not an extension of one’s self. It’s what it stands for. It’s what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult!
Before the people of the world, let it now be noted that here, in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice, truth, and the value of a single human being.
One of the men in the dock, Bert Lancaster’s character, the esteemed German jurist Emil Janning, had basically doomed his reputation, his principles and his humanity when he “first sentenced to death a man [he] knew to be innocent,” because Janning at the time (early 1930s) put national survival above justice. The tragedy was that it turned out the two were not separable. This lesson was at the core of Haywood’s speech.
You can hear echoes of Haywood’s speech in Obama’s passage about values (BTW, when did “values” become synonymous with “principles” – since I don’t see them as the same thing … “values” means literally what is valued by a person or people, and that can change over time and isn’t necessarily even a moral thing; whereas “principles” implies something tied to a fixed [even eternal] standard, an unchanging truth):
Yesterday I visited the National Archives and the hall that holds our Constitution, Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. I went there because as our nation debates how to deal with the security challenges that we face, we must remember this enduring truth: the values and ideals in those documents are not simply words written into aging parchment, they are the bedrock of our liberty and our security. We uphold our fundamental principles and values not just because we choose to, but because we swear to. Not because they feel good, but because they help keep us safe.
Because when America strays from our values, it not only undermines the rule of law, it alienates us from our allies, it energizes our adversaries and it endangers our national security and the lives of our troops. So as Americans, we reject the false choice between our security and our ideals. We can and we must and we will protect both. And that is just what you will pledge to do in a few moments when you raise your right hand and take your oath.
Except that I think there are important, even critical, points of difference between the two speeches. First of all, Haywood’s guilty verdict is rendered against the advice of the American politicos there on the scene in West Germany, who are worried about losing German support in the Cold War. Note that the story takes place in 1948 and the movie came out in 1962. In neither time frame was American victory in the Cold War assured. In other words, “national survival” is still a question mark, not a guarantee. So Haywood’s insistence upon holding fast to principles knowingly puts national survival on the line, because the “survival as what” (a degraded Horrorland — i.e., the object lesson of post-war Germany) alternative is unacceptable to him.
He knows he is risking. And he thinks the risk is one worth taking.
I think what Haywood says is consistent with what Wretchard has been saying. Yes, you can choose to stick to your principles, but realize that that choice might get you killed; so walk into that choice eyes open. It serves nobody’s interest (except moral preeners perhaps) to be duped or duplicitous about the risk involved in making that choice.
By contrast, Obama seems to be saying that sticking to our values and ideals is the very thing that keeps us safe. That safety and survival are guaranteed as long as we remain the good guys.
This is not realistic, IMO, and pretty much flies in the face of what Wretchard has been saying is the choice and the consequences thereof. That the President of the United States does not understand so critical and fundamental an issue as this is, ahhhhh, enormously disturbing to say the least.
For someone who came up through the Chicago political machine, he displays an astounding lack of hard-headedness on this and other vital matters.
RWE/26:
On board was an officer with detailed information on the U.S. SIOP. He apparently told the pilot that he could not afford to be taken alive. The pilot pulled the wings off that T-39 rather than be captured.
My uncle, for whom I was named, piloted a bomber out of Trieste in WWII, In a bombing run to take out refineries one night at the front of a formation, the flak was so heavy that he looped around to the rear for a second pass, because they couldn’t see the target. His bomber was hit. They did drop their load on target and his fellow officers got everyone off the plane buy chute. He stayed with the plane to destroy the targeting system, telling the co-pilot that he would be right behind him with his chute. The official War Dept records are fascinating to read – truly the fog of war. Some crew said that he had sustained injuries when they were hit. Others said they saw him on the ground, before he was captured and executed by SS in a farm field – bullet to the back of the head. He was 21 years old, the oldest of six children. In our family, he is one of the standards against which all our lives are measured. I’m sure there are thousands of similar stories across the generations. Why don’t we hear about the ones from the current crop of soldiers? Instead, the press obsesses on the negative. How many Americans know the names of Dunham, Monsoor, McGinnis, Smith, and Murphy – much less their stories.
Sure, our values are screwed in this country – but it isn’t about torture. Too many people live in a bubble world. That is about to deflate when the economic crisis can’t be stalled any longer and reality hits us all in the face.
I think that the existence and content of the “Torture Memos” are important.
They seem to have done a number of things: They provided an analysis of what was considered torture and its prohibition under “Int’l Law”; thus setting forth the line which should not be crossed.
They then defined what did not cross that line including as I understand it numerical limits in intensity, duration and repetition on the practices which could approach the line thus establishing a design margin against the accusation or application of torture.
This was done by responsible adults (as opposed to the feeble minded twits in congress) trying to accomplish a difficult intellectual and moral task in service to their country in a time of substantial threat.
Keeping those limits secret was key to the utility of the practices. If Achmed the Undead doesnt know the limits of the cold room or how much he would be kept awake or the number of times and the rest period between applications of the water, he is in fear that it could go on forever. He has no hope of relief except to begin to discuss what they want.
Now McCain and the rest knew that the North Vietnamese could theoretically kill them with impunity. The information they were asked for was some tactical and some strategic information but as I understand it more that was useful as propaganda, and their status as prisoners was used as propaganda. It also served to make it clear that the PRVN Govt didnt want them dead. So they had hope. Achmed doesnt have that because he is held by the Devil Hisself. Allah only knows what terrible pain is in the far future. That I think is the key to extracting information: the death of hope. If he knows the limits he can hope he can resist past the limits or in the worst case from our standpoint be trained to pass them.
Allowing the release of this information was a terrible decision that will cost the lives of a very large number of innocent human beings on both sides of this conflict. Obama and we will pay the price for it.
Then, it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient — to look the other way. …Because when America strays from our values, it not only undermines the rule of law, it alienates us from our allies, it energizes our adversaries and it endangers our national security and the lives of our troops. So as Americans, we reject the false choice between our security and our ideals. We can and we must and we will protect both. And that is just what you will pledge to do in a few moments when you raise your right hand and take your oath.
If one were prohibited from doing things simply on the grounds that the enemy used them then the armory should be emptied of guns, bombs and knives. The real test is which of the means available one chooses to use because they consistent with survival and own values. Sometimes a society chooses to compensate in one area to avoid transgressing in another. Thus, a technological society like the US develops precision weapons to prevent collateral damage. By being overwhelmingly strong in one area, it can concede in another, yet still maintain survival.
Now Obama may believe that by prohibiting coercive interrogation he will gain diplomatic strengths which will make up for any advantages conceded to the enemy by self-restriction. But that argument itself is an admission that that tradeoff is in progress. His own inner logic refutes the assertion of a “false choice”. He winds up arguing against his own free lunch assertion, albeit in a hidden way, in his own Annapolis speech.
But there is one more thing. It is not entirely true that it is “ideals that make us safe”. Ideals and safety are related concepts. In order for ideals — for the Constitution itself — to survive they must first of all be preserved. Victory makes magnanimity possible. No one can be generous in defeat. No one can deliver a ringing address at Annapolis in an occupied country. The character of Spencer Tracy could deliver a speech at Nuremberg because he was trying the Nazis and not the other way around. Survival and victory are the preconditions for preserving ideals. It is the Naval graduates that make Obama possible, not the reverse.
A commander in chief endeavors to preserve ideals within the feasible space of survival. Obama might in fact be right in believing that political gains from his gestures may outweigh any advantages that might be obtained from self-restraint. But that’s an empirical judgment, one to be based on facts, not an immutable assertion from Olympus.
Finally, some Christians may believe that some acts are so heinous that not even survival can justify their commission. Personally, I think anyone is entitled to act in this way, but he or she must be conscious of the fact. Even in first century Rome, no one ushered the martyrs into the Coliseum saying that there was false choice between the lions and faith. That were too mean a joke to play.
Interesting, all this talk of values, morality, and principles in a time when our society, and the Left especially, has little or none of the above. Group think pervades all our discussions.
The comment about sacrificing our loved ones for our own “principles” was particulary interesting. Each of us is (or should be) the sole owner of our own body and mind, but how can we “in principle” decide to sacrifice another? If our country’s survival rests on our adhering to its founding principles, then it is on very shaky ground indeed, since so few of us can even state those principles with any accuracy.
And part of that problem is that even the Founders didn’t clearly and fully state those principles which should form the contractual basis for free individuals to live in a mutually-advantageous society. The Declaration and the Constitution came close, and are two of man’s greatest achievements, but in today’s America they are close to being meaningless pieces of paper due to the general lack of understanding of what they mean. And in any event they only apply to citizens of the United States, not to terrorists or citizens of other countries.
As a matter of principle, we should treat others as they deserve, not just according to a set of one-size-fits-all rules. So when someone indiscriminately kills the innocent to achieve his goals by terror, we are under no obligation to deal with this person by rules or standards suitable for another situation. Each individual case will be different and will require different measures. Torture may be required to gather information that may save lives but will not be justified for any other reason.
If we reject “torture” on “general principles” or on “moral grounds”, what exactly are these principles and moral grounds?
Nothing to good for our friends.
Nothing to bad for our enemies.
and they both need to know it…
Pelosi is guilty of a war crime…ship her to the Hague and have her stand trial.
If I KNOW that there are persons intent upon killing everyone I hold dear and destroying everything I know to be good and right I will use any means necessary to thwart them. Any means. I am willing to face God and account for my actions. But I would be terrified to face Him knowing I had acted as a coward and allowed babes, women, relatives, friends and decent ordinary people to die or live in chains without doing EVERYTHING in my power to prevent it.
But if it is only me at stake then I may well choose to not engage in certain actions for the sake of my soul. In a one-on-one situation I hope I would use whatever force was necessary to persuade the other to desist and stand down when he stopped.
Is this inconsistent? You bet. So what? A man who would allow evil lunatics to plot and kill and torture and destroy those he professes to love and value above all else is no man at all.
Now Obama may believe that by prohibiting coercive interrogation he will gain diplomatic strengths which will make up for any advantages conceded to the enemy by self-restriction.
Yup, this may well be part of the calculus. Unfortunately it smacks of naivete, vanity, or both.
With whom would he be wanting to gain those diplomatic advantages by putting on the good guy white hat (via proscription of coercive interrogation)? I don’t think the Anglosphere needs convincing that we are the good guys. I don’t think the Poles or the Czechs need convincing either. The Russians laugh in their vodka at all this anyway as just so much stupid American kabuki. The Chinese don’t give a damn what we are doing in Gitmo, and the Indians are too busy (understandably so) watching the Pakis. Finally, the jihadis who want to slit our throats won’t suddenly change their opinion of our character based upon whether we play dirty or nice; the only thing that might conceivably change is their tactics … not their overall goals.
In other words, every foreign state with an appreciable stake in the WOT already has an established POV of the United States that is not going to be improved by any policy change re: detainees. There is, alas, only room for diminution of how these countries assess us. So just whom is Obama trying to impress? Ghanaians? The wonderful people of Fiji? Penguins in the Antarctic?
If he (and we) were really honest, we would admit what’s really driving all this navel-gazing is not what others think of us, but what *we think* they think of us. Which is all … so junior high.
Really. It is much easier when you just don’t care what others think, and instead plow forward with doing what you gotta do. I’ll give the Chicoms credit for that sliver of an example of mental health.
His own inner logic refutes the assertion of a “false choice”. He winds up arguing against his own free lunch assertion, albeit in a hidden way, in his own Annapolis speech.
There are, I think, quite a lot of things in this speech that cut two ways, the “underbelly” meanings being not ones that he either intends or would be pleased with.
Wretchard #46:
Thus far the lofty rhetoric against torture and closing Gitmo has got us somewhere between nothing and zippity do dah. Al Queda has not announced., “Well, geee, we misunderstood. Sorry about that 911 thing. Let bygones be bygones.”
And the so-concerned Yerps have not rushed to take these poor unfortunates off our hands and gather them onto their bosums to bind up their wounds and comfort their fevered brows. In fact they bascially told us to get lost.
Even Nancy Pelosi has not eagerly embraced the idea that Alcatraz be reopened so that her constituants can ensure that the wretched masses of Gitmo yearning to breath free can be treated with the proper respect.
So, logically, now we should try an opposite tack and tell the Yerps and Marion County that we will expand Gitmo and accept anyone they need to dispose of – if they will just shaddup about the place.
I stand with #50 SCORRY. Except-I don’t believe his contrast of situations is inconsistent at all.
BTW I was in a Reserve Intel Interrogation Unit, so I got the training, such as it was.
hey
i think an important point has been overlooked. post 9/11 all Dems and especially the clintonistas were considered wimps and pussy-galores. remember all the clap trap post 9/11 dealing with the general relief”that this didn’t happen during clinton or gore”. like most people knew the dems couldn’t stand the ”point” and the yea the cowboy had the huevos to make terrorists piss their long dirty white shirts.
urban folklore, maybe…be Dems are still not trusted in security issues. and yes. mcpain let that golden egg (dems weak on terror) fall to the ground under ”nice guys” finish last logic. go figure.
in the early days of iraq, the spanish posted in south east iraq-kirballah-najaif-basra were handed a dogs dinner, with bad guys backed by iranian rev. guard coming out the yin yang. the spaniards rigged up this little ”show and tell” where bad guys once captured were bounced around and softened for a day or two and then dragged into a room with an ”imam” type arab sitting at a big desk and saudi flag draped as a backdrop. the imam would inform the shit stain that he was now in saudi arabia and would be brought to justice and made to talk.
well seems the IRAQI BAD GUYS KNEW THE MEANING OF THAT ”CODED MESSAGE” AND WOULD PISS THEMSELVES ALL COLORS OF THE RAINBOW…AND GUESS WHAT…SING, AND SING, AND SING. IN ONE CASE, THEY TURNED ON A SAUDI PRINCE…SUPPORTING THE BAATHI REGIME GONE UNDERGROUND.
go figure….torture never yields importnat info…yaaaa, right.
#25 TCobb: You’ve got the thrust of the quote right; I forget the precise words as well. Something like: “No, I don’t know what scruples are, but if you got ‘em, it’s a sure bet they belonged to somebody else.”
It was Tatum O’Neil, and she was speaking to her real life father Ryan O’Neil, who was playing the part of the con man Moses Pray, in the 1973 movie “Paper Moon.” This was Tatum’s first movie, for which she won an Oscar.
#55-Well, the Spanish approach doesn’t much seem like torture, but, of course, the ACLU might see it differently
LOTM #54: I was an AI at Bragg running the latest class through when I was assigned the role of Greek cypriot gunrunner in a Practical Excercise. When asked if I could read a land navigation map, I got off my favorite line: “No. American maps are all English to me.”
Then on the one where I was the Primary Instructor, the scenario was counter-insurgency in Malaysia. Mixed in with the costumed “Malays” was an English planter cooperating (reluctantly) with the communists. This guy could do a pretty good Bristish accent and he properly attired himself in suit and tie. He noticed that as a result, the students were not following proper frisking procedures. So he started asking for permission to remove his outer jacket (“Veddy warm here, don’t ye knew.”)
thereby revealing my Walther PPK in a shoulder holster. They got the point.
Staged tricks such as these and interrogating
American soldiers on Escape and Evasion excercises (where they were not really afraid of the interrogator) helped sharpen mental skills and minimized the need for more coercive methods.
Had your unit been called up, I rather imagine you would have surprised yourself with how well you had done.
It doesn’t make me sick at all. If you are kind to the cruel, you will be cruel to the kind.
All I have to do is think of Nick Berg, Danny Pearl and the hundreds who jumped from the WTC rather than being burned alive.
Thanks to the media, America was spared the horror of seeing our fellow citizens die horrible deaths. Maybe if we had the truth on 9-12-01, we wouldn’t be in the predicament we are today.
Great thread.
What is lost in the torture “debate” in Washington (as opposed to the serious debate taking place here at the BC) is the power of strategic ambiguity.
Let’s consider the question “Should there be a line, beyond which we will not go in interrogating a prisoner?” Ignore, for the moment, what that line would be. Should we draw any line?
The arguments against drawing a line are:
1. Limits are context-dependent. I would say that the line for a PIN number would generally be “lower” than the line for the codes to disable a thermonuclear device in Midtown Manhattan. Then again, you could imagine a (far-fetched) situation where getting a PIN number is critical, as it would allow you to get the cash you need to bribe a guard to allow you access to a safe where the H-bomb codes resided. (Like I said, far-fetched.) The point is that a preset limit does not take into account extenuating circumstances.
2. Commitment is required. A line is meaningless unless we truly commit beforehand to observe it. Without such a commitment, you might as well have no line.
3. There is a chance that the line will be misunderstood. For instance, you may set the line by saying “We will never torture.” But what is torture? Lots of room for misinterpretation or misunderstanding.
4. A line proscribes the use of judgment by actors on the ground. You take away the discretion of the individual who is faced with the situation. Additionally, their judgment may be better than those who set the line.
5. A line allows our enemies to adjust their behavior, thus undermining the effectiveness of our interrogators.
However, there’s another side:
1. Without rules, human beings under pressure will often go further than they should. Think of the Milgrom experiments: when pressured by an authority figure, about 2/3rds of test subjects were willing to administer a lethal dose of electricity to a stranger simply because they did not answer a set of arbitrary questions correctly. Rules, aka laws, do play an important role in containing our base instincts when confronted with a challenge.
2. Rules protect the actors. It is very easy to Monday-morning quarterback any situation (cf. last 8 years of left-wing criticism of Iraq). Rules provide protocols which act as “safe harbors” for those who have the difficult job of performing an interrogation.
3. Rules provide a mechanism for retaining the learning of previous generations. By setting a rule, and measuring success and failure, we can make adjustments to the rule that provide the benefit of informing future actors of the learning that took place (particularly of previous failures).
But the other part of this analysis is the question of whether to make public what we do. It could be argued that the best situation is one in which we have very clear, internal, confidential rules. We get the most of the benefit of rules, without some of the downsides.
Central to this is the notion of strategic ambiguity. Because the other side does not know what we will or will not do, we get the benefits of apparent discretion, combined with the benefits of clear rules.
The disclosure of our internal thinking through the publication of the “torture memos” and other pronouncements from the Obama Administration has eliminated this option, however. Thus we are only left with inferior choices.
But, don’t worry. The country’s in the best of hands.™
L3
L3:
Bad (inferior) choices are like sin. The result of sin is death. But what is it when all of your choices are bad?
Very interesting debate.
First, I completely disagree with making any military operating rules public. That is a gift to the enemy that should never be given. The enemy should always feel that you are willing to do anything to win. That keeps them in check.
Second, no one other than those completely familiar with the situation and with the proper experience should have the right to judge those actions. That is why we have court marshals. They are intended to allow officers familiar with the operating conditions to judge whether any of our men and women acted wrongly. Civilian courts and juries are simply not qualified.
Those who have not been in combat do not understand what it means.
“Survive as what?”
It is true that survival alone is not the point, but rather surviving as the people and nation that we want to be. For example, by ceding the country to Islamic fundamentalist and doing what they want, we will be allowed to live to a ripe old age. All we have to do is pay the Jizya and obey. But, that is not the survival we seek. We seek the survival of our culture and way of life.
However, we are talking about war conduct. War is a completely different world than daily life. Those who have been in battle know what I am talking about. What is acceptable on the battle field is completely different than what is expected and acceptable in suburban America.
The big debate about principles and moral standards comes down to this. Are we willing to ignore some principles for a moment so we can maintain them for a life time and pass them on to our children? Or, are we to stick to then in situation where they do not apply and loose them forever?
A good and simple example is the commandment “Thou shall not kill”. Some people take that to mean that all killing is wrong including war. But, we all know that it is necessary to kill in war to protect what we hold dear and to insure that the commandment remains in effect the rest of the time. Should we command that soldiers should not to kill?
We are not talking about how to behave with our neighbors. We are talking about how to fight a war. Sure there are twisted minds who enjoy the killing and mayhem. But, most people I know who have fought in wars never enjoyed the killing. They did it because it is necessary to defend the “principles” everyone talks about.
Those people are the nicest most moral people in daily life. They are kind, generous, helpful and respectful to name a few traits. Their generosity extends to their willingness to sacrifice their own life for others. As Jesus said in the last supper, “there is no greater love, than that of one man (or woman) laying his life for another.”
Yet, when in battle these guys stop at nothing to defeat the enemy. Most civilians will consider their acts “barbaric”. Why? They believe in what they are defending. They believe in the “principles” and “moral standards” everyone is talking about.
Everyone applies torture, especially according to the extremely stretched definition here. “A bottle Whiskey!!!” I never realized how many torturers I knew.
Unfortunately those armchair warriors who wish to apply elementary school rules to warfare, are destroying the military’s ability to fight and preserve their “principles”
With that said, this whole point is moot when it comes to Gitmo. These guys we have there have nothing to tell us any more. If they knew anything 7 years ago, it has long since become obsolete. Talk about beating a dead horse.
Gitmo presents a dilemma beyond anyone’s expectation. Ignore terminology of the people there for a moment. Even if we apply the Geneva convention rules, what are we to do. War prisoners are allowed to be held through the duration of the war, since releasing them would put them back on the front line and cause more death than needed. But, they are supposed to be released when the war ends.
The question here is: When does this war end? Given that this is a global confrontation with “Political Islam”, when will we release these people? They may be with us until they die of old age. They are of no use to us. But, releasing them means we will have to fight them again.
Some want to put them on trial. For what? It has repeated in this post, that since these people were not on their home turf and not wearing “uniforms” (meaning what we consider uniforms), they cannot be considered soldiers, but rather criminals. This is a very dangerous proposition. Our soldiers are not on their home turf either and their uniforms differ from the other side. I do not consider our soldiers criminals. We must be very careful with the rules we lay out there. They may come back to bite us some day.
As I have said before. This is a war. The others, however despicable their actions may be, are soldiers in their own army fighting to defeat us. Their nation is Islam “Al Umma”. They do not believe in any worldly country, least of all ours. These guys took orders like our soldiers do.
This is not a police hunt for a bunch of “criminals” to be put on trial.
This is a war to be won by military means.
Cadmus
I think that most of the purpose behind the Democrats’ and the Left’s fixation on torture, coercion, rendition, and Gitmo is… lawfare. This is how the radicals act in order to help their allies, the jihadis, cause chaos, confusion, and destabilization of our civilization and our country. It is political expediency. Nothing more. And they know it is. The only ones who seem impervious to this insight are the useful idiots who really do believe that human lives are worth less than the preservation of their moral rectitude.
T Cobb at #34 gets it. So does Cadmus @62
The American and international collectivists/statists don’t have muscle inside of the United States in the form of weapons and logistics to actually win a revolutionary struggle against us, the capitalist pig dogs. So, they use what weapons they do have: the legal profession and the various Marxist groups in the legal profession. Lawfare.
Wrethard, good discussion of the problems of using coerced testimony, and the moral problem of when it is justified. I would add the hollywood analogy of Jabba the Hutt in “Star Wars” – when Luke tried to use mind control Jabba laughed “..your Jedi mind tricks will not work on me, only on weak minded fools…” The non-lethal, non-chemical and unpolytested mind tricks we used would only work on weak minded, paranoid and lunatic thugs, which unfortunatly describes the three thugs involved. Our people had none of the “good” choices the self righteous are preaching, they had only bad choices, and chose the least bad.
what to do? what to do?
I have a simple old fashioned ide for the gitmo guests; how about we apply the geneva convention standards, and summarily execute them.
Whiskey, why do you believe that a CIA who deliberately undermined Bush would help Cheney trash Obama? Heck, the intel they keep leaking to the New York Times has probably gotten more than one of their own operatives killed. A CIA that dedicated to the Democrat cause won’t care about a little public dustup with Pelosi.
Does the use of a tazer constitute torture or is it legitimate enhanced behavioral control? Lasting damage? Discomfort?
Crazy stuff we’ve been playing with so LEO’s can be all charged up. That is about the level of argument regarding water boarding. As for conduct, the object is to get some one to behave, either to answer a question against his will or stop resisting arrest it is a behavioral modification we’re after. Of course the meth has usually not worn off by the time an officer applies the tazer.
As a devil’s advocate position, one reason the ACLU would be concerned about the fate of prisoners in Gitmo is that loosening the bounds that constrain the power of the state for others does suggest that loosening the bounds that constrain the state against its own citizens is a possibility down the road. Just as most of us commenters will agree with prosecution of warfare against terrorists over there, lest they come here, the ACLU may see themselves as prosecuting lawfare for those over there, before it comes here.
When you trust the government in power, it’s easy to cede them powers that they need to get a certain job done, however distasteful or otherwise disturbing they may be. But it’s not an argument to be dismissed out of hand that giving the government power is something that should be considered in light of the fact that we have an election every four years, and you may not trust the people in government after the next election. You may find yourself on the other side of an ideological fence from them, and they turn tools intended for use on others upon you for their own political goals.
Just as one example, as a gun owner, a veteran or someone who believes that abortion kills children you are a potential terrorist according to the DHS. Attend a political rally like a Tea Party with someone who goes on to commit a crime you would never condone, and suddenly you are part of a conspiracy against the government of the United States. Whether you are guilty or not, you are now subject to electronic scrutiny (something the Obama administration agrees with fully), and while charges like that may be ridiculuous on the face they are also prohibitively expensive to defend. You’d think the career professionals at the DOJ would not engage in prosecutorial misconduct, but then again, so did the former Senator from Alaska. This of course assumes that you aren’t simply put in a dark hole and for national security reasons, not allowed to obtain counsel or even notify anyone of your whereabouts.
I don’t fully agree with the ACLU in their spirited defense of those who would, given their druthers, kill as many of us as they could. But the issues they raise are not insignificant.
Darren,
You can look this up if you doubt the veracity of it. The ACLU was founded as a Communist front group and, to my best understanding, has not eschewed its path of “progressive” politics. There. I got that out of the way.
The counterargument you presented should be taken seriously, even if you and I know that there are huge differences between conservatives like us and jihadi killers. Unfortunately, now the Communists are in power and they may just be tempted to use the ideas that Billy Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Mark Rudd discussed during one of their meetings: after the revolution, set up “re education” camps for up to 25 million Americans, and even execute those who obstinately refuse to become good comrades down with the revolution.
I am well aware that now the Communists are in position to use the national security apparatuses against their political opponents. People like you and I are targets, if they do indeed pursue that path.
Fred, I would much rather trust Judical Watch with the job of watchdog than the ACLU. Whether or not they were a communist front, they are a progressive organ plain and simple, and lawfare is real. At least Judicial Watch holds everyone’s feet to the fire.
I guess I am getting in late into this discussion.
An earlier comment listed a #1) torture memo controversy, and a #2) Gitmo controversy.
The whole Gitmo thing is all politics and rope-a-dope, and so on. Yeah, yeah, Bush was eeeevill for Gitmo and my first act as President will be to close the place. Ooops, wouldn-cha-know-it, there are some real bad actors in Gitmo, and oh gosh darn, a lot of members of Congress don’t want those folks, even in supermax prisons, in their own districts, and so on an so forth. All politics, one could have seen it on Day One of the First 100 Days, but politics none the less.
The torture memo controversy, on the other hand, has really called into question whether Mr. Obama knows what he is doing. Everyone projects what they think should be on to Mr. Obama. He is speaking the talking points of the Left, yes, but he is talking that language to get elected, but he is intellectually gifted and once in office do the right thing. He is conceding some point to the Right, yes, but he is talking that language to get elected, but, did I tell you he is intellectually gifted — as President he will do what needs to be done.
So Mr. Obama wanted to open that can of worms of torture under the Bush Administration. Let’s set aside the wisdom of setting out to “get” the preceding government on criminal charges and how long a Republic will last and will have peaceful transitions between political parties. Let’s set aside the problem of the message it sends to our sworn enemies.
Let’s just sit down and think about it. So the Bush Adminstration approved “torture.” Who then carried out this “torture.” Could it be the CIA? Is the CIA run out of the West Wing or is it a Federal Agency with a half-century long tradition of independence?
So suppose the Bush Adminstration set out to have the CIA interrogate terrorists roughly. Now remember what Congress did to the CIA in the 1970′s — Church Hearings and all of that. Do you suppose that the CIA would have learned a lesson here? That they would brief members of Congress to the level of detail that would implicate those members of Congress as accessories to whatever action they were going to take.
So if you start turning over rocks to look into what the Bush Administration knew, would you suppose those same rocks would reveal what ranking Democrats in Congress knew? Democrats who are now the Leadership after 2006?
I suppose every President has his big “whoops” moment, and Kennedy had his Bay of Pigs, and this is no Bay of Pigs. On the other hand, President Kennedy was an intellectual lightweight who had Ted Sorenson or some family retainer do his Harvard assignments, but this President is, did I say, intellectually gifted.
So what was Mr. Obama thinking when he lifted the lid on the worm can?
You see, the whole point of the Obama Presidency is that it doesn’t matter what stand the President takes on an issue, the President is smart and a quick study and will do the correct thing required by circumstances.
But what if he isn’t as smart as he looks. You see it is not about torture or about investigations or Truth Commissions. It is about if the current President cannot react to circumstances based on his being intelligent, it doesn’t seem that he has an iron-clad set of core beliefs that we hope he falls back upon, and if this incident is a window into his level of smarts, we are totally hosed.
Bogie Wheel wrote:
>>By contrast, Obama seems to be saying that sticking to our values and ideals is the very thing that keeps us safe. That safety and survival are guaranteed as long as we remain the good guys.
This is not realistic, IMO, and pretty much flies in the face of what Wretchard has been saying is the choice and the consequences thereof. That the President of the United States does not understand so critical and fundamental an issue as this is, ahhhhh, enormously disturbing to say the least.
For someone who came up through the Chicago political machine, he displays an astounding lack of hard-headedness on this and other vital matters.<>The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions<<
A comment and attribution was left out of my post which begins with the second sentence of the last par. All preceding was by Bogie Wheel