As readers of this site know, I’ve long argued that one of the historical reasons that the US attempted to take custody of terrorism suspects after 9/11 was to avoid having to rely on bad intelligence provided by foreign intelligence agencies using unbridled methods of interrogation. I’ve maintained that the political push to bring terror suspects into the criminal system and/or close down prisons like Guantanamo Bay would mean a reversion to reliance on rendition; and while that provided the appearance of humanitarianism, in practice it was neither humane nor intelligent. It moved the interrogation process offshore, beyond the legal responsibility of the United States. But that merely moved things behind the curtain and once again returned poor intelligence without any gain in moral stature. In the absence of the political will to take responsibility for either challenging the existing protocols on coercive interrogation in order to keep up appearances or simply accepting the risks that might attend a self-restriction on interrogation techniques, policymakers have resorted to subterfuge to try and have it both ways. They’ve employed weasel phrases like “a false choice” to imply that there were no tradeoffs, no hard decisions that had to be made; or they have simply redescribed former practices with other words to produce the desired cosmetic and technically legal result. But the dilemma remains the same: to keep their jobs the politicians have know they must prevent another mass terror attack on American soil, but to keep their jobs they decided to lie about how they had to do it. Nancy Pelosi was perhaps the most egregious example, but she was by no means alone.
Today the Washington Post describes what anyone should have known from the start: the holier-than-though routine was a shell game. Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School, writes about how things have simply been shifted around:
The revelation last weekend that the United States is increasingly using foreign intelligence services to capture, interrogate and detain terrorist suspects points up an uncomfortable truth about the war against Islamist terrorists. Demands to raise legal standards for terrorist suspects in one arena often lead to compensating tactics in another arena that leave suspects (and, sometimes, innocent civilians) worse off. …
The U.S. rendition program — which involves capturing suspected terrorists and whisking them to another country, outside judicial process — began in the 1990s. The government was under pressure to take terrorists off the streets and learn what they knew. But it could not bring them to the United States because U.S. law made it too hard to effectively interrogate and incapacitate them here. So instead it shipped them to Egypt and other places to achieve the same end. …
A little-noticed consequence of elevating standards at Guantanamo is that the government has sent very few terrorist suspects there in recent years. Instead, it holds more terrorists — without charge or trial, without habeas rights, and with less public scrutiny — at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Or it renders them to countries where interrogation and incarceration standards are often even lower.
That is not the half of it. As I’ve argued in the past, bad intelligence leads to further abuse. It fingers the wrong people; it leaves gaps in our true knowledge of enemy intentions. By reverting to a reliance on rendition the current administration has done the worst of all possible things, consign detainees to unlimited brutality in order to falsely represent themselves as the paragons of moral uprightness, for the worst of all possible ends: to get bad intelligence bought at the pain of hidden suffering. Goldsmith concludes:
The government, however, sees the terrorist threat every day and is under enormous pressure to keep the country safe. When one of its approaches to terrorist incapacitation becomes too costly legally or politically, it shifts to others that raise fewer legal and political problems. This doesn’t increase our safety or help the terrorists. But it does make us feel better about ourselves.
It is on this last point that I disagree with the professor. It only makes some people feel better about themselves.
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All true but it does let The Left practice their highest and most moral virtue … hypocrisy.
But there was money to be spent, a presidential campaign to win, and other high stakes in the vast Byzantine machinations that is 21st century American politics. None dare call it treason.
I watched an interesting show on PBS the other day about John Ford, the director. It was about his time in WWII as a photography director for the OSS. The documentaries and such that he made were shown in part, interspersed with analysis and talking heads in the movie industry that knew Ford or had critiqued his work. Among them was Oliver Stone. He is as unrepentant an anti-American as you can find, and he harshly criticized John Ford and the photography he directed and produced in WWII as “propaganda”. And in a way, it was propaganda. Serving a cause to defeat a monstrous set of tyrannies.
But Oliver Stone is too pure for that. And he’s proud of it, and says so every chance he has in public, in various ways. He certainly represents a very tangible wing of the wealthy Hollywood elite that supported Obama. And on and on.
Everyone that touches this issue is bound to be stained by it, no matter how they try to do “what is right”, because those who lead this country culturally (such as Stone and people like him), academically and politically (at this time), want some other outcome than is visible to we silly plebes. That outcome is legion among the many speculations among those who post at the Belmont Club; I still don’t know what they really want.
But the interrogator in the field, whether part of the uniformend military or the CIA, is at criminal jeopardy for trying to do his job. And that’s the way they want it.
When you can make everyone a criminal for the most banal and inverted reasons, you can hold them in thrall to their unearned guilt. And that is an ugly indictment of those who are leading our country.
I deeply rue the fact that the Right doesn’t seem to have prepared any ready arguments to counter the Left’s endless dogmatic attacks on policy. For example, the ludicrous claim that engaging in enhanced interrogations equates to America losing her moral bearings, and rendering herself no better than the Muslim filth we’re fighting.
We firebombed Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo, and Osaka in WWII. We neither lost our soul, nor did we debate ourselves to the level of Nazis or Jap fascists in shattering them. Hell, we nuked Hiroshima, Nagasaki and still remained a decent nation of generous law abiding free people who turned right back around and reached out to our now decimated former foes and made them friends.
The slanders of the Left reveal that they have convicted America a priori of those same terrible crimes they claim to wish to save us from committing. we cannot win their hearts and minds — they, much like our Muslim foes, will not stop until we are utterly subverted and destroyed. Their moral posteuring is hollow, meaningless, but extremely malignant and mortally dangerous.
Every effort must be made to develop material hit them back, (and HARD) as soon as they spew their predictable repstitivs sewage. The Left must be frozen, mocoed, marginalized, and made irrelevant. Use their vile community organising stalinist tactics against them to destroy them. Why isn’t this being done?
“…in order to falsely represent themselves as the paragons of moral uprightness, …”
The MO of the Leftist Fascists that are running the show these days.
E. Nigma @ 3: “When you can make everyone a criminal for the most banal and inverted reasons, you can hold them in thrall to their unearned guilt.”
Or you can refuse to play their game. Here is the name of the new game. Call them out on it. When they react as you know they will with full violence then we can fight back properly.
Perhaps it is the Puritan inheritance of the United States, but there is strong tendency in American political culture to desire to appear holier than thou, particularly when the costs are borne by others.
Being moral is a personal matter. In contrast, appearing moral is a measure of status. Appearing more moral than one’s neighbors can be a primal scream of tribalism where the real point isn’t to actually effect an improvement in the lives of other people but rather to assert one’s moral superiority over others. One of the reasons why America’s “culture wars” get so virulent is because of a visceral fear of being perceived as morally inferior.
Such “morality” is rather like a government program with a budget for a couple of salaries but nothing else; the real point is to give salaries to friends. Of course it’s corruption; that’s the point.
Is it better to appear evil while doing good or appear good while doing evil? It may appear that propriety is more important than an appearance of propriety, but in actual fact there are a lot of people in the world who will be deceived by outward appearances. I think some people just won’t feel “normal” unless the United States upholds a Wilsonian standard of hypocrisy; if we don’t assert our moral superiority in the most self-defeating manner possible, it is assumed there must be something wrong with America.
Perhaps the reason for the existence of lower castes is to bear the consequences of the vanities of the higher castes. It isn’t right. It isn’t fair. And it’s no different from blaming a prostitute for the moral failings of her clients. Isn’t that what Wilsonian idealism is all about?
“Is it better to appear evil while doing good or appear good while doing evil?”
My point dear Alexis is that world is now about gone. Did you miss the announcement? Who cares about “morality” when being alive is more important? When the Leftists call us out as un-moral, prove it to them. Soon the world of being able to sit around and engage in talk-talk as therapy will be gone. The hypocrites will be dead. The living will be the moral ones.
Let’s remember that the studied and practiced moral inversion of the Left is aiming the world toward catastrophe.
Their absurdist posturing and contrarian revelation of methods, policies, and mistakes that should be hidden, materially assists the fanatics preparing themselves for attacks against the U.S., and mires US diplomatic efforts to foster essential cooperation.
Their steady corruption of the financial system wounds our economy as surely as a burrowing worm in the brain of a wildebeest on the Serengeti.
Their criminalization of Republican administration policies which they enthusiastically employed and endorsed without criticism when Democrats were in the White House have had the effect of lobotomizing the country like a first year biology student pithing a frog for a lab experiment.
We are mired in a generations-long spasm of cognitive dissonance on a cosmic scale. Some have broken through and are murmuring, “The emperor has no clothes.”
Others are so afraid of being exposed in their idiocy that they’re ready to murder the ones who speak the truth.
“It is on this last point that I disagree with the professor. It only makes some people feel better about themselves.” –Wretchard
Obama has reserved the right to torture people. It’s hushed-up by his MSM cronies. He will use proxies and/or “rendition” to torture people. But, it will make Him Feel Better.
Obama is just bringing back Bill Clinton’s tactics. I did you ever see headlines saying “Bill Clinton tortures Muslims” No.
And, it will be the same with Obama.
USA Today has a long article about the impossible amount of debt that past and current policies have piled up. Deficit spending, unsustainable entitlements — the numbers are simply undeniable.
It’s inexorable arithmetic. But guess what: it will be disregarded. That’s just like being in an airline cockpit watching the altimeter unwind while the pilots keep chatting, oblivious to everything, making big plans about tomorrow. You can point out the spinning horizon, the dropping readings on the gauges, but nothing seems to matter to the pilots and half the passengers. Their attitude is that nothing bad can happen. What is really alarming about current politics is that facts don’t matter. They count for less than nothing. What counts are sound bites, snarky replies, talking points, big speeches, spin. It’s a world addicted to fantasy. But how long can it continue? For as long as it can.
Personally I don’t think there’s even the remotest possibility of an awakening. Not until the big thud. And when it comes there will be an unaccountable astonishment, even a hurt resentment.
“What is really alarming about current politics is that facts don’t matter. They count for less than nothing.”
This is the essence of postmodernism. Only those facts which outwardly seem to support the predetermined narrative are permitted, and if at some later time they seem not to do so, they will also be discarded. Note the tendency of postmodern leftists to be deficient in the field of statistics and to use outlier examples illustrating a desired outcome to supposedly ‘explode myths’ about center-right policy decisions, instead of looking at the entire bell curve. Facts that get in the way, and those who proclaim the undesired facts, must be destroyed, ultimately in any way required (ranging from hypocrisy and phony self-righteousness to the violence hinted at by some of the commenters), in order to maintain the illusion of the narrative being perfect in every way. In order for the postmodern left to feel that they have achieved their goal, they must have that image, both to themselves and to the rest of the world, of absolute purity.
The Gramscian termite has made full use of mass media, understanding its potential as the center right and libertarians have not. The two latter groups understand that an assessment of all the data show that on a factual level in the contest between the French Revolution ideas that came out of the Enlightenment and the American Revolution ones, the American memeset, while not without flaws, clearly produces societies with more liberty and economic opportunity. Content to know that, they muddle on, thinking that what is obvious to them should be obvious to everyone. But in an age of mass media, a human species which has not fully evolved the ability to screen out propaganda in movies, newspapers and newspulp mags like Newsweek, popular music, and especially television, can be fed that small set of data, in a fashion that makes it seem completely believable, and not move beyond to the whole dataset.
And as some commenters pointed out, only when it all comes crashing down will the folly be revealed. If you look at what it took to oust Jimmy Carter after one term, it was the near collapse of the American economy and the nearly complete breakdown of foreign policy combined with an extremely telegenic presenter of authentically American ideas (Reagan) which ended the dreck of the late 1960′s.
The patient is overrun with the bacterial infection doctor. What is your course of action now? There is nothing more we can do nurse. It is up to the patient to overcome or succumb. He is on his own…
The partisans in a religious war cling to the belief that the other side will eventually have an epiphany and convert to their cause. Most of the time, it never happens. What actually occurs is that either one side ruthlessly conquers the other and enforces conversion at swordpoint or both sides fight to a standoff and coexist during long truces, just as they do in Lebanon.
The long culture wars were in one sense, a religious war and in my view, neither side is going to convert the other very soon. The probably outcome will be a standoff in which a consensus will be negotiated as an alternative to all out conflict. Perhaps technology will advance sufficiently in the 21st century to allow people, tired of the bickering and squabbling, to seek their freedom and fortune amid the moons of Titan or prospect the asteroid belt.
Matt Patterson predicts a “bloody century” ahead as the West continues its “demographic, economic, spiritual, and military contraction”. With any luck, the smarter kids may eventually turn their back on the stupidity of politics and head outward to do cool things. But first they have to survive. And for that to happen, the generation which congratulated itself on living at the end of history may find itself living in its most dangerous times. Their role will be to find some way to keep things from falling completely apart; to spend their days as the rearguard to buy time and space for a future yet to be born.
About all that seems certain at this stage is that we will be living through eventful times.
Over the years I noticed, when getting into discussions with leftists, that they concentrate on winning the argument rather than solving the problem. Facts that get in the way of their arguments are simply dismissed. Sometimes I would say to them: How do you come up with effective solutions if you simply assume away inconvenient knowledge? The answer, of course, is that you cannot (though I never got that answer from them). In any case, the so-called “unintended consequences” that follow the implementations of their solutions are certainly not surprising.
At some point I realized it was I who was mistaken. The Left is concentrating on solving the problem, and are taking all relevant factors into account finding the solution. But that problem is not the micro-mini scrape I thought we were discussing. That problem is the uber-problem, the root cause of all the others: them not having enough power. The solution is: them getting more power. So every problem is simply the flip side of them not having enough power. And the solution is them getting more power. Unintended consequences? That is like sawdust when building a new home.
“…bad intelligence leads to further abuse. It fingers the wrong people; it leaves gaps in our true knowledge of enemy intentions.”
And don’t forget. It empowers the people who are willing to use such harsh interrogation techniques. Rendition is simply another example of a cold War attitude that the Left frequently criticized: “Yeah, he’s bastard but he’s OUR bastard.”
Ever argue with a teenager? They usually exhibit the same behavior, dismissing facts and experience, providing anecdotal evidence as trends, refusing to admit error. Its simply frozen cognitive development. Stuck on narcissism.
Personally I don’t think there’s even the remotest possibility of an awakening. Not until the big thud. And when it comes there will be an unaccountable astonishment, even a hurt resentment.
And the survivors will hold a savage blame festival.
#5 Alexis: Holier than thouism is not a purely American phenomena. In fact, the Germans have a special name for these people: Gutmenschen. The combining of adjective and noun into one word distinguishes the term from the separated words for good people.
If Torture has as much value as you all suggest then why not use it at home? Really, what is the problem with that? Not only could we fight crime better but it could also help some of the financial problems we face. For example: EIRUS
Strange my old bookmark to Pajamas Media now directs me to openstreetmap/org. This happen to anyone else?
Re 18: At least one reason to not use torture to combat ordinary crime is that one should weigh the cost of the cure with the disease one is treating. Cancer surgery can be horrific but it beats dying of cancer. Nearly everyone, I think, who supports the use of torture in obtaining information from terrorists will admit that torture is dirty, nasty and undesirable. It would be gross over response to use it to break up a burglary ring. It’s just that sometimes one must choose something really nasty to treat a yet more nasty problem.
#3 Morton Doodslag:
“”"”"We firebombed Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo, and Osaka in WWII. We neither lost our soul, nor did we debate ourselves to the level of Nazis or Jap fascists in shattering them. Hell, we nuked Hiroshima, Nagasaki and still remained a decent nation of generous law abiding free people who turned right back around and reached out to our now decimated former foes and made them friends.”"”"”"
Excellent points, tahnk you. I have made the exact same points repeatedly on various forums, perhaps even this one, I forget. It is the single most compelling rebuttal that can effectively resonate with a majority of ordinary Americans, and it is a refrain that should be repeated again and again against the moral equivalence slander. If regular Americans can memorize a variant of these points and repeat them in rebuttal, either out loud or to themselves whenever they hear this anti-American nonsense, it might put a stake through the heart of these insidious notions.
Bin Laden’s driver was a terrorist worth torturing but gang bangers constantly shooting up folk on crowded city streets are treated with kid gloves? Bad guys tried and convicted in a court of law deserve our mercy, food, and a warm bed, but some foreigner scooped up by our troops in another country gets the torture treatment? That rationalization of yours, Alvin, doesn’t seem to add up…
[Note: My original comments should have been referenced as a response to Wretchard.]
17:
You are absolutely correct about holier-than-thouism not being exclusively American. I think the term “Gutmenschen” is apt. Actually, some of the most self-righteous spin I have ever seen has come from Saudi Arabian newspapers.
One of the principal emotions that leads people to join al-Qaeda is the illusion of perfect righteousness. The ideology of al-Qaeda provides the perfect theological indulgence, for those who follow orders are promised to be right all the time. These are people who truly believe that doing evil is good and doing good is evil. Fanaticism is one of the greatest temptations precisely because it promises to overcome the fallibility of being human; fanaticism promises the false certainty of being an agent of God’s will.
Even Scalia thinks torture could be used at home, constitutionally. Anything wrong with that in your view?
Herb @ 15,
You seem to have accurately predicted Ash’s scatter-shot of non-sequiter zingers that prove all of us are fascist torturing false-Christian hypocrites.
Herb, are you psychic? Your prowess is astonishing, and so accurate as to defy comprehension. Your gift to peer into the future could be the dawn of a new era of mankind.
What’s that? You’re not psychic? You have no unique ability to unfold the higher dimensions of the universe and view the near future?
Oh…So what does that make Ash?
wretchard @ 12: “Perhaps technology will advance sufficiently in the 21st century to allow people, tired of the bickering and squabbling, to seek their freedom and fortune amid the moons of Titan or prospect the asteroid belt. …With any luck, the smarter kids may eventually turn their back on the stupidity of politics and head outward to do cool things.”
The last century was the first one in human history where there was not a frontier to release the tensions of various societies. The frontiersmen were the ones who would be less able to stand the strictures of supposedly civilized existence and would strike out to find new spaces to breathe free. The 1800′s had the American frontier. That space was viewed as open, rightly or wrongly. It could absorb the excess steam of ‘civilization’. The 60′s saying, “The meek shall inherit the Earth. The rest of us will go to the stars.” may have some mileage to it.
Ash — any political system that allows mass murder of potentially millions of Americans and nuked American cities is tossed on the ASHCAN (sorry) of history. It’s why your messiah, Obama, is torturing the heck out of terrorists through outsourcing.
Nuke proliferation changes everything. It’s as simple as that.
—————————
Wretchard, you still have not asked and answered the bigger questions, WHY?
WHY is the West in a demographic, spiritual, economic, and military decline ala Matt Patterson?
WHY the Culture wars?
And WHY is the need for being morally superior (see ASH) so strong as to over-ride the requirement not to be nuked into radioactive cinders?
WHY do the politicians ignore reality?
———————–
IMHO, it has to do with contraception, anonymous urban living, rising income equality or in some cases superiority of women (to men), and finally non-stop status competition among women for “moral” superiority.
It’s a problem in essentials of “too much good times.”
#23 Alexis
The scenario you describe – that of telling the potential convert that once you sign on to become one of us, you automatically earn the right to go around thinking of yourself as perfect – is EXACTLY the same as that of the NPR ‘look at me, I’m so wonderful because I think all the right thoughts’ left.
Can’t do math? Scientific method a mystery?Statistics too much to comprehend? You’re ‘not very good’ at history or the classics or learning languages? No matter. Join the left club, and you can then go around thinking you’re an upper tier towering intellect.
Never worked doing charity? Afraid to go into a tough neighborhood? Unwilling to let your kids (assuming you are unselfish enough to have them in the first place) play with the neighbors’ kids because the neighbor hunts or likes NASCAR or flies the Gadsden flag on national holidays? No matter. Join the left club, and you get to go around thinking of yourself as so very, very open minded and, because you voted for pols who took money from people to ‘help the needy’, you get to think of yourself as the very embodiment of charity.
Most of you folks seem to be shying away from the question by spouting, well, nothing but invective.
If Torture has value as an interrogation technique and Justice Scalia is correct in his notion that it can be done in the USA without violating the constitution why are you so afraid to advocate the use of it domestically in the USA as a standard investigative technique?
Ash, maybe it’s the weight of suffering I want to consider. If torturing a terrorist can reveal information that will save 1000 lives or a million lives, it outweighs the evil of torture. Torture a gang banger? Why? How many lives could that save? You don’t see the difference?
I’ve been saying for years that we don’t torture terrorists because we’ve outsourced that to our “cannibal allies”, borrowing a term from Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley.
Here’s an excerpt to a recent Belmont Club post on the subject, and note that my last sentence agrees with Mr. Goldsmith about the hypocrisy here.
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/04/22/terrorism-and-moral-torture/#comment-149
“The elephant in the living room … is that, for torture to be an effective interrogation technique, it must be used by suitably trained and experienced interrogators. And I repeat what I said above:
The price of developing the necessary expertise in torturers is horrid. For them to have that expertise when emergencies arise, they must either practice torture on unwilling subjects in non-emergency situations, or develop it the hard way in the field.
Another alternative is to out-source it to, as Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley put it, “our cannibal allies”. Which we seem to have done.
There is a reason why there is no evidence, from the American experience in the war on terror, that torture is an effective interrogation technique:
We haven’t used it. At all.
Ourselves.
A more informative question would be, “Have non-American interrogators, working for their own governments but in cooperation with American interrogators, used torture to produce reliable intelligence information concerning terrorist activities?”
IMO the answer to that question is “Yes. Many times.”
I.e., we’ve out-sourced it to cooperative foreign governments.
If lefties are sincere on this subject, they’d focus on our out-sourcing of torture to foreign governments. Listen to their telling silence about that.”
Perhaps he doesn’t believe that he or his children might ever be the ones saved by the extracted information?
Alvin, when you torture that “terrorist” you have no idea how many lives could be saved through the use of that torture, right? If you torture a gang-banger to get evidence to put away his cohorts you could save, say, 3 lives. Is that worth it in your view, 3 lives saved? If not 3, how many outweigh the evil you suggest that is inherent in torture and how sure must you be that those lives will be saved before you engage in torture? It seems to me a terribly slippery slope to rely on the greater good argument for justifying torture as a legitimate investigatory technique but it is the argument used by most – doing evil to one to save more than one makes it good. If that equation is true then we should make it work at home as well.
It was precisely to create some kind of halfway house between the jungle of rendition and the protections of the domestic criminal process that the limbo of Guantanamo was created. Those who argue “why not make torture legal in the US” know that it cannot; and therefore leave the counterterrorists with the binary alternative, which is rendition.
By closing down limbo, we are left, as in classic eschatology, with Heaven or Hell. Put them in the criminal justice system and read them their rights or send them to Egypt. Since Obama and Pelosi have belatedly realized that since terrorist suspects cannot be released into the civic equivalent of Heaven they must perforce be consigned to hell. It serves no purpose, either from the intellgence point of view or the humanitarian one. But it has political advantages. And that is after all, what counts.
ash,
You completely misunderstand the point of Wretchard’s post. He is not advocating torture, here or abroad. He condemns it. His point is that (1) the interrogation methods used at Guantanamo are not torture in the same sense as what they’ll get in Egypt or Pakistan, and (2) that they’re more effective as well. We ARE for bringing those EFFECTIVE methods back to Guantanamo. Heck, Atlanta is also fine with me.
Now for example, the Obama administration wants Australia to take in Uighur detainees from China since there’s now no place to put them. They can’t be sent back to China because that would ‘violate their human rights’.
But wait: isn’t this the situation policy aims creating? If you close Limbo, then you are left with the choice of either sending the Uighurs to Australia (which we will represent as heaven) or back to China (Hell). Which is the more absurd I don’t know. I suppose you could argue that we should send all captured Islamic Uighur extremists to China and await the transcript of their interrogation from the Public Security Bureau. Or maybe they can be sent to Oz where they can surf on the Gold Coast. Or maybe they won’t be taken as prisoners at all or if ever just sent to Egypt, where they will be well treated by their co-religionists. Ya think?
But why should one expose ordinary Australians to the perils of living with these dangerous men? And if you care for the Uighurs’ fingers and toes and eyeballs, why is it preferable to send them back to China instead of keeping them in Cuba? How about not capturing them at all then, if these are the choices? The Guantanamo solution was a highly imperfect, and probably unsustainable one. But it is no less absurd than the situation that people are now creating, and arguably, far more humane.
The long term disposition of the detainees could arguably have been managed if you had a place to put them. People change over time. But that process shouldn’t be left to happen on some Australian beach.
Ash, I agree, it is a slippery slope. Put on crampons.
I have often thought that if the liberals got their wish during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan about our questioning of prisoners that the obvious result would be take no prisoners and just kill the enemy on the field. That result has the simplicity of not having to worry about where to keep prisoners and how long to keep a prisoners that cannot be convicted in a criminal trial.
Alvin, give us a number please. Are you like cjm in the gory gory thread who supports the killing of the doctor because that represents saving lives? The ‘it’s simply math’ argument. That is the argument you are propounding – it’s simply math.
Wretchard,
There certainly is a problem with what to do with the prisoners now, to that I’ll agree but I’m having trouble trying to see the sense in your argument which is in support of the enhanced interrogation techniques, is it not? You are basically saying that it is better for the US to use these techniques because 1.) they will yield more reliable information then getting the info second hand and 2.) they’d do it more humanely. Have I got it right?
What to do with the current crop of prisoners caught in limbo is really a different issue then the one of interrogation techniques. With respect to this issue due process is important. Habeas corpus and all that. We’ve got a bunch of people trapped in limbo. They’ve been scooped up from all manner of places and brought to US jurisdiction and confined. No trial, nothing. This is absurd and they should be given due process or released. The Bush administration has left behind a stinking pile of s… here because their interrogation techniques and other un-lawful activity has poisoned any reasonable prosecution of these folk. Most of the evidence is now unusable in any carnation of a court of law. This however does not justify the continuing use of ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ aka torture. It does pose a problem of what you do with these folks. Locking them away untried in Guantanamo is not a suitable solution.
The use of EIT, or torture is a different issue. The standard argument for its use here at Belmont is the ‘ticking time bomb’ scenario which I’ve argued is tautological. But if we accept the argument then the next logical position to take is to embrace the use of these techniques as a standard investigative procedures. The supreme court justice Scalia has argued in a BBC interview that they could be used domestically – just don’t convict the person first. Twisted logic, but, it reflects his thinking. Anyway, if you argue that Torture has value (hurt 1 to save many) then that argument holds domestically as well. I think many recoil at the thought of torture being used domestically because of they instinctive realize it would be wrong. Imagine, the US government routinely waterboarding, depriving folk of sleep for long periods of times placing US CITIZENS in stress positions and keeping them cold for long periods to glean information that would ‘better society’ and they immediately know how wrong that is. But somehow, when the person getting this done to them is a ‘foreigner’ labeled by some government functionary as a ‘terrorist’, well, then, its fine. It is not.
… by the way, the US gov. has prosecuted Japanese individuals for waterboarding Americans so it is a tough slog to argue that Americans waterboarding others is not torture.
What is torture and what is its purpose?
Torture in the past was to create pain, suffering and physical and mental damage in the victim. So the slivers under fingernail, hanging someone by their wrists, the rack or electricity to the sensitive areas of the body all constitute torture. All of these methods induce pain and damage to the body.
In past times the purpose was usually to break the will, for sadistic pleasure, to make a lesson to others not to resist the ruler or doctrine.
America’s use of interrogation is to break the will without damage to the body. Sleep deprivation is damaging to the brain and body but not usually long lasting. Excessive heat and cold break the will before it breaks the body.
Water boarding is designed to create a severe fear/panic that breaks the will but does not do long lasting damage. However on KMH I heard that his heart stopped several times and that in my mind is damaging the body. When interrogation creates the state of death even for a short time it is excessive.
So is water-boarding torture, not really but is on the margin. So the ends justify the means, perhaps.
The purpose America use EIT are to break the will and give intelligence on planned further enemy actions. Is it worth it? I do not know because there are other instances that can stop a planned attack. The Seattle Space needle was stopped by a woman security that was suspicious, not from breaking the will of a prisoner.
Our Founders place into the Constitution a prohibition against compelled testimony that would indict the suspect. The Founders were quite aware of the use of torture to elicit testimony or intelligence and place it a barrier to conviction.
These prisoners are not citizens so the prohibition does not apply legally and they are not on US soil. We have no intention of attempting a conviction that is why military tribunals were proposed. Bush took too long to set up theses tribunals and everlasting holding of prisoners starts to raise questions. I think the Bush administration was too much focused on getting intelligence rather than destroying the enemy.
Geneva Convention s was agreed because there is always the temptation to abuse prisoners to get information and we did not want that treatment done to our soldiers. No AQ does nit follow the Geneva Convention and it outside that agreement. Military rules of war prevent abuse of prisoners regardless of status. It goes against our code of conduct. So maybe it would have been better to kill these people on the battlefield rather than taking prisoner.
However our most valuable prisoners for potential information were not taken on the battlefield but in other countries in cities like KMH. They were taken solely for information and not to eliminate them as enemy.
Israel faces terrorist bombings and they do take extra legal assassinations in other countries to eliminate enemy leaders. However they do not do enhanced interrogations to get the intelligence. They forgo that ability but rather kill the enemy. We can do the same by authorization of kill orders of enemy leaders but we give up the ability to force the enemy to tell of other in the network.
It is a trade off. I think that I will be willing to take the risk of attacks rather than increase the use of forced interrogations.
I am not bothered about the morality of hurting KMH but I do worry how the utility argument translates in other ways.
Wow, indeed. What Nancy Pelosi has done to condone war crimes (if she has done it) is worth considering. Absolutely. She should hang with the rest if the facts tell that way. The (D) after her name on the TV does not change the law or the culpability. Agreed.
Um, is that what you’re saying? Because, seriously, it’s difficult to tell what you’re saying. I get that you don’t like libruls or Nancy Pelosi. I don’t care, but I get that. It sounds as though you like torture, provided *we* are doing it for the very best of reasons, namely making sure you feel safe & protected, and provided that it is done to those evil scary bad swarthies who don’t worship the correct god.
Does your like of it — conditional as it is — make it legal?
Perhaps I’m unfair. How far will you broaden this? Do you want the US to apologize to the families of Japanese, German, Vietnamese, Korean, (etc.) who did, in their heydays, torture Americans in the name of the home team only to be hanged for it? I mean, we can’t un-hang them now, but surely we can issue apologies for taking those ever-so-needful-in-wartime “harsh interrogation techniques” so wildly out of context. Yes?
As for the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad habits of (a) feeling better about oneself based on false posturing and (b) wishing away the necessity of making hard choices, would the Bush-Cheney repetition of “we do not torture” perhaps be a case of this? I mean, saying “we do not torture” while we are, in fact, torturing at the authorization of the guy saying “we do not torture” does, I would think, serve the purpose of (a) feeling better about oneself and (b) pretending hard choices don’t have to be made.
Here’s my proposal: war crimes shall remain war crimes unless and until they are lawfully made otherwise — we abrogate the relevant treaties, repeal the relevant statutes, amend the Constitution if necessary, etc., according to the established legal methods. Until then, if some president feels the urge to violate those laws, he should own up to it by pardoning those he orders to carry it out. Later, once we’ve tortured out way out of the urgency of the “ticking time bomb scenario” that gave rise to the order — these scenarios happen all the time, I gather from watching 24 and reading “conservative” blogs — he comes forward with the truth of what he did. In writing. He submits it to the jury of mankind, history, and the Congress. All the heat goes to him. The buck stops in the oval office. All cards are on the table. The hard choice is acknowledged and made.
Same with rendition, same with secret prisons, same with indefinite detention, same with abandoning habeas corpus, same with all ways in which the Constitution is treated as so much toilet paper. Yes? No?
Or, I suppose we could just go on huffing and puffing about Nancy Pelosi.
Here’s my proposal: war crimes shall remain war crimes unless and until they are lawfully made otherwise — we abrogate the relevant treaties, repeal the relevant statutes, amend the Constitution if necessary, etc., according to the established legal methods.
That’s essentially correct, but do it before the fact. The political system should set forth the rules under which it is acceptable to fight and bind themselves to it. If that means repealing Geneva, or asking for its amendment, or leaving the convention, then so be it. If if means telling the UN and the EU to take a hike, then so be it. The Bush memos now being denounced were an attempt to see how much wiggle room there was within existing statute; and the accusation is that the past administration interpreted the rules to their advantage. But if Bush made bad public policy, then open up the discussion so people can draw the line in the correct place. The first task is to get the CIA to release the relevant documents as Dick Cheney suggests and to openly tell the public how their safety is being ensured. Put the tradeoffs out in the open. The public can weigh the pros and cons of authorizing different levels of coercion with respect to compelling public interest. Is it OK to use drugs? Maybe under some circumstances. Is it OK to threaten coercion but not carry it out? Ditto. Is it OK to use electric shock? Not OK under any circumstances, then disallow that even if people die as a consequence of not doing it.
Cancer patients make decisions to lop off their parts of their face, breasts, arms and internal organs on the grounds that it may save their lives. And they take the chance even if they know they may still die. They play the odds. They do it after agonizing over the pros and cons. I know some people who’ve refused treatment, even if they might survive otherwise because for whatever reason, they didn’t want to do it. Patient choice is ok, but uninformed choice is not ok. No doctor talks about the “false choice between a mastectomy and cancer survival” in a vacuum of clinical evidence. But the political system talks about “false choice” and then bans the release of the evidence. There is probably no right answer, but there is a facing of the facts, or at least their weighing. Now what are the odds the political system will be so forthright?
Wretchard,
Your 42. post suggests that you think the Bush admin. indeed did violate the current rules and they shouldn’t have done what they did. Most of your previous writings suggest the opposite.
Your 42. post suggests that you think the Bush admin. indeed did violate the current rules and they shouldn’t have done what they did. Most of your previous writings suggest the opposite.
You’re putting words into my mouth. You misunderstood what I wrote above and you misunderstood what I wrote before. I’ll give you a legal opinion on the memos when I finish law school, which is probably never. But from the logical point of view the attempt to work within law was a good impulse; and if the law was too restrictive Bush should have tried to change it, though I believe the political opposition would never have agreed. Not because they were any more moral or law-abiding than Bush but because it was convenient for PR purposes. And nothing has changed. Obama’s policies will lead to far worse cruelties and far less intelligence. That’s my prediction and you can bookmark it.
I’m puzzled. How do you square the fact that the Bush admin. used waterboarding with the fact that the US has prosecuted others for waterboarding? How is it a crime in one instance but not the other?
If you are referring to the Japanese, they weren’t prosecuted for waterboarding, but for the torture and murder of American POWs at which waterboarding, among many other things was done. Look up the words “water cure” and you’ll discover it was a common method for interrogating prisoners during the Filipino-American war. You forced water down the throats of prisoners and jumped on their stomachs. Lasting harm and death was caused by these methods. You can be sure that lasting injury and death was caused by the Japanese.
Far more heinous things were done by FDR and Truman during World War 2 for which no prosecutions were even contemplated. The internment of the Japanese Americans. The firebombing of Japanese citizens. And that favorite of the Left, the Atomic Bombings. But historians today seriously argue that FDR and Truman saved lives, are heroes even, for shortening the war and avoiding an invasion and partition of Japan. Whether or not you agree, it is an illustration of how even acts like incinerating Tokyo had to be viewed in the context of lives lost and saved; in the pitiless arithmetic of war. If you compare GWB’s acts to those of Roosevelt or Truman, it is clear that you cannot just say “of course GWB was evil”. It is at least a debateable subject. If, that is, we want to debate it instead of engaging in sanctimony.
Some people will want Barack Obama to use his visit to Dresden as an opportunity to apologize for the allied firebombings of that city. It’s easier to do that now than back then; when they had to defeat Hitler and didn’t know what worked, so they tried everything. Churchill and Roosevelt denounced the bombings of cities as war crimes. Yet they did it themselves. But a generation that had walked across fire swept beaches (remember the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. An uncle of mine was on that beach, all 4’11″ of him and he never wanted to talk about it. Just said ‘they shot at me, I shot at them’) knew that it wasn’t so easy to judge. Real humanitarian law involves making war as cleanly as possible. And you often have no control over what is possible. You’ll call down artillery on yourself, attack through cities, even burn your own homes to deny them to the enemy. It’s not a series of rules you can determine in advance before or after the war. That’s no fair.
The Japanese Imperial Army probably didn’t even think of waterboarding as any big deal. They marched dying men into the ground, bayoneted them when they fell. They bayoneted civilians who tried to give water to perishing soldiers. They threw babies up into the air and caught them on bayonet point. They vivisected American airmen. They experimented on the Chinese with germs. Officers placed bets on the number of Chinese they could hack to pieces with their heirloom swords within the span of given minutes. And you think that people who might have saved your very life should be prosecuted for being like the Japanese? Is the comparison even possible? Well OK. Let’s at least release the memos and find out whether and how many were saved by their actions. It’s at least relevant as a mitigating circumstance isn’t it. Because we are at war, or at least we were, with an enemy. And if the people we intend to prosecute saved your, or my life, it is at least relevant to the conversation.
But the worst thing we can do is send people into combat with a set of rules of engagement which we expect them to disobey privately, so that the politicians can claim to uphold them them publicly. If the politicians mean to uphold the ROEs, they have the duty to ensure they are practical and proportionate. For what does it profit a nation to close Guantanamo Bay if you’re going to send anyone you capture to Egypt? Where Barack Obama’s going to give his speech about reconcilation and all the rest of it? What does it profit a nation if the Mukhabarat give you nothing but garbage intel back? Does it mean no one was tortured? No. But it may mean someone was tortured for nothing. That’s terrible. But not as bad as calling it “integrity”.