As O’Mara emphasises, torture does not produce reliable information largely because of the severity with which it impairs the ability to think. Extreme pain, cold, sleep deprivation and fear of torture itself all damage memory, mood and cognition. Torture does…
Responding to Dick Cheney’s infamous performance on Meet the Press, Andrew Sullivan delivers an admission at odds with his thesis of the irredeemable evil of the Bush Administration’s enhanced interrogations program. Sullivan addresses a set of exchanges between Cheney and…
The danger for torture opponents in accepting collateral damage to the bases of public discussion, not least in the involvement of the proponents of public reason in habitual defamation of designated enemy political combatants, is the topic for a different discussion, or, more likely, non-discussion.
Because the idea of “terror” is a definitional and circumscribing topic for our “way of life,” perhaps for ways of life at all, we should not be surprised if it is not merely difficult to define, but ends up seeming to connect everything to everything – if every particular question explodes like a conceptual bomb striking ever other question in the vicinity.
As is typical for Administration critics among left-liberals and libertarians, Digby blames the the executive branch, here represented by its last two chiefs and its current top lawyer, for offering lawyerly locutions on a decisively legal matter, as though the answers to the underlying questions would and must be both non-legalistically simple as well as simply favorable to the ideological liberal legal position. As an ideologue, she is unwilling to imagine that the truth might be relatively simple, but unfavorable to her ideology or at least to the notion of its universality and completeness. The spokesperson for the executive branch is at such times embodying the foundational paradoxes of the liberal democratic order, at the classic exceptional moment in which liberalism encounters the coincidence of its own real-political and conceptual limits.
In an “objective” if not necessarily “morally clear” accounting, the thousands killed and thousands more disfigured and terrified would receive many thousands of times greater concern. The child dismembered by a bomb blast, the soldier buried alive in a bunker, the prisoner merely sent off to some conventional Hell, and on and on, precisely as they become multiplied by thousands or millions and turned into numbers, all seem to command less outrage and concern than the captive in manacles.
All statements on torture are destined to be distorted, twisted, agonized, tormented statements.
We’re all KSM on this topic – undergoing a harsh interrogation completely beyond our control, unsure of where it could be heading, wondering whether our very political and moral lives are at stake. We’re all Jay Bybee, too, asking ourselves the same questions, from the perspective of the master, not the slave, dreadfully responsible no matter what we do, morally endangered by our relative safety, in thrall to our very freedom to choose.
