That's ridiculous, strangelet. Not everyone shares your abysmal fear of physical pain, or, in the case of waterboarding, your abysmal fear of losing control.
I stand by my earlier comment that, if we offered forgiveness of student loans and credit card debt in exchange for KSM levels of waterboarding, we would have millions of volunteers.
You have defeated your entire rationale, and exposed it as emotional projection.
And you have neglected even to attempt to answer a long series of questions and arguments, or explain why they do not go to the heart of your case, such as it is.
strangelet, I continue to believe that your notion of a Jack Bauer scenario requiring rape is an excessively lurid diversion. It's like telling a guy his fly is open and being accused of sexual assault. If all application of physical force, representing in any ideal sense "negation of free will" is the same as torture, and if there is no difference between different kinds and classes of physical acts designed to elicit cooperation against someone's will, then the only moral option left is self-starvation on the way to the quickest possible death, as among the radical Janes - because imprisoning the captive, restraining the captive, denying the captive cigarettes or a premium movie channel, all of that is "torture" which is the same as "rape."
The problem relates to your intellectually fetishistic attitude toward the word "torture," which you allow to function like a talisman of black magic in your mental dungeon, converting every act and gesture in its vicinity into a monstrous crime against humanity. However, if there's any chance of the US raping for info, it would come about as a result of some desperate volunteer in a crisis driven insane by the socially suicidal moral pettifoggery, dishonesty, and cowardice of his Obamaist superiors.
The "why torture is wrong" piece you present is completely unpersuasive. On its face, and at its level of generalization, it presents a moral absolutist position - apparently to be applied in a socially self-mortifying way in this realm of interrogation matters exclusively, leaving all other negations of absolute free will and moral self-governance that pervade social life, in war and peace, intact.
Essentially, you want us to seek out terrorists, if at all, only for the purpose of supplicating ourselves at their feet and begging forgiveness for having sinned against them. Or would this be too much of an intrusion on their convenience and free exercise of moral self-governance? How would anything short of leaving them completely alone NOT be an "intrinsic evil" from which no good could derive?
We don't agree about the proper use of the word "torture." Furthermore, I don't believe that you have for a moment in all of this discussion approached this subject with an authentically open mind. Try explaining your position without using the word "torture."
But to consider if we would support say…female terrorists being systematically raped in order to extract information
But, you see, there you go again with the phony scene: Who, where ever proposed that an interrogation program intended to be effective and humane would ever settle on systematic rape of female terrorists? On what planet, in what universe, in what concrete reality would those two concepts ever come together?
You'd have to propose the existence of female terrorists, or perhaps of male terrorists, who were insensitive to every other conceivable measure, but for some reason drew the line at systematic rape of the females - alongside a situation so dire that our most trusted, and reviewable, public servants felt that engaging in such loathsome behavior was the lesser evil. If our society ever reaches such a nightmarishly psychotic point, then rough interrogations - torture - of terrorist suspects will be the least of our problems.
The resort to scare scenarios suggests to me that what you're really afraid of is your own sadistic imagination.
Are you aware, strangelet, of Dostoevsky's plan for Alyosha in the never-completed sequel to the BROTHERS K?
If you dislocate your shoulder, then it's possible that a doctor's procedure for returning your arm to its socket will be the most painful thing you ever experience. For that moment, there will be nothing else in the universe except the "severe pain." It would be torturous. But it won't be torture. There are many other medical procedures that, for the sake of "gaining information," inflict high degrees of discomfort, including sever pain, on the patient. They are torturous, but they are not torture.
Someday, in addition to the narcotics and other non-ideal methods of extracting information that are theoretically available to us, we may have access to new technologies, the use of which, to some, will represent a gross violation of the person of a terrorist suspect. Is that the "same as slavery" - negating the suspect's "free will" to yield information, or not?
If we had a drug that could induce a state in KSM in which he could be convinced, to the point of desperate panic, that Allah would torment him for eternity if he didn't reveal the location of OBL, would that be "torture"?
As regards the real unreal thing, what makes you think you have a choice in the matter?
As for myself, I'm always suspicious of any great revelation that happens to confirm my pre-existing inclinations and prejudices, and that seems to make things easier rather than harder.
Take two Kierkegaards, and text me in the morning.
And, in your interest, I will reject solipsisms and false certainties. Thinking for oneself and projecting are not the same thing.
My advice is to work your epiphany-rate down gradually, first aiming for no more than 1 a day, then 1 a month, and so on. Eventually you may determine that real epiphanies are rare. You can live a rich life without ever experiencing a single one.
Its over for me.
Realizing that torture is based on the exact same premise as slavery finished it.
The negation of free will, the negation of what it means to be human.
I don’t think you have any arguments left that can touch me.
Game over.
strangelet on April 28, 2009 at 2:00 PM
Enjoy your self-dramatic dance in your imaginary victory circle.
That's England quote demonstrates little, sesqui. It's a tenuous if not completely phony connection, not an objective one. And you can have no idea what would have been happening in Abu Ghraib if the Iraq war had taken place in the aftermath of successful follow-ons to 9/11.
We're not in a position, may never be, in critical respects cannot ever be, to perform a full and objective cost-benefit calculation of all aspects of Bush Administration post-9/11 strategy. The system is too complex, and the assessment vulnerable to bias and self-serving oversimplification at every point.
Instead, we bottom-line things politically, and make political adjustments. At this moment, we appear to be turning the dial several notches to the left, while some take advantage of the luxuries of peacetime to indulge in one kind of moral posturing, and to reject a different kind (in many instances the same people now striking the former posture were straining their backs to adopt the other a few short years ago). A few bumps in the road, and the dial will be turned back right on this issue - first quietly, if the bump's not too shocking, then dramatically if "the bumped" get angry enough.
Read my lips, Geek.
Torture is the same as slavery.
The negation of free will.
Yeah, so's a 55 MPH speed limit. So are silk handkerchiefs affixing ankles and wrists to bedposts. So's the UCMJ.
We signed a treaty defining torture.
Then we changed the definition.
Game over.
We signed a treaty pretending to define torture. Inevitably, under pressure we sought refuge in ambiguity, relativism, and legalism - and we've hardly even begun to test the bounds of the last.
You're not in the position to declare any game over.
how can you say that? the widespread moral objection to the barbarism of dresden and hiroshima ensures that they will not happen again, inshallah. as a result of this objection, we now have laser guided bombs and the like, which enable governments to wage extended war in the age of real time war coverage. no civilized government is considering firebombing cities anymore.
I don't know if you're joking or have a childish belief that precision-guided munitions have solved the "collateral damage" problem.
your suggestion that we sympathize with terrorists is deeply offensive.
So you say when not posing as the high holy humanist. I think you identify in your imagination with the terrorist suspect undergoing harsh interrogation - not quite the same thing as "sympathizing with the terrorists" - while removing from your calculation everything outside the immediate scene.
I can answer most of your questions at once: There is absolutely nothing that you, strangelet, Andrew Sullivan, or Barack Obama has proposed that prevents the various problems of volunteers, officials acting in bad faith, and so on. All that you do is set up some obstacles whose main effect over time will be to ease your consciences. In the short term, you will encourage renditions, battlefield executions, voluntarism, overcaution, and so on. Over longer spans, you will set up ad hoc overreactions that will either be hidden under secret findings and plausible deniability, or will sweep away the would-be guardians of our narrowly defined moral purity.
As to the details of any legal regime and desirable levels and methods of oversight, no system - whether designed by Glenn Greenwald, Alan Dershowitz, you, or me - is going to be foolproof, or can overcome a presumption of bad faith on the part of principle participants.
what is your position on the allegedly significant number of insurgent/AQI fighters who were driven to fight the US by our widely-publicized treatment of our prisoners? would you venture a guess how this affected US casualties and the our overall success in iraq and af-pak?
Yet once again you fully conflate detainee treatment, in particular Abu Ghraib, with interrogation. We don't know what would have happened if we waterboarded - if we eye-gouged, dismembered, and flayed - KSM, but handled Abu Ghraib like Club Med.
I certainly accept as credible the beliefs of Petraeus and his people that civilian protection and respect of rights was critical to an effective counterinsurgency campaign. Dicretly combatting terrorist plots already under way or being planned is something else altogether.
Prior to the surge, multinational forces operated under another assumption about the "causes" of the insurgency and insurgency recruitment - that the very presence of US troops incited hostility and that handing over authority to Iraqis as quickly as possible was more important than establishing security. That turned out to be a simplistic abstraction that looked good on paper and sounded good in anti-war agitprop, b8ut arguably did a lot more harm than good.
A policy that aims to be both as effective and as humane as possible - humane both to the "evildoers" and to their actual and potential victims - would be better than a policy that emphasizes one while merely hoping that the other takes care of itself.
You two still don't get it - so I have no expectation that you will. As for Larison and Manzi, I'm sure they mean well, as I grant the vast majority of participants in this discussion do, but I haven't found their contributions particularly useful, and phrases like "part of the same moral universe as I am" strike me as melodramatic and self-serving: Oh, I'm so deeply appalled that someone else is addressing this issue from some perspective other than the one I prefer!
The scene of interrogation, the elements and the experience of "enhanced" techniques, loom very large when put under very close scrutiny. It's a familiar act of selective perception: One chooses to enjoy one's outrage over the vividly imagined violation of KSM, because the people whose murders and maimings he organized have faded into the past and the realm of statistics, and the people whom he intended to have killed and maimed are walking around whole and free. The scene of distant bombardiers dropping highly but imperfectly accurate bombs on distant enemies and unfortunate bystanders in distant lands for half-forgotten, but connected reasons seem hardly to register as a moral issue compared to the dramatic identification with a man whose faced is plunged over and over in water, inducing feelings of panic, fear, and shame, but little or no serious damage to him.
Being able to sympathize with KSM and AZ, but not their their direct and indirect victims, or with the people tasked with protecting their victims, does not represent some noble moral exercise. It's a primitive, highly selective version of morality, one sub-level of abstraction higher than the same psychological mechanism that enables, one might even say compels, a citizen to favor the lives of friends and family over the lives of unknown strangers. A policy based on a fantastical promise to privilege the health, comfort, and sensibilities of mass murderers over those of the citizens a government is sworn to protect, and of the innocents it will someday be forced to destroy, may make a portion of the populace feel better about themselves and their government, for a while. Their marvelously if narrowly upraised self-consciousness over the banished scene of rough interrogation won't survive the scenes of atrocity that will follow.
That's a silly study you link, strange, among other things based on stereotypical views of what constitutes a "conservative" vs. a "liberal" outlook on life and politics.
In addition, it makes an overly broad point in reply to a specific issue - whether the ridicule of Palin in '08 is in itself fatal to her future prospects.
I have long intended to write a post on scenarios and candidates.
If we imagine the range of possible outcomes for Obamaism from Epochal Triumph to Cataclysm, and attach letter grades to them, I would see Palinism, with or without Palin, as a valid response with decent prospects for success in scenarios C and D (Obama a disappointment to the nation and Obama a failure). Scenario D- to F - nuke attack-level cataclysm - would seem like a situation for the Person on a Humvee: "Save us, General Petraeus, you're are only hope."
In scenarios A (start chiseling at Rushmore) and B (good enough for government work), it likely doesn't make any difference in terms of electoral prospects, but history suggests we might as well put up a Barry Goldwater sacrificial lamb who can lay down some markers, perhaps to be followed by virtual Obamaist Republican (the coming era's Nixons and Fords) if a Reagan doesn't show up ahead of schedule.
I agree with much of what you say on this subject, strange, although, as I believe we've discussed on another thread some weeks ago, I think you project a bit much and invest a bit too much in your intuitions about your own age cohort and where its head will be in future years.
Lots of us old farts never would have believed that Rev Wright's spiritual stepson and loyal congregant could have been taken seriously as a candidate, much less elected Prez, in the good ol' USA. Lots of other people were sure that the mythical American bigot cavalry would ride to the rescue at the last moment.
IFF (if an only if) the tide is in Palinism's favor AND if she takes advantage of her Second Act entrance to "stun and amaze" (Machiavelli) the people, the 2008 stumbles won't matter, whether in 2012 or 2016 or 2032, and it's the people who point to them and expect them to matter who will be laughed at.
If, on the other hand, she either doesn't really want it or isn't really up to it, then that will become clear sometime during Act 2, and, again, the SNL/Couric i-view stuff will be the least of it.
.I think she’s your choice, and NOW instead of shredding her and mocking her the conservo intelligentsia should be trying to fix her, help her, right?
Instead of pissing and moaning about how impossible she is and how stupid the base is to insist on her, gtf up to Alaska and help her, give her some decent advice, educate her on foreign policy.
R-E-S–P-E-C-T!
Not exactly as I would put it - and it's not all about future President-Dictatrix Palin - but close enough for government work.
By "shredding her and mocking her," they put themselves in opposition to the base, and intensified the identification of the base with her. Anyone with some minimal experience of life, without an ego or professional aspirations obscuring his or her vision, should have understood what would happen when, with the election under way, you called the base's new darling, under heavy attack from all the usual suspects, a "cancer" (Brooks) or offered childishly ludicrous political advice (Parker) or made blanket judgments about Palin's real understanding of her people - from 30,000 feet (Noonan) - or simply accepted without question the distortions of her beliefs and her record (all of them), then seized upon them as an excuse to re-double attacks not just on her but on her entire constituency.
It's as though they wanted to split the party/movement - and right in the middle of a presidential election - all the while speaking as though convinced that they unquestionably possessed some higher insight into our best interests. It was a confoundingly, pathetically fatuous display.
Regardless of whether you consider Palin to have been justly shredded and mocked (I personally think she's terrific, but I have no problem acknowledging flaws and missteps), the behavior of the "reform conservatives" toward her exposed how tactically inept, how lacking in maturity, how ill-suited to lead or even to fight they were - unless they were really just on the other side, with or without realizing it.
A Sully link!!!!!
All Hail the Highlander!
Gratz, man.
strangelet on April 27, 2009 at 7:20 AM
Wonders never cease, and Caesars never wonder.
I'm a little skeptical that Mr. Sullivan has actually read, and, more important, grokked the entire thread. As I hope you are aware, I cited the UN Convention, preserved in his extended quote with highlights intact, in order to criticize it as what I believe the legal theorists call "void for vagueness," and distortive of policy and discussion, and also to criticize our having agreed to it as written as dishonest and short-sighted.
Mr. Sullivan asks, "Why are we still debating this?" One answer would be, because the law is an ass. If 70% of Americans tell Pew that the option of "torturing" terrorists for information should be preserved at least in rare instances, with ca. 50% in favor of the "sometimes" and "often" options, then we have a problem - not case closed.
I'm happy to have my piece linked, and I hope that, if perhaps inadvertently, a few Sullivan fans are exposed to the alternative views both on the larger question and on the tactics and attitudes coming from their side of the discussion.
jic my unconscious reference to Reagan as antecedent is mistaken for a sexist default assumption - especially untimely given whom a big chunk of the base clearly wants
note: I'm indulging in this OT because it's my darn thread and this theme I like and still consider under-explored.
People are going to start talking about us, grrrl.
Larison has to insult Sarah Palin and her supporters in some major media outlet for anyone even to care who he isn't.
If the reform conservatives want to be accepted as part of political conservatism, they might want to learn some manners. It's particularly unseemly for the smarty-pants, in-the-know, self-styled better angels of conservatism, the people intent on housebreaking conservatism of its troglodyte tendencies, to be so downright compulsively rude.
Instead of posing as the under-appreciated brain of conservatism, they need to get used to being part of the left brain of conservatism. Otherwise, we'll just keep hanging out with Mark Levin, Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Steyn, and Rush and the rest. We'll pick our Reagan ourselves. As we work things out, instead of focusing on that individual's and our flaws, his and our failure to treat the reform conservatives as the be-all and end-all of the conservative intellect, they can try to bridge the gap between the base's passions and intuitions and everyone else's prejudices.
And we'll thank them for it - though some of them better get started soon if they expect any of us to forgive and trust them by the time it matters.
Why haven't they been doing that? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that it's because they're social-climbing, fingers-in-the-wind, bed-feathering and -wetting opportunists.
I could argue the results. I've probably written the equivalent of a book arguing the results, and as important the plausible alternatives, on various web sites - right, middle, and left. One guy up above apparently considers me suspect because I was registered at TalkLeft and participated in discussions with relatively sensible Dems mainly about the '08 campaign, but was finally banned (or part-banned) for arguing about, you guessed it, the war in Iraq. (It was Big Tent Democrat who banned me from his threads. Jeralyn Merritt I lost all interest in when she converted to Obamanaut then offered a TL tote bag to the person who correctly predicted when Sarah Palin would be dropped from the McCain ticket. There was some other guy but he was basically the TL Kossack...)
But I won't argue the subject here. I'll just say that calling an undefined entity - the Bush Doctrine - an "Epic Fail" is childish. And off-topic.
Have you ever read THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM, strange? The Constitution of the United States is a mechanism and the American system is a machine for that reconciliation, ad infinitum/til kingdom come.
The Founders were true Machiavellians, in many ways - and Machiavelli was a democratic republican.
A decent and moral person in a position of political authority may, as a matter of conscience, think it necessary to subject a terrorist to enhanced interrogation techniques for the purpose of saving thousands of lives. This is why some people may want greater precision on what constitutes torture. Not because they are sadists looking for loopholes, but rather, because they have a sense of moral obligation, as well as a deep loathing for the deaths of innocents, that motivates them to seek clarity so they can sleep at night. This sort of person believes that it his duty to exhaust every possibility in order to know for sure that there is a moral means that will help extract information that will save thousands.
The historical context of the Geneva Convention were Nazi and Japanese war crimes that were commissioned for only one reason: to advance the cause of totalitarian regimes. Given the spirit of that convention, do you think that its participants would approve of interpreting its prohibitions overinclusively so that they would inhibit the rescuing of the innocent?
I carry no brief for torture, and I am not saying that waterboarding is not torture. What I am saying is that this present discussion is colored by assumptions about the former president’s character that don’t seem to account for the totality of his actions in relation to the terrorist threat. Did he in fact cross the line by ordering interrogations that are immoral? Of course, that is certainly possible. But did he do so with the intent to perform an immoral act? I think there is no evidence for that. So, why not commend rather than condemn the cautious public servant who wants to offer a plausible account of torture prohibitions that would allow borderline practices for the purpose of rescuing the innocent?
In an age in which many of our fellow citizens believe it is obligatory for one to be skeptical about the beginning of life, the nature of marriage, the censorship of pornography, and even what constitutes racial discrimination (whether or not includes affirmative action), all of a sudden, on the question of what constitutes torture many of these same citizens are absolutely certain they know what it is and that anyone who requests greater precision is declared a moral monster. The preachers of epistemological humility when it comes to one set of beliefs become the Christianists they loathe when it comes to another set of beliefs, but they offer no account as to why this is so.
I believe that what you advocate would last until the next major failure, perhaps a little longer as a result of so many in our current leadership now on record pretending that they didn't really go along with post-9/11 aggressiveness - perhaps not even as long as that, if we are lucky enough to gain actionable intelligence and a captive with time-critical information, leading Obama to take advantage of the reservations and flexibility he's quietly provided himself even while stirring up an attack on the prior administration for in effect the same things.
I agree that our prisoner treatment should strive to be exemplary and humane, but our policy should also be effective and resilient, and less concerned with letting others, under some amorphous concept of international public opinion, stand in judgment of how we go about securing our interests.
If we were committed to effectiveness, in all of its dimensions, first, we would avoid such a crisis, or we would at least have a framework for dealing with it. It's possible that professionals, much better informed than you and I are, would determine that a "soft" approach with an implied threat of getting as hard as necessary, would be entirely adequate - meaning less rough treatment viewed by some as torture, less voluntarism and informal heroics, less need for lies and secrecy, less recrimination and politicization.
Alexander's been on this campaign for a while now. His opinions have been noted. Others would disagree - except this his use of prejudical language and his tactic of over-simplifying conflation make disagreement almost impossible.
No one's in favor of "abuse," no one's in favor of "torture," no one's in favor of Abu Ghraib, and we're back to conflating interrogation with treatment in re Gitmo, with a heavy addition of propaganda conflated with facts still under dispute as well.
After several years of the Obama charm offensive, perhaps we'll see different, less effective propaganda by AQ and other jihadis, perhaps we won't. It's obviously speculative at this point.
I've given my views as to a preferable policy going forward. I have you to hear a response from you on it, sesqui, though maybe I missed it amidst all the rest.
A realistic strategic posture is another big question entirely. The role of the "torture meme," to use your language - which frankly I rather detest (phrases like "Epic Fail," too) - is, I would suggest, a teensy-weensy part of that discussion.
If we try for a new Fortress America - a distinct possibility, I believe - while the world, lacking its defunded, demoralized, and supposedly unwanted American pseudo-imperial sentinels, tears itself apart and irradiates the shreds, then the assumptions and requirements guiding interrogation of suspected terrorists and other enemies will likely be transformed in ways that would have the anti-torture chorus singing a very sad tune. You'll have to turn to science fiction for more detailed visions of how some future Obamaist sliver of the current American elite, behind the very high, very high-tech walls protecting it from everyone else, might choose to justify itself. I picture a Stalinist-flavor Neo-Byzantium, quite possibly with a range of words more pleasant than "torture" used to describe the interrogation-associated destruction of individual threats to the shrunken order. (To be filed under "Unintended Consequences - Speculative Scenarios.")
In your opinion is Obama not-a-machiavellian, or not-a-pragmatist?
Or neither?
Does it matter what anyone thinks about the internal workings of the Obamabrain and the Obamaself? All we have are the facts before our eyes and the context.
And…let us make blanket immunity and/or pardons a precondition of any further release of the torture memos and documents. Could you then accept the dispostion of the judgements and rulings by the DoJ alone?
strangelet on April 25, 2009 at 12:15 PM
I'm not sure that immunity/pardons are required for further release of whatever documentary and other evidence, though they might be a good idea even before subpoenas are issued since the Administration has thusfar engaged in obviously unfair selective releasing/redaction against people who are constrained from speaking in detail in their own defense.
As for accepting whatever the DoJ came up with, not really: It would remain subject to review and revision. The pudding would have to be proofed. I'll just have to hope that wouldn't make AG Holder view me as a "coward."
As for your summation, I disagree with your characterization of what Bybee et al were doing: They weren't trying, in my opinion, to change a definition or definitions, legally or otherwise. They were trying to assess whether particular methods of interrogation could be applied within accepted understandings of law and precedent. Since much of the rest of your summary flows from what I view to be a flawed premise, I'm afraid I'd have to dispense with it at this point. Even if I agreed with it, that would still leave open the question of whether prior understandings of law and precedent were or should have been treated as sacrosanct. For instance, I've argued that the UN Convention was ill-conceived and that our ratification and affirmation of it was short-sighted. I also disagree about the implications of Dr Manzi's arguments, as you know.
As for the alternative framework I've put forward, I've addressed, I believe reasonably, your arguments regarding institutionalization/normalization, and I've suggested additional arguments for, in effect, bypassing the "torture" debate as irresolveable and moving to a humane, pragmatic, lawful, and honest approach that addresses the main underlying issues. I am not aware of any other substantial criticisms of it advanced here.
We agree that other measures effectively outlawed or outside of precedent may deserve to be re-considered.
Incidentally, the Inquisitors viewed torture differently than I believe you realize. The objective of Inquisitorial torture was often not to extract confessions, but to validate confessions in the subject's spiritual interest. Their beliefs about the soul in some respects overlapped Japanese Bushido or, say, the Native American warrior creeds. Validation isn't the same as verification, but the idea goes back to the old Roman presumption that intelligence often couldn't be trusted unless verified by torturous interrogation.
I'm toying with the idea of making passages from Machiavelli the center of my 100 days post. I don't accept your characterization of Obama, and, even if I did, seeing in him a Machiavellian pragmatist wouldn't be in his favor from my perspective if his means are ill-chosen where his ends aren't contrary to my interests and the country's.
This is not a partisan issue for me, although it seems to be one for you.
strangelet on April 25, 2009 at 11:18 AM
Ideally, it would be a wholly non-partisan issue. When the leader of one party continually muses aloud about prosecuting members of the much-abused prior administration, and the jackals of the left start shrieking, louder even than normal, then it's a bit late and obviously unfair to start accusing those attacked, directly or by association, of acting in a partisan manner.
I appreciate your attempt to sum things up on the way to moving forward, but I must point to a typically dishonest and weasely post you link there from Andrew Sullivan, in turn linking to a typically dishonest and weasely post from Paul Begala attempting to defend his typically dishonest and weasely prior propagandistic utterance on his, see!, "we hanged waterboarders" argument.
IF we had hanged a single Japanese soldier for doing to an American soldier or soldiers what we recently did to KSM, and under comparable conditions and circumstances, then we would have been wrong to do so.
As Mark Hemingway explains this morning, that's far from what occurred.
You would do well to think carefully, do whatever checking, and exercise common sense before taking anything Andrew Sullivan or Paul Begala says at face value. The odds of the combination of Sullivan and Begala on any subject of political interest yielding any approximation of useful truth are incredibly low.
when you say i’m conflating issues you’re evading addressing any of the points that i brought up.
No, many if not all of the points you have brought up have been addressed by myself and others, in many cases repeatedly. When you constantly conflate issues, often under prejudicial assumptions and terminology offered as shorthand, discussion grinds to a virtual halt, we start repeating ourselves and getting confused... and then the thread ends... and we move on to the next entropic cycle...
For instance:
if a fair assumption can be made that information gained through pain is not worth the price, the burden of proof is on the promoters of pain- or severe distress-causing methods to justify it. so far, nothing suggests that they worked when all else would have failed, or that any interrogation expert ever suggested they would work effectively au lieu other, more humane methods.
The opening "if"-clause contains an assumption that many here are not willing to concede. Therefore, they would be reluctant to jump to the "then" part. The second sentence is based on speculation combined with credulous readings of partial reports that happen to favor your preferred set of assumptions.
Another example:
we must have a zero tolerance policy for torture, and we don’t want any overzealous interrogator or guard to assume that he or she is free to do anything to a prisoner if the gravity of the danger is sufficient.
A "zero tolerance policy for torture" is an absurdity, since under "zero tolerance" a harsh word or a raised voice would qualify as torturous. So, you don't really mean "zero tolerance," or you need to provide an exact definition of torture - which is impossible (see, extensive prior discussion).
i’m all for defining publicly what methods constitute torture. i’m not so insecure to worry about our enemies knowing where we draw the line. i’m happy with people around the world knowing what we won’t do, even if our prisoners will use this to their advantage.
I'm happy for your happiness, though not much, frankly. The happiness of one or two contributors to an internet message board doesn't amount to a hill of beans, even to a virtual hill of beans. 300 million Americans get to decide how happy they are about the likes of KSM and AZ using our policies to their advantage.
The Red Cross report has been discussed elsewhere, as have been your fragmentary narratives, including by coldwarrior on the other thread. Again, we get into the conflating with detainee treatment problem, as well as retrospective judgment of unnamed administrators and policymakers, as opposed to the more fundamental moral, theoretical, and foward-looking policy questions regarding interrogation methods.
let me ask you something. the one thing that struck me most in your post was how you feel threatened by us ever expanding the definition of torture. where do you get this from? is it just the conservative paranoia that they live under the left’s increasing oppression? i feel a lot of your antipathy toward our arguments comes from this.
There, as again here, I have repeatedly argued that an unrealistic and dishonest policy - that denies human nature (individual and collective), denies what we will do and in fact are doing, ignores the logic of war, encumbers and defames our own people for acts viewed differently than in their own time, and so on - will not only fail, but ensures far worse real outcomes even on its own terms, and will likely bring with it a host of unintended consequences.
The last point actually does go back to your question, phrased in typically prejudicial language, on "the conservative paranoia" about "the left’s increasing oppression." We think you guys have a tendency to fall in love with certain ideas whose flaws - logical and moral incoherence as well as poor outcomes - you look away from because your passion feels too good to be given up easily.
What do you think should happen with the OLC memos and Bybee and Yoo and Bush and Cheney and Condi and Congress and the CIA?
strangelet on April 25, 2009 at 12:33 AM
and
Ummm….you lost me there. I quite like his proposal to cut private lenders out of the student loan loop and have the unis administer the loan allocation. He apparently also plans to funnel the 94 billion in savings into Pells and lower interest rates.
strangelet on April 25, 2009 at 12:47 AM
Last point first, my comments about Obama's "behavior last week" being "confoundingly stupid, insane, and irresponsible - altogether dangerous" were focused on "torture" memos and national security realm, not the pay off whoever's loans/credit cards realm.
I think Bybee, Yoo, Bush, Cheney, and others probably deserve various medals and other honors as we work to restore their reputations, and as we look to drawing further positive value from their immense experience and expertise.
At this point, I think that we need to err on the side of sunshine regarding the interrogation program, preserving operationally valuable information where possible. The suggestion of blanket immunity in the event of hearings might facilitate actually learning something useful from them, rather than tearing the country apart, though in the latter I think the odds favor conservative benefiting from the process and the Democrats destroying their "brand" for a generation, so it might be worth the legal bills to Yoo and Bybee. Others could advise them on setting up defense funds if necessary.
This latter option is known as the BRING IT ON! plan, and has much to recommend it, but it's risky.
To bring both points together, if we must have government stimulus of the economy, I suspect that if we offered to forgive credit card and student loan debt for everyone willing to undergo waterboarding to KSM levels, we would have tens of millions of volunteers, and alternative short-term employment for millions more. It would be extremely stimulative, and a much better use of all that money we're spending that we don't have and at this rate may never have except in the form of worthless paper and pixels.
I'd like to see Obama and Biden resign, though for different reasons, see Pelosi indicted or at least removed from the speakership, and have a bipartisan national unity government formed as we prepare - very deliberately - for the next elections and a constitutional convention.
Since hardly any of that last paragraph is, ahem, realistic, and since my impression is that Obama has already done terrible and worsening damage, yet doesn't have it in him to reverse his policies radically and consequentially, I think that those in place at specific national security-related institutions should be formulating concrete strategies for preserving core capacities toward eventual fastest possible efficient re-generation - and at the same time towards documenting what's being done.
But's it's early - maybe I can work up something better while I'm helping my stepmother with her new garden later today.
The neuro-receptors for revenge are co-located in the small neocortical area also responsible for opiate addiction and sexual pleasure.
...I've heard the same general description but with different terms - call it what you will, the organic sex-violence stimulation-response/excitation connection is one reason 1) that torture is dangerous to the torturer and the torturing state as well as to the immediate victims - an argument for what you call institutionalization, in my view; 2) that so many people are attracted to this topic and effectively incapable of addressing it rationally; 3) that t-porn and horror are often thought of as "date" movies; and 4) that Barack Obama's behavior this week appears confoundingly stupid, insane, and irresponsible - altogether dangerous.
Yes, because it is normallized. The MaCleod touched on this….torture is awful, horrific….normalizing it, making it banal takes its power.
Which is why, instead of having wanna-be Jack Bauers taking the law into their hands out of frustration with their political masters, we would want a policy that's aimed at extracting information in a timely manner, by whatever means necessary and effective - only rarely involving anything that would fit the broad practical definition of torture - and, if ever intersecting narrow definitions of torture, only under rigorously controlled and well-understood circumstances (not the same, btw, as "on national television, live" or even as "other than classified").
There have been many regimes that strictly denied allowing "torture" that are known to have been the most brutal police states ever.
And this is another thing you don’t understand, Highlander….. Saw and Hostel are about revenge. Everyone in the Saw movies deserves what they get because of something they did. In Hostel I beautiful teenagers get what they derserve for being beautiful teenagers.
See, there's so much we agree about!
Hostel II is one of the best revenge movies of all time. The neuro-receptors for revenge are co-located in the small neocortical area also responsible for opiate addiction and sexual pleasure.
That is why Americans approve torturing KSM in polls.
Revenge.
strangelet on April 24, 2009 at 10:18 PM
...though not that, necessarily. Have Americans been polled about KSM himself? Regardless, I think you might say Americans are rather less troubled by the prospect of bad things happening to KSM, or other terrorists, than to people they like, but that's only natural, and inevitable - and goes with "don't do the crime, if you can't do the time."
In any event, it's not your place to judge the American people. They're never going to like terrorists, but their judgment about what it's OK to do to them offered today is certainly informed a lot less by this than it might have been 7+ years ago.
As for what sustains the HOSTEL/SAW experience for viewers, and makes one gorno film better than another from the traditional perspective (character, moral themes, etc.), that's different from what attracts people to them (the latter being more relevant for the poster art). There's a wide range of opinion among film/narrative theorists over the role of plot and theme in the "success" of such movies. Did people go to the RAMBO movies because they dug the rebellious sorta-super-hero or because they wanted feelgood violence and stuff blowing up, or did they want the latter but need the former or vice versa or both or all and more?
I can speak only theoretically about the t-porn, however, as I generally find manipulative horror/slasher films extremely annoying (love the posters, though). I'd be interested, however, in seeing IRREVERSIBLE, which is sometimes discussed in connection with t-porn, and I've been thinking about SALO for many years.
sesqui, there are separate issues here that you continually conflate: detainee treatment apart from interrogation; the effectiveness of the particular methods discussed in the OLC memos; the characterization of those methods - either separately or taken as part of a pseudo-system potentially including detainee treatment - as torture or not; the culpability of the OLC lawyers and others with nominal or theoretical responsibility; the best moral basis for proceeding; the best basis vis-a-vis war objectives; the best basis vis-a-vis larger social objectives... and I could tease out a few more if I felt like it, since many of these issues are attached to overlapping but relatively autonomous moral, legal, and practical issues.
Other arguments you bring up in your "answering post" reprise ones we've gone into in detail on the prior thread - such as how to imagine the predicament of OLC lawyers and other responsible parties at the time (or in the future) facing a captive in reference to "ticking time bomb" or, as I suggested, "falling day-calendar pages" scenarios. I invite you to review that discussion again, and to try to focus and advance your arguments if possible, taking coldwarrior and my replies into account.
As for the surge experience, what it might tell us precisely regarding these issues is a complex something different again, but the link between our national agony over detainee interrogation and a civilian protection orientation under counterinsurgency conditions is a stretch. Some might also want to note that our civilians also deserve to feel protected. On that note, it's hard to see how releasing new detainee abuse photos is going to serve either the Iraqis, ourselves, or anyone else.
I do not believe that either foreign or domestic ends would be served by a "pro-torture" policy. I do think they would be served by a maximally humane/by all means necessary self-defense posture of the sort I've outlined, and would be respected and even appreciated on that basis at least as much as any other, with pluses and minuses like any other.
well, I realized that it might seem unfairly to tar you, and I suppose there might have been a more elegant way to have phrased it, but 1) the link goes to the actual comment, 2) and my text goes on to describe sesqui as the writer, 3) on other threads you have, in my opinion, gone on disdain jags among whose objects were undoubtedly (your fellow) gun nuts, and 4) the immediate context was rather figurative - in truth I'm not actually wearing a cup or helmet or steel-toed boots, and my snickersnee is in the other room.
So, ATC, I figgered I could let it stand. Your protest has been noted, and, by the time we put together the jubilee edition, if not sooner, we'll try to come up with something more precise, I guess.
strangelet, what we did when we waterboarded does not compare to what the Japanese did - employ a form of waterboarding in the context of a massive cultural commitment to torture, not just for the sake of extracting information, but for the sake of demonstrating one's own virtues as a warrior, in comparison to captives who by definition were unworthy of respect. This is a canard - like most such based on a half-truth or element of truth - being bandied about.
However, you DO point to one of the main criticisms of the Dershowitze proposal, that the existence of a torture warrant mechanism might regularize the process, desensitizing us to it. We would have to put our hope and faith, as with so many other areas of human life in our society, that an engaged populace through its representatives would continually review and refine the "insitutions" in keeping with its standards of humanity.
Remember, the question isn't "no physical compulsion ever" vs "rare (potentially growing in frequency) physical compulsion," but the latter, under open democratic oversight vs. inconsistent, informal, spasmodically overcompensating, destructive, morally corrosive use of physical compulsion.
Would they have approved systemic institutionalized torture?
strangelet on April 24, 2009 at 8:25 PM
Considering that the accepted the maintenance of the South's "peculiar institution," I think the obvious answer is that they would have accepted just about anything in the interest of preserving the nation - even things that many felt were totally immoral, in the interest of some day being able to eliminate them.
Your deployment of the phrase "institutionalized torture" is prejudicial, as is your insistence on a broad, collectively self-flagellatiing definition of "torture."
Let others determine whether what we choose to do is "torture," and whether that makes it a bad thing, and and whether that makes them want to do something about it. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that in Japanese and Arabic, just to pick two languages, have very different usages.
By adopting an open, results-oriented commitment to maximally humane but sufficient physical compulsion where necessary, we let our enemies use their own (on this score likely fertile) imaginations. If your objective is to reduce the morall abhorrent incidence of torture, then consider in addition that many who might, under your favored scenario, end up being tortured informally by Jack Bauer, or drugged, would instead simply talk, knowing that soon enough they would end up talking anyway.
The harder you look at a word, the harder it is to understand it.
That's ridiculous, strangelet. Not everyone shares your abysmal fear of physical pain, or, in the case of waterboarding, your abysmal fear of losing control.
I stand by my earlier comment that, if we offered forgiveness of student loans and credit card debt in exchange for KSM levels of waterboarding, we would have millions of volunteers.
You have defeated your entire rationale, and exposed it as emotional projection.
And you have neglected even to attempt to answer a long series of questions and arguments, or explain why they do not go to the heart of your case, such as it is.
Mary Worth: http://www.marked4mary.com/
strangelet, I continue to believe that your notion of a Jack Bauer scenario requiring rape is an excessively lurid diversion. It's like telling a guy his fly is open and being accused of sexual assault. If all application of physical force, representing in any ideal sense "negation of free will" is the same as torture, and if there is no difference between different kinds and classes of physical acts designed to elicit cooperation against someone's will, then the only moral option left is self-starvation on the way to the quickest possible death, as among the radical Janes - because imprisoning the captive, restraining the captive, denying the captive cigarettes or a premium movie channel, all of that is "torture" which is the same as "rape."
The problem relates to your intellectually fetishistic attitude toward the word "torture," which you allow to function like a talisman of black magic in your mental dungeon, converting every act and gesture in its vicinity into a monstrous crime against humanity. However, if there's any chance of the US raping for info, it would come about as a result of some desperate volunteer in a crisis driven insane by the socially suicidal moral pettifoggery, dishonesty, and cowardice of his Obamaist superiors.
The "why torture is wrong" piece you present is completely unpersuasive. On its face, and at its level of generalization, it presents a moral absolutist position - apparently to be applied in a socially self-mortifying way in this realm of interrogation matters exclusively, leaving all other negations of absolute free will and moral self-governance that pervade social life, in war and peace, intact.
Essentially, you want us to seek out terrorists, if at all, only for the purpose of supplicating ourselves at their feet and begging forgiveness for having sinned against them. Or would this be too much of an intrusion on their convenience and free exercise of moral self-governance? How would anything short of leaving them completely alone NOT be an "intrinsic evil" from which no good could derive?
We don't agree about the proper use of the word "torture." Furthermore, I don't believe that you have for a moment in all of this discussion approached this subject with an authentically open mind. Try explaining your position without using the word "torture."
You're obsessed with a word that frightens you, like a child gazing into the mirror and saying "Mary Worth" over and over again.
Our most trusted public servants did not systematically rape female anyone.
Not even close. It's sickening to suggest otherwise.
If schools are prisons, then what are prisons?
But, you see, there you go again with the phony scene: Who, where ever proposed that an interrogation program intended to be effective and humane would ever settle on systematic rape of female terrorists? On what planet, in what universe, in what concrete reality would those two concepts ever come together?
You'd have to propose the existence of female terrorists, or perhaps of male terrorists, who were insensitive to every other conceivable measure, but for some reason drew the line at systematic rape of the females - alongside a situation so dire that our most trusted, and reviewable, public servants felt that engaging in such loathsome behavior was the lesser evil. If our society ever reaches such a nightmarishly psychotic point, then rough interrogations - torture - of terrorist suspects will be the least of our problems.
The resort to scare scenarios suggests to me that what you're really afraid of is your own sadistic imagination.
Are you aware, strangelet, of Dostoevsky's plan for Alyosha in the never-completed sequel to the BROTHERS K?
If you dislocate your shoulder, then it's possible that a doctor's procedure for returning your arm to its socket will be the most painful thing you ever experience. For that moment, there will be nothing else in the universe except the "severe pain." It would be torturous. But it won't be torture. There are many other medical procedures that, for the sake of "gaining information," inflict high degrees of discomfort, including sever pain, on the patient. They are torturous, but they are not torture.
Someday, in addition to the narcotics and other non-ideal methods of extracting information that are theoretically available to us, we may have access to new technologies, the use of which, to some, will represent a gross violation of the person of a terrorist suspect. Is that the "same as slavery" - negating the suspect's "free will" to yield information, or not?
If we had a drug that could induce a state in KSM in which he could be convinced, to the point of desperate panic, that Allah would torment him for eternity if he didn't reveal the location of OBL, would that be "torture"?
As regards the real unreal thing, what makes you think you have a choice in the matter?
As for myself, I'm always suspicious of any great revelation that happens to confirm my pre-existing inclinations and prejudices, and that seems to make things easier rather than harder.
Take two Kierkegaards, and text me in the morning.
And, in your interest, I will reject solipsisms and false certainties. Thinking for oneself and projecting are not the same thing.
My advice is to work your epiphany-rate down gradually, first aiming for no more than 1 a day, then 1 a month, and so on. Eventually you may determine that real epiphanies are rare. You can live a rich life without ever experiencing a single one.
Enjoy your self-dramatic dance in your imaginary victory circle.
That's England quote demonstrates little, sesqui. It's a tenuous if not completely phony connection, not an objective one. And you can have no idea what would have been happening in Abu Ghraib if the Iraq war had taken place in the aftermath of successful follow-ons to 9/11.
We're not in a position, may never be, in critical respects cannot ever be, to perform a full and objective cost-benefit calculation of all aspects of Bush Administration post-9/11 strategy. The system is too complex, and the assessment vulnerable to bias and self-serving oversimplification at every point.
Instead, we bottom-line things politically, and make political adjustments. At this moment, we appear to be turning the dial several notches to the left, while some take advantage of the luxuries of peacetime to indulge in one kind of moral posturing, and to reject a different kind (in many instances the same people now striking the former posture were straining their backs to adopt the other a few short years ago). A few bumps in the road, and the dial will be turned back right on this issue - first quietly, if the bump's not too shocking, then dramatically if "the bumped" get angry enough.
Yeah, so's a 55 MPH speed limit. So are silk handkerchiefs affixing ankles and wrists to bedposts. So's the UCMJ.
We signed a treaty pretending to define torture. Inevitably, under pressure we sought refuge in ambiguity, relativism, and legalism - and we've hardly even begun to test the bounds of the last.
You're not in the position to declare any game over.
I don't know if you're joking or have a childish belief that precision-guided munitions have solved the "collateral damage" problem.
So you say when not posing as the high holy humanist. I think you identify in your imagination with the terrorist suspect undergoing harsh interrogation - not quite the same thing as "sympathizing with the terrorists" - while removing from your calculation everything outside the immediate scene.
I can answer most of your questions at once: There is absolutely nothing that you, strangelet, Andrew Sullivan, or Barack Obama has proposed that prevents the various problems of volunteers, officials acting in bad faith, and so on. All that you do is set up some obstacles whose main effect over time will be to ease your consciences. In the short term, you will encourage renditions, battlefield executions, voluntarism, overcaution, and so on. Over longer spans, you will set up ad hoc overreactions that will either be hidden under secret findings and plausible deniability, or will sweep away the would-be guardians of our narrowly defined moral purity.
As to the details of any legal regime and desirable levels and methods of oversight, no system - whether designed by Glenn Greenwald, Alan Dershowitz, you, or me - is going to be foolproof, or can overcome a presumption of bad faith on the part of principle participants.
Yet once again you fully conflate detainee treatment, in particular Abu Ghraib, with interrogation. We don't know what would have happened if we waterboarded - if we eye-gouged, dismembered, and flayed - KSM, but handled Abu Ghraib like Club Med.
I certainly accept as credible the beliefs of Petraeus and his people that civilian protection and respect of rights was critical to an effective counterinsurgency campaign. Dicretly combatting terrorist plots already under way or being planned is something else altogether.
Prior to the surge, multinational forces operated under another assumption about the "causes" of the insurgency and insurgency recruitment - that the very presence of US troops incited hostility and that handing over authority to Iraqis as quickly as possible was more important than establishing security. That turned out to be a simplistic abstraction that looked good on paper and sounded good in anti-war agitprop, b8ut arguably did a lot more harm than good.
A policy that aims to be both as effective and as humane as possible - humane both to the "evildoers" and to their actual and potential victims - would be better than a policy that emphasizes one while merely hoping that the other takes care of itself.
You two still don't get it - so I have no expectation that you will. As for Larison and Manzi, I'm sure they mean well, as I grant the vast majority of participants in this discussion do, but I haven't found their contributions particularly useful, and phrases like "part of the same moral universe as I am" strike me as melodramatic and self-serving: Oh, I'm so deeply appalled that someone else is addressing this issue from some perspective other than the one I prefer!
The scene of interrogation, the elements and the experience of "enhanced" techniques, loom very large when put under very close scrutiny. It's a familiar act of selective perception: One chooses to enjoy one's outrage over the vividly imagined violation of KSM, because the people whose murders and maimings he organized have faded into the past and the realm of statistics, and the people whom he intended to have killed and maimed are walking around whole and free. The scene of distant bombardiers dropping highly but imperfectly accurate bombs on distant enemies and unfortunate bystanders in distant lands for half-forgotten, but connected reasons seem hardly to register as a moral issue compared to the dramatic identification with a man whose faced is plunged over and over in water, inducing feelings of panic, fear, and shame, but little or no serious damage to him.
Being able to sympathize with KSM and AZ, but not their their direct and indirect victims, or with the people tasked with protecting their victims, does not represent some noble moral exercise. It's a primitive, highly selective version of morality, one sub-level of abstraction higher than the same psychological mechanism that enables, one might even say compels, a citizen to favor the lives of friends and family over the lives of unknown strangers. A policy based on a fantastical promise to privilege the health, comfort, and sensibilities of mass murderers over those of the citizens a government is sworn to protect, and of the innocents it will someday be forced to destroy, may make a portion of the populace feel better about themselves and their government, for a while. Their marvelously if narrowly upraised self-consciousness over the banished scene of rough interrogation won't survive the scenes of atrocity that will follow.
That's a silly study you link, strange, among other things based on stereotypical views of what constitutes a "conservative" vs. a "liberal" outlook on life and politics.
In addition, it makes an overly broad point in reply to a specific issue - whether the ridicule of Palin in '08 is in itself fatal to her future prospects.
I have long intended to write a post on scenarios and candidates.
If we imagine the range of possible outcomes for Obamaism from Epochal Triumph to Cataclysm, and attach letter grades to them, I would see Palinism, with or without Palin, as a valid response with decent prospects for success in scenarios C and D (Obama a disappointment to the nation and Obama a failure). Scenario D- to F - nuke attack-level cataclysm - would seem like a situation for the Person on a Humvee: "Save us, General Petraeus, you're are only hope."
In scenarios A (start chiseling at Rushmore) and B (good enough for government work), it likely doesn't make any difference in terms of electoral prospects, but history suggests we might as well put up a Barry Goldwater sacrificial lamb who can lay down some markers, perhaps to be followed by virtual Obamaist Republican (the coming era's Nixons and Fords) if a Reagan doesn't show up ahead of schedule.
I agree with much of what you say on this subject, strange, although, as I believe we've discussed on another thread some weeks ago, I think you project a bit much and invest a bit too much in your intuitions about your own age cohort and where its head will be in future years.
Lots of us old farts never would have believed that Rev Wright's spiritual stepson and loyal congregant could have been taken seriously as a candidate, much less elected Prez, in the good ol' USA. Lots of other people were sure that the mythical American bigot cavalry would ride to the rescue at the last moment.
IFF (if an only if) the tide is in Palinism's favor AND if she takes advantage of her Second Act entrance to "stun and amaze" (Machiavelli) the people, the 2008 stumbles won't matter, whether in 2012 or 2016 or 2032, and it's the people who point to them and expect them to matter who will be laughed at.
If, on the other hand, she either doesn't really want it or isn't really up to it, then that will become clear sometime during Act 2, and, again, the SNL/Couric i-view stuff will be the least of it.
Not exactly as I would put it - and it's not all about future President-Dictatrix Palin - but close enough for government work.
By "shredding her and mocking her," they put themselves in opposition to the base, and intensified the identification of the base with her. Anyone with some minimal experience of life, without an ego or professional aspirations obscuring his or her vision, should have understood what would happen when, with the election under way, you called the base's new darling, under heavy attack from all the usual suspects, a "cancer" (Brooks) or offered childishly ludicrous political advice (Parker) or made blanket judgments about Palin's real understanding of her people - from 30,000 feet (Noonan) - or simply accepted without question the distortions of her beliefs and her record (all of them), then seized upon them as an excuse to re-double attacks not just on her but on her entire constituency.
It's as though they wanted to split the party/movement - and right in the middle of a presidential election - all the while speaking as though convinced that they unquestionably possessed some higher insight into our best interests. It was a confoundingly, pathetically fatuous display.
Regardless of whether you consider Palin to have been justly shredded and mocked (I personally think she's terrific, but I have no problem acknowledging flaws and missteps), the behavior of the "reform conservatives" toward her exposed how tactically inept, how lacking in maturity, how ill-suited to lead or even to fight they were - unless they were really just on the other side, with or without realizing it.
Wonders never cease, and Caesars never wonder.
I'm a little skeptical that Mr. Sullivan has actually read, and, more important, grokked the entire thread. As I hope you are aware, I cited the UN Convention, preserved in his extended quote with highlights intact, in order to criticize it as what I believe the legal theorists call "void for vagueness," and distortive of policy and discussion, and also to criticize our having agreed to it as written as dishonest and short-sighted.
Mr. Sullivan asks, "Why are we still debating this?" One answer would be, because the law is an ass. If 70% of Americans tell Pew that the option of "torturing" terrorists for information should be preserved at least in rare instances, with ca. 50% in favor of the "sometimes" and "often" options, then we have a problem - not case closed.
I'm happy to have my piece linked, and I hope that, if perhaps inadvertently, a few Sullivan fans are exposed to the alternative views both on the larger question and on the tactics and attitudes coming from their side of the discussion.
his or her and our
jic my unconscious reference to Reagan as antecedent is mistaken for a sexist default assumption - especially untimely given whom a big chunk of the base clearly wants
note: I'm indulging in this OT because it's my darn thread and this theme I like and still consider under-explored.
People are going to start talking about us, grrrl.
Larison has to insult Sarah Palin and her supporters in some major media outlet for anyone even to care who he isn't.
If the reform conservatives want to be accepted as part of political conservatism, they might want to learn some manners. It's particularly unseemly for the smarty-pants, in-the-know, self-styled better angels of conservatism, the people intent on housebreaking conservatism of its troglodyte tendencies, to be so downright compulsively rude.
Instead of posing as the under-appreciated brain of conservatism, they need to get used to being part of the left brain of conservatism. Otherwise, we'll just keep hanging out with Mark Levin, Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Steyn, and Rush and the rest. We'll pick our Reagan ourselves. As we work things out, instead of focusing on that individual's and our flaws, his and our failure to treat the reform conservatives as the be-all and end-all of the conservative intellect, they can try to bridge the gap between the base's passions and intuitions and everyone else's prejudices.
And we'll thank them for it - though some of them better get started soon if they expect any of us to forgive and trust them by the time it matters.
Why haven't they been doing that? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that it's because they're social-climbing, fingers-in-the-wind, bed-feathering and -wetting opportunists.
I could argue the results. I've probably written the equivalent of a book arguing the results, and as important the plausible alternatives, on various web sites - right, middle, and left. One guy up above apparently considers me suspect because I was registered at TalkLeft and participated in discussions with relatively sensible Dems mainly about the '08 campaign, but was finally banned (or part-banned) for arguing about, you guessed it, the war in Iraq. (It was Big Tent Democrat who banned me from his threads. Jeralyn Merritt I lost all interest in when she converted to Obamanaut then offered a TL tote bag to the person who correctly predicted when Sarah Palin would be dropped from the McCain ticket. There was some other guy but he was basically the TL Kossack...)
But I won't argue the subject here. I'll just say that calling an undefined entity - the Bush Doctrine - an "Epic Fail" is childish. And off-topic.
Have you ever read THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM, strange? The Constitution of the United States is a mechanism and the American system is a machine for that reconciliation, ad infinitum/til kingdom come.
The Founders were true Machiavellians, in many ways - and Machiavelli was a democratic republican.
-Francis Beckwith
sesquipedalian on April 25, 2009 at 7:40 PM
I believe that what you advocate would last until the next major failure, perhaps a little longer as a result of so many in our current leadership now on record pretending that they didn't really go along with post-9/11 aggressiveness - perhaps not even as long as that, if we are lucky enough to gain actionable intelligence and a captive with time-critical information, leading Obama to take advantage of the reservations and flexibility he's quietly provided himself even while stirring up an attack on the prior administration for in effect the same things.
I agree that our prisoner treatment should strive to be exemplary and humane, but our policy should also be effective and resilient, and less concerned with letting others, under some amorphous concept of international public opinion, stand in judgment of how we go about securing our interests.
If we were committed to effectiveness, in all of its dimensions, first, we would avoid such a crisis, or we would at least have a framework for dealing with it. It's possible that professionals, much better informed than you and I are, would determine that a "soft" approach with an implied threat of getting as hard as necessary, would be entirely adequate - meaning less rough treatment viewed by some as torture, less voluntarism and informal heroics, less need for lies and secrecy, less recrimination and politicization.
Alexander's been on this campaign for a while now. His opinions have been noted. Others would disagree - except this his use of prejudical language and his tactic of over-simplifying conflation make disagreement almost impossible.
No one's in favor of "abuse," no one's in favor of "torture," no one's in favor of Abu Ghraib, and we're back to conflating interrogation with treatment in re Gitmo, with a heavy addition of propaganda conflated with facts still under dispute as well.
After several years of the Obama charm offensive, perhaps we'll see different, less effective propaganda by AQ and other jihadis, perhaps we won't. It's obviously speculative at this point.
I've given my views as to a preferable policy going forward. I have you to hear a response from you on it, sesqui, though maybe I missed it amidst all the rest.
A realistic strategic posture is another big question entirely. The role of the "torture meme," to use your language - which frankly I rather detest (phrases like "Epic Fail," too) - is, I would suggest, a teensy-weensy part of that discussion.
If we try for a new Fortress America - a distinct possibility, I believe - while the world, lacking its defunded, demoralized, and supposedly unwanted American pseudo-imperial sentinels, tears itself apart and irradiates the shreds, then the assumptions and requirements guiding interrogation of suspected terrorists and other enemies will likely be transformed in ways that would have the anti-torture chorus singing a very sad tune. You'll have to turn to science fiction for more detailed visions of how some future Obamaist sliver of the current American elite, behind the very high, very high-tech walls protecting it from everyone else, might choose to justify itself. I picture a Stalinist-flavor Neo-Byzantium, quite possibly with a range of words more pleasant than "torture" used to describe the interrogation-associated destruction of individual threats to the shrunken order. (To be filed under "Unintended Consequences - Speculative Scenarios.")
+1
Does it matter what anyone thinks about the internal workings of the Obamabrain and the Obamaself? All we have are the facts before our eyes and the context.
I'm not sure that immunity/pardons are required for further release of whatever documentary and other evidence, though they might be a good idea even before subpoenas are issued since the Administration has thusfar engaged in obviously unfair selective releasing/redaction against people who are constrained from speaking in detail in their own defense.
As for accepting whatever the DoJ came up with, not really: It would remain subject to review and revision. The pudding would have to be proofed. I'll just have to hope that wouldn't make AG Holder view me as a "coward."
As for your summation, I disagree with your characterization of what Bybee et al were doing: They weren't trying, in my opinion, to change a definition or definitions, legally or otherwise. They were trying to assess whether particular methods of interrogation could be applied within accepted understandings of law and precedent. Since much of the rest of your summary flows from what I view to be a flawed premise, I'm afraid I'd have to dispense with it at this point. Even if I agreed with it, that would still leave open the question of whether prior understandings of law and precedent were or should have been treated as sacrosanct. For instance, I've argued that the UN Convention was ill-conceived and that our ratification and affirmation of it was short-sighted. I also disagree about the implications of Dr Manzi's arguments, as you know.
As for the alternative framework I've put forward, I've addressed, I believe reasonably, your arguments regarding institutionalization/normalization, and I've suggested additional arguments for, in effect, bypassing the "torture" debate as irresolveable and moving to a humane, pragmatic, lawful, and honest approach that addresses the main underlying issues. I am not aware of any other substantial criticisms of it advanced here.
We agree that other measures effectively outlawed or outside of precedent may deserve to be re-considered.
Incidentally, the Inquisitors viewed torture differently than I believe you realize. The objective of Inquisitorial torture was often not to extract confessions, but to validate confessions in the subject's spiritual interest. Their beliefs about the soul in some respects overlapped Japanese Bushido or, say, the Native American warrior creeds. Validation isn't the same as verification, but the idea goes back to the old Roman presumption that intelligence often couldn't be trusted unless verified by torturous interrogation.
strangelet on April 25, 2009 at 11:36 AM
I'm toying with the idea of making passages from Machiavelli the center of my 100 days post. I don't accept your characterization of Obama, and, even if I did, seeing in him a Machiavellian pragmatist wouldn't be in his favor from my perspective if his means are ill-chosen where his ends aren't contrary to my interests and the country's.
Ideally, it would be a wholly non-partisan issue. When the leader of one party continually muses aloud about prosecuting members of the much-abused prior administration, and the jackals of the left start shrieking, louder even than normal, then it's a bit late and obviously unfair to start accusing those attacked, directly or by association, of acting in a partisan manner.
strangelet on April 25, 2009 at 9:05 AM
I appreciate your attempt to sum things up on the way to moving forward, but I must point to a typically dishonest and weasely post you link there from Andrew Sullivan, in turn linking to a typically dishonest and weasely post from Paul Begala attempting to defend his typically dishonest and weasely prior propagandistic utterance on his, see!, "we hanged waterboarders" argument.
IF we had hanged a single Japanese soldier for doing to an American soldier or soldiers what we recently did to KSM, and under comparable conditions and circumstances, then we would have been wrong to do so.
As Mark Hemingway explains this morning, that's far from what occurred.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZWQ4YTBiYjJiOGNiMjQxNGY5ZmUxYTNjOTM1MDk1MDY=
You would do well to think carefully, do whatever checking, and exercise common sense before taking anything Andrew Sullivan or Paul Begala says at face value. The odds of the combination of Sullivan and Begala on any subject of political interest yielding any approximation of useful truth are incredibly low.
(Quoting sesqui)
No, many if not all of the points you have brought up have been addressed by myself and others, in many cases repeatedly. When you constantly conflate issues, often under prejudicial assumptions and terminology offered as shorthand, discussion grinds to a virtual halt, we start repeating ourselves and getting confused... and then the thread ends... and we move on to the next entropic cycle...
For instance:
The opening "if"-clause contains an assumption that many here are not willing to concede. Therefore, they would be reluctant to jump to the "then" part. The second sentence is based on speculation combined with credulous readings of partial reports that happen to favor your preferred set of assumptions.
Another example:
A "zero tolerance policy for torture" is an absurdity, since under "zero tolerance" a harsh word or a raised voice would qualify as torturous. So, you don't really mean "zero tolerance," or you need to provide an exact definition of torture - which is impossible (see, extensive prior discussion).
I'm happy for your happiness, though not much, frankly. The happiness of one or two contributors to an internet message board doesn't amount to a hill of beans, even to a virtual hill of beans. 300 million Americans get to decide how happy they are about the likes of KSM and AZ using our policies to their advantage.
The Red Cross report has been discussed elsewhere, as have been your fragmentary narratives, including by coldwarrior on the other thread. Again, we get into the conflating with detainee treatment problem, as well as retrospective judgment of unnamed administrators and policymakers, as opposed to the more fundamental moral, theoretical, and foward-looking policy questions regarding interrogation methods.
Please re-read my Obama's "Never Again" means Lots More Soon post if you are seriously interested in this question.
There, as again here, I have repeatedly argued that an unrealistic and dishonest policy - that denies human nature (individual and collective), denies what we will do and in fact are doing, ignores the logic of war, encumbers and defames our own people for acts viewed differently than in their own time, and so on - will not only fail, but ensures far worse real outcomes even on its own terms, and will likely bring with it a host of unintended consequences.
The last point actually does go back to your question, phrased in typically prejudicial language, on "the conservative paranoia" about "the left’s increasing oppression." We think you guys have a tendency to fall in love with certain ideas whose flaws - logical and moral incoherence as well as poor outcomes - you look away from because your passion feels too good to be given up easily.
Good morning from the Inland Empire.
and
Last point first, my comments about Obama's "behavior last week" being "confoundingly stupid, insane, and irresponsible - altogether dangerous" were focused on "torture" memos and national security realm, not the pay off whoever's loans/credit cards realm.
I think Bybee, Yoo, Bush, Cheney, and others probably deserve various medals and other honors as we work to restore their reputations, and as we look to drawing further positive value from their immense experience and expertise.
At this point, I think that we need to err on the side of sunshine regarding the interrogation program, preserving operationally valuable information where possible. The suggestion of blanket immunity in the event of hearings might facilitate actually learning something useful from them, rather than tearing the country apart, though in the latter I think the odds favor conservative benefiting from the process and the Democrats destroying their "brand" for a generation, so it might be worth the legal bills to Yoo and Bybee. Others could advise them on setting up defense funds if necessary.
This latter option is known as the BRING IT ON! plan, and has much to recommend it, but it's risky.
To bring both points together, if we must have government stimulus of the economy, I suspect that if we offered to forgive credit card and student loan debt for everyone willing to undergo waterboarding to KSM levels, we would have tens of millions of volunteers, and alternative short-term employment for millions more. It would be extremely stimulative, and a much better use of all that money we're spending that we don't have and at this rate may never have except in the form of worthless paper and pixels.
I'd like to see Obama and Biden resign, though for different reasons, see Pelosi indicted or at least removed from the speakership, and have a bipartisan national unity government formed as we prepare - very deliberately - for the next elections and a constitutional convention.
Since hardly any of that last paragraph is, ahem, realistic, and since my impression is that Obama has already done terrible and worsening damage, yet doesn't have it in him to reverse his policies radically and consequentially, I think that those in place at specific national security-related institutions should be formulating concrete strategies for preserving core capacities toward eventual fastest possible efficient re-generation - and at the same time towards documenting what's being done.
But's it's early - maybe I can work up something better while I'm helping my stepmother with her new garden later today.
also
...I've heard the same general description but with different terms - call it what you will, the organic sex-violence stimulation-response/excitation connection is one reason 1) that torture is dangerous to the torturer and the torturing state as well as to the immediate victims - an argument for what you call institutionalization, in my view; 2) that so many people are attracted to this topic and effectively incapable of addressing it rationally; 3) that t-porn and horror are often thought of as "date" movies; and 4) that Barack Obama's behavior this week appears confoundingly stupid, insane, and irresponsible - altogether dangerous.
Which is why, instead of having wanna-be Jack Bauers taking the law into their hands out of frustration with their political masters, we would want a policy that's aimed at extracting information in a timely manner, by whatever means necessary and effective - only rarely involving anything that would fit the broad practical definition of torture - and, if ever intersecting narrow definitions of torture, only under rigorously controlled and well-understood circumstances (not the same, btw, as "on national television, live" or even as "other than classified").
There have been many regimes that strictly denied allowing "torture" that are known to have been the most brutal police states ever.
See, there's so much we agree about!
...though not that, necessarily. Have Americans been polled about KSM himself? Regardless, I think you might say Americans are rather less troubled by the prospect of bad things happening to KSM, or other terrorists, than to people they like, but that's only natural, and inevitable - and goes with "don't do the crime, if you can't do the time."
In any event, it's not your place to judge the American people. They're never going to like terrorists, but their judgment about what it's OK to do to them offered today is certainly informed a lot less by this than it might have been 7+ years ago.
As for what sustains the HOSTEL/SAW experience for viewers, and makes one gorno film better than another from the traditional perspective (character, moral themes, etc.), that's different from what attracts people to them (the latter being more relevant for the poster art). There's a wide range of opinion among film/narrative theorists over the role of plot and theme in the "success" of such movies. Did people go to the RAMBO movies because they dug the rebellious sorta-super-hero or because they wanted feelgood violence and stuff blowing up, or did they want the latter but need the former or vice versa or both or all and more?
I can speak only theoretically about the t-porn, however, as I generally find manipulative horror/slasher films extremely annoying (love the posters, though). I'd be interested, however, in seeing IRREVERSIBLE, which is sometimes discussed in connection with t-porn, and I've been thinking about SALO for many years.
sesqui, there are separate issues here that you continually conflate: detainee treatment apart from interrogation; the effectiveness of the particular methods discussed in the OLC memos; the characterization of those methods - either separately or taken as part of a pseudo-system potentially including detainee treatment - as torture or not; the culpability of the OLC lawyers and others with nominal or theoretical responsibility; the best moral basis for proceeding; the best basis vis-a-vis war objectives; the best basis vis-a-vis larger social objectives... and I could tease out a few more if I felt like it, since many of these issues are attached to overlapping but relatively autonomous moral, legal, and practical issues.
Other arguments you bring up in your "answering post" reprise ones we've gone into in detail on the prior thread - such as how to imagine the predicament of OLC lawyers and other responsible parties at the time (or in the future) facing a captive in reference to "ticking time bomb" or, as I suggested, "falling day-calendar pages" scenarios. I invite you to review that discussion again, and to try to focus and advance your arguments if possible, taking coldwarrior and my replies into account.
As for the surge experience, what it might tell us precisely regarding these issues is a complex something different again, but the link between our national agony over detainee interrogation and a civilian protection orientation under counterinsurgency conditions is a stretch. Some might also want to note that our civilians also deserve to feel protected. On that note, it's hard to see how releasing new detainee abuse photos is going to serve either the Iraqis, ourselves, or anyone else.
I do not believe that either foreign or domestic ends would be served by a "pro-torture" policy. I do think they would be served by a maximally humane/by all means necessary self-defense posture of the sort I've outlined, and would be respected and even appreciated on that basis at least as much as any other, with pluses and minuses like any other.
strangelet on April 24, 2009 at 9:36 PM
well, I realized that it might seem unfairly to tar you, and I suppose there might have been a more elegant way to have phrased it, but 1) the link goes to the actual comment, 2) and my text goes on to describe sesqui as the writer, 3) on other threads you have, in my opinion, gone on disdain jags among whose objects were undoubtedly (your fellow) gun nuts, and 4) the immediate context was rather figurative - in truth I'm not actually wearing a cup or helmet or steel-toed boots, and my snickersnee is in the other room.
So, ATC, I figgered I could let it stand. Your protest has been noted, and, by the time we put together the jubilee edition, if not sooner, we'll try to come up with something more precise, I guess.
strangelet, what we did when we waterboarded does not compare to what the Japanese did - employ a form of waterboarding in the context of a massive cultural commitment to torture, not just for the sake of extracting information, but for the sake of demonstrating one's own virtues as a warrior, in comparison to captives who by definition were unworthy of respect. This is a canard - like most such based on a half-truth or element of truth - being bandied about.
However, you DO point to one of the main criticisms of the Dershowitze proposal, that the existence of a torture warrant mechanism might regularize the process, desensitizing us to it. We would have to put our hope and faith, as with so many other areas of human life in our society, that an engaged populace through its representatives would continually review and refine the "insitutions" in keeping with its standards of humanity.
Remember, the question isn't "no physical compulsion ever" vs "rare (potentially growing in frequency) physical compulsion," but the latter, under open democratic oversight vs. inconsistent, informal, spasmodically overcompensating, destructive, morally corrosive use of physical compulsion.
Considering that the accepted the maintenance of the South's "peculiar institution," I think the obvious answer is that they would have accepted just about anything in the interest of preserving the nation - even things that many felt were totally immoral, in the interest of some day being able to eliminate them.
Your deployment of the phrase "institutionalized torture" is prejudicial, as is your insistence on a broad, collectively self-flagellatiing definition of "torture."
Let others determine whether what we choose to do is "torture," and whether that makes it a bad thing, and and whether that makes them want to do something about it. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that in Japanese and Arabic, just to pick two languages, have very different usages.
By adopting an open, results-oriented commitment to maximally humane but sufficient physical compulsion where necessary, we let our enemies use their own (on this score likely fertile) imaginations. If your objective is to reduce the morall abhorrent incidence of torture, then consider in addition that many who might, under your favored scenario, end up being tortured informally by Jack Bauer, or drugged, would instead simply talk, knowing that soon enough they would end up talking anyway.
The harder you look at a word, the harder it is to understand it.