Three detainees at Guantanamo were clearly tortured to death

The amount of circumstantial evidence for this is almost comical.

Asking too much of morality

Andrew Sullivan has a pretty interesting response to Sam Harris' claim that we should not rule out torture as an ethical choice in certain extreme circumstances.

To me, I look at this sort of position--that there are some "ticking time-bomb" scenarios in which torture should be sanctioned--and I start to ask myself if we're asking more of morality than it can give us. After all, human society is a big, complex, organic system. These kinds of systems defy description by analytically rigorous and consistent first principles--you see this all the time in our efforts to model or duplicate things with computers: the more organic something is, the harder it is to duplicate. Figuring out chess moves and modeling proteins comes easy, but things like natural language and even just simple walking turn out to be the difficult problems. With this in mind, it seems weird to me that we would think that there would be an analytic, derived-from-first-principles ethical system that perfectly provides a solution to every possible human choice and dilemma. In other words: even given that there is one true morality, it's weird to think that this morality is complete in the sense of the term used to describe algorithms (an algorithm is complete if it can find every possible solution).

What this means in practice is what we also find to be pretty obviously true: though moral principles guide us through life in general, they don't perfectly apply to every situation, and sometimes remain maddeningly silent on the best course of action. We tend to think of a "moral dilemma" as something we can find our way out of by applying some code of morality ever more judiciously, but it seems to me what causes the dilemma in the first place is the absence of clearly applicable morals. When we're in a dilemma--like the ticking-time bomb scenario--we're beyond morality's ability to help us. There is no "morally right" choice--there's just muddling through.

Note that what I'm saying here isn't that morality is relative or anything like that. It's as universal as you like. It's just that it's incomplete. We're used to the idea that for every choice, our morality can tell us which one is least bad--that morality always shows us the way out. But maybe there are times when there is no way out. There are times when you are--for lack of a better word--fucked. There are times, for example, when you are President and morality tells you that it is wrong to incinerate thousands upon thousands of innocent Japanese people, and yet you do it anyway. Morality tells you to do A, and yet no one in their right mind would do A. Does this mean the moral code that told you to do A can't be right? Only if you assume that the right moral code must be complete. But if you do away with that, another answer suggests itself: you had been ethically checkmated. There was no way out. You were simply fucked.

If this sounds like defeatism, I think things make a little more sense when we think about the crucial role that wisdom must play in exercising morality. Sometimes you end up in a dilemma--an ethical cul-de-sac--out of bad luck. Ask any hard-boiled noir detective, he'll tell you all about it. But sometimes you end up there because of your own foolishness and immorality. (Or maybe it's a little of both.) You can't just run amok and expect to be able to consult your little book of moral rules whenever you have to make a decision. You need to have the wisdom and foresight to avoid getting trapped in those cul-de-sacs in the first place. If you're in a ticking time-bomb situation, the real question isn't what the moral thing to do is--morals don't matter, you're going to torture the guy no matter what--the real question is, how did we get here? This guy's about to nuke a city. Where was the anti-nuclear proliferation strategy that would have stopped this from happening? What about other security measures? Why is this guy so pissed off that he wants to blow up a city?

To me the real sign that a code of morality is correct is that when you zoom out to the macro level and consider the events leading up to these impossible, no-way-out quandaries, it turns out that morality and wisdom work in harmony. It turns out that, if we had only adhered more closely to our code of morals, it would have led, in the long run, to wiser choices, and we would have avoided the ethical cul-de-sac altogether.

A moral code giving you the wrong answer in a highly specific, constrained, and contingent scenario doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't the right code; it could just mean that, through some combination of immorality, foolishness, and plain bad luck, it's already too late and there's no way out. You muddle through as best you can and at the end someone mutters in your ear, "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

This story will be buried

Scott Horton--one of the few actual journalists left on the planet, it seems--has a new piece in which witnesses step forward to question the official account of the deaths of three inmates held in Gitmo. According to the Navy, the inmates all committed suicide. Simultaneously. And bound their legs and hands together and stuffed rags in their mouths before hanging themselves. A fact which could not be medically verified after the fact because the bodies were returned to their families with the necks removed.

I'll have more to say later. But you really should read the whole thing.

Down the slippery slope we go

Sullivan talks torture:

Notice again how far down the slippery slope we have gone. Krauthammer's first position was that torture should be restricted solely to ticking time bomb cases in which we knew that a terror suspect could prevent an imminent detonation of a WMD. His position a few years later is that torture should be the first resort for any terror suspect who could tell us anything about future plots. Those of us who warned that torture, once admitted into the mainstream, will metastasize beyond anyone's control now have the example of Charles Krauthammer's arguments to back us up.

Decade in review: Shitty Events of the Aughts

The list is unranked. (Edit: on my machine the HTML is kind of wonky, such that the table is placed too low on the page. Apologies if you're seeing the same.)

No.	Shitty event	Cultural corollary	Explanation
1	Terrorists destroy the World Trade Center towers on 9/11/2001	Flag pins	It is worth noting that, for all the awfulness of the 9/11 attacks, their effects on the nation as a whole were primarily psychological. Strictly speaking, the destruction of two buildings in downtown New York hardly constituted an existentially threateneing attack--in a nation of 300 million, a mere 3,000 were killed, and America's infrastructure and capabilities were completely intact. Compared to a country that is actually attacked in a sustained conventional war--e.g., Britain during the blitz, or Iraq during the most recent invasion--the damage done was insignificant. Of course, the real felt threat of the attacks was that it demonstrated that another attack could come anywhere, any time. And it could be worse--it could, for example, involve a biological or nuclear weapon. Americans for the first time in memory felt physically unsafe--and, it seemed, not very prepared for this feeling. There didn't seem to be a protocol for what to do in a crisis like this--there was no tradition, for example, of the stiff upper-lip, "Keep Calm and Carry On" attitude as in Britain. So we seemed to be making up our own protocols on the fly. The most prominent and emblematic of these was, of course, the flag pin, which quickly became a ubiquitous accessary on news people and politicians everywhere. Though I think the initial sentiment behind it was a fairly benign one--establishing some sense of underlying national unity in a crisis--it was not long before it curdled into a cynical symbol of heavyhanded jingoism, one more politico-cultural bludgeon at the disposal of the pro-war right. The "death" of the flag pin came during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Barack Obama was criticized for not wearing the pin. Eventually the controversy fizzled when Obama began wearing the pin, but sporadically. By that time though terrorism had faded into the background, with the economic crisis at the forefront of everyone's mind. So the flag pin saga tracked, I think, the rise and fall of the post-9/11 "everything is different" mindset--the psychological effect of those attacks.
2	United States invades Iraq on false pretenses	B.O.B, by Outkast	Maybe this Pitchfork article puts it best: "B.O.B." is not just the song of the decade-- it is the decade. Appropriately, the contemporary hip-hop act most in tune with the Afro-Futurist philosophies of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and Afrika Bambaataa, wound up effectively crafting a fast-forwarded highlight-reel prophecy of what the next 10 years held in store. The title-- aka "Bombs Over Baghdad", a phrase that sounded oddly anachronistic in 2000, sadly ubiquitous two and a half years later-- is only the start of it. In "B.O.B"'s booty-bass blitzkrieg, we hear an obliteration of the boundaries separating hip-hop, metal, and electro, setting the stage for a decade of dance/rock crossovers. We hear a bloodthirsty gospel choir inaugurating a presidential administration of warmongering evangelicals. We hear André 3000 and Big Boi fire off a synapse-bursting stream of ripped-from-the-headlines buzzwords ("Cure for cancer/ Cure for AIDS"), personal anecdotes ("Got a son on the way by the name of Bamboo") and product placements ("Yo quiero Taco Bell") that read like the world's first Twitter feed. We hear four minutes of utter fucking chaos yielding to a joyously optimistic denouement (a point reinforced by the Stankonia cover's re-imagination of the American flag, which anticipates a White House set to be painted black). In a lot of ways, I think, the Iraq War was the real crux of the Aughts--the American establishment's "original sin", as Frank Rich once put it, that revealed its character as utterly wanting, and its fealty to core liberal democratic principles a fiction. If 9/11 was the question posed, the Iraq War was the answer given: an answer that had nothing to do with the question, that was based on false evidence, that was, as Obama would put it during the campaign, "dumb". The Iraq War revealed so much: the failure of the mainstream press to hold those in power accountable; the willingness of the Bush administration to dispense misinformation to achieve its political ends; the utter incompetence of the Bush administration; the spread of torture techniques throughout the military; the failure of the Democrats to stand up to jingoism and demogoguery; the failure of the Democratic establishment in general to identify the war as a mistake at the time. It is no coincidence that the current president was the only serious contender in the primary who was against the Iraq War from the beginning--the war had tainted everybody else. The narrative arc of the Aughts--the crisis, the fall, the attempt at redemption--has, as its central event, the Iraq War. It's tentacles reach into everything, into both parties, into the past and the future. The war, after all, had been prefigured, since before 9/11--since before Bush took office, when the neocons ran think tanks instead of US foreign policy. Saddam Hussein was on the minds of top officials in the White House from literally the first days that the towers came down. The false evidence that was eventually used by Colin Powell to make the case for the war was extracted using the same torture techniques that would spread to Guantanamo and back to Iraq at Abu-Ghraib. The incompetence of Bush's war plan forshadowed the incompetance that would be on display years later in the handling of the Katrina aftermath. And, finally, the Iraq War begat the political career of one Barack Obama, who would bring--or try to bring, at any rate--the conflict to a close.
3	United States tortures detainees in violation of the Geneva Conventions and US law	24	America's shift to a torture state did not happen in a vaccuum: at some point, it became an acceptable mainstream moral position to support the use of torture in dire circumstances. Out of this mindset was Jack Bauer born--or maybe, out of 24 was America's pro-torture mindset born.
4	Domestic abuses of power by the federal government: illegal wire taps, politicization of the Department of Justice, interference with various regulatory agencies	Dick Cheney shoots a man in the face, and the man apologizes to Cheney	In the heyday of Republican power, the Bush administration seemingly got away with anything, whether it was conducting unconstitutional surveillance on millions of Americans, using Justice Department lawyers to settle political scores, or censoring reports by the EPA to make them more industry-friendly. Not only was there no legal consequences of any of these actions, but the mainstream press--and the US Congress--seemed uninterested in holding anyone accountable for these transgressions. We all knew we were really through the looking glass when, one day in February 2006, we were informed that Dick Cheney had indeed shot a man in the face with a shot gun. For a delerious day or two as confused accounts trickled in and Cheney exhibited odd, guilty-seeming behavior we thought the whole Bush ediface would finally come crumbling down in the craziest scandal ever. But in the end it turned out to be a common hunting accident--and the victims bizarre apology to Cheney for "all the trouble" confirmed the invincibility of the Bush-Rove-Cheney political machine.
5	New Orleans is destroyed by Hurricane Katrina	"George Bush doesn't care about black people."	Katrina was the moment when the establishment realized that Emperor Bush had no clothes--when the idea that the Bush administration was incompetent and reckless finally made its way into the canon of conventional wisdom. The failure of an adequate response to the disaster was not in question whatsoever. In those heartstopping few days after the hurricane struck, the nation shook its collective head in wonder at how there could be people going thirsty and dead bodies lying uncollected in the streets in an American city. Meanwhile, Bush dithered in his response--and it quickly became clear that he had staffed FEMA with a bunch of unqualified cronies. His legendary assessment of FEMA director (and former horse pageant judge) Michael Brown's performance marked the moment at which his administration descended into farce. That outward sign of this state of affairs was when, at some MTV related event, Kanye West went off-script and uttered, next to a memorably flummoxed Mike Meyers, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Now, let me say that I don't think George W. Bush was or is any kind of racist, and that I don't think Kanye West is a very important figure in the grand scheme of things. But this little moment was significant because West's comment gained traction, as opposed to bouncing off Bush without incident. Bush was no longer the teflon president he once was. Katrina marked the beginning of a long downward slide in Bush's approval rating that ended at a record low 22% by the time he left office.

Forehead slapping time

So, Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize. But why? Not only has he only been in office for less than a year, but:

• he's still got the two wars going, and they are far from resolved.
• he will not be able to close Guantanamo when he said he would.
  
• he's completely reneged on his campaign promises of transparency and accountability for Bush-era abuses, including civil liberties and torture. See here (via Harinder) for an account of how Obama--with the help of a Democratic Congress--is actually continuing the war on transparency that began with the Bush administration.

Worst of all, this sort of thing will give Obama the cover to continue Bush's policies, making it harder to hold his feet to the fire on the campaign pledges he's broken. The whole thing is really heart-rending, really, because it likely means that we're just stuck with this awful, brutal, secretive government for a long time to come--a government that infantilizes its citizenry, assuming the role of arbiter of what we need to know.

Ultimately, though, the blame resides with the citizenry itself. The idea that our government tortures people and acts upon information gathered from torture is no longer seen as something dispicable, morally reprehensible, and a practice that characterizes only the most brutal and oppressive regimes. Instead, it's seen as a mere partisan talking point--a point on which reasonable people can disagree. But it's just awful. It proves that we are a savage people.

PS: This reminds me of when Micheal Moore won the Cannes Film Festival for Fahrenheit 9/11, which was not a particularly great film in any respect. It was pretty obvious that the Cannes people just wanted to make a melodramatic "statement". This seems like the same sort of thing--hey, let's stick it to Bush, they probably thought. Let's reward America for doing an about face and rejecting the Bush worldview. In the end, though, they just ended up stupidly endorsing a slew of positions held by Obama that are indistinguishable from those held by Bush. Ack.

Modernity, torture

My Blogger Dashboard is littered with half-written posts about what I'm about to talk about--it's just very hard to express clearly, and I'm still finding my way--but I'll just go ahead and try to blurt out something short that hopefully is not complete gibberish.

I've been trying to figure out what lies at the very, very center of modernity and Western thought and so forth, and I think it's something like this: that the whole thing rests on a single foundational insight about truth, namely, that no one is infallible. Or, put another way: it is always possible that you could be wrong.

Everything seems to derive from this one bedrock principle. The moment you acknowledge that any view uttered could be false, any position held could be wrong, it becomes clear that you must assume a position of doubt--one that always leaves open the possibility that you are wrong and that some dissenter is right. And the next thing that springs to mind is a model--the "marketplace of ideas"--where no viewpoint is prohibited (because it is possible that this viewpoint is correct), and where the correct and good viewpoints rise to the top. And in this model, the more that is contributed--the larger the marketplace--the better, because it increases the chances of a good viewpoint emerging. And besides the marketplace being larger, we also want it to be more diverse, because this too will increase the chances of finding a good viewpoint. And suddenly, we begin to structure our ontology around this epistemological need: we view society as consisting of "individuals", rather than the less granular unit of society that is centered on the family or clan, which has the effect of increasing the number of nodes in the marketplace. We encourage "individualism", which increases the diversity of the marketplace. We encourage "equality", so as to maximize the interactions between nodes, which generates more possibilities. Every facet of liberalism, and the general direction of liberal progress over the centuries, seems to be in the direction of increasing the magnitude, the kinetic energy, and the combinatorial explosiveness of this abstract marketplace, which is ever-ratcheting upward to higher and better truths. And it will never stop, because we will always think: well, it is possible that we are not now at the highest and best truth, because it is always possible that one is wrong.

And so the whole liberal project, it seems to me, has this epistemological obsession--a core skepticism that we can ever be certain of the Truth--leading it forward by the nose. (A lot of this, it's interesting to note, is intensely Cartesian: not just the fact that it is founded on a non-negotiable kernal of doubt, but also this very dualistic relationship between the material world and the mental world of the marketplace of ideas. This dualism is really brought out, I think, by the liberal conception of punishment as physical confinement. Crime--doing harm to others--is bad, because it inhibits or destroys other nodes in the marketplace. So by physically confining the criminal node, you prevent this harm from taking place--while also maintaining, to the greatest possible extent, the effectiveness of the criminal node. Note that we do not prohibit criminals from reading or staying connected to the world, nor do we limit their free speech rights. In typical dualistic Cartesian fasion, we jail their bodies but not their souls.)

Anyway, getting back to torture: torture seems to be the precise antithesis of this model and this way of thinking, because it leverages the body against the soul, imposing the will of the torturer node onto the torturee node. Nodes are only valuable in the marketplace so long as they are independent of each other and actually contributing original material; coercing a node to think and express certain thoughts removes the independence of that node--reducing it to a mere extension of some other node's will. When the node is tortured, it is, for all intents and purposes, destroyed. Worse than destroyed, even: enslaved. Converted into a puppet that is wholly controlled by some other individual, and yet nominally still a node-in-good-standing in the marketplace, it submits ideas and thoughts as if they sprung ex nihilo from an independent will but in fact they are the utterances of the zombified empty hulk of an individual. The torturer--the puppeteer--is thus in a position to illegitimately reap all the epistemological benefits of an "independent" voice that just so happens to say exactly what it wants to hear.

Now, some clarification here. What I'm laying out here occupies kind of a weird space. It's not the actual moral argument against torture; rather, it's sort of the--I don't know--anthropology of reasoning out of which the moral argument arises? I don't know. That might be nonsense, but as I said at the outset, I'm still feeling my way on all this.

EDIT: By the way, I notice that the little image I used for the post says something interesting--that modernity is the "yearning for the infinite". I would say this has it backwards: we're not yearning for the infinite, but rather, due to our axiomatic commitment to doubt, we condemn ourselves to infinite yearning--a state of affairs that I think is problematic in a lot of ways, and that I plan on talking about in a future post.

An independent AG at last?

Just when I thought all hope was lost, it looks like there will be the possibility of prosecutions after all:

President Obama does not intend to voice his preference for whether anyone is prosecuted from prisoner abuse cases, a White House spokesman said Monday, and will allow Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to make the decision.

And that's as it should be. The question now is whether Holder has the guts to allow the investigation to go up as high as the evidence leads.

EDIT: Maybe I shouldn't have been so optimistic. The crucial thing is whether or not Holder will be leaving the door open for criminal investigations and prosecutions of the OLC lawyers (and, for that matter, Bush and his cabinet). It looks like Holder is implicitly foreclosing on this possibility: you can hardly make the case that the OLC memos were written in bad faith and, therefore, invalid, if you are also treating those memos as the established law of the time in order to prosecute low-level interrogators for breaching them. Sigh.

For your safety

Once again, evidence is released that confirms that the Bush administration blatantly violated the Geneva Conventions and United States law:

A long-suppressed report by the Central Intelligence Agency's inspector general to be released next week reveals that CIA interrogators staged mock executions as part of the agency's post-9/11 program to detain and question terror suspects, NEWSWEEK has learned.

According to two sources—one who has read a draft of the paper and one who was briefed on it—the report describes how one detainee, suspected USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was threatened with a gun and a power drill during the course of CIA interrogation. According to the sources, who like others quoted in this article asked not to be named while discussing sensitive information, Nashiri's interrogators brandished the gun in an effort to convince him that he was going to be shot. Interrogators also turned on a power drill and held it near him. "The purpose was to scare him into giving [information] up," said one of the sources. A federal law banning the use of torture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with "imminent death."

The law was broken. Who will be investigated? Who will go to jail?

Who am I kidding? No one will be investigated or held accountable for this--with the exception, maybe, of a few low-level scapegoats. The United States has become unmoored, in a very profound way, from its liberal founding principles (or maybe I'm being naive: maybe it has been unmoored for a very long time, or was never moored in the first place). There is no longer even an expectation of justice at the highest levels of government.

But ultimately this isn't a failure of the government to democratically represent the people; it's a failure of the people to collectively behave in a civilized manner. As it is, too many Americans practice a sort of aggrieved barbarism that results not just in the lack of condemnation of moral outrages such as unnecessary wars and torture, but an exultation of them. It is a remarkable and sickening thing to behold.

The rise of empiricism on the right wing

Yet another conservative figure scoffs at the notion that waterboarding is torture, decides to waterboard himself as a stunt, and is completely humbled by the experience.

I just want to say that though a lot of liberals make fun of this sort of thing, it is actually a very admirable commitment to empiricism, in my opinion. I mean, this is a guy who formed a belief, and then decided to test that belief to see if it was true. Well, not quite: surely the only reason he went through with it was because he was so certain that he was right in the first place. But the important thing is that he was honest about the results. I don't think you can ask for much more from a person than that.

Incidentally, I think an odd side effect of this sort of thing--where torture apologists volunteer to have themselves tortured to demonstrate their point--is that it has become routine for liberal bloggers like Matt Yglesias to call on various conservatives to torture themselves. It's kind of crazy.

PS: I think another interesting thing for someone who defends the various torture methods used by the US would be to undergo not just waterboarding, but the other methods as well--e.g., sleep deprivation. These are just as much torture methods as anything else, even though intuitively they may not sound so bad and don't seem to entail any simple physical harm. But if you've been kept up for days straight, sleep deprivation really is torture, and a person will say or do anything to be able to go to sleep.

(Photo by The Ardvaark)

Let's get succinct

A point I was trying to make earlier about the contradiction at the heart of the "it's not torture" argument is better and more succinctly expressed by this joke.

The basic contradiction at the heart of the "it's not torture" argument

There are two lines that torture apologists take: either they say that torture is justified in certain circumstances ("it works"), or they maintain that what the US did was not torture ("the United States doesn't torture").

Addressing the latter argument, I think a fundamental problem with it is this: if the methods under consideration--waterboarding, sleep deprivation, exploiting insect phobias, "walling", etc.--are not "harsh" enough to rise to the level of torture, then why do they yield results? If forced standing is really no different than Rumsfeld "being on his feet" for most of the workday--in other words, if forced standing is no big deal--then why would we expect it to make a hardened terrorist spill the beans? So the contradiction is this: if the methods are lax enough to not be torture, then it doesn't make sense that they would succeed in wresting information from an incooperative detainee, and so you would be against using these methods on efficacy grounds. But if they are effective in coercing information from detainees, then there must have been a point at which the detainee decided that he would rather stop the abuse than keep mum about what he knows. But pushing a person beyond this "breaking point" pretty much just is torture.

That rule of law thingy

Ted Sorenson--a John Kennedy advisor--addresses law students:

“In a country based on the rule of law, in which no man is above the law, whatever his rank or title, no man can undertake, authorize or immunize unlawful conduct,” Sorensen said.

“Our current wonderful president cannot promise the CIA practitioners of torture that they will not be prosecuted,” he said.

Right. And yet you never heard so much as an "Um, he can't do that" from the establishment punditry when Obama made his royal proclamation.

We create our own reality

Sullivan distills the danger of a government that uses torture to extract "information":

And so Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi was first captured by the US and tortured by CIA surrogates in an Egyptian cell. Apparently, they beat him and put him in a coffin for 17 hours as a mock-burial. To end the severe mental and physical suffering, he confessed that Saddam had trained al Qaeda terrorists in deploying WMDs. This evidence was then cited by Colin Powell as part of the rationale for going to war in Iraq. Bingo! And we wonder why torture is such a temptation. Which politician wouldn't want to be able to manufacture evidence to support what he wants to do anyway?

In a strange way, the torture program was the logical--if horribly unethical and illiberal--extension of the post-modernization of truth that was movement Conservatism's modus operandi. They created their own shadow version of every truth-seeking institution that didn't produce the results they desired: so you had think tanks instead of academia, Fox News instead of the mainstream media establishment, Alberto Gonzales instead of an independent Justice Department, a political hack going through scientific reports on global warming with a red pen.

The torture program was in the same mold: the traditional institutions and methods weren't generating the right results, and so they created their own alternative institutions and methods on the fly--Gitmo, extraordinary rendition, torture--justifying all of it, I'm sure, with the sincere belief that the old institutions had been long ago compromised by Liberals and their anachronistic, "pre-9/11" mindset.

The internet is watching

One thing about this brave new world of communications technology that we don't hear much about is the almost ubiquitous, distributed surveillance that results from the fact that everyone carries around a handheld video recorder. So when Condoleezza Rice has a rather testy exchange with a Stanford student after some event:



...it can eventually find its way into an editorial of the nation's paper of record:

Consider a recent chat at a college reception between a student and Condoleezza Rice, who as White House national security adviser was deeply involved in the development of the authorization of brutality and torture.

Among the many absurd things Ms. Rice did was to offer this argument that waterboarding is legal: “By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.”

Pretty neat. And incidentally, I've always thought of this "distributed Big Brother" phenomenon as a good thing, giving us the benefits of surveillance (people get punished for doing bad things) without the accompanying specter of government abuse. Be good: society is watching you!

On a separate note, Rice's behavior in the video made me rise an eyebrow or two. When you accuse someone of stealing bread, and that person starts talking about how hungry they were at the time of the theft, that person starts to sound pretty guilty. Likewise, if you accuse someone of authorizing torture, and that person starts talking about how dreadful 9/11 was, it sounds like this is a person who, as a matter of fact, has authorized torture, and who is basically pleading for mercy given the circumstances.

Anybody else would have done the same thing! You don't know what it's like to go hungry! I had children to feed--I had to steal it!

And I'll tell you something. Unless you were there in a position of responsibility after September 11^th, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans....If you were there in a position of authority, and watched Americans jump out of 80-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people, then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again.

Hippocratic Oath: optional

Says zedzure:

At a certain point torture become about making one live against one's will, keeping the body of the tortured alive. Clearly important in this regard is some doctor in the room monitoring the victim. I have not actually heard much in the US press about this aspect and what must be some egregious breach of the Hippocratic Oath (though I read short interview in the German newspaper Die Zeit about a month ago that brought it to my attention). In fact, the only mention of a doctor in the room I recall hearing about was from a torture apologist who made it seem like a positive thing, something to the effect of "well, there's always a doctor monitoring the situation." I suppose we're still embedded in this absurd "is torture really bad or not" debate.

That's an excellent point, and one I haven't heard expressed so far--that torture is about "making one live against one's will", and that is why the doctors are necessary.

I know Sullivan (and surely countless other anti-torture bloggers) has repeatedly called to have the doctors who treated the detainees stripped of their medical licenses, but of course the establishment punditry has remained silent on the issue, choosing instead to all but sip gin and tonics as they coast from one pithy one-liner to another, seemingly unburdened by anything like, oh, facts or ethical principles or historical context:



Actually, looking at the video again I'm amazed at the number of truly surprising things that these people say. Sam Donaldson is the only one who even remotely looks like he subscribes to such basic principles of liberalism as the rule of law and inviolable human rights--and even he doesn't do too well.

Misrepresenting torture

In reading and watching various video clips about torture, I see a lot of the same misrepresentations repeated over and over. Here are two:

First, torture apologists--and even some anti-torture folks--often refer to the fact that a caterpillar was placed in a confined box with a detainee without also mentioning that the detainee had a fear of insects. Kind of a crucial detail.

Second, some have made the argument that since Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded so many times--something like 183 times in a month--he must have figured out that the waterboarding would not kill him, and that this fact somehow mitigates the badness of what was done to him. This argument, though, is based on a misunderstanding of what waterboarding does. Waterboarding does not necessarily convince you, on an intellectual level, that you are going to drown. Instead, it triggers the body's drowning response, which is a very visceral and traumatic experience. Indeed, even people who are voluntarily waterboarded in a totally controlled setting experience the full brunt of the body's drowning response. I've never heard of anyone who has undergone waterboarding and not concluded that it was obviously a form of torture. So the fact that Zubaydah was waterboarded over a hundred times doesn't mean that he was somehow spared the worst effects of waterboarding--it just means that he was horribly tortured over a hundred times.

(PS: Sorry for the lack of links. I'll retroactively add them in if I run into more examples.)

US, North Korea, torture

It is difficult for me to understand how torture apologists think America can retain any moral standing if we fail to bring US war criminals to justice:

Take a look at the most recent State Department human rights report on North Korea, updated in February. Under the section forthrightly titled "Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment," it lists that among other tortures, the North Koreans prefer "prolonged periods of exposure to the elements"; "confinement for up to several weeks in small 'punishment cells' in which prisoners were unable to stand upright or lie down"; "being forced to kneel or sit immobilized for long periods"; and "being forced to stand up and sit down to the point of collapse." If these aren't exactly the "confinement box" or "stress positions" or the "cold cell," they're close cousins. Shall we get into a debate about whether stripping someone naked and placing him in a cell chilled to 50 degrees and dousing him with cold water is materially different than "prolonged periods of exposure to the elements"?

One of the core commitments of the Enlightenment is universalism: the idea that morals apply universally. So long as we apply different standards to the out-group as we do to the in-group, we abandon this core commitment.

"This chapter is over."

Peggy Noonan--lately of "just keep walking" fame--lays out the case for not prosecuting Bush war crimes:

Mr. Obama has had great and understandable difficulty in balancing competing claims regarding how to treat government information on prisoner abuse. The White House debated, decided to release Bush-era memos, then said they wouldn't allow anyone to be prosecuted, then said maybe they would. It was flat-footed, confusing. The only impressive Obama we saw on the question this week was the one described by "a senior White House official" in the Washington Post. He or she was quoted saying, of the internal administration debates, that the president was concerned that a 9/11-style commission "would ratchet the whole thing up," and "His whole thing is: I banned all this. This chapter is over. What we don't need now is to become a sort of feeding frenzy where we go back and relitigate this."

This misses the point. Of course, it's good that the Bush era of secret executive laws and illegal torture is over--but there remains no good reason to believe that such a chapter couldn't happen again. That is the whole purpose of investigating and prosecuting these crimes, beyond achieving simple justice: it would set a precedent that circumventing the Constitution and violating important US laws prohibiting torture results in going to jail. Obama can ban things and end chapters all he wants, but it's not going to stop a future President from "going to the dark side".

Moreover, and probably more importantly: the decision of whether to prosecute war crimes shouldn't even be a political decision, and certainly not a decision made by the President. The Bush years has acclimated everyone so much to the idea of a politicized, non-independent Department of Justice that we forget that all this is Eric Holder's call, not Obama's--and that it is, in fact, inappropriate for Obama to even weigh in with his opinion as forcefully as he has.

PS: As a sort of meta-comment on all this, an interesting thing to consider is this: suppose that Obama's intention actually is to prosecute war crimes to the full extent of the law. What would a good strategy be? Certainly, it would be to appear to be reluctant or even opposed to prosecuting them, so as to avoid giving the appearance of partisan retribution. Then Obama can stand aside as the process grinds forward, sympathetically throwing up his hands and saying "what can I do? The DoJ is independent and apolitical." This would give the whole process maximum legitimacy.

So my point is, even as I criticize Obama for his position on this issue, I also acknowledge that his actions underdetermine his true intent, and we will just have to see how things unfold--and keep pushing for prosecutions.

Shifting rationales: A Few Good Men edition

Check out this nifty bit of writing from Anonymous Liberal:

This entire debate has progressed in an almost surreal way. For a long time, the Bush administration and its right wing apologists were in pure denial mode, claiming that the U.S. did not torture and conceding that torture was a bad thing ("what's a Code Red?"). After Abu Ghraib, the official line was that torture is against the law and these acts were the work of a few bad apples disobeying clear orders from above ("the men were specifically told that Private Santiago was not to be touched"). Eventually as the extent of the torture began to be reported, the Administration's apologists began to defend the concept of torturing terrorists in the abstract, while still not admitting to any specific conduct ("Private Santiago is dead and that is a tragedy, but he is dead because he had no code. He is dead because he had no honor, and God was watching.") With the release of the torture memos, however, we've now reached a whole new stage. Dick Cheney and his defenders are now in full on Jack Nicholson meltdown mode ("You have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. . . .you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall!"). I just hope we eventually get to the frog march stage ("You fuckin' people, you have no idea how to defend a nation. All you did was weaken a country today.")

So I guess that makes Eric Holder Tom Cruise.

Man, I don't think those two have ever been in a sentence together until now.

(Extra thought: damn, Google, how come you don't have a "search within sentence" feature? What if I want to search for sentences that have specific words in them? Get on the fucking ball.

I mean, seriously: why doesn't Google have the craziest-robust search queries of all time?)