FBI documents provide countless claims by inmates that desecration or abuse of the Koran was deployed as an interrogation technique at Guantanamo. For good measure, we even have a toilet story. At this point: Did you really believe otherwise? Yes, these reports are from inmates; and, yes, those inmates are obviously biased, even trained to lie. But the sheer scope and scale of the protests, the credible accounts of hunger-strikes in Afghanistan and Gitmo, and the reference, cited below, of interrogators conceding that they too had heard of such techniques, seems to me to resolve the question. The U.S. has deliberately and consciously had a policy of using religious faith as a lever in interrogation of terror suspects. Is this “torture”? It is certainly part of psychological abuse. It is also beyond stupid. Do you really think that throwing the Koran around is likely to prompt an Islamist fanatic to tell you what he knows? Did anyone ask what the broader consequences might be of such techniques – in polarizing Muslim opinion against the U.S., in providing every left-wing hack rhetorical weapons against the United States, in handing the Islamists a propaganda victory that makes all our effort to spread democracy in that region that much harder? Still, we can be grateful for Scott McClellan for one thing: he dared the press to provide substantiation for the Newsweek claim. We’ve now got it. Will administration defenders finally concede we have a problem?
BUSH’S VETO: In my view, he’s right to veto federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. There is a very clear principle here: do you take life to save lives? My conviction is that you don’t, and that the human life in embryonic form is still human life. The idea of cloning embryos to experiment on them is morally repugnant; equally, using left-over, frozen embryos for the same purpose is using human beings as means, not ends. If that isn’t a clear, moral line, then I don’t know what is. My own religious faith in the dignity of human life is not necessary to support this argument, whatever the NYT says. We’re all humans; whatever we believe about our origins or destiny, we can all agree that each of us deserves to be treated as ends in ourselves, not material for others’ benefit. If we cede that principle, then we will slide (and have already slid) toward hideous forms of eugenics. Now I know many people disagree. But the pragmatic arguments they deploy – these embryos will be destroyed or kept in limbo anyway, they’re teensy-weensy – don’t circumvent the deeper moral issue. The only logical justification is an entirely utilitarian one, in which the use of “lesser” humans for the benefit of more developed ones is justified. But this begs an important question: in our society, there is no fundamental moral consensus any more, especially on contentious issues like these. Under those circumstances, it seems to me that the government should remain as neutral as possible between moral claims. The NYT interprets neutrality as funding embryonic stem cell research. That’s a funny form of neutrality. In this case, the president has carved out a policy that is, indeed, about as neutral as it could be. If the private sector wants to pursue this course, it can; if individual states want to, ditto. But no American taxpayer should be required to fund from her own dollars what she regards as a moral outrage. Keep the feds out of it. Let the states and private sector do as they will.
AND ABORTION? So how can I remain a very reluctant pro-choicer in the first trimester? Simply because the fetus is inside another human being’s body; her own liberty begins in her right to control her own physical being. Violating that freedom is another kind of slippery slope toward the erosion of liberty and property rights on which this country’s constitution is based. If your own body is not your property, what is? To clarify: I believe all abortion is morally wrong in every circumstance. But given our lack of moral consensus, the government should allow it to happen, while refraining as much as possible from facilitating it, and doing all it can to make it unnecessary (by expansive adoption practices). I know this view is, in many ways, philosophically unsatisfying; but it’s my best attempt to reconcile morality with politics in modernity. Most of our current political solutions to deep moral disagreement will be messy. This is not a reason to despise them.
IRAQ: Looking for the truly depressing view? Juan Cole has it, of course. It’s depressing largely because it’s not implausible.
The Dish 