Month: September 2006

A reader writes:

Begin has a nasty image problem outside of Israel. But it should be noted that his torture policy was noteworthy. As soon as he assumed office, after the general elections of 1977, he summoned the head of the GSS (AKA Shin Beth), and told him simply, "you must stop using all methods of torture. This is an order". The director protested: "Not even a slap to the face?"; "Not even that," replied Begin.
It should be noted that when he did so, the country was under a deadly wave of terror attacks. Not yet suicide attacks, but deadly nevertheless. And he stuck by his order.

When you have actually confronted what torture is, like McCain and Begin, you know how cancerous it is to a free society. The sign of a strong conservative is his disavowal of torture. The sign of a weak one is his embrace of it.

I haven’t posted on the torture bill yet because of its complexity, language and political implications, and because this matter is easily the most important moral decision made yet in the war on terror by the Congress, and I want to make sure I understand it entirely and have thought it through. Blogging can be instant and maybe should be instant. But I’m trying to read the actual text rather than the spin. I’ve learned these past few years that Cheney’s legal aide, David Addington, is absolutely ruthless in making sure that the United States continues to have the capacity to torture prisoners. I’ve also learned that if you do not read every comma, adjective and sub-clause, you may get taken to the cleaners by this guy. I’ve taken my time honestly to avoid getting trapped in the spin zone, and to listen and read carefully what both sides have said. Bear with me.

The near-anarchy in Iraq intensifies. 7,000 sectarian murders in the last two months, according to the U.N.

You might be surprised.

A reader writes:

I find myself troubled by your recent posting. Specifically, the line, "We have a dictator on the brink of nukes." By all indications, the Iranian regime is at the very least, 6-7 years away from a working nuclear weapon. Most estimates give it a decade, as in around the year 2016. Some predict more time. I have seen no credible reports that they are remotely close to a nuclear weapon. Have you?

Also, Ahmadinejad is not a dictator. He cannot make decisions without the specific approval of Supreme Leader Khamenei. A small point, but still.

I understand the difficulty in projecting domestic politics in a country as hostile as Iran. However, we know that Ahmadinejad is facing a dearth of support in his country over his economic failures, when he was elected largely on an economic populist platform. Seeing how the key issue driving his popularity appears to be his belligerence and feistiness towards the USA, instead of adapting a hard-line stance and feeding into his popularity, it puzzles me why we don’t treat him like the pretend fraud he is.

Considering that Iran will likely have its nukes by 2016, and Ahmadinejad is up for re-election in 2009, the smart move appears to be to apply sanctions and just wait him out. By that time, we will have a new administration who is able to competently deal with the issue, and Ahmadinejad will likely be tossed out by his own people.

In any case, they are not on the "brink" of nukes. This hysteria does nothing to help the situation. Personally, I don’t think any of this matters. Bush and company appear determined to deal with Iran and they will do so, over the rest of our complaints.

There are reasons to hope for the best, yes. And reasons to fear the worst as well.

Saline, Michigan, 6 pm.

"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness…

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer…

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient," – George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language."

I intend to study very closely the language of the Senate deal on "alternative interrogation techniques" before commenting further.

I think American Airlines just lost a lot of potential customers.

Sam Harris, fearless as ever, hammers the Pope for having … religious faith. One core element of Benedict’s address was that science cannot account for science itself, that there is something called the whole in which scientific and empirical discourse have an essential place – but not the only, or prime, one:

Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought ‚Äî to philosophy and theology …

Harris has no real answer to this (scientism has its limits), concedes that questions of epistemology can indeed make one sweat, but then dismisses Benedict’s point by arguing that he said nothing "interesting or controversial" about this issue. So, in one essay, Harris both condemns Benedict for being controversial in inflaming Muslims and then condemns him for not being controversial enough. I can understand Harris’ argument, respect his intellect, and admire his last book. But asking the Pope to be an atheist is not exactly illuminating. And between the pope’s call for reason-in-faith and the Islamist insistence on revolutionary violence, I don’t think it’s the "silly old priest" who bears the greater moral burden in these perilous times.

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

Respect for bodily integrity

2297 Kidnapping and hostage taking bring on a reign of terror; by means of threats they subject their victims to intolerable pressures. They are morally wrong. Terrorism threatens, wounds, and kills indiscriminately is gravely against justice and charity. Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity. Except when performed for strictly therapeutic medical reasons, directly intended amputations, mutilations, and sterilizations performed on innocent persons are against the moral law. 91

2298 In times past, cruel practices were commonly used by legitimate governments to maintain law and order, often without protest from the Pastors of the Church, who themselves adopted in their own tribunals the prescriptions of Roman law concerning torture. Regrettable as these facts are, the Church always taught the duty of clemency and mercy. She forbade clerics to shed blood. In recent times it has become evident that these cruel practices were neither necessary for public order, nor in conformity with the legitimate rights of the human person. On the contrary, these practices led to ones even more degrading. It is necessary to work for their abolition. We must pray for the victims and their tormentors.

Notice that terrorism and torture are treated in the same context and abhorred for similar reasons. You cannot morally fight one with the other – without losing the very moral law you are trying to protect.