Month: April 2009

Breaking The Law, Suffering The Consequences

Josh Marshall on the torture advocates' cowardice:

Being bold means taking responsibility for being bold. As I've argued before, I think the answer to the ticking time bomb rationale for torture is this: that in the extremely unlikely circumstance that government officials ever found themselves in that position of having a ticking time bomb ticking away, they might have to make the decision to break the law. Not fudge it or keep their actions hidden, but take the decision on their own responsibility that it was the best thing to do in the situation — despite it being wrong as a general matter — and then bring their decision to attention of the people and law enforcement authorities and throw themselves on the mercy of the public. Thomas Jefferson explored a similar question and argument for the position a president could find himself in when faced with extra-constitutional or even unconstitutional actions.

In any case, if your patriotism is such that in an extreme situation you'd risk your own liberty to defend the lives of Americans, that's courage. But nothing else really cuts it.

Face Of The Day

SWINERaulArbuleda:AFP:Getty

Pigs are seen at a swine farm in Rio Negro, outkirts of Medellin, Colombia on April 28,2009. An outbreak of deadly swine flu in Mexico and the United States has raised the specter of a new virus against which much of humanity would have little or no immunity. The outbreak of the new multi-strain swine flu virus transmitted from human to human that has killed up to 149 people in Mexico is a 'serious situation' with a 'pandemic potential', the head of the World Health Organization said Saturday. By Raul Arboleda/AFP/Getty Images.

Defending Secrecy

Poulos wades into the torture debate:

Even someone who justifies the suffering of our victims or the corruption of our perpetrators cannot yet be finished. They must defend the secrecy; in so doing, they must defend trusting the government of a free and equal people to violate the terms of that people’s law, custom, and mores on terms which only the government is to set and know.

How can the country judge this theoretically acceptable?

By closing our eyes and walking. Fast.

Following Lincoln’s Lead

Jonathan Zasloff compares Bush's torture program to Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus in the spring of 1861:

Had Bush and Cheney really believed that there was an emergency requiring torture, they would have 1) said so publicly; 2) taken responsibility for the decision and defended it; 3) gotten Congressional approval; and 4) limited it as much as possible.

But they couldn't have done that, because torture was never about a national security emergency.

It was about proving an Iraq-Al Qaeda link for political purposes. Or establishing precedent for unilateral executive rule. Or about military dropouts and draft dodgers like Bush, Cheney, and Addington showing how tough they were. Or something.

Following Lincoln's 1861 precedent would thus have defeated the entire purpose of the torture program.

Beating The Rump

Noah Millman counters Douthat:

I want America to have two healthy political parties. And there’s plenty of material in the GOP DNA, howsoever unexpressed or poorly expressed in the party’s current form, that still speaks to me. So I care about the question that animates Ross’s column. I’m just not convinced that giving them enough rope to hang themselves is the way to beat the ultras. Give ‘em enough rope and you never know who they’ll wind up hanging.

A Conservatism Of Doubt

E.D. Kain gets what the Dish is trying to do:

I find [Sullivan's} style and approach to the medium of blogging, and to the exploration of ideas and the world appealing – necessary, even.  I wish more bloggers would air dissent as freely, or would admit to their mistakes as often, or would attempt to transcend the weary partisan landscape for a while, and seek – if not common cause – at least common purpose, deeper truth.  Some within the mainstream conservative movement have likened Sullivan’s “tactics” to those of Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing pundits.  But where the true difference lies, I think, is in Sullivan’s desire to seek not some arbitrary political victory, but rather the white heat of truth in whatever grotesque form it may take and, as Scott has noted, often by admissions of his own mistakes.

NRO’s Ed Whelan, Ctd.

Mr Whelan insists that this blog retract for the second time that he has written in defense of torture at National Review. I am happy to do so again and personally apologize again. He also insists that, pace the Senate Intelligence report, he attended no such meeting discussing interrogation techniques. I have no reason to disbelieve him, published his denial promptly, am happy to post such a categorical denial again and will await the Senate Intelligence Committee's retraction for the record. Others have contacted me with good faith concern that he has been unfairly associated with matters he had nothing to do with, that he does not support torture, and I take them and him at his word. It must be distressing to deal with this while attending a family funeral (something I was unaware of), and I am indeed sorry for causing Mr Whelan any distress at this time.

A Theocon Against Torture

Finally. This small essay seems to me to get to one of the critical issues. Although any single technique approved by Bush and Cheney (apart from waterboarding) could, if used minimally, not amount to torture, each technique used maximally could, and all the techniques combined, as they were, are indisputably legal and moral torture:

For not everything that could be held out as a motive for confession is intrinsically wrong: some level of discomfort, some absence of amenities, and some subsequent improvement of circumstances surely do not rise to the level of torture if offered as reasons for a subject’s compliance, and in some cases are probably not unreasonably utilized by interrogators. Yet taken en masse, the range of enhanced interrogation techniques looks very much like a strategy for breaking down hardened characters bit by bit; standing naked, shackled, deprived of sleep, kept awake with cold water and loud noise, prevented from cleaning oneself after defecation, and subject to painful (though not physically damaging) slaps and disorienting smacks against a wall—and then subject to repeated waterboarding over a course of weeks or months: this looks like precisely the sort of choice described by Lee and myself (though I do not, of course, speak for Lee in drawing my conclusions), viz., the choice to disrupt an agent’s capacities for personal integrity by disrupting his control over his emotions, choices, self-awareness and self-image, connection to other human beings, and judgments.

If so, then neither legal distinctions between this and the infliction of severe pain and suffering, nor consequentialist judgments about national security, nor even reasonable awareness that these terrorists were bad people, and that the US was in a very difficult situation, making hard choices under considerable stress with, in most cases, the good of the country in view, should obscure the judgment that these approaches involved torture. This judgment should especially guide us in going forward: we should repudiate such techniques across all intelligence gathering operations, as was done in the Army Field Manual for Human Intelligence Collector Operations and resolve to hold such operations to the highest moral standards. But we should hope that such a resolve is possible without descent into the politicizing and partisanship that threatens to knock any effort at serious moral self-criticism off course.

Quote For The Day

"War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished and it will be no defense to say, 'I was just following orders," – former president George W. Bush reiterating core American principles, 2003.

Of course we now know that American principles only apply to non-Americans. That's what is now known as American exceptionalism.