Month: April 2009

Torture’s Smoking Gun

Frank Rich and I use our Sunday columns to make the same core point. Rich:

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq.

Yours truly:

The problem with torture is the enormous damage it does to the possibility of finding the truth. Torture forces a victim to tell his interrogator anything to stop the pain. There may be some truth in the confession but there is also untruth – and no way to tell the two apart. Every experienced interrogator knows this, which is why governments that are concerned with getting at the truth do not use it … The reason totalitarian states use the torture techniques that Bush did is to produce false confessions to create a reality that buttresses their ideology.

The Bush and Cheney ideology was that Iraq needed to be invaded because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and had an operational relationship with Al-Qaeda that put America under an intolerable risk. When the facts could not be found to defend that idée fixe, they skewed the intelligence. When there was no intelligence to skew, they tortured people to get it.

Or, to put it more simply: on March 27, 2007, when Zubaydah went before his combatant status review tribunal at Guantanamo, the judge asked him: “So I understand that, during this treatment, you said things to make them stop and then those statements were actually untrue. Is that correct?”

Zubaydah replied: “Yes.” This is partly how the entire war was justified: on a tortured lie. And this much we now know for sure.

Are Catholics More Concerned About Global Warming?

Kawanotakeshi

Nate Silver considers the evidence:

It can't be said for certain that religion itself is the cause of these differences, because we haven't controlled for other sorts of variables. For instance, there is some tendency for Catholic countries to be concentrated in warmer-weather latitudes, where people might naturally have more reason to be concerned about planetary warming. Still, the differences generally seem to hold even within particular regions; in (Catholic) Ireland for instance, 66 percent believe global warming is the result of human activity, versus 48 percent for the (Protestant) United Kingdom.

(Image by Kawano Takeshi)

A World Of Clutter

Tim Brayv dreams of digitizing all his books and turning his home into a sort of "monastic cell." Nick Carr responds:

Whatever its charms, the online world is a world of clutter. It's designed to be a world of clutter – of distractions and interruptions, of attention doled out by the thimbleful, of little loosely connected bits whirling in and out of consciousness. The irony in Bray's vision of a bookless monastic cell is that it was the printed book itself that brought the ethic of the monastery – the ethic of deep attentiveness, of contemplativeness, of singlemindedness – to the general public. When the printed book began arriving in people's homes in the late fifteenth century, it brought with it, as Elizabeth Eisenstein describes in her magisterial history The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, "the same silence, solitude, and contemplative attitudes associated formerly with pure spiritual devotion."

An Era’s Drug Of Choice II

Meghan O'Rourke responds to Margaret Talbot's article on cognitive enhancers:

Adderall is a drug for our Information Age not because it actually works as a “cognitive enhancer,” it strikes me, but because it merely makes it possible to do what we once used to take for granted, before instant-messaging technology and mobile email started to make our brains go haywire. That is, they make it possible to ignore that blinking light on the “CrackBerry” and finish a task. Studies have actually shown that multitasking and using email at the office all day leads to fall in IQ larger than if you smoked a joint at work. From that perspective, Adderall isn’t an enhancer. It’s just a corrective that gets you back to the norm. Only it’s not really a norm, just as drinking a VitaminWater and eating a power bar is not the same as drinking water and eating vitamin-packed fruits and vegetables.

Resisting Torture

Appleyard:

… the ultimate question is, of course: is torture absolutely wrong beyond all considerations of efficacy? The answer in western liberal democracies has to be yes. That answer does not require a metaphysical justification. It is just the way we are and how we define ourselves. That we might so define ourselves while averting our eyes – as Peggy Noonan has suggested – describes a likely state of affairs but cannot represent an explicit position. Torture is and will always be inevitable, it is a default human response. As John Gray has pointed out, that it should, once again have become quasi-respectable, is as clear as sign as any that ethical and moral progress is a myth. It is also as clear a sign as any that moments of respite from our fallen natures – like the moment provided by the institutions and mores of the liberal west – should be defended at all costs, not least against our own torturers.

An Era’s Drug Of Choice

Margaret Talbot is against cognitive enhancers:

Every era, it seems, has its own defining drug. Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for the anxiety of white-collar competition in a floundering economy. And they have a synergistic relationship with our multiplying digital technologies: the more gadgets we own, the more distracted we become, and the more we need help in order to focus. The experience that neuroenhancement offers is not, for the most part, about opening the doors of perception, or about breaking the bonds of the self, or about experiencing a surge of genius. It’s about squeezing out an extra few hours to finish those sales figures when you’d really rather collapse into bed; getting a B instead of a B-minus on the final exam in a lecture class where you spent half your time texting; cramming for the G.R.E.s at night, because the information-industry job you got after college turned out to be deadening. Neuroenhancers don’t offer freedom. Rather, they facilitate a pinched, unromantic, grindingly efficient form of productivity.

I’d say I’d leave that judgment up to those who want to use them.

This War Is For You

Alex Massie pin points a disturbing feature of American culture:

The trouble with the notion that Americans only fight wars for other people is that it encourages a mindset in which it is much more acceptable for the US to go to war than it is for other countries. Your aggression is wicked, our aggression is the disinterested defense of innocents.

Sometimes, as most obviously, was the case in the Second World War, there really are many innocents to be defended. But the United States was not exactly a disinterested player in World War Two. Nor can one avoid reminding you that the conflict left the United States a much stronger country than it had been before the Japanese dragged the Americans into the war. Self-interest and principle overlapped but even the Good War wasn't quite as clean or noble as is recalled.

Faces Of The Day

FLUKISSAlfredoEstrella:AFP:Getty

A couple kisses at the Historic Center, in Mexico City, on April 25, 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 60 people in Mexico is a 'serious situation' with a 'pandemic potential', the head of the World Health Organization stated. By Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Images.