Month: April 2009

The man who wants to export human rights and also torture prisoners in the US tangled with Jon Stewart last night. Their conversation went far beyond the edited show, and you can watch the video of it here. I should repeat that I long admired Cliff's defense of American and Western values and find his current position – that America should retain the right to torture with the same techniques as the Khmer Rouge and the Gestapo – as demoralizing as it is abhorrent. I also believe that it has darkened the rest of the world considerably.

But that's what happens when the city on the hill has a torture chamber attached to it.

The state Senate votes to grant same-sex couples full equality:

The vote was 13-11 in favor of the measure. The House passed a similar measure last month by a 186-179 vote. The two chambers must reconcile small changes between the two measures in a conference committee but this is seen as a technicality. Democratic Gov. John Lynch must decide whether he will sign or veto the bill or allow it to become law without his signature. Lynch has been silent on the matter, though he has stated in the past that he opposes same-sex marriage.

The momentum is now close to unstoppable in New England.

… then the rest of the civilized world will have to take a stand against the now documented war crimes of high officials in the American government:

Judge Garzón’s decision revealed a deep engagement with documents which had been released in Washington in the last two weeks, particularly a group of memoranda prepared by lawyers in the Bush Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) a report of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a memo released by the Senate Intelligence Committee, making it likely that he would focus on the authors of the torture memoranda and other lawyers who worked with them.

The OLC memoranda gave a green light to the use of techniques such as waterboarding, hypothermia, stress positions, sleep deprivation up to eleven days and confinement in a coffin-like environment with stinging insects in exploitation of a prisoner’s phobias with respect to specific prisoners, demonstrating that the lawyers had been deeply engaged in the process of application of torture techniques and not merely giving abstract legal guidance. …

Spanish lawyers close to the case tell me that under applicable Spanish law, the Obama administration has the power to bring the proceedings in Spain against former Bush administration officials to a standstill. “All it has to do is launch its own criminal investigation through the Justice Department,” said one lawyer working on the case, “that would immediately stop the case in Spain.”

Frum isn't drinking Kristol's Kool-Aid:

“Everybody knows, of course, that even when Al Franken finally makes it to Washington, getting all 60 Democrats-and-fellow-travelers to vote together on something will be like herding … something really impossible. Not cats. Cats I could envision all going in one direction if there was a little herring-flavored incentive at the end of the line. Herding rabid guinea pigs in a thunderstorm, maybe,” – Gail Collins, NYT.

(hat tip: Ezra)

Julian Sanchez investigates the root of our anathematizing torture:

…as the research of folks like Joshua Greene and Jonathan Haidt shows, we have a set of evolved moral intuitions that are evolved to be especially keyed to harm to others that is both intentional and proximate.  This (they suggest) is why many of us, in the classic ethics thought experiment, seem to think it would be acceptable—even obligatory—to switch a speeding trolley that is headed toward five people onto an alternate track where it will hit just one, but balk at saving the five by pushing an obese man into the path of the trolley. On this account, the discrepancy is just a side effect of the fact that our ancestors on the woodland savannah did not engage in many aerial bombing raids.

He goes on:

In war, we sometimes (and sometimes wrongly) accept the suffering that results from our actions because we cannot avoid it: suffering will be a side effect of actions aimed at concluding the war, but also of inaction that prolongs it, so we grimly tolerate its presence.

When we torture, suffering is the point; we cease to tolerate it an instead aim at it, make it our ally, hope to increase it beyond what the subject can endure.  Bracketing a thousand other sound institutional and practical reasons not to make a policy of torture—and everyone should read Paul Campos’ summary of Rawls’ crucial insight on this score—I find myself thinking that’s a difference that makes a difference. The first type of calculus might be tragic but right or horribly wrong; only the second is evil.

Kristol daydreams.

Clive Crook repeats the old line:

New controversy? The existence of war crimes has been around for several years now. And since Nancy Pelosi, among others, may be sweating as the truth emerges, "furiously" partisan seems to me to be  inaccurate. Moreover, there is simply no room for doubt as to the illegality of waterboarding, under US and international law. There is equally no room for doubt about the other array of horrors devised by Bush and Cheney to torture, destroy and traumatize its victims, including more than two dozen tortured to death in US custody. Henry Farrell responds.

Christopher Buckley is relatively pleased with Obama thus far: