Month: May 2009

Is That A Sea Change I Hear?, Ctd.

Ryan Sager looks at the new marriage poll:

I want to make the argument that we may be starting to see a “bandwagon effect” that will significantly increase support for gay marriage in the next few years.

The bandwagon effect — relatively well-established in social and political science — is when voters are influenced in their opinions or votes by which side they perceive as having majority support or being the “winning” side. While partisans tend to remain committed, more undecided voters react to two basic impulses: wanting to follow the herd and assuming that the majority of people must have information that they don’t.

Krauthammer: Withdraw From Geneva

That's the only clear inference one can draw from Charles Krauthammer's latest column in defense of the indefensible. Back in 2005, in an influential essay that helped move the US into the ranks of torture states, he wrote:

Let's take the textbook case. Ethics 101: A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. It will go off in one hour. A million people will die. You capture the terrorist. He knows where it is. He's not talking. Question: If you have the slightest belief that hanging this man by his thumbs will get you the information to save a million people, are you permitted to do it? Now, on most issues regarding torture, I confess tentativeness and uncertainty. But on this issue, there can be no uncertainty: Not only is it permissible to hang this miscreant by his thumbs. It is a moral duty.

In 2009, the scenario has evolved into this:

The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy.

Wow. We've gone from justifying torture in order to prevent nuclear holocaust all the way to justifying it for merely saving one innocent person's life. Notice also that all that is required to torture is "the slightest belief" that the torture victim has useful information. This exception is therefore not an exception. It's a rule, allowing anyone in government with any scintilla of a suspicion that a captive has information that could save lives to torture or abuse him.

And as Krauthammer was writing his first essay, his friends in the Bush administration were indeed constructing a permanent government program to torture suspects routinely to gather information – something that even the Nazis didn't do systematically, in coordinated centralized fashion, according to Darius Rejali.

Moreover, nothing below the level of waterboarding qualifies as torture. Krauthammer has to engage in some selectivity to avoid seeming absurd, so we get this harrumph:

To call some of the other "enhanced interrogation" techniques — face slap, sleep interruption, a caterpillar in a small space — torture is to empty the word of any meaning.

No, it isn't, as the long history of torture and abuse will reveal to anyone open to the evidence. What John McCain endured – excruciating long-term stress positions, for example – is torture, and the US has done it to captives. Maybe Krauthammer would take Menachem Begin's word on how sleep deprivation is indeed torture, as he experienced it under the Soviets. But the brusque dismissal of hypothermia, extreme heat, stress positions, and the like as non-torture is a sign of intellectual insecurity, not confidence. And it's an argument that McCain was not tortured (which is, of course, the repulsive current neocon orthodoxy).

The idea that Krauthammer's is an argument against the use of torture is therefore preposterous. It is an argument for the embrace of torture and abuse whenever the executive branch wants to use it, against anyone it deems likely to cough up information. There is not a scintilla of distrust of executive power in either essay, which reveals the radically unconservative vision that underlies the torture state. And the moral outrage used to make his argument seem less monstrous is mitigated by the rather obvious fact that, by the logic of Krauthammer, nothing that happened at Abu Ghraib was morally or legally awry (except the murder-by-torture of one prisoner). All the other techniques – ordered and authorized by Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney – were used against possible insurgents with possible real information that could have possibly saved the lives of American soldiers. Given his arguments, how does Krauthammer object to anything that was done there? Or is his response that it was amateurish and the real torturers and abusers don't take photos? Or that only Lynndie England is vulnerable to sadism? He can't possibly object to the cruelty in principle – just the fact that it slipped into the public domain. The screams of the tortured should be reserved for a few elite ears.

And no one can possibly doubt that a policy along the lines Krauthammer wants is a clear, ongoing violation of domestic law, the Geneva Conventions' Article 3, and the UN Convention on Torture. So when will Krauthammer formally argue that the US should withdraw form these international and obligations? If we are to follow his advice in turning the US into a state that routinely abuses prisoners in the war on terror and tortures them at will, then we have no choice.

Cheney In The Movies III

Cheney as Colonel Kurtz (from :30 to 1:30): "Horror and moral terror are your friends. If not, they are enemies to be feared":

More honorable mentions after the jump:

A reader writes:

The key aspect of Cheney which eliminates most evil film protagonists as descriptors is his place behind the throne. He isn't Sauron, Palpatine or Voldemort, all of whom were the face and inspiration of their movement. Cheney without Bush wouldn't have been nearly so effective. To me, Cheney is Grima Wormtongue, an errand boy whispering poison into unwary ears:

Lastly, Cheney as Kaa from the Jungle Book:

A big thanks to everyone who submitted.

Krauthammer vs Reagan

From Charles Krauthammer's pro-torture column today:

Some people…believe you never torture. Ever. They are akin to conscientious objectors who will never fight in any war under any circumstances, and for whom we correctly show respect by exempting them from war duty. But we would never make one of them Centcom commander. Private principles are fine, but you don't entrust such a person with the military decisions upon which hinges the safety of the nation. It is similarly imprudent to have a person who would abjure torture in all circumstances making national security decisions upon which depends the protection of 300 million countrymen.

Greenwald fights back:

If you now believe about torture and prosecutions exactly what Ronald Reagan advocated in 1988 — or what Israel today advocates — then, according to our establishment narrative, you are, by definition, a member of the Hard Left.

And nobody who believes what Reagan advocated could possibly, in Krauthammer's words today, be entrusted with national security decisions.  We've gone from Reagan's "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever . . . may be invoked as a justification of torture" and "Each State Party is required [] to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory" to the moral depravity of the Charles Krauthammers' explicit endorsement of torture and the virtually unanimous view of political and media elites that advocating criminal prosecutions for those who torture is confined to the vengeful, leftist masses.

It Wasn’t Torture As Such

Readers know that I don’t buy for a second that the techniques used against many prisoners by president Bush were somehow not torture or torture-lite or “enhanced interrogation.” But let us concede for a moment that everything authorized by Bush and Cheney evaded the definition of torture as “severe mental or physical pain or suffering.” What do the Geneva Conventions say about acts of inhuman treatment that do not rise to the level of torture?

Article 16

1. Each State Party shall undertake to prevent in any territory under its jurisdiction other acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture as defined in article I, when such acts are committed by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

In particular, the obligations contained in articles 10, 11, 12 and 13 shall apply with the substitution for references to torture of references to other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

2. The provisions of this Convention are without prejudice to the provisions of any other international instrument or national law which prohibits cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment or which relates to extradition or expulsion. That makes Article 12 applicable to acts “which do not amount to torture as defined in article I.”

Article 12 Each State Party shall ensure that its competent authorities proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.

If the United States continues to refuse to investigate these very credible and indeed confirmed acts of torture or even “other acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture”, it is in violation of Geneva. I’m not sure whether the various reports on these abuses, culminating in the Senate Armed Services Committee Report, legally qualify.

Nearing The Bottom?

Ryan Avent, back at his old digs after Portfolio's closure, thinks there is reason to be hopeful about the economy:

Threats remain. Any unforseen shock could get things deteriorating again (and there’s an outside chance that a flu pandemic could be such a shock). It’s also true that a bottom does not mean an end to pain. Recovery will take a long time, and unemployment will remain high well into recovery. But we are nearing a bottom, which is a very, very good thing. There are still a lot of people out there spinning narratives of utter hopelessness, and that strikes me as completely out of step with the changing situation on the ground.