Author: Andrew Sullivan

Silence Audible

Senators Gather To Caucus Over Hagel Nomination

Hillary Clinton – surprise! – has said not a word about the torture report since yesterday. She’s on record supporting publication of the report and against prosecuting anyone for war crimes, but hasn’t uttered a peep since the damning evidence was laid out for all to see:

In her memoir about her time helming State, “Hard Choices,” Clinton adds: “There was no denying that our country’s approach to human rights had gotten somewhat out of balance” after the Bush administration. She also praised Obama’s order “prohibiting the use of torture or official cruelty,” using the term the Bush administration refused to use for the harsh interrogation tactics.

Then there is Rand Paul, famous libertarian. We have just read a report that shows that the US government tortured 26 innocent people – about as deep an attack on human liberty as can be conceived. And, so far, he has nothing to say. These individuals are almost as cowardly as our sad, defensive, equivocating excuse for a president at a moment when we need clarity and courage.

Update: Rand Paul did comment today, caught by a reporter:

As he strolled to his Senate office, Paul declined to characterize the report as an attack on Bush like so many of his colleagues.

Instead the Kentucky senator, who’s attempting to chart a less interventionist course for the GOP as he mulls a presidential run, expressed mixed feelings on the report’s release and what it says about the United States — a sharp break from his Kentucky colleague McConnell, who blasted Democrats’ work as “ideologically motivated.”

“It’s important that people take a stand and representatives take a stand on whether they believe torture should be allowed. I think we should not have torture,” Paul said. “Transparency is mostly good for government. The only thing I would question is whether or not the actual details, the gruesomeness of the details, will be beneficial or inflammatory.”

Update from a reader:

It has been 24 hours since publication of the Senate’s report.  Your visceral reaction to publications and politicians not responding to the report on your time line is unfair and obnoxious. This is an important document which requires a thoughtful, sober response.  Everyone should be thankful that, for example, two prime candidates for president aren’t running their mouth without thinking, which is what a 24 hour turnaround would be in this situation. Not everyone runs on a blogger schedule.

(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty)

What The Torture Apologists Aren’t Disputing

Steven Taylor makes a simple but essential observation:

So far the only critique of the Senate report has been that the techniques deployed by the CIA did, in fact, produce good and useful intelligence. Setting aside whether that is true or not, keep in mind that such an argument is a defense of torture. I have not seen anyone disputing the actual content of the report. If you are going to be upset about the report, keep in mind what you are defending.

American Support For Torture Has Grown

This is beyond depressing:

Data shows that popular opinion on the use of torture by the U.S. government has subtly shifted since 2004, when Pew Research Center began polling Americans on the subject. Pew asked whether torture used against suspected terrorists to gain important information is justified, finding a majority of respondents (53 percent) said torture could never or only rarely be justified. But over the next five years, public opinion slowly reversed.

By November 2009, a slight majority of Americans said for the first time that torture could sometimes be justified. In Pew’s 2011 report — its most recent — 53 percent said the U.S. government’s use of torture against suspected terrorists to gain important information can often (19 percent) or sometimes (34 percent) be justified, marking a turnaround from 2004.

But Aaron Blake finds that not all polling is in agreement:

Pew in 2011 showed 24 percent of Americans said torture should “never” be used — little-changed from the 25 percent who said that same in 2009. But also in 2009, a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed Americans were actually about evenly split on torture, with 48 percent saying it could be used “in some cases” and 49 percent saying “never.”

The reason for the even split? Probably because people were given just two options rather than four. And so people who might otherwise say torture should “rarely” be used are temped to say “never,” because they really don’t like the idea of it. … So in sum, depending on how you ask the question, support for using torture in at least some cases — even rare ones — has polled at 70 percent-plus, around 50 percent, and also at just 38 percent.

Torture As Big Government

James Antle III calls out torture apologists who complain about government overreach:

[T]he case for limited government is weakened when those making it ignore or defend torture, testicle-crushing, and waterboarding, complaining only about big government when someone proposes spending taxpayer dollars to help people. And I say that as someone who has written a book arguing that seemingly benign and compassionate government spending can curtail individual freedom.

It is difficult to take someone seriously who thinks the imprisonment of human beings in cages and the behavior of government agents with guns have less impact on personal freedom than the capital-gains tax rate. That is one reason it is so easy for many to dismiss arguments against programs like Obamacare as being motivated purely by economic self-interest.

Darkness Visible: Your Thoughts

A reader writes:

First, thanks for the live blogging yesterday. It was exhausting to read and I’m sure much more so for those on the Dish team slogging through what is a very depressing report. Days like this make my subscription worth it.

Last night, Congress finally agreed on a spending bill to fund the government for the next year. Digging into the bill I found this on pg. 1353:

10      PROHIBITION ON THE USE OF TORTURE
11      Sec. 7066. (a) None of the funds made available in
12      this act may be used to support or justify the use of tor-
13      ture, cruel, or inhumane treatment by any official or con-
14      tract employee of the United States Government.

It is utterly depressing that we need to include this in a law dictating how taxpayer funds will be used, but as the torture report release makes clear, it is absolutely necessary.

Another is bewildered:

I’m trying to understand why Obama won’t own the report now, and why his administration has resisted its release. Did he want to keep all tools available to current and future executive administrations? Is his administration being held hostage by the CIA? Does he want to stand back and let Congress and the American people work through this without his entering the debate and unleashing Republican rage even more?

I think Obama is a great president and human being, so I am really trying to understand why he seems to be choosing the wrong side of history here. I hope there’s an explanation, but it’s an increasingly small hope.

Another has had enough:

I am disgusted after reading about how Obama is a shill of the CIA and refuses to follow through on transparency in government. He should give the Nobel Peace Prize back. He truly does not deserve it.

Another gives props to Obama’s former presidential rival:

Unfortunately, so far most of the response on the right has been how political the report is, and that it’s just Democrats being mad at losing the Senate (as if this report hadn’t been in the works for a long time), and how torturing people was OK, because, you know, terrorists! I am pleasantly surprised to find myself in agreement with John McCain, something that hasn’t happened in a long time. If he has credibility on anything, it is this, and at least thank god he is speaking up in defense of the report.

Will this cause problems for the US? Perhaps. But, when you’ve done something wrong (and this has all been so very wrong), it’s better to ‘fess up, take your licks, and try to move on. Burying this longer will not make it go away and undo damage that, IMHO, has already been done. Exposing this will allow us to move on, and hopefully, eventually, regain some moral high ground that we have sadly lost.

Another is more pessimistic:

I wish I had some insightful analysis that I could offer, but all I thought as I read of these atrocities was, “It won’t matter. It won’t matter. It won’t matter.”

The report won’t even cause a ripple in this country’s view of torture. If anything, it’s liable to strengthen the position that any and everything is justified, because look at what they did and continue to do to us. To feel outraged, you must view the torture in a vacuum, free of its associations with September 11. And I guarantee you that will NEVER happen. The apologists won’t let it happen, and certainly those who conducted and authorized it will never let it happen.

Add to that the political view that it was released by Democrats in their waning days of Senate power, on the day the Republicans had hoped to grab headlines by humiliating Gruber in front of Congress, and there you have it. The report is at once groundbreaking and astounding – and completely irrelevant if not outright damaging to its own intents and purposes.

I have a feeling we’re about to see, over the next few days (if the story even lasts that long, which in itself is telling), just how far we’ve fallen from our lofty heights. Osama bin Laden must be smiling from his watery grave.

More despair from a reader:

I never truly had my heart broken. Until today.

My father was born here in the States but grew up in Eastern Europe. He lived his childhood on the wrong side of the lines in World War II. The Nazis kicked him out of his bed and made him sleep in the barn with the animals. The Russians came in after the war and eventually turned his village into an artillery range.

He and his brother came back to the States as foreigners in their own land. He got a job, raised his brothers, found a girl and had a family of his own. He was a union man, a Democrat and a fierce anti-communist. He used to wear my brother and me out with stories of his childhood and coming back to America.

He would talk about the Nazis and the Partisans and the Russians. He was a young boy, so he was often insulated from what was happening around him, but not always. In his experience, the Nazis were terrible and the Russians were worse, but America was different. The stories often ended the same way. “What a country!” he’d say as we rolled our eyes and turned back to the TV.

I just can’t reconcile that his America is capable of such barbarism. To annex the tactics of the Nazis is inconceivable.

Perhaps if the masterminds had spent any time in an actual war zone instead of hiding behind a plum Air National Guard assignment or multiple college draft-deferrals. Perhaps then, they would have understood how gravely they betrayed the very America they claimed to defend.

It feels like the America my father loved so dearly died today. And I am heartbroken.

Another anguished reader zooms out:

I’m having trouble recalling a more depressing month.  There’s something about the grand jury decision in Ferguson, the grand jury decision in Staten Island, and the release of the torture memo today that feel weighty – and for me, connected.  Obviously the events in Ferguson and Staten Island have brought us to a critical moment, one that begs our attention to racial injustice, police brutality, the militarization of our police forces, and the profound inequities of our criminal justice system.  There’s been – rightly – much ink spilled these issues in the last several weeks, and hopefully more in the weeks to come.

But with the release of the torture report, I can’t help but think (and hope) that we might be reaching an even broader convergence – one that shines light on the cost of American “security,” at home and abroad.  The cost of the wars on drugs and terror – and the unchecked expansion of police powers that have come with – have wrought havoc on our budget, our laws, our moral credibility, our international standing, and of course the lives of people like Eric Garner, Mike Brown, and Gul Rahman.

I don’t have any hope that the incoming Republican Congress is going to do anything about it, of course.  We will all be lucky if they don’t make it worse.  But what a wasted opportunity for true conservative reform if they don’t.  It’s time we shortened the leash, lest the dogs run away from us.  Maybe they already have.

Quote For The Day

“Torture is the polar opposite of freedom. It is the banishment of all freedom from a human body and soul, insofar as that is possible. As human beings, we all inhabit bodies and have minds, souls, and reflexes that are designed in part to protect those bodies: to resist or flinch from pain, to protect the psyche from disintegration, and to maintain a sense of selfhood that is the basis for the concept of personal liberty. What torture does is use these involuntary, self-protective, self-defining resources of human beings against the integrity of the human being himself. It takes what is most involuntary in a person and uses it to break that person’s will. It takes what is animal in us and deploys it against what makes us human. As an American commander wrote in an August 2003 e-mail about his instructions to torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib, “The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken.”

What does it mean to “break” an individual?

As the French essayist Michel de Montaigne once commented, and Shakespeare echoed, even the greatest philosophers have difficulty thinking clearly when they have a toothache. These wise men were describing the inescapable frailty of the human experience, mocking the claims of some seers to be above basic human feelings and bodily needs. If that frailty is exposed by a toothache, it is beyond dispute in the case of torture. The infliction of physical pain on a person with no means of defending himself is designed to render that person completely subservient to his torturers. It is designed to extirpate his autonomy as a human being, to render his control as an individual beyond his own reach. That is why the term “break” is instructive. Something broken can be put back together, but it will never regain the status of being unbroken–of having integrity. When you break a human being, you turn him into something subhuman. You enslave him. This is why the Romans reserved torture for slaves, not citizens, and why slavery and torture were inextricably linked in the antebellum South,” – yours truly, TNR, December 2005.

How Cockfighting Changed History

dish_cockfighting

Andrew Lawler, author of Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?: The Epic Saga of the Bird That Powers Civilization, suggests that the vicious sport “may be responsible for creating the bird that today is the world’s single most important source of protein”:

Pitting two roosters against one another may seem barbaric and arcane, but it may be why the bird became so ubiquitous. Biological evidence suggests that thousands of years ago in South Asia, its ancestral home, the chicken existed only in small numbers. In other words, chickens weren’t kept for producing meat and eggs; there weren’t enough of them for that purpose. They must have had a specialized use, and some scholars believe that use was cockfighting.

It may have begun, like bull fighting, as a religious ritual. A clan or village may have pitted its sacred rooster against another group’s bird. In northern Thailand, for example, the faun phi ceremony honoring ancestral spirits entails cockfighting of a religious nature that may reflect ancient practices. And in Indonesia’s Bali, few religious rituals take place without a cockfight that spills blood into the soil, satiating earth demons.

As the chicken spread, so did its use in ritual and gambling. One of the earliest recorded cockfights took place in China in 517 B.C. The match was held in Confucius’ home province of Lu during the philosopher’s lifetime. The earliest unequivocal evidence of cockfighting in the West comes from this same era. In a tomb just outside Jerusalem, excavators found a small seal that shows a rooster in a fighting stance. The seal was owned by Jaazaniah, who is called “the servant of the king.”

(Image of cockfight in Tamil Nadu, India, via Wikimedia Commons)

Orwell Everywhere

Robert Butler remarks on the ever-expanding influence of the great writer 65 years after his death:

In his office in Holborn, overlooking the Family Courts, [Orwell’s literary executor, Bill Hamilton] describes the onward march of “1984”. “We’re selling far more. We’re licensing far more stage productions than we’ve ever done before. We’re selling in new languages—Breton, Friuli, Occitan. We’ve recently done our first Kurdish deals too. We suddenly get these calls from, say, Istanbul, from the local publisher saying, ‘I want to distribute a thousand copies to the demonstrators in the square outside as part of the campaign,’ and you think, good grief, this is actually a political tool, this book. As a global recognised name, it’s at an absolute peak.” A new Hollywood movie of “1984” is in the pipeline, “Animal Farm” is also in development as a feature film, and Lee Hall, who wrote “Billy Elliot”, is writing both a stage musical version of “Animal Farm” and a television adaptation of “Down and Out in London and Paris”. It’s boom time for Orwell: “total income”, Hamilton says, “has grown 10% a year for the last three years.”

His enduring impact is particularly noticeable online:

Type “#Orwellian” into the search box on Twitter and a piece in the South China Morning Post says the Communist Party mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, has attacked the pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong on the Orwellian grounds that they are “anti-democratic”. An article in Forbes magazine warns of an Orwellian future in which driverless cars catch on and computer hackers track “rich people in traffic and sell this information to fleets of criminal motorcyclists”. A story in the Wall Street Journal reports the Supreme Court judge Sonia Sotomayor warning that unmanned drones will create an Orwellian future. In a piece in Politico, Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale, advises, “To understand Putin, read Orwell.” …

Barely a minute goes by when Orwell isn’t namechecked on Twitter. Only two other novelists have inspired adjectives so closely associated in the public mind with the circumstances they set out to attack: Dickens and Kafka. And they haven’t set the terms of reference in the way Orwell has.

Interactive Intersections

Traffic Light That Lets You Play Pong with Person on the Other Side Officially Installed in Germany video games urban intervention safety public interactive Germany

Christopher Jobson presents a new way to kill time while waiting for the light to change:

Back in 2012, a trio of interaction design students from HAWK University unveiled a concept for StreetPong, an interactive game of pong installed at a street crossing that allows you to play opponents waiting on the other side. The concept video (above) was viewed a bajillion times around the web, compelling designers Amelie Künzler, Sandro Angel, and Holger Michel to work with design firms and traffic experts to build a fully-functional device. After two years of waiting, the game units have been designed and approved for use by the city of Hildesheim, Germany where they were installed two weeks ago.

Chris Mills considers the practical implications:

Called ActiWait, the idea is reasonably simple: rather than the usual push-button to cross the street, you’ve got a touchscreen unit. It lets you play Pong with whoever’s waiting across the street, rather than losing yet again at Candy Crush. Pong is just the start, though: the developers want to enable all sorts of apps, like speed dating, or traffic safety eduction for children.

Apart from the obvious benefits to humanity of spontaneous Pong games, ActiWait has actual, tangible benefits. It could reduce jaywalking (and thus increase road safety), by providing something fun to do whilst waiting for the lights to turn. It’s also an interesting use of public space, both making it more interactive, and giving complete strangers a moment of connection.

Plus, Pong.

Did Jackie Lie? Or Misremember? Ctd

Back to your regularly scheduled Dish:

Touching on the disjunction between how victims remember their rapes and how they are expected to remember them, survivor Katie Klabusich reminds us that survivors’ accounts often contain discrepancies – and not because they’re making shit up:

Despite having a public platform and a degree of credibility that a private citizen doesn’t enjoy, I’m not a good victim. My story isn’t airtight or unchanging. Even now, when I talk about what happened to me during my four-year abusive relationship, my story has alternate versions. Depending on how much I can handle on any given day, I will leave out details or add them back in. Depending on what aspect of my story can be helpful to another survivor or current news, I will emphasize that part of my attacker’s behavior.

Does this mean I am lying? Certainly not; it means I am a human being with a complicated psyche and lived experience. …

Because I didn’t report, I didn’t have to endure the process of retelling my story the way survivors who come forward in the hopes of prosecuting their attackers must. Most sexual assault survivors tell their story around a dozen times the first day they report — to the responding officer; to the triage clerk at the hospital; to the nurse at the hospital; to the doctor at the hospital; to their best friend who took them to the hospital; to their partner; to the detective. Having to tell your story dozens and dozens of times to dozens and dozens of people leads to discrepancies. Of course it does; how could it not?

She rightly blasts Rolling Stone for making it even harder for survivors to be taken seriously:

When a respected investigative journalism outlet incites a national discussion about what a victim is supposed to do, how and when they’re supposed to report, and whether we should even bother believing them, they are actively choosing to support rape culture and silencing survivors. As our “justice” system only sees fit to punish 3% of prosecuted attackers, most victims will only ever have the court of public opinion (should they seek it out) to vindicate them. Rolling Stone has taken that away as well.

Julia Belluz turns to memory science to point out that even non-traumatic memories can easily be warped, manipulated, or even invented:

In a British study on false memories, adults were led to imagine that they underwent a medical procedure that never took place: it involved a nurse removing a skin sample from their fingers. They then asked the participants about the surgery, as well as other events that were common in childhood (i.e. a tooth extraction). Study participants who imagined the events — as opposed to just reading about them — were more likely to believe they occurred, with about 30 percent reporting that they underwent the impossible surgery in detail such as, “There was a nurse and the place smelled horrible.” Through imagination, the study authors concluded, people can create vivid memories.