The Dish

I was at the opening night of Martin McDonagh‘s astonishing play, "The Pillowman," at the Studio Theater in Washington, DC, directed by Joy Zinoman. It’s the best contemporary play I’ve seen in a very long time, and one that seems to me to speak powerfully to our current moment. (Full disclosure: I was at the opening because my other half has a minor part in the ensemble cast.) The production is reviewed here and here. Many will find its subject matter shocking, although there is minimal gore in the production.

The play is set nowhere in particular but in a police state which practices torture. A writer, Katurian, is arrested because he has written unpublished short stories about tortured and murdered children. We are told by the interrogators that three children have recently been murdered in ways eerily similar to the writer’s stories. The suspect is also told that his retarded brother has been detained, interrogated and is being tortured. Katurian can hear his brother’s screams in the adjoining cell. Katurian is threatened with torture as well – is stabbed in the face with a pen, hooded, beaten up, and hooked up to electrodes (which are never used and might be phony for all we know). Eventually, Katurian confesses to the three murders. I won’t give any more plot twists in case you get to see it.

But by the end of the play, I was unsure whether any child-murders had actually taken place. We find out in the play that some confessions are false; in fact, a majority turn out to be false. And yet some other confessions may also be true. And we realize that, in fact, when torture becomes a tool, the possibility of actually discovering any reliable truth is itself a chimera. Coercion destroys empirical reliability. No jury of peers is allowed to weigh both sides of the issue; no independent police force collects evidence; no independent judiciary ensures that a trial is fair; no lawyers operate with equal standing with respect to the evidence, which is itself filtered through the police; interrogators, for their part, lie and lie again. And the interrogators – one sounds like Bill O’Reilly in his passion for protecting children – have good intentions. In a world like this, truth is a fantasy, and reason is always subject to the distortion of violence.

Yes, of course, I could not help but think of the military justice system set up by Bush, Cheney, Gonzales and Rumsfeld for alleged "enemy combatants". At the heart of most such cases, the fact of torture or the threat of torture renders any solid grasp on the truth impossible. Some argue that being concerned with torture in the KSM case is to miss the forest for the trees. I can only reply by asking them if they really believe every word of every boastful claim made by the tortured Khaled Sheik Mohammed? I have no doubt that some of what that Islamist monster confessed is true; but I’m sure some of it isn’t. And after his being tortured, I don’t think there’s any solid way to determine which is which. That’s why he will never go to trial; and the families of his victims will never know for sure who really killed them on 9/11. This matters – not as a question of "moral vanity" but as a question of empirical truth. When "enemy combatants" can also be American citizens, detained on American soil, like Jose Padilla, we are closer to McDonagh’s nightmare than we might imagine.

The problem with torture is not just that it produces bad intelligence, but that its existence and even the possibility of its existence taints all evidence and all testimony. It is simply incompatible with the entire justice system in the West since the Enlightenment and incompatible with military justice as well.  That is why it is illegal. Once it is endorsed, as you see most graphically in "The Pillowman," nothing is believable and everything is believable. Eventually the truth becomes merely one narrative’s power against another – one set of stories told by one group compared with another set of stories by another. The issue of veracity is settled by power, not reason, by force, not justice. This is the Schmittian vortex into which the West has been hurled by the Bush administration. This is the vortex from which we have to escape. Under this president, it’s impossible. But the next one will have a momentous choice.

Trust your gut.

This is a long email, but worth it:

Interesting post on the Butler report and the British case for war in Iraq. You miss, however, the critical phrase in Lord Butler’s quote. You cite Butler as saying: all competent intelligence communities "sincerely believed" that Saddam both "possessed and was bent on acquiring such weapons." Then comes the critical clause: everyone agreed, even "Hans Blix when he first took UN observers back into Iraq."

That is, of course the rub.  Blix believed, until he did the research on the ground…and then he concluded that Saddam had no meaningful WMD capacity, in a series of reports delivered to the UN and available to every government and every intelligence agency (and the rest of us, too).

In other words, there was uncertainty; there was an internationally mandated program to reduce that uncertainty; that program did so; its results were consciously ignored, dismissed and ridiculed. Those who did so were wrong. They choose to believe and act on what they wished to be true, rather than on what the best available hard data told them.

You say that you think the truth lies between outright deception and the impossibility that leaders of such demonstrated honor as Bush and Blair could lie to their publics. Probably so:  but it matters a great deal how close to one pole or the other of that dichotomy the answer falls. On the issue of WMDs, the answer is clear. Anyone who thought that Saddam’s WMDs presented a significant risk after reading, with care, Blix’s reports in early 2003 was not paying attention. I refer you especially to the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of this issue, which included a summary of the materials Blix declared unaccounted for, and the possible significance of those materials’ survival.

As Blix reported in February, 2003: "UNMOVIC is not infrequently asked how much more time it needs to complete its task in Iraq. The answer depends upon which task one has in mind – the elimination of weapons of mass destruction and related items and programs, which were prohibited in 1991 – the disarmament task – or the monitoring that no new proscribed activities occur. The latter task, though not often focused upon, is highly significant – and not controversial. It will require monitoring, which is "ongoing", that is, open-ended until the Council decides otherwise." In other words: with inspections in place, Saddam’s freedom of action would continue to be deeply impaired.

Given this, to argue for war after the first few weeks of 2003 on the basis of an existential threat from Iraqi WMDs (the "mushroom cloud over Manhattan" trope) required either flat rejection of the on the ground reports, or deceit about their meaning. My guess is that both tacks were taken by various members of the Bush administration, composed as it was of fantasists and cynics (and some who mixed both traits), and that the Blair team, more realist than their American counterparts, were the more purely deceitful.

A reader writes:

Here’s something I don’t understand: this recent pettiness and blog-style jabs that two guys, Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds, throw at each other. I have been reading the blogs for about 6 years and understood why it was that at one time, links and praise between the two of them made sense. But now it seems that neither understands that there is a different way of blogging and putting one’s personality across. Glenn is more upbeat and has less passion for political philosophy differences. A lot of the linked-to news is upbeat. Glenn’s trademark is the three letter commentary. 

Andrew is very open and personal on his blog. He lets the world hear about his personal life’s details: his family, his physical ailments, his pets, music, religion. Andrew also blogs in a stream of consciousness way so that mental contradictions happen. If one watches a breaking story on the cable news channels, one can see that reporters get it wrong, then somewhat right, then wrong again, and finally figure out what truly happened in time for the evening news. The stream of consciousness-like writing means that one will contradict himself as he formulates an opinion for the column or book. Since both bloggers write columns and books, evidence of contradictions or lack of convictions should be found in those mediums, not the blogs themselves. 

Both bloggers have much more in common philosophically than they have in conflict. I love reading both blogs to be exposed, in ways that seem to connect to me, to the latest in electronic gadgetry, porkbusting, space stuff, philosophy, discussions within conservatism, gay things, and a general holding of feet to the fire. This leads me to another question. Is it that libertarian-ish thinking people don’t come together in a meaningful political way because we find other people who think like us to be, well … pricks?

How to respond? I think the reader has some good points. I’m not sure what Glenn thinks. I do believe there’s a reason that libertarian types do not form movements. We’re not joiners by temperament. I think what distinguishes us is occasional orneriness. But the joy of the blogosphere is what this reader has figured out. Don’t just read one blog. Read a lot. Enjoy the disagreements when they help illuminate real issues. And don’t forget that behind these screens are humans: full of vanity, wounded pride, moods, misunderstanding, and occasional sulks.

It would be funny if the Bush administration hadn’t taken it completely seriously.

The signs are ominous, according to the latest polls. You can download it here (PDF). And you can feel it in the culture. When history is written, I predict Karl Rove will have a major legacy: the creation of a permanent minority party.

An Iraqi boy stands next to US soldiers with the 82nd Airborne Division and members of Iraq’s National Police patroling in Baghdad, 21 March 2007. Iraqi Vice-President Tareq al-Hashemi called today for talks with the country’s insurgent groups, as the Pentagon claimed Al-Qaeda is using children as fodder in their brutal war in Iraq. (By Ahmad al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty.)

Tom DeLay denies writing a sentence in his own book.

Forget rent-a-village. Why not rent a whole country?

A chav is unleashed at Number 10, Downing Street.