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“It’s much easier to identify Republicans who have, quite literally, voted for torture”

so who has literally voted for torture? If you’re going to use a juxtapositon try to make it work – Hitchens uses a bit of real subtelty in response to which you post patent nonsense.

Hitchens point is I think honest and one that most of us recognise as going on in our heads. I know that I’ve in my heart often rooted for the economy say to tank when I dont like the incumbent party – its called Death riding and everyone indulges in it, even if they know its wrong and dont act on it.

There is no need to “root” for bad news. What Democrats are “rooting” for is for someone to honestly report the events that are actually occuring. But I suppose people such as the Wall Street Journal’s Iraq correspondent are just traitors for writing about what they see, eh?

Cranky

“They had to option to keep torture illegal, or make it legal”

NO IT IS AND WILL BE ILLEGAL IN THE US BUT MAY BE LEGAL ELSEWHERE. This bill doesnt change that – so it is not a bill literally legalizing torture

Re the Hitchens, the puzzle is that he’s never AFAIK admitted that his views have changed at all. Very differenct from the God That Failed crowd or his new pal Horowotiz, who never tire(d) of breast-beating over their past errors. When he left the Nation it was the magazine that had changed, not him.

Anyone ever see a Hitchens piece where he acknowedges that he’s switched sides?

Hitchens point is I think honest and one that most of us recognise as going on in our heads. I know that I’ve in my heart often rooted for the economy say to tank when I dont like the incumbent party – its called Death riding and everyone indulges in it, even if they know its wrong and dont act on it.

Then what, exactly, is Hitchens’ point? “Everyone indulges in it, but it’s only objectionable when it’s something I disagree with” is a pretty weak argument, isn’t it?

Katherine at Obsidian Wings is posting a long, very careful series about the history of extraordinary renditions. She is up to 1999 I think. I suspect part of purpose of recounting Clinton-era renditions is to show that toture is not a partisan matter.

There have been discussions on CT, IIRC, about the International Red Cross and/or other Human Rights organizations focusing strongly on behavior and actions, and avoiding direct attacks on politics or regimes. It is usually the right who are most offended by this pattern, e.g., where condemnation of torture in Castro’s prisons is not accompanied by a general condemnation of Castro.

I remember Bono taking his case & cause (tho I can’t remember what it is;doesn’t matter) to anyone who will listen to him, to the surprise of his friends on the left. Katherine I hope is not saying in her current articles that Democrats are as bad on torture as Republicans, and that I should fear Nancy Pelosi with power as much as I fear Tom DeLay.
This is simply not credible, and irretrievably weakens her case.

Power is a dangerous thing, and restraints should be carefully codified. But power will always be available, and our first priority should be to take care who has access to it. The American Constitution does itemize some specific restraints, but I think more tries to provide institutional processes to ensure tyrants are restrained.

Sorry if I went too long, but I find it an interesting question, to the point, and ask for help. I suspect those who know me would be able to guess my immediate response to Ted’s post.

uncle kvetch – its a weak point but I think that there’s a bit of a rope a dope in it. In every election in any country the opposition will get accused of talking down the economy.

That’s twice now that you’ve drawn an analogy between hoping things getting worse in Iraq and hoping for bad economic news. Sorry, but I find that analogy very sloppy. I maintain that there’s a difference between “My opponents are hoping the economy actually gets worse” and “My opponents want more Iraqi children to get blown to bits by suicide bombers.”

There’s a basic line of decency that Hitchens is crossing here–I don’t expect better of him, mind you. But I think his latest contribution puts him right up there in Ann “Liberals Want There to Be Lots More 9/11’s” Coulter.

Uh…my last post should have concluded with “right up there with Ann Coulter,” obviously.

“There’s a basic line of decency ” which people observe in practice but not in their heads.

I agree its a bit Coulterish but I still think teds point is weakened by being a) seemingly oblivious to the obvious b) hyperbolic use of the world literal.

As for economics and war – well being an economist I see every thing as degrees – people die during resessions and more people die during wars. But sometimes its recession are more the fault of the government while deaths in wars are the fault of the enemy. So I think its a good analogy.

“Katherine at Obsidian Wings is posting a long, very careful series about the history of extraordinary renditions. She is up to 1999 I think. I suspect part of purpose of recounting Clinton-era renditions is to show that toture is not a partisan matter.”

Not my purpose at all–though the only post I’ve ever gotten Glenn Reynolds to link to on extraordinary rendition is about that incident under Clinton, and if being able to blame Bill Clinton is face-saving enough right wing bloggers to acknowledge the existence of this bill and support Markey, that’s better than the current silence.

But Reynolds is shameless, and still has never covered the issue at all or even cut it out with the sarcastic “More crushing of dissent–I blame AshKKKroft posts.” Balance for its own sake is lousy journalism. I’m just trying to be as complete as possible, and I’m going in chronological order, so the two incidents under Clinton came first.

I’m up to 2001 now.

It is simply not honest to pretend the Democrats have been as pure as the driven snow on this issue. But the Democrats do not have to be pure as the driven snow on the torture issue, for there to be a huge difference between the parties.

Extrapolating from the few specific incidents I know of:
before 9/11 there were fewer renditions. The suspects were more likely to be guilty. They were deported on better evidence than other suspects’ confessions made. Suspects were more likely to be returned to their own country, where they were really wanted for a crime–not sent to a third country on charges that the government drew up at our request. We were more likely to make some good faith attempt to make sure suspects were not tortured.

Bill Clinton did not preside over Abu Ghraib. He did not authorize waterboarding. He did not assert the authority to detain anyone he wanted for as long as he wanted. He did not set up extra judicial prisons where interrogators–including unaccountable private contractors–had as much power as possible over prisoners. His Defense Secretary did not hide prisoners from the Red Cross. His justice department did not write memos trying to come up with ingenious arguments for why torture was legal.

More importantly, Bill Clinton is not President nor is he running for President. My guess is John Kerry is rather, there’s that word, sensitive about war crimes, though I wish Kerry would speak more forcefully on those issues.

Nancy Pelosi is not pushing to legalize extraordinary rendition and I have a very, very hard time imagining her ever doing so.

The Ashcroft DOJ probably requested these provisions. The House Republican leadership wrote them into the bill. A Democratic Congressman wrote the bill making extraordinary rendition illegal, and all of his cosponsors are Democrats. All of the Democrats in the Judiciary committee voted for Markey’s amendment and all of the Republicans voted against it. When Markey’s amendment comes to the House floor, my guess is a large majority of Democrats will vote for it and a large majority of Republicans will vote against it.

The Republican-dominated conference committee will probably write the provisions legalizing extraordinary rendition into the final bill. A Republican President will probably sign the bill into law.

The Republicans have three probable motivations in this:
1) To give President Bush as much power as he sees fit to do whatever he likes in the war on terror, even if it will lead to suspects being tortured and probably to innocent suspects being tortured.
2) To help the Department of Justice escape liability in the Maher Arar lawsuit, and get the case thrown out of court before discovery starts.
3) To force Democratic Congressmen to either vote for an awful bill that legalizes torture outsourcing, or to vote against that bill and be branded as weak on national security in campaign ads–exactly what happened with the homeland security bill.

So: There is a huge gap between the parties on this issue.

“They were deported on better evidence than other suspects’ confessions made.”

should be

“”They were deported on better evidence than other suspects’ confessions made under torture.”

I’ve learned that before I allow myself to get worked up by a situation described to me by a leftist. Its important that I ask them to specifically define what it is they are speaking of.
When you say torture are you speaking of visiting physical pain on a prisoner or are you including in that coercion through passive means as well? I’d prefer that information be gained through tactics such as sleep dep, disorientation etc instead of resorting to anything physical. Unfortunately, and contrary to a popular progressive myth, physical torture works and works well.
I think before you demand a stop to this means of extracting information, you should ask yourself what effect that would have on our efforts to prevent another 9-11. And if another 9-11 were to occur that could have been prevented in this way. What effect do you think that will have on the citizenry? And how do you think they’ll express that to those of you who tied the governments hands and enabled
the mass murderers?

So mike would vote for torture too; I’m glad we got that straight.

A simple question: do you think the scandal at Abu Ghraib has made terrorist attacks on the USA more or less likely?

When you say torture are you speaking of visiting physical pain on a prisoner or are you including in that coercion through passive means as well?

Mike, here are some of the methods of interrogation used in countries to which the US has rendered suspected terrorists, according to the US State Department:

Egypt: Suspension from a ceiling or doorframe; beatings with fists, whips, metal rods, and other objects; administration of electric shocks; being doused with cold water; sexual assault or threat with sexual assault

Jordan: Beatings on the soles of the feet; prolonged suspension in contorted positions; beatings

Morocco: Severe beatings

Pakistan: Beatings; burning with cigarettes; sexual assault; administration of electric shocks; being hung upside down; forced spreading of the legs with bar fetters

Saudi Arabia: Beatings; whippings; suspension from bards by handcuffs; drugging

Syria: Administration of electric shocks; pulling out fingernails; forcing objects into the rectum; beatings; bending detainees into the frame of a wheel and whipping exposed body parts.

Source: http://www.hrw.org/press/2003/04/torture.htm

If ever you want to send Hitchens back across the Pond to us, I know of place in Belmarsh where he could spend some quality time, writing, and stuff.

Uncle – “I’m still struggling to figure out exactly what you found defensible about his piece, other than the fact that people who you disagree with didn’t like it.”

No firstly I read it as an attack on the evasiveness of those who disagree with him – which he personally dislikes and which he has repeatedly explained to us is one of the reason he went over “to the other side” and secondly its an attack on their expressed views – both of which seem entirely valid. So I think that this is an entirely defensible article to write and I’ve seen many explaining similar things the other way – i.e. why they left the right because of its black and white attitude etc.

Ted well you might say you’re literally killing your children if you make them walk to school since they might get run over by someone else. Most dictionaries acknowledge its use as in both the “literal sense” and its colloquial sense; in other words its more likely to precipitate a semantic than substantive argument. It’s use doesn’t strengthen your case.

I’m all for not outsourcing torture.

However, the divide between countries that torture and those that don’t unintentionally obscures what is done in the name of regular ‘punishment’ in this country. Personally, I think putting people into lightless, small holes for months at a stretch is torture, although it is a common practice in prisons in the States. I also think the negligent policing of prisons is a form of torture — of a kind that was practice in the Gulag. As Solzhenitsyn points out, one of the pains facing the political prisoner was being left in the power of thieves by the guards.

Here’s a nice case from the files of the ACLU:

In a legal complaint that reads like a nightmare scenario from the graphic HBO prison drama “Oz,” the ACLU detailed the story of 33-year-old Navy veteran Roderick Johnson of Marshall, Texas, who for the last 18 months has been bought and sold by gangs, raped, abused, and degraded nearly every day.

“Prison officials knew that gangs made Roderick Johnson their sex slave and did nothing to help him,” said Margaret Winter, Associate Director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “Our lawsuit shows that Texas prison officials think black men can’t be victims and believe gay men always want sex — so they threw our client to the wolves.”

According to the ACLU complaint, Johnson appeared before the prison’s all-white classification committee seven separate times asking to be placed in safe keeping from predatory prisoners. Instead of protecting Johnson, the ACLU complaint charges, the committee members taunted him and called him a “dirty tramp,” and one said, “There’s no reason why Black punks can’t fight if they don’t want to fuck.”

The rape of prisoners, of course, is standard fare for stand up comedians in this country. I don’t know, did stand up comedians tells jokes about Jews going up in smoke in Nazi Germany? In any case, I’m not sure that your standard American prisoner will be handled so differently in Egypt than he will in Iowa City, Texas.

Bad news favors challengers, and always has.

Hmm, I dunno. I thought most pundits agree that a hypothetical terrorist act in the US before Nov. 2 would favor Bush.

So, while the Democrats may hope that things don’t work out in Iraq short-term, one could easily imagine that the Republicans are rooting for terrorists to succeed in the US and kill a bunch of us. Bastards.

Mike, I apologize for jumping on what is a highly defensible (but not ironclad) interpretation of the hitchens quote. Ellipses are dangerous, and in my view they should replace only truly independent clauses and modifiers, rather than fusing the subject of one sentence with the predicate of another spoken in a different voice. Still on second reading I admit your interpretation is likely the correct one.

Mike (8:36) writes, “I think before you demand a stop to this means of extracting information, you should ask yourself what effect that would have on our efforts to prevent another 9-11.”

Mike – I think you should understand that the main goal of inserting this provision into the bill is political. It is an attempt to cover the #sses of those who have already been participating in this currently illegal activity. The White House, the Pentagon, and the Justice Dept. were caught with their pants down when the Abu Graib investigation didn’t stop with just prosecuting a few guards. If the Bush Admin was so gun-ho about preventing another 9/11 they wouldn’t have been so blase about letting the perpetrators of the first 9/11 attack melt away at Tora Bora. And, they most certainly wouldn’t have transferred our best special ops, drones, etc., to Kuwait to prepare for invading Iraq after realizing their mistake at Tora Bora if they were serious about preventing another 9/11. Now, repeat what Bush was forced to say during the debate, “I know Osama bin Laden was the one who attacked us. I know that.” And I hope you and Bush are sincere because if there is another 9/11 it will be directed from the hinterlands of the Afghan/Pakistan border and not the slums of Baghdad.

(I wonder if this new responsibility for the Director of Homeland Security has anything to do with Tom Ridge resigning? The ease with which this administration views using torture has to appall an exmarine.It has to appall a former marine.)

They released the floor version of the bill that the House will take up this week.

The torture outsourcing provisions are still in there.

No surprise. But damn, damn, damn.

Legislative process question: these provisions are not in the Senate version in the bill. Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins are the main sponsors of the Senate version. Do they get any special say in the conference committee, or can DeLay et. al shut out the Democrats and moderates as with the energy and Medicare bills?

Collins may be key. To the (metaphorical) barricades, Mainers!

“I’d prefer that information be gained through tactics such as sleep dep, disorientation etc instead of resorting to anything physical. Unfortunately, and contrary to a popular progressive myth, physical torture works and works well.”

I’m sorry, you can “prefer” whatever you like to prefer, it doesn’t matter, because the US has signed on to conventions against torture, and approved them as federal legislation, so it CANNOT do any of those things, from the mildest to the strongest form of torture, they’re all I-L-L-E-G-A-L. If this bill passes, it will mean the US is passing legislation in overt contradiction to those conventions, it may not be the first time but it’s getting serious enough by now and I for one am disturbed even more by the fact people seem to not give a shit about international law the US is bound to, except when it comes to claiming it to the US advantage. I’m not even getting into the ethical debate, I have nothing but disgust for people willing to consider torture, they deserve all their fantasies enacted on them, see if they favour sleep deprivation that much after testing out how physical it is, on their own skin. But the legal aspect is even more worrying.

In other words. The ethical debate is closed already, there is no reopening it, the US is bound to conventions against torture, still now, no exceptions, no special circumstances, it’s all already black on white and ratified. So there is NO point in discussing if it could ever be justified, it’s like discussing if theft could ever be justified, it can’t, cos it’s illegal. If you want to make theft legal, you don’t come up with a way to outsource it to someone outside your legislation, when _even that_ is forbidden by the laws you already have. You abolish the laws against theft. The US must either denounce the conventions or else respect them in full, there’s no third way, except illegality.

Is legality a “progressive myth”? So does that make illegality and circumvention of laws and treaties without even denouncing them, in total impunity and unaccountability (because who could ever hold an economic and military superpower accountable? who could impose sanctions on the US? martians?), what, conservative values?

All politics come with a dose of hypocrisy and cynicism, but at least spare us all the benevolent bullshit about human rights and democracy and oh, security. This is not going to make anyone more secure except those in power. Torture serves no practical purpose but intimidation, and that is precisely one of the reasons why there are conventions against it.

For what it’s worth, NPR did a lengthy piece about both the House and Senate versions of the bill this morning, without so much as a word about extraordinary rendition.

Andrew: I know, but how can they do it, legally? you can’t have countries singlehandedly make their own exceptions to a Convention against torture. There’s no point to having a convention, then.

mona: legal under domestic law, illegal under international law.

Right, but it can be overridden by later statutes.

Mona

I understand and normally agree with what youre saying. What has me rethinking the issue is this. What good is standing firm on principle? For me to demand that human dignity & life be respected by our government. If the result is a massive loss of life in an American city? It forces me to ask myself a really shitty question. What do I value more? Principle or people?
The answer to any question like this will always be people. Which begs me to answer another shitty question. That answer being “my people”.
So you see for me its not as simple as just being a matter of law. What good are laws if following them facilitates massive human death?

Who’s to say that would happen?
Who’s to say it wont?

Which one of those should be assumed and should we act on when we error on the side of caution?

MS

Hostettler has taken a position:

“US Representatives John Hostettler and Lamar Smith, Republicans of Indiana and Texas, defend the provisions as necessary to prevent terrorists and criminals from being released to the streets instead of being deported if they contend their home country will torture them. ”Without this provision, your constituents will continue to be in danger,” they wrote to colleagues, adding that 500 immigrants with criminal records have been released in the United States after saying they would be tortured if deported.”

I think I’m going to give $25 to his opponent.