If you haven’t read Malcolm Nance’s Small Wars Journal essay, “Waterboarding is Torture … Period” – well, you should. It is a clear, cogent, forceful statement of the anti-torture position. At the bottom of that page you also get a long list of links and trackbacks, and a comment box. Here, for example, is a helpful explanation of why all the anti-torture complaints about ticking time bomb scenarios miss the point:
One need not imagine a ticking nuclear bomb, by the way. One only need imagine that they are a father who has captured a man who belongs to a pedophilia ring that managed to kidnap his 2 year old daughter. In other words, the life of the innocent need not be in direct or immediate danger, nor must there be a high number of innocents in danger. A single innocent babe in danger of being subjected to such inhuman cruelty deserves to be protected by any means necessary, provided one is certain they have collared a member of the ring. I would never ever be able to forgive myself for allowing my daughter to be degraded in that way, and believe I would sleep well and without guilty conscious should I subject such a man to the minimum force possible to rescue her.
Jesus wept. Meanwhile, another commenter earnestly wonders whether the reason there is so much resistance to torture is that leftists have been watching too much TV.
Then you get Alan “for it even while I was against it” Dershowitz. And Blackfive, on ‘the virtues of waterboarding and secret prisons’: “The reason that character is so important in choosing a President is that the Commander in Chief powers are almost unchecked.”
Sigh.
I don’t have original ideas to contribute to the ‘debate’. I’m against torture. Maybe this would have some rhetorical effect: you can’t waterboard your way to winning hearts and minds. Giving up our country’s longstanding commitments against torture means giving up any hope of winning any War on Terror we might think we are fighting.
I hereby add my humble voice to the chorus of indignation at the sorry sight of the Mukasey confirmation. What follows are my stray, semi-formulated musings about how we got to hell in this handbasket
Good old Free and Cantril: ‘Americans are operational liberals/philosophical conservatives’. Take that as a premise and (scribble, scribble, skipping a few steps) you get the result that stupidly extreme rhetoric on the right is more winning, electorally, than equally stupid rhetoric in the other direction. (Because what Free and Cantril mean by ‘philosophy’ is more like ‘ideology’, or even – I’m tempted to say – ‘political romanticism’.) To adapt Goldwater: ‘extremist rhetoric in defense of conservatism is no vice’. When Reagan said “Government is not the solution to our problem; Government is the problem,” people liked it. Not because such a vast portion of the electorate were considerate, committed anarchists, but because they thought they liked the spirit of the slogan. “Government is not the problem; Government is the solution to our problems,” is not, in absolute terms, any more stupid than what Reagan said. But it wouldn’t appeal to the voters, even voters who are, operationally, liberals/progressives.
You can say things that commit you to anything from anarchism to ‘dear leaderism’ and you end up just sounding like some flinty farmer, self-reliantly heaving boulders out of the ground with his own hands. Or Jack Bauer. The phenomenon of extremist policy proposals as code for ‘I have good character’ is so prevalent it’s almost honest.
A few days ago Kevin Drum was wondering how the hell the likes of Tom Tancredo keep getting away with it, moving the goalposts. At the very least, why don’t liberals and progressives fight fire with fire?
So: Politics 101. Stake out an ultra-extreme position so that when the rest of your party endorses a merely extreme position it looks like it’s a moderate compromise.
Question: why don’t liberals do this? The stock answer is that we’re wimps, but I don’t think that’s it. At least, not always. I think the answer is talk radio. Our extremists don’t succeed in redefining the playing field because there’s no institutional infrastructure behind them that converts lunacy into political pressure.
I think ‘talk radio’ is the right answer, but not the final answer because the next question is: why can’t liberals/progressives have their own extremist version of talk radio? The answer is: extremist liberal/progressive soundbites don’t appeal to the American voter. The proof of this is the eternal role of academic leftists in all these wrangles. Leftist academics like Ward Churchill are an eternal blessing for the right, not the left. Rush Limbaugh/Ann Coulter are never going to be albatrosses around the neck of the right. They can say crazy stuff forever and it rubs enough people the right way, doesn’t rub enough people the wrong way. I don’t think liberals or progressives could pursue the Tancredo strategy. It would always backfire. (This is speculation. I’m really just making what I think are plausible observations here, not really proving. I’m not explaining why there should be this asymmetry. I think it’s a fact about Americans that they are more tolerant of political rhetoric from the right than from the left. They read it as code for character traits they regard as virtuous. It’s not that Americans actually are as conservative as the political rhetoric they like. They aren’t as liberal as all that Hollywood liberalism they watch either. Go figure.)
And now I proceed to consider a consequence. Even with the brand name – conservatism – about as fallen-from-grace as it is likely to fall, what with Republicans in such disarray, it’s still the case that the Republicans onstage are all jostling to grasp the brass ring of ‘most conservative man in the room’. With the result that they are competing to peddle extremist slogans and Hail Mary pass policy soundbites. (By contrast, there is no inherent mojo in being the ‘most liberal man/woman in the room’ in a Democratic debate.) The power to speak lunacy and come across as having your heart in the right place is a curse, frankly. Since you can’t win without seeming like your heart is in the right place, you get boxed into extremism. You get locked in by your own rhetoric. Policy-wise, you back into making every proposal a Hail Mary long-shot. (Two Gitmos in every garage!) So what I said above about Republicans being able to sound good across the board, from anarchism to authoritarianism, is not right. They can’t sound good in the middle, making moderate policy prescriptions. (Humorous side-effect: earnest hand-wringing on the right these days about the ‘extremism’ of Ron Paul. Gosh, why would extremist rhetoric ever sound good to people?)
What do Republicans stand for? small government, family values, strong defense. Very potent formula in six words or less. Unfortunately, the first four aren’t working out as well as they used to, so the last two have to do all the lifting. Substantively, ‘strong defense’ should mean, roughly: keeping the country safe, and then some. But this is a rhetorical use we are considering. Rhetorically, for Republicans to be strong, Democrats have to be weak. The result is that you have to go out and horrify Democrats, so you can keep your ‘strong defense’ mojo charged up. Democrats are horrified by torture and the prospect of bombing Iran. So here we are. The brass ring of ‘strong defense’ has to run through the donkey’s nose. The donkey must be dragged against its will as proof of our good, strong will.
And, of course, being able to get people to confess to anything has its conveniences as well.
Sigh.
N.B. I’m still reading The Conservatives Have No Clothes
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alphie 11.10.07 at 11:00 am
If America tortures people, then your personal/regional/national sins don’t look so bad, do they?
Sinners hate saints.
abb1 11.10.07 at 11:01 am
I think it’s a fact about Americans that they are more tolerant of political rhetoric from the right than from the left.
Why the exceptionalist explanation; why not not look for structural reasons pertaining to the political system, economics, the media? Have you ever seen a single Trotskyist or Maoist on any US TV channel? If not, how do you know their rhetoric wouldn’t resonate?
Drake 11.10.07 at 11:06 am
“One only need imagine that they are a father who has captured a man who belongs to a pedophilia ring that managed to kidnap his 2 year old daughter.”
Actually, one only need imagine that any given person might have some bit of information that will save someone else’s life. You just never know what you might find when you induce (in a controlled, carefully calibrated manner) a terrifying fear of death.
In the future, everyone will be a terror-suspect for 15 minutes.
John Holbo 11.10.07 at 11:36 am
Abb1 quotes me: “I think it’s a fact about Americans that they are more tolerant of political rhetoric from the right than from the left.
Why the exceptionalist explanation?”
In my defense: I didn’t propose an explanation. I just made a generalization. I do admit that things can always change. But it seems to me a sound generalization, things being as they are.
bi 11.10.07 at 11:58 am
I’ve always wondered whether there’s actually a Platonically ideal right-wing crapmill somewhere in some remote corner of the world, churning out talking points _en masse_ for brainless propagation.
In other news, I find I’m now using the word “brainless” a lot. This isn’t good.
Hidari 11.10.07 at 12:04 pm
I’m not trying to be wilfully stupid here (or at least no more than usual) but hasn’t the reason that America is ‘different’ been covered by numerous political scientists and sociologists? I’m just thinking of this off the top of my head here, but aren’t the following explanations usually rolled out?
1: America’s status as a colonial state. If you look at what was liberated from the British and then the US now, you will see that the US rolled ‘West’ conquering and then displacing the indigenous inhabitants. This led to a myth of the ‘West’ where men were men and women were prone. Etc. ‘Love and Death in the American Novel’ covered this ground. Cf also Manifest Destiny.
(This also led to a deep paranoia: when the US was liberated it was felt to be (and was) a weak state surrounded by conniving foreign powers and beastly, treacherous Indians. This view of ‘they are all out to get us’ still resonates).
2: Religion. The influence of radical, fundamentalist protestantism, caused by the vast influence of original Puritan settlers. The ‘Shining City on the Hill’ etc. and an emphasis on protestant individualism….which leads to
3: American Exceptionalism: the idea that the US is different, special, anointed by God. Clifford Longley talks about this in ‘Chosen People’.
4: Governmental structure. Because the US was ‘created’ in an extremely weird way (i.e. it was ‘built up’ from States) this has led to a generalised distrust of ‘Central Government’, something which resonates down to the present day.
5: Numerous other factors, including the fact that the US had no native aristocracy for the middle classes to ‘kick against’ (meaning the State was always unusually closely allied with the business owning class).
Has this not been done to death? I mean we know that America is ‘different’ from Western Europe, for better and for worse. The question is: what do we do about it? Where do we go from here?
Cian 11.10.07 at 12:05 pm
I think it’s a fact about Americans that they are more tolerant of political rhetoric from the right than from the left.
This strikes me as a rather broad overgeneralisation. For one thing, in a country where 50% of the people don’t vote (and are probably underrepresented in most polls), one could just be seeing what plays better with the wealthier half of Americans. Secondly, most of the “data” on this seems to be sourced from journalists, or polls, neither of which are going to be terribly reliable.
The other thing which doesn’t seem to have occured to you, is that it might simply be the wrong kind of rhetoric. Liberal rhetoric in the US is simply awful. It tends to be rational, technocratic and fairly depersonalised. It wouldn’t be that hard to change the rhetoric on all these arguments, but liberals don’t and attack those who do (Michael Moore, for example, who for all his faults gets political language). Many of the populist right attacks on liberals in the US work because they are true. Liberal political elites do tend to look down on ordinary people and, in contrast to the right, do not do a very good job of disguising this. Its not helped by the fact that the liberal political elite emphasise a method (i.e. big government), rather than the problem, or solution. Nobody’s ever going to get excited about government, whereas they might get excited about a vision of better healthcare/more equal society/whatever. Taxes are a method, a necessary evil, whatever. First you sell the vision, then you close with the solution. There’s probably also a racial element to some of this as well (welfare is unpopular as its seen as a black thing).
Liberal rhetoric tends to be depersonalised, technocratic and overly rational. People tend not to vote rationally, but emotionally. What makes them feel better, more comfortable, more secure, etc.
So to take it back to the flinty farmer. The flip side of that is the community coming together, volunteer firestations – or even, “ask not what your country can do for you…”. People get communities, its government they have a problem with.
abb1 11.10.07 at 12:10 pm
I just made a generalization.
And I’m saying that there’s no basis for this generalization, since the radical-left rhetoric has been and is being suppressed. Sorry if this sounds conspiratorial, but how else would you explain the total absence of it. It’s not like the well-financed Glorious Revolution News channel is competing with the Fox News channel and losing.
John Holbo 11.10.07 at 12:34 pm
“…how else would you explain the total absence of it.”
If my generalization is true, that would be at least part of the explanation. (Not that you wouldn’t have potential fodder for conspiracy theories! You are free to conspiricize away about why my generalization might be true. You might be right!) At any rate, the fact that this stuff is nigh totally absent is hardly evidence AGAINST my generalization.
clan writes: “The other thing which doesn’t seem to have occured to you, is that it might simply be the wrong kind of rhetoric.”
Well, actually that had occurred to me. If it were obvious how the rhetoric could be changed up to produce a totally different response that would be one thing. I don’t think it is obvious what leftist message – far to the left of what is ordinarily heard – would strongly resonate. You say “a vision of better healthcare/more equal society/whatever. Taxes are a method, a necessary evil, whatever. First you sell the vision, then you close with the solution.” I think that’s been tried numerous times and didn’t sell so hot. So it’s not clear to me that it’s a superficial packaging problem.
miuw 11.10.07 at 12:40 pm
“One only need imagine that they are a father who has captured a man who belongs to a pedophilia ring that managed to kidnap his 2 year old daughter.â€
The torturephilic imagination seems prone to ghoulish and mostly irrelevant hypotheticals. It produces these inventions as proof of torture’s necessity.
This ghastly utilitarian rhetoric that figures torture as an instrument of security, barely conceals the righteous glee of the torture-merchants for whom torture in fact seems to be less a utilitarian practice and more a punitive practice. Torture is what its victims deserve. It is too good for them.
Perversely, torture for the torturers confirms their moral superiority and demonstrates the moral inferiority of its victims. Not only must its victims deserve it, but what torture produces is something barely recognizable as human – an undone series of reflexes whose only constant is fear.
And all the while this insistence that torture ‘works’.
I find this debate over the efficacy of torture disturbing. I wrote in another thread that, ‘the question isn’t whether torture ‘works’ or not, the question is whether or not we want to live as a people that puts torture to work.
It is incidental to my position on torture that I think a regime which institutionalizes it is likely to create conditions in which it has many more enemies that it ‘needs’ to torture (and that therefore institutionalized torture, whatever its dubious efficacy in particular instances, does not ‘work’).
Some of us are apparently terrorized into believing that letting ‘terror suspects’ go untortured increases the risk we face of death-by-dirty-bomb. Still, scared to death as we might be, can we not ask whether there are values that might be worth not only living for, but (possibly) dying for also? It is not a common strength, but people die (and not necessarily kill) for deeply help principles often enough for us to be able to ask this question.
The efficacy of torture is not at issue, it is the morality of torturers that is at issue.’
But as another commenter pointed out, rather than the morality of torturers, it is the legality of torture that is at issue.
One would hope that there would be no arguments about exceptionalism in this regard.
Barry 11.10.07 at 1:53 pm
“The proof of this is the eternal role of academic leftists in all these wrangles. Leftist academics like Ward Churchill are an eternal blessing for the right, not the left. Rush Limbaugh/Ann Coulter are never going to be albatrosses around the neck of the right.”
How infulential is the academic right, compared to the talk radio right? Compared to the elite MSM favoring of economic right-wing notions, respect for right-wing whackjobs, and for GOP presidents?
Rich Puchalsky 11.10.07 at 2:09 pm
At this point, I think that one has to admit that torture is popular because the American people like torture. That isn’t just a rant on my part; it’s actually been polled. It’s 32% saying it can “never” be justified against suspected terrorists and 17% “rarely”.
That’s the kind of populace you get, with a declining empire. And the implications should affect every political position. I’m particularly unsympathetic to “the right-wing media made people do it.” The media do not have magical powers to make people do things that they don’t want to do. Their primary contribution was to normalize the idea that one could be pro-torture or anti-torture, but from then on, of course about half of America could acknowledge that it was pro-torture.
abb1 11.10.07 at 2:34 pm
I’m particularly unsympathetic to “the right-wing media made people do it.â€
If it’s not the media, then what? Their church, their school curriculum, their parents, the oral tradition? How do they know they are the populace of a declining empire and what the populace of a declining empire is supposed to be like?
Rich Puchalsky 11.10.07 at 2:51 pm
Torture is an American tradition, abb1 — bound up with the tradition of racism. Are you now going to say that Americans are racist because the media told them to be?
hello 11.10.07 at 2:59 pm
Blackfive? You missed the best one:
On the Virtues of Kinning Children
abb1 11.10.07 at 3:09 pm
How’s torture an American tradition?
Racism doesn’t seem to have anything to do with this, but are you sure Americans are more racist than the others? I really don’t think so. Racism is a very common concept all over the world; in my experience the average Eastern European, for example, is much more racist than the average American. And yes, I think it does have something to do with the media.
Jackmormon 11.10.07 at 3:51 pm
The torturephilic imagination seems prone to ghoulish and mostly irrelevant hypotheticals.
Yes, there does seem to be a kind of narcissism in it: “I, a decent and average person, find myself in a situation so monumentally important that I am forced to do horrible things.”
Which probably can be read: “I am important!!1!”
My theory is that after 9/11, a lot of not-very-smart people got swamped by information about complex global phenomena.
P O'Neill 11.10.07 at 4:21 pm
Two answers:
(1) The constitution sucks. The perverse genius of Bush has been to expose so many flaws in such a short period of time. (executive presidency, electoral college, influence of small states, no standards for elections, recess appointments, signing statements, fixed term executive and legislative terms, and lack of legislative restraint on the executive, just to name a few).
(2) The USA is in the Americas. It’s closer to its Spanish and Portuguese cousins than conservatives would want to admit. Authoritarian populism is not a bad description of what Bush has been up to.
seth edenbaum 11.10.07 at 5:01 pm
#7 “American Exceptionalism: the idea that the US is different, special”
# 11 “I find this debate over the efficacy of torture disturbing. I wrote in another thread that, ‘the question isn’t whether torture ‘works’ or not, the question is whether or not we want to live as a people that puts torture to work.”
Exceptionalism is hardly the purview only of the right. It’s an intellectual tradition and an academic one, that goes hand in glove with the anti-intellectual exceptionalism of the masses. It’s an odd American mix.
And the question outside academic discussion isn’t torture but the institutionalization of torture; it’s not about whether it will ever be used under some circumstance or other (or whether or not it ever works) but whether it should ever be legal. Laws are laws, not absolute values, and some conflicts can’t be solved, but only dealt with: mandatory sentences, pardons, etc. The question is how to deal with torture’s place or lack of place in the structure of society. It’s about taboos. Liberals like to think they can reason can replace taboos. Many of them think that in their case it already has. proof that it hasn’t?
Exceptionalism is hardly the purview only of the right. It’s an intellectual tradition and an academic one.
#13 “That’s the kind of populace you get, with a declining empire. And the implications should affect every political position.”
It’s good to remember that the anti-modernists were modern, that anti-bourgeois intellectuals are bourgeois, that angry leftist academics are academics and that American liberals are fundamentally American. Other people will always see things you don’t. American (and academic) exceptionalism says this doesn’t apply. It can’t: it’s determinism “and we’re free.” It’s the masses who are deluded. Scholasticism? Impossible.
Torture is taboo and should remain that way.
bob mcmanus 11.10.07 at 5:09 pm
With a million dead in Iraq and torture made law, liberalism has failed. Reason has failed. If the rhetoric/polemic from the extreme left has no plausible efficacy, then I suppose one is regretfully horrifically left only with some particularly brutal option of Vanguardism, to speak in such a way so that I can hopefully avoid arrest.
Emigration or acceptance is not a moral response,
bob mcmanus 11.10.07 at 5:16 pm
What would a sane decent person do in 1936 Germany, with a fairly reasonable guess as to what was coming? Emigration really sucked, and I have little respect for the Einsteins, Schoenbergs, & Manns. Some forgiveness, perhaps.
Most Americans have not yet realized who they have become, what they have done, what might be on the horizon. Should Rudy get elected, all options should be on the table for the morally conscious, if they aren’t already.
CKR 11.10.07 at 5:25 pm
I don’t think liberals or progressives could pursue the Tancredo strategy. It would always backfire.
To the extent that Drum is right about this strategy, I think this statement is wrong.
In the 1960s, the civil rights movement had its extremists: the Black Power faction, Black Panthers, even CAP to some degree. All those organizations made much more radical demands and claims than did the “mainline” Martin Luther King. I believe he even said something to the effect that the extremists helped his cause by making it look like the most reasonable alternative.
It may be that momentum, rather than anything inherent to “liberalism” or “conservatism” is the operational factor here. If a social movement is going forward and seems unstoppable, then the choices are only between its various manifestations.
Conservatism (or whatever we may call what Tancredo and others are peddling) got its momentum going in the way that civil rights did in the sixties. So now the choices are apparently between the bad and the worse.
This would argue for an entirely different strategy on the part of liberals: get a coherent program going. Much less about how it’s packaged or framed, although those are part of it. The need is to make movement in progressive directions appear to be (actually be?) unstoppable.
tatere 11.10.07 at 6:12 pm
I don’t think it is obvious what leftist message – far to the left of what is ordinarily heard – would strongly resonate.
There’s a lot of examples in popular culture from the 30s and 40s, I think. It’s not exactly what I personally would call far left, but it sure is way to the left of the standard Democratic mush today. I’m so tired of the rhetorical obsession with “the middle class” – stand up for the working man and woman.
ko-aint 11.10.07 at 6:24 pm
#22 – I don’t think that a general revolt is in the cards. Should Rudy get elected, then I imagine a scenario where something like 2 old hippies and a college student show up at the barricades and down the memory hole they go. Most of us Americans won’t notice or will only barely care. We’ve got kids to feed. And they won’t screen the next season of Heroes in Guantanamo!
Sebastian Holsclaw 11.10.07 at 6:31 pm
I know I’m a suspicious person to be giving advice to the left, but it seems to me that the torture debate exemplifies lots of what is wrong with how you-guys work politically the US. The ticking bomb scenario or the sick pedophile scenario actually resonate with lots of people. I know, you don’t like that fact, but there it is.
But that doesn’t need to end the question at all. You can believe that torture is always wrong, but that is no reason whatsoever to make it your talking point. Because even though many people would torture in extreme circumstances, they don’t want to be tortured themselves. There is no reason to get into a “would you lie to the Nazis about where the Jews are? What don’t you believe lying is wrong?” fight. You can show that it never actually works that way in practice.
And most importantly you can show that, in practice, MOST of the people don’t know the knowledge they’re being tortured for and MANY (if not in fact a majority of them) are completely innocent of being involved in terrorism or crime at all.
That should be your focus, not some hyper-intellectual discussion about whether or not torture is EVER EVER EVER defensible.
(Yes I know some of you are already taking the direction I suggest. Good.)
From a conservative point of view, like restrictions on speech, torture is not a power to be trusted to the government. The taboo against it ought not be casually replaced as if we fully understand all of the ways the taboo helps our society. Also, it is morally wrong.
Bill Gardner 11.10.07 at 7:34 pm
From a conservative point of view, like restrictions on speech, torture is not a power to be trusted to the government. The taboo against it ought not be casually replaced as if we fully understand all of the ways the taboo helps our society. Also, it is morally wrong.
Sign me up, Sebastian. And will we ever see this kind of conservatism again?
miuw 11.10.07 at 8:25 pm
#26: “You can believe that torture is always wrong, but that is no reason whatsoever to make it your talking point.”
But this is perverse. Are we really at the point where we find ourselves involved in serious strategic discussions about how to unsell torture and popularize the ‘anti-torture’ position?
Why on earth should voicing the idea that it is wrong to torture involve one in ‘some hyper-intellectual discussion’? Considering such questions calls for no exceptional capacities. But the ingenuity that goes into inventing the most elaborate scenarios to demonstrate that we might have to stick pins under a child’s nails to save our planet from imminent destruction, well, there’s where the discourse on torture seems most elaborate.
The discussion is bound to get nice if you don’t take as your basic position that torture is wrong. For instance, what to make of the claim that, ‘[f]rom a conservative point of view, like restrictions on speech, torture is not a power to be trusted to the government.’?
Why not? If there’s nothing necessarily wrong with torture, why shouldn’t we grant them that power. We grant governments the power to lock people up for decades for selling pot to their friends, why not a short session with a wet towel to save the world from evil terrorists?
Sebastian sets out by claiming that we shouldn’t make the wrongness of torture the talking point. But where does he end up? Precisely with that talking point: ‘Also, it is morally wrong.’
miuw 11.10.07 at 9:00 pm
I mean, even the Bush-Cheney administration make ‘torture is wrong’ a talking point. And, therefore, they insist, they do not torture.
Only this insistence is used to drive a horrible logic: we do not torture, therefore none of our practices are torture, therefore we can pursue any practice without becoming tortures.
Mrs Tilton 11.10.07 at 9:04 pm
Bob McManus @22,
Emigration really sucked, and I have little respect for the Einsteins, Schoenbergs, & Manns. Some forgiveness, perhaps.
WTF? I mean, WTFF?!?
Do you mean that Thomas Mann should have stayed in Germany, gone underground and waged one-man ninja warfare against the NS regime? If that’s what you think, then yes, I suppose he was a bit of a pussy.
This is nonsense. Mann was a man of letters, not arms. Leaving Germany for the US was, for what it was worth, an eloquent statement. (And the statements of others who took the same route in broad terms were even more eloquent, e.g., Marlene Dietrich.)
If you knew anything about German intellectual life during the nazi period, you’d know that the soft path was “innere Emigration“. (And not necessarily soft for all who took it.) Yes, of course, active resistance (violent and nonviolent) against the regime deserves the greatest praise. But bear in mind that many of those we remember today as resistance heroes didn’t start out that way. In particular, most of the Wehrmacht men who tried, late in the war, to kill Hitler were happy enough, in the early days of the regime, to go along. (That doesn’t detract from their merit. They had to travel a lot farther than, say, social democrats to understand that the nazis were hostes humani generis. They deserve praise for coming to understand this and taking appropriate action, not criticism for taking longer than others to come to that understanding.)
And Einstein? You are aware, aren’t you, that something about him would have made it hard for him to effectively resist the NS regime from within? Because he’d have been resisting it from within a death camp, if not an oven. But I’m sure he rests easier in his grave, knowing that you forgive him (perhaps) for emigrating.
Roy Belmont 11.10.07 at 9:13 pm
#26- “And most importantly you can show that, in practice, MOST of the people don’t know the knowledge they’re being tortured for and MANY (if not in fact a majority of them) are completely innocent of being involved in terrorism or crime at all.”
What you’re missing there is that the people being tortured are seen as disposable. So the efficacy is purely logistic, not ethical. And what’s missing from most of this discussion is the continuity of that regard. It’s not wrong to torture subhumans. You can line them up in rows and rows and have at it.
And an aspect of the torture scenario that’s completely overlooked here and most everywhere else is how well it functions purely as terrorist act. It instills terror, it becomes dark legend and myth.
More than a few of us saw the publication of the Abu Ghraib photos and narratives as intentional acts by the truly, as opposed to publicly, responsible parties.
Intentional acts of terror, gloatingly publicized. Nothing in the succeeding months, and years, has refuted that.
bob mcmanus 11.10.07 at 10:03 pm
30:You must take great comfort in their examples.
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” Or not enough.
Mrs Tilton 11.10.07 at 11:07 pm
Bob @32,
I can only hope that I (unlike Mann, Einstein et al.) may someday show some small fraction of your immense courage at a distance of seventy years and several countries.
But please, do expand on your theme of how Einstein, that spineless coward, ought to have overthrown Hitler from a chimney at Auschwitz.
Twat.
bob mcmanus 11.10.07 at 11:13 pm
27,28:I suppose one could look up the long arguments I had with Sebastian at Obsidian Wings on the administration’s definition and application of the special category of “illegal combatant.” As far I know, Holsclaw still supports the administration, and since it has been very clear for centuries that the suspension or weakening of habeas rights are the necessary and sufficient condition for torture, Holsclaw apparently is able to objectively support torture while gaining brownie points from the liberals for tsk-tsking over its inevitable use.
But I stopped engaging that fascist son of a bitch years ago.
bob mcmanus 11.10.07 at 11:49 pm
33:The entire science of collective “direct action” has apparently, and conveniently, been lost in the West. If the only alternative is rushing the Fuhrer with a knife in your teeth, of course resistance looks absurd. And so the complicit enablers sleep soundly.
See above on the “engineers of jihad” for how a division of labor in resistance has not been lost everywhere.
Simple, I think. If the entire left blogosphere were willing to make illegal statements and go to jail, torture would be stopped. Iran would not die. As just a small preliminary example. Did Einstein call for armed resistance to the Nazis? Did he so much as verbally risk his security?
A million dead and torture made law and I am the twat for saying something could be done, that we are not facing an irresistable force of nature. I join Arthur Silber without speaking for him. Fuck you all.
This post is utterly contemptible, Holbo. Henley says structural change cannot happen without the total exhaustion of elites. So I guess this post is encouraging.
abb1 11.10.07 at 11:58 pm
@23: Conservatism (or whatever we may call what Tancredo and others are peddling) got its momentum going in the way that civil rights did in the sixties.
‘Up-and-down with the momentum’ would’ve been a good explanation, but again, the same problem – there’s an obvious lack of symmetry here. Radical groups of the civil right movement were pursued ruthlessly by the FBI, infiltrated and destroyed by the cointelpro, firebombed by the police, their leaders and members jailed, many simply murdered, assassinated. Compare that with the ‘conservative’ movement that followed – the toughest challenge these guys face is coming up with new abbreviations for their thinktanks.
So, no, I don’t think this ‘spontaneous up and down movements’ theory is very convincing.
miuw 11.11.07 at 12:46 am
Bob, I’m not really sure of Sebastian’s position. Have read a few of his comments here and there. I just wanted to note the perversity of that particular comment.
At least that comment, in its perversity, argues against itself and ends with the categorical he suggests we should strategically shun: ‘[torture] is morally wrong.’
But, Bob, you shouldn’t say bad things about Einstein or Bob Marely. Such things never go down well.
But it is certainly so that the courage you describe is rare. And it is certainly so that we need a small dose of it now. I agree that it is not ninjas, but social movements that are needed now. and that this, given the circumstances, must likely include direct collective actions.
Because, yes, it is true, as you say, that countless have been murdered (though mostly elsewhere, of course). And it is something of a concern when an imperial power institutionalizes torture, and it appears to be a popular move.
Sebastian Holsclaw 11.11.07 at 1:01 am
“Sign me up, Sebastian. And will we ever see this kind of conservatism again?”
I hope so.
“At least that comment, in its perversity, argues against itself and ends with the categorical he suggests we should strategically shun: ‘[torture] is morally wrong.’”
I think it is morally wrong. And so what? My point was that you don’t have to limit the argument to convincing people that it is absolutely and in every possible situation wrong. Focusing on the fundamentalist position isn’t as convincing to non-fundamentalists of which there are apparently many, if not in fact a majority. Since you need to convince some of those people in order to get the job done and keep torture out of the system, I’m suggesting that you are going about it the wrong way.
Sebastian Holsclaw 11.11.07 at 1:03 am
“And it is something of a concern when an imperial power institutionalizes torture, and it appears to be a popular move.”
That last clause “and it appears to be a popular move” is exactly why I suspect an ivory-tower pure “torture is JUST wrong” appeal isn’t the best way to go, even though you believe that torture is just wrong. You can say “torture is especially/obviously wrong because we are torturing innocent people.”
nu 11.11.07 at 1:57 am
“torture is especially/obviously wrong because we are torturing innocent people.â€
The problem is that while those innocents may be innocent of what they’re tortured about, they’re not seen as innocents by the public.
Islamists may not be part of the terrorist plan one wants to get information about or of any terrorist plan, they’re viewed as non-innocent because they are islamist.
Same with resistants under Nazi occupation or under Stalin or under Franco.
So that tactic too wouldn’t work because people would say “let’s not torture innocents” and that would include most of people tortured.
miuw 11.11.07 at 2:00 am
‘You can say “torture is especially/obviously wrong because we are torturing innocent people.‒ – Sebastian
But the problem here is that then one is merely left with a technical issue: making sure you only torture guilty people.
The fact that innocent people are executed hasn’t made the death penalty unpopular enough to lead to its repeal in the USA.
This is a war-on-terror, after all, we may have to stick pins in a few innocent people to save our civilization. And, in any case, we only torture guilty people. So the torturer’s logic goes.
Do any of those marvelous ticking bomb hypotheticals ever hinge on a group of ‘terrorist suspects’, who are just that, suspected? No, there is no suspicion, just righteous certainty. And so they deserve to be tortured (this is the punitive intent that the utilitarian argument often hides).
Perhaps torture is popular because people aren’t convinced that it’s actually wrong. And so presenting the technical problems with torture, and wrangling over means-ends calculations might be part of the problem (then again, maybe torture is popular because people have a taste for it)?
So, Sebastian, I’m not convinced by your ‘strategy’, but relieved that you think torture morally wrong (I had no reason to think otherwise).
And I still don’t understand why you insist that taking a moral position is ‘ivory-tower pure’. People who don’t live anywhere near ivory towers make moral decisions all the time, no academic training is required.
miuw 11.11.07 at 2:02 am
Oh, posted before seeing Nu’s comment. Obviously, I follow him/her here.
Mrs Tilton 11.11.07 at 2:05 am
Bob @35,
If the entire left blogosphere were willing to make illegal statements and go to jail, torture would be stopped.
1) In a civilised state, the term “illegal statements” should be meaningless.
2) No, it wouldn’t stop. We’d merely all be in jail, and the Americans would go on doing what they do.
On the broader front, if you are advocating direct action against the Bush regime, more power to you (and good luck with that), but I really don’t think that entitles you, even for rhetorical purposes, to sit in judgement on Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein.
miuw 11.11.07 at 2:30 am
‘1) In a civilised state, the term “illegal statements†should be meaningless.’ – Mrs Tilton
It would be precisely when such a term is not meaningless that such statements would need to be made.
‘2) No, it wouldn’t stop. We’d merely all be in jail, and the Americans would go on doing what they do’ – Mrs Tilton
But would that be a reason for not going to jail if such protests entailed that? Perhaps not? And perhaps this would lead to systemic changes.
So many of us are both desirous of radical systemic transformation, and cynical about it [‘if you are advocating direct action against the Bush regime, more power to you (and good luck with that)…]. But surely, at some point, enough is enough?
Who was it that said, ‘to change ones language, ones life must change’ (or was it the other way round)?
bob mcmanus 11.11.07 at 3:12 am
43:”…to sit in judgement on Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein.”
Well I think, Thomas Mann, more than many writers, directly and indirectly, put himself out there to be judged. Doktor Faustus is a pitiless book, and I don’t think Mann granted himself the luxury of identifying with the victims of Germany, and the unearned pleasures of compassion. He knew better.
Rich Puchalsky 11.11.07 at 5:13 am
abb1: “How’s torture an American tradition?”
Within the memory of living people, Americans routinely gathered to torture — often, to death — darker-skinned people who had gotten out of line. That persisted well into the 20th century, with occassional outbreaks today, and went back to the beginning of American history. So now we are torturing darker-skinned people again. That’s hardly a culturally new phenomenon. And it is supported by exactly the same people who are most concerned about race.
And, by the way, bob mcmanus is wrong. “They can’t put us all in jail” was tried, by the IWW, and didn’t work. They certainly can put any conceivably motivatable number of martyrs in jail if a majority of the population supports them.
Bruce Baugh 11.11.07 at 6:13 am
Just remember: helping found and support the International Rescue Committee and alerting Allied leaders to the risk of Nazi atomic weaponry are not brave. Writing semi-comprehensible esoterica and bullying fellow posters are brave. If in doubt, compare the practical achievements in the service of liberty and justice, and see how Einstein is ever so much less worthy of attention than McManus. After all, the whole world knows about all the things Bob has actually done offline to restore lost justice or advance a future of better justice, while who can point to anything that that sap Einstein might have done?
Bruce Baugh 11.11.07 at 6:17 am
Though in fairness we can and should note that Bob’s view on the responsibility of anti-Nazi Germans, Jewish and otherwise, is just as good as Gandhi’s and deserving of all the compliments Orwell gave Gandhi on the subject.
Josh in Philly 11.11.07 at 6:59 am
Hey, hey, Bruce –don’t neglect the fact that Bob, to his credit, has considered the possibility of forgiving Einstein.
Bruce Baugh 11.11.07 at 7:55 am
Very magnanimous, sir, very magnanimous indeed.
bob mcmanus 11.11.07 at 8:56 am
Glad to see the righteous spending their energies defending poor vulnerable Albert. I see where your sympathies lie, with ineffective elites in safe comfortable surroundings rather than the one million dead Iraqis and the several million refugees. Course,it is harder to identify with the currently physically suffering and damaged, or those who caused their suffering, rather that poor fellow who had to run to tenure at Princeton, isn’t it. Poor, poor Albert. Never mind the six million without his connections. It’s about Albert.
Albert Einstein our hero. That’s the ticket. With him as our model, we may not save the world, but we can comfort each other in our futility. They also serve who run and hide, and write letters. We see the dynamic by which tyranny triumphs.
Orwell was dead right about Gandhi.
Bruce Baugh 11.11.07 at 9:13 am
Oh, shut the fuck up, Bob. The schtick got old years ago. You’re good at talking a tough fight, then ignoring any inconvenient facts and remaining uselessly quiet when it’s time to actually do anything. All you’ve got is bluster and disruption – you wield your radicalism as pathetically and uselessly as Brett Bellmore does his racist rugged individualism or Sebastian Holsclaw his cultivated autism about health statistics, and to just as much good result. You bring crap and then seem surprised as well as annoyed that we fail to be impressed. But like I said, it’s old news, and in the meantime, there are actual problems to be dealt with.
Bruce Baugh 11.11.07 at 9:16 am
Okay, that wasn’t very helpful either, and if blog owners want to nuke any of my posts from tonight, I won’t mind. I’ll have to check out killfile-type plugins.
bi 11.11.07 at 9:32 am
Bruce Baugh:
Amen to that. bob mcmanus’s ‘proposal’ is even worse than the Iraq War — not only does it has not a single trace of any post-war plan, it doesn’t even have any war plan, period.
In any case, why isn’t Bob’s sorry bum in Gitmo already? He’ll be experiencing hell on earth, but we can praise him for his profound bravery in speaking against the Administration. Bleh.
= = =
Rich Puchalsky:
The 32% figure was from 2005, right? I hope the figure is lower by now.
abb1 11.11.07 at 10:22 am
Within the memory of living people, Americans routinely gathered to torture—often, to death—darker-skinned people who had gotten out of line.
Too polemical. Even for me.
bob mcmanus 11.11.07 at 10:29 am
54:Make the phone call to the FBI, dude, Wouldn’t be the first, and it is exactly what I would expect from a liberal. Hand your critic over to the torturers, and show whose side you are really on.
Amaze me, Bruce. I really would rather there wasn’t a Gitmo for your fan bi to send me to, and really want the war to stop. I leave myself in your capable hands. So far, so good, huh. Keep up the good work. I’m sure the Iraqis are grateful, and I know the Iranians have full confidence in youer methods.
bi 11.11.07 at 11:08 am
No, bob mcmanus, why don’t _you_ in your swaggering anti-Einstein machismo go pick up the phone and call FBI _yourself_, and tell them that they’re a bunch of jackboot thugs and you’re going to be the one-man ninja who’ll destroy the sinful administration. When you’re done making a phone call, let us know by sending a postcard from prison.
Or you can stop criticizing “liberals” for doing as you do and not as you say, and start coming up with some sort of plan that’ll actually work out to end torture.
bi 11.11.07 at 11:11 am
Or even better, Bob, why don’t you follow the example of William Sherman and come up with some sort of real strategy for outright literal war against the torturers?
Bruce Baugh 11.11.07 at 11:26 am
Bob’s posturing in #56 reminds me of an old joke:
Masochist: Beat me, hurt me, make me beg.
Sadist: No.
SG 11.11.07 at 11:31 am
Um Bob, I think Einstein actually didn’t emigrate, but had his citizenship revoked while in America at a conference, when he criticised the National Socialists.
Also there was a big movement in Germany in the 30s of Social Democratic activists – some hundreds of thousands strong I recall – who fought and struggled daily with the fascists, in groups, defending workplaces, union offices, political parties, and organisations. The communists and social democrats between them had more public support, including the majority in parliament, and they acted on it daily. The final death knell for German democracy – the enabling act – was passed by a minority of parliament, because the Communists had been imprisoned or murdered by thugs (despite their armed resistance) and the Catholic “centrists” voted for fascism, overlooking Goering’s deliberate procedural abuse, so that they could protect their church.
I think your lesson in history is a little flawed. As is your sense of kindness, by the look of things.
bob mcmanus 11.11.07 at 12:02 pm
57,58:I am neither a liberal nor a General, and I don’t do plans. That more than likely sounds ridiculous and irresponsible to a liberal, but it is a very important and radical theory of politics. May I suggest the all the wonks demanding a health-care plan from HRC 15 months before the election, or demanding an exit plan from Iraq, or a definite process to get the prisoners out of Gitmo are precisely the problem of the Democratic Party? That top-down technocracy is alienating? MY knows foreign policy better than Joe Blow, and Ezra Klein knows health care, and Katherine understands rendition, and Brad DeLong understands the economy, and Joe Blow should just vote the way they tell him and STFU and get out of the way?
Here’s my plan:
Listen to what Joe Blow thinks are his problems
Give Joe the tools and confidence to organize
Get the hell out of his way
“You can stop the War.” NOT “You can stop the war by electing a Democratic congress in 2006” but not enough people really believe they can stop the war, and by offering a plan (Congress) that failed, the leaders were discredited and the people discouraged.
Policy & plans are the opposite of politics. Reread Holbo’s post. Republicans know this truth. Holbo doesn’t think the left can come up with inspirational organizing slogans & soundbites. Well, I think if they stop trying to control the process and determine the outcomes they can do pretty well. The radicals at the turn of the century didn’t do too badly.
And oh yeah, it is wildly illiberal. Dangerous & scarey for those who worship law, process, order.
…
Now if the people truly can’t be trusted we are into Vanguardism, and under current conditions I would not discuss those tactics in a blog comment.
abb1 11.11.07 at 1:16 pm
I got the impression that Stalin’s splitting the left and branding the SDP “the enemy number one” (iirc) was probably the decisive factor there. The left is too disorganized.
bob mcmanus 11.11.07 at 1:18 pm
Here qew two fine examples of politics
Can We Retire Bob Herbert
Brad Delong calling for Bob Herbert to be fired because Herbert confused Headline Inflation with Core Inflation, or something, in a column discussing economic difficulties of average Americans.
The Herbert column, besides being inadequate for membership in the reality-based community, also is simply a screed and rant, and doesn’t offer a plan. OTOH, Brad, in a later post in a three way comversation with Bob Rubin & Krugman, offers not one economic plan, but an 0-3 year plan, a 3-8 year plan, and an 8+ year plan.
That’ll get em cheering in Kansas.
Rich Puchalsky 11.11.07 at 1:37 pm
I don’t think it’s too polemical to point out that racism enables the pro-torture sentiment in the U.S. People support torture because they know that it won’t be used on “people like us”, but instead on those scary others. Skin color is the traditional way of distinguishing between the two.
abb1 11.11.07 at 1:58 pm
People support torture because they know that it won’t be used on “people like usâ€, but instead on those scary others.
Sure, Rich. Though this phenomenon is not specifically American and I suspect it would correlate better with social status than skin color. Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice have nothing to worry about.
seth edenbaum 11.11.07 at 3:32 pm
DeLong’s post is disgusting. Dripping with contempt for the non-expert and politically stupid for somene who calls himself a liberal. It’s self-defeating Weimar logic
Barry 11.11.07 at 4:39 pm
Sh*tting on Brad here, because in this case he deserves it – I’ve asked both in comments and in e-mails when the increased gasoline prices of the past few years were finally folded into core inflation.
I’m still waiting on an answer.
IIRC, I wasn’t the only commenter to ask about that.
bi 11.11.07 at 5:47 pm
bob mcmanus:
“I am neither a liberal nor a General, and I don’t do plans. That more than likely sounds ridiculous and irresponsible to a liberal, but it is a very important and radical theory of politics.”
“Here’s my plan: – Listen to what Joe Blow thinks are his problems – Give Joe the tools and confidence to organize – Get the hell out of his way”
So your plan is to say that we should trust that you have a plan? What a great, um, plan.
Oh, you realize that your ‘radical theory of politics’ exemplifies everything that’s so wrong with the Iraq War,(*) don’t you? Chickenhawkish posturing, lack of planning, total disregard for facts and logic, insinuations that any librulz who object to these are namby-pamby traitors. Yeah, the same theory that got the US into this whole bloody quagmire in the first place, and now we’re the same un-method will bring us out of this whole mess!
If you have anything to offer other than the same old swaggering nonsense, be my guest. Otherwise, shut up.
= = =
(*) Except the WMD part.
bi 11.11.07 at 5:50 pm
s/now we’re/now we’re supposed to believe/
bi 11.11.07 at 6:04 pm
Speaking of plans, I think a combination of CKR’s and Holsclaw’s ideas isn’t too bad. Sure, 25% of people are still die-hard Republicans… but perhaps it’s more useful to ignore them and worry about the other 75% instead? Emphasize the “reality-based” message at every opportunity. Keep drumming, drumming, drumming the message home until it sticks, and even then. And meanwhile, yes, get a coherent program going.
bob mcmanus 11.11.07 at 6:18 pm
68:Jesus, bi you can’t read for shit and I don’t know why I should engage you.
It’s called democracy. You don’t get to plan everything because the people have a say. Or should, if the little bureacratic dictators ever give up a little power. Statists like you look at the Reconstruction in Iraq and never imagine that we could have asked the Iraqis what they needed and wanted, or even let the Iraqis do the the rebuilding with American money. You demand a “plan”. You know what’s best for the little brown people.
Colonialism with velvet handcuffs. Paternalistic liberalism.
Since you have apparently read me without realizing I am attacking liberalism from what I badly understand as its left, left-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, left-libertarian, whatever you might want to call it.
My “Power to the People Right On!” may be pathetically dated, but at least I am not trying to convince the people that they really aren’t suffering economically, they just think they are. Silly little plebes need to listen to their betters?.
bi 11.11.07 at 7:16 pm
Bob, excuse me? “Paternalistic liberalism”? _You_ are the one who’s raising hell about how all the rest of us are ignorant unwashed masses and everyone should just listen to you. _You_ are the one who’s shouting absolute truths down to us. _You_ are the one who’s criticizing Mann, Schoenberg, Einstein, and others because they chose to do something which you don’t like them to do.
And _you_ are the one who’s asking the rest of us lowly masses to go all ninja against the Bush administration while you sit back and look tough. _You_ are the one ordering people to do this and do that.
Guess who’s being paternalistic here? Who’s being elitist here? Who’s making himself out as a “better” here?
bob mcmanus 11.11.07 at 8:28 pm
Stupid flame war without communication, misreadings and misrepresentations. Bye.
bi 11.12.07 at 4:12 am
Why, saying that everyone except Bob himself is obviously guilty of a “stupid flame war without communication, misreadings and misrepresentations”, that’s so un-elitist indeed… again…
= = =
abb1:
“I suspect it would correlate better with social status than skin color. Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice have nothing to worry about.”
Nowadays it seems that it’d correlate best with ideology. John Edwards doesn’t belong to the correct ideology, which makes him fair game for mud-slinging (though I don’t know whether he’s also fair game for torture…).
Rich Puchalsky 11.12.07 at 4:50 am
Racism has always been used as a method of distracting people from concern with the actualities of differential treatment by social status, though. Poor white people could always reassure themselves that they were, at least, white.
abb1 11.12.07 at 9:23 am
I got the impression that these days many poor white people believe (with at least some justification) that the blacks are, in fact, better protected against government oppression.
See, the blacks have organizations operating openly and explicitly to protect their interests. Some of them are more or less mainstream organizations that are tolerated by the elite and get significant media coverage. Show me a single class-based mainstream organization.
bob mcmanus 11.12.07 at 1:33 pm
74:”saying that everyone except Bob himself is obviously guilty”
This is what I mean. Check out 73 again. You are either a liar or can’t read. I can’t deal with people who completely make shit up. One of the more despicable commenters I have ever encountered.
c.l. ball 11.12.07 at 5:54 pm
The torturephilic imagination seems prone to ghoulish and mostly irrelevant hypotheticals.
The Gäfgen/Metzler case was not a hypothetical. Casuistry is useful for deciding whether we oppose torture entirely or only when it is immoral for other reasons (e.g., the victim might be innocent; other, less brutal means are effective; no crime is in progress). In the case of a ticking time-bomb, many people would support torture if there was a ticking time-bomb.* The problem today is that torture and near-torture is being used when there is no ticking time-bomb or kidnapped child. Torture is being used as part of intelligence collection.
* The ticking time-bomb scenario requires that 1) there is a ticking time-bomb, i.e., the torturers have near-certain evidence such a bomb exists, not a supposition or suspicion and 2) the person to be tortured knows where the bomb is, i.e., the torturers have evidence that the person knows, not a supposition or suspicion. Those conditions are rare, and have never existed in any of the examples put forward by advocates of “enhanced interrogation.”
Jim S. 11.12.07 at 6:42 pm
Re some of the comments above:
America once had 90% top income tax rates, and large-scale government sponsored developments in many walks of life.
Certainly torture is wrong, but it is wrong everywhere, every time. A great many nations do this, and not just America.
Frankly most American leftists do view their own people with contempt. Yet if an alternative were offered to Americans Bush and Co. might not be in power.
COINTELPRO was failure, as were most of the government persecutions-such as they are-of the 60’s and 70’s. Furthermore the causes championed by the left were achieved, such as getting out of Vietnam.
miuw 11.13.07 at 12:12 am
‘The Gäfgen/Metzler case was not a hypothetical.’ – c.l. ball
I am not sure what point you are trying to make with mention of this case – that people murder children?, that police sometimes feel entitled to break the law when dealing with people they are sure have murdered children?
You’ll note that the police in this case tortured (or, rather, threatened to torture) in order to produce a confession, not to gain information that might prevent harm or eliminate an imminent threat. No ticking bomb here.
So this ghastly case would hardly serve the casuist’s cause in this discussion in which the hypotheticals invariably figure torture as an instrument for the extraction of preventative information.
But still, as examples go, this would rather seem to argue against torture – the extracted confession was ruled inadmissible, the case was nearly derailed, and the sentence may yet be overturned. Torture didn’t ‘work’ (if the work it was supposed to do was secure a conviction).
The confession was ruled inadmissible because torture (and in such circumstances, the threat of it) is illegal. Torture can only function ‘usefully’ in a system of laws if that system formalises it as a judicial instrument.
The hypotheticals of the torturephilic imagination (the ones that I have encountered) seem mostly aimed at trying to construct scenarios which persuade that most ‘normal’ people would torture in certain circumstances. This may be so, but, as an exercise in casuistry it is deeply flawed (as with most such exercises).
In the first instance such hypotheticals ask us, in our admission that ‘we’ would torture in the given scenario, to imagine torture as a ‘skill’ that we might be able to spontaneously express. But of course torture, at least as an instrument of interrogation, is a learned ‘skill’. Torture is learned from torture instructors and from torture manuals (many of the US manuals have long been in the public domain – techniques learned from the Nazis, honed in Korea, transferred to Vietnam, institutionalised in the ‘School of the Americas’ – not the use of torture, but the attempt to overtly institutionalise it, is new).
Torture is a systematic, codified practice that exists in institutional contexts (we are not considering spontaneous acts of sadism here – though surely sadism is involved).
Such hypotheticals, then, on one level, try to emotionally muddle us into taking what should be a reasoned, principled position on the institutional use of torture by asking us to admit that each of us is potentially a torturer (which is a diferent issue).
But at the same time as these hypotheticals try to appall us into supporting the codification of torture through emotional manipulation, they mask that emotionalism by at once appealing to a utilitarian calculus (which doesn’t add up) and in that mode of tough rationalism we are tempted to neglect the ’emotional’ or ‘spiritual’ question over what accepting such a calculus condemns us to.
These same people who are happy to spout ‘noble sacrifice’ on the battlefield, are terrified moral cowards hiding beneath a nasty mangle of irrelevant emotionalism and weak rationalisation.
Maimonedes 11.13.07 at 2:06 am
I posted this in the comment thread appended to Nance’s essay:
“Please consider the possibility that the President was weighing national security against the legal and moral implications and that – just maybe – he did not begin from all of the same assumptions that you begin with.”
If that was the case, then not only did he disregard the oath he took upon assuming office:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
but he also failed in his constitutional duty to see that the laws be faithfully executed (such as the Convention against Torture).
Also, what many are losing sight of is the difference between personal moral agency and the function of employees of the government. Those employees all take a similar oath to that of the president, which is an oath to uphold the consititution. They owe no similar moral duty to my family that I do.
So while the question of what I would do if confronted with some kind of one-in-a-million situation that for example Mr. Evans refers to, where I could save my family by committing torture, I can’t honestly say what I would do in that situation. Perhaps I would commit what is undeniably a wrong in the hopes of saving my family. But if I did it would be because I believed that I owed such a moral obligation to my family.
But even in that case, I would also have no reason to expect legal immunity or even leniency. Seeking legal protection strips the entire exercise and justification of its moral profundity. Either you think your moral justification trumps the law or you don’t. Having official and legal approval doesn’t make your action a morally trenchant decision, it makes it following orders.
There is no evidence of a similar moral duty owed to citizens by employees of our government. They may believe it is so; but that does not make it so. They are acting in their capacity as our employees. If we wish to empower them with that ability, we should undo all of the laws on the books forbidding such behavior and withdraw from all treaties that do so as well. People may attempt to graft that moral obligation to MY family onto our servants in government, but that merely represents an attempt to win by visceral reaction, rather than logic. Yes, I would probably HOPE that some random interrogator would save my family by torturing a suspect, yet I have no legitimate reason for expecting it. In this respect the analogy to WW II Germany is apt: a German interrogator may have been able to morally justify torturing a captive in an effort to save his family (say by gaining information about a planned bombing raid in Dresden), but he should not expect to escape legal liability at Nuremberg.
As far as the practical results of torture, I would say that the use of torture could result in increase peril to our troops in battle because opposing combatants who thought they might be tortured would be more apt to fight to the death rather than surrender. There was a good reason why the understood rule among German soldiers in WW II was to run west not east if they found themselves behind enemy lines or separated from their unit.
Finally, also from a practical point of view, I would ask that people examine the case of Ahmed Ressam, the captured millenium bombing plotter:
http://corrente.blogspot.com/2005/08/terrorizing-judges.html
A sample:
“Ahmed Ressam became a terrorist turncoat.
On May 10, 2001, FBI Agent Fred Humphries questioned Ressam, the first of dozens of interviews. The information was invaluable — and terrifying. He explained how he was recruited in Montreal and funneled into the bin Laden camps. He talked in detail about training with Taliban-supplied weapons. He informed on Abu Zubaydah, Abu Doha and other top al-Qaida operatives. He provided the names of jihad fighters he had met in the camps. He revealed that he had contemplated blowing up an FBI office and the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C….
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Ressam’s solitude has been broken by a stream of visitors, often FBI agents such as Fred Humphries, but also investigators from Germany, Italy and elsewhere.
With federal public defender Jo Ann Oliver at his side, he is told names and shown photographs of suspected terrorists and asked if he knows them.
On several occasions, Ressam has been flown to New York City for similar questioning. There, he is held in a detention center just blocks from Ground Zero.
Ressam did not recognize any of the 19 suicide hijackers from Sept. 11. But he was able to identify student pilot Zacarias Moussaoui of Minneapolis, now in U.S. custody, as a trainee from Osama bin Laden’s Khalden camp.
Ressam informed on Abu Doha, a London-based Algerian who was the brains and money behind Ressam’s Los Angeles airport plot. He identified Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who ran the Khalden camp, and Abu Sulieman, who taught bomb-making at the Darunta camp.
Most importantly, Ressam named the previously little-known Abu Zubaydah as a top aide to bin Laden. That helped smash the notion that Zubaydah, also now in U.S. custody, was little more than a travel agent for terrorist wannabes making their way to the al-Qaida camps.
Ressam is expected to testify at the trials of these and other suspected terrorists.
So it is that Ahmed Ressam — the boy who loved to fish in the Mediterranean, the teenager who loved to dance at discothèques, the young man who tried and failed to get into college, who connected with fanatical Muslims in Montreal, who learned to kill in bin Laden’s camps, who plotted to massacre American citizens — has become one of the U.S. government’s most valuable weapons in the war against terror…
Ressam’s information was given to anti-terrorism field agents around the world _ in one case, helping to prevent the mishandling and potential detonation of the shoe bomb that Richard Reid attempted to blow up aboard an American Airlines flight in 2001”
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