Detention, torture and standards of legitimacy

Saint Paul and his mentor pragmatically accepted the limited legitimacy of the brutal and autocratic Roman state as a provider of public goods, including money. “Render unto Caesar”. See also Saint Augustine on the two cities.

Consent leads to anarchism, fine. But elevation, above all, the protection of individual members, it seems weird. And it’s never fulfilled: every state has jails, used precisely for depriving its members of liberty. So there has to be more to it.

Consent leads to anarchism if you regard legitimacy as a binary value, and demand 100% consent. I regard legitimacy as a continuous variable, and consent as something we ought to aspire to 100% on, not expect.

But I do find it very troubling when somebody just rejects consent of the governed completely. That leads rather directly to a very dark place, because governing without the consent of a large proportion of the governed involves some really nasty means.

“arbitrary deprivation”

‘Arbitrary’ in this context could probably only mean something like ‘unreasonable’, because ‘in accordance with whatever laws are on the books’ wouldn’t make sense. But reason is subjective, opinions differ, and so we are back to consent.

@2 Saint Paul and his mentor pragmatically accepted the limited legitimacy of the brutal and autocratic Roman state as a provider of public goods, including money. “Render unto Caesar”. See also Saint Augustine on the two cities.

One of the most important rights conferred by Roman citizenship was exemption from torture, though this did not apply (under the Empire increasingly) in cases of treason – or slaves, who were not citizens, of course.

Detention without judicial oversight for eight years does sound horrific. Does this happen because the immigration service simply locks people up and forgets about them? Or is it that those detained keep issuing legal challenges to stop attempts to end their detention by deporting them? If the latter, in what sense is the process “without judicial oversight”?

I think that legitimacy (and so authority, though of course the connection between the two is complex) must always be a matter of degree and not total, at least in real cases. What that tells us to do in actual circumstances is a hard question, in particular, I think, because we shouldn’t expect general answers. Each case will likely be different.

David Lyons has some interesting discussion of issues of these types, partially made in the process of criticizing some standard philosophical discussions of civil disobedience, in his recent collection of essays, _Confronting Injustice_. I’m not sure I agree with all of his take, but it’s interesting stuff that’s worth considering. There are interesting reviews of the book available by Laurence Thomas and Avery Kolers for people who want a taste.

On some of the same topics, I will be presenting a paper on civil disobedience and immigration protests (understood fairly broadly) at the up-coming Eastern American Philosophical Association meeting, for anyone who is interested. I’m still revising my paper, so if people have particularly interesting issues to look at, I’d be glad to hear about them.

J, do you think of “legitimacy” as some kind of unified metric for the worth of a government? That there’s no such thing as a bad legitimate government, or a good illegitimate one?

No, I think legitimacy is just one component of the worth of a government. That there can be bad legitimate governments, indeed, the legitimate government of a bad people, as their faithful agent, ought to be expected to be bad. And good illegitimate governments, though nobody should expect those to be at all common; The British rule of Hong Kong qualified. AND, in the way it ended, provided a warning about such.

The problem with approving of a democratic government being unrepresentative, (And thus illegitimate.) when the people want something bad, is that to accomplish that you need mechanisms, it will not magically happen. And those mechanisms, to enable somebody or some group to rule in defiance of the population’s wishes, will not only work when the clique is better than the people. They will also work when the clique is worse than the people.

Not that the clique will ever admit they’re worse on anything.

J, do you think of “legitimacy” as some kind of unified metric for the worth of a government?

Of course not. The standard that OP quoted is only one possible *minimum* standard.

It concerns me some that the quote implies that this minimum is all a state has to do to “earn” legitimacy. If that’s all that “legitimacy” means I’d rather choose another word for that kind of legitimacy and reserve the “legitimacy” word for something else.

There could be other minimum standards. Consent of the majority of the governed could be one. The de facto traditional standard was that a state had to be able to beat down all rebellions and also defend itself against whatever invasions happened to come in. If it was strong enough not to be overthrown, that’s what made it legitimate.

Lots of ways to declare a minimum bound.
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Two different things here, perhaps. A political regime, of any kind, may gain acceptance or recognition, if it is able to preserve the monopoly of violence against competitors. And if it succeeds in dictating which violence is legitimate and which is not, then it becomes correspondingly stronger. But “legitimacy” in the sense used here is a far more nebulous and normative concept, which is essentially subjective , and can be endlessly debated, in the sense that effective control of territory and population cannot.

On a more serious note, isn’t this more or less what Agamben’s on about in Homo Sacer? That there exist a third group who are neither members of the original state (in the sense of the term in the quotation in the OP) nor outsiders (here meaning simply “normal” members of other states. Thus Cameron can say what he does because to him, the homines sacres (or is it sacri, I forget) in the detention centers just don’t count – that they are “outlaws” in Agamben’s sense (which I’ve always thought was remarkably close to “outlaw” in the Robin Hood mythos.)

There’s a mental faculty that recoils from pragmatism, clearly stated. This faculty becomes over developed with education past age 18.

But the alternative–coherent abstract theories–make us hypocrites every time. At some point, every practical man learns that moral philosophy is a snipe hunt.

A man both practical and philosophical, like John Dewey, does not recoil from this result. Instead he sees our social organization as a collection of solutions to particular problems. Moral particularism, and it’s subset of philosophy of justice, are the success of human problem solving. Trying to make a coherent unified whole out of it is just missing the point.

#23 TheSophist

Is “farcical aquatic ceremony” a term of art I’m not familiar with for “electoral campaigns financed by billionaires”?

It’s from a scene in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxGqcCeV3qk

King Arthur encounters a Marxist peasant who denies his authority to rule.

[Angelic music plays…]

Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king!

Dennis: (interrupting) Listen, strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcicial aquatic ceremony!

Arthur: Be quiet!

Dennis: Oh but you can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!

Arthur: SHUT UP!

Dennis: Oh but if I went ’round sayin’ I was Emperor, just because some moistened bink lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!

Arthur: SHUT UP! WILL YOU SHUT UP! [Grabs Dennis]

Dennis: Ah! Now we see the violence inherent in the system!

oh, and if you read some of Agamben’s later work, iirc The Kingdom and the Glory (don’t, actually, the writing/translation is terrible), he contends that state power derives much more from ‘farcical aquatic ceremonies’ than it does from any sort of ‘consent of the governed’ (whatever that means).

I would say that governments mostly get by on the resignation of the governed, and pretend that it’s the same as consent. Sometimes they settle for pretending unsuccessful resistance is resignation.

Okay, so it was deriving, not derive. Measure twice, cut once applies to fact-checking as well as carpentry it seems.

” A person is subject to an administrative process, where the burden of proof is against them.”

Which is unreasonable because?

Generally, administrative process is neither arbitrary nor unreasonable. Most governmental privileges are adjudicated administratively, with access to the courts only given after administrative review is complete (if then!) Having an ALJ determine your rights is hardly a kangaroo court.

Nor is the burden of proof resting with the claimant arbitrary or unreasonable. The burden of proof reasonably rests with either (1) the person seeking relief or (2) the person who has best access to the evidence. Someone seeking to live in a country is both of these, and should bear the burden of proof.

Not one of your best efforts.

David @11 raises interesting issues; don’t have time to respond just now, but wanted to thank him for the comment.

I am not familiar with all the wrinkles of this discussion, but having only skimmed this paper by Wellman:

http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/phil267fa12/Immigration%20Proofs.pdf

I have to say that I am not very interested in jumping through the hoops of this academic sets up – quote:

every legitimate state has the right to close its doors to all potential
immigrants, even refugees desperately seeking asylum from incompetent
or corrupt political regimes that are either unable or unwilling to
protect their citizens’ basic moral rights.

He seems to base all this on the spurious (in this case) notion of “freedom of association”.

Billy Wilder, mentioned by Ignatieff as being from Austria, was actually from Galicia, now Poland and the Ukraine.

@36
i’m not sure that Agamben’s theoretical framework has much space for the notion of ‘legitimacy’ that you are trying to parse out here. are you saying that my exposition of how this statement is read through Agamben’s framework is wrong, or that Agamben’s framework itself is wrong? because i find it quite unclear, and i would appreciate a bit more exposition on your end before you flatly declare something wrong.

and while i am not sure that i want to go to bat for the Schmittian approach to sovereignty, quite frankly that approach is much more consonant with the evidence in front of me than most of the rival notions that i have encountered.

Thomas Jefferson wrote “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”, but that didn’t stop him from incorporating the Louisiana Purchase into the United States without giving any consideration to whether the inhabitants consented or not.

Just want to point out that I did, in fact, see MPATHG in a cinema when it was first released (yeah, I’m old) and so was aware of the origin of “farcical aquatic ceremony.” Just an attempt at humor that didn’t quite work…

On the other hand (and now for something completely different) I appreciate the Agamben discussion greatly. Thanks to Gianni and others. I wish I’d had you guys around when I was struggling with his books a decade or so ago.

“Just an attempt at humor that didn’t quite work…”

I thought it worked and I knew that you got my joke. J can be a little literal.

LFC @51, isn’t the entire concept of “legitimacy” supposed to function as a marker of what states can be treated as states (and therefore held up to some kind of standard of global justice) and what states can be treated as aberrations to be removed by force, or simply ignored?

As for the concept of the “consent of the governed”, it seems a mythical construct to begin with, since in practice the state itself constructs the population of governed individuals qua governed. Consent is presupposed by the fact of the state’s existence. Anyone objecting can be given the “well if you don’t like it you can just leave” routine.

In relation to the topic, there’s a very interesting essay about the creation of a state in practice that can be found here. Some quotes:

Ultranationalist discourse has made sure that those colonized and criminalized within the state are guaranteed to become new recruits in this guerrilla war; and our very own governments cannot wait to kick-start a new phase of eroding what’s left of civil rights, the rule of law, and democratic institutions. Only recently, the UN Security Council unanimously decided that the mere suspicion of terrorist activity can be enough to strip citizens of their passports, so they can be bombed safely without having to consider international law. In other words, to the extent that we should consider our states to even still exist, we are soon to be rendered stateless within them. So when something is presented to us as a “terrorist,” “separatist,” or “stateless” struggle, we ought to look carefully, listen, and learn.

Between the Coalition of the Willing and the Islamic State, there is no true choice: both wish for a total state, beyond boundaries; and both benefit endlessly from the other’s aggression, the Islamic State being largely a product of Western intervention, and Western interventionism continuously profiting from its self-manufactured opponent. The state as such has become inflated, totalized, to the point where we need a new political horizon.

While what is left of democracy is being consumed through these total states, our question—in line with the Azawadian Slogan “La Revolution est Sans Frontière” (The Revolution is Without Frontiers)–is, how we can liberate democracy from our states? How do we redefine the practice of democracy without the construct of the state? Our liberation, I believe, is to enact, in the face of the total states arising before us, a stateless democracy.

Robespierre @1
” The State is a tool, not designed by us, and not designed for our purposes, that ”

Who is the “we” (well rather “us” and “our”) here? I really have no idea what you mean. Because in a certain historic sense, this statement is clearly not true of every state (there were in fact constitutional conferences involving representatives of the people at the time that did in fact design the state).

@areanimator (52). A lot depends on who does the “marking”. Given the impossibility of defining legitimacy satisfactorily, any effective judgement essentially comes down to considerations of power. Interestingly, in view of CB’s original post, it’s clear that the discourse of “legitimacy” functions on the international level just as Agamben’s argument about the discourse of “exception” functions in a domestic context. That is to say, by calling states “illegitimate” (as domestically we call people “outlaws” or “suspected terrorists”) we take away their protection under international law, and give ourselves the right to attack and destroy them.

When I say encompassing mostly the entire world, I mean that almost all modern states recognize some higher authority to which they in sub matters are subservient. As far as I know the only exceptions to this are Cuba, North Korea and the US.

#48 TheSophist

Just want to point out that I did, in fact, see MPATHG in a cinema when it was first released (yeah, I’m old) and so was aware of the origin of “farcical aquatic ceremony.”

Sorry. It was easy and quick to post a reference, just in case. I hope no harm done.

#53 Resident Troll

“Between the Coalition of the Willing and the Islamic State, there is no true choice: both wish for a total state, beyond boundaries; “

I think this is at best the fallacy of equivocation. At best. And, if you think otherwise, I’ll provide you with a long, long list of things you can do here, and will get executed for doing there.

You could easily be right that there are important differences. But your argument is worthless. If somebody said about two kings that they both wanted to be emperors who controlled the whole world, and you pointed out that one of them gave his subjects lots of privileges that the other did not, you could be correct about that and he could still want to be an emperor who controlled the whole world.

areanimator @52

LFC @51, isn’t the entire concept of “legitimacy” supposed to function as a marker of what states can be treated as states (and therefore held up to some kind of standard of global justice) and what states can be treated as aberrations to be removed by force, or simply ignored?

I doubt this is how “legitimacy” functions in the Altman/Wellman book mentioned by Chris in the OP (though I haven’t read it).

More generally, I wd distinguish betw. normative political theory and ‘positive’ (for lack of a better word) international law. I suppose theorists can use “legitimacy” in various ways and for various reasons. As far as int’l law is concerned, although there has been a good deal of talk in recent years of “outlaw” and/or “rogue” states, I doubt such a category has much basis in int’l law. (Will try to link to something on this later.)

The organizing notion is still that of state sovereignty, which — aside from a few anomalies and exceptional cases (e.g., Taiwan) — most of the entities that we think of as states or countries are presumed to possess. State sovereignty and the principle of nonintervention in domestic affairs are the still the basic norms — they’re quite regularly violated in practice, of course, but as Krasner has argued (in Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, 1999), such violations have not seemed to affect or diminish the norms’ durability. “Durability” here means, among other things, that violations remain controversial, which is one reason the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003 aroused so much opposition.

You (areanimator) have also, I think, somewhat misunderstood my use of the phrase ‘global justice’, above, but I can’t go into that right now.

@LFC 53
You’re right about terminology, in the sense that the word “illegitimate” is not usually used about states such as N Korea, Iran, and, in the past, Libya, Iraq and Syria, although I think the idea is present everywhere, by subtraction, if you like, from the discourse of legitimacy. The thought is omnipresent in the use of terms like “rogue state” and the contorted rhetoric about states or regimes “oppressing their people” or the people struggling to free themselves or to replace their system by a “democratic” one. In other words, we define a category of state (with a fluctuating and incoherent vocabulary) which we argue has, by its actions as we present them, placed itself outside the legal protections all states enjoy. This, I insist, is effectively the power of some states to impose a de facto state of exception internationally.
Some of the confusion results from the old dichotomy between state as nation and state as regime. In the Cold War, it was common to hear that the Soviet Union was illegitimate in both senses, and therefore, for example, it had no valid security interests. These days, we tend to mean illegitimate regimes (though we use other words) rather than nations. Thus “regime change” which can be seen to be the replacement of an illegitimate one by one which, we trust, will be legitimate. Bearing in mind there aren’t many such identified states in the world, attacks on those states (nations) and destruction of those states (regimes) has actually been pretty common.

#65 BB

The “total state” doesn’t, as I understand it, refer to a state which recognizes no geographic limit to its reach, but rather a state which recognizes no area of life as beyond its reach. We may be headed that way, but haven’t gotten there yet.

From the quote that you were referencing:

… our very own governments cannot wait to kick-start a new phase of eroding what’s left of civil rights, the rule of law, and democratic institutions. Only recently, the UN Security Council unanimously decided that the mere suspicion of terrorist activity can be enough to strip citizens of their passports, so they can be bombed safely without having to consider international law.

The USA did not veto this bill. Would the USA cancel your passport if they thought you were a terrorist? In a New York millisecond.

The USA gives you various privileges if they like you. You get to be a homosexual, maybe you can even have same-sex marriage. You get to say whatever you want on blogs provided it doesn’t look like you’ll actually do anything that would annoy the government. You can eat pork on friday and have sex with any adult who wants you.

But if they decide they don’t like you, they can take away all your privileges including the privilege of running away from them.

Saudi Arabia’s government doesn’t have the “right to rule”? That’s surprising to me- I may be misunderstanding. Does that mean Saudis (or visitors to their country) have no obligation to follow current Saudi law?

The road to hell…

Quote
We also heard what we’ve long known, that the United States routinely tortured on an industrial scale after 9/11.
Unquote

*after* 9/11 ? how about *continued after* ?

Church committee, SAVAK, ‘Nam, Operation Condor, School of Americas, dirty war in our colony known as the Phillipines early in the 20th century, support for the Coups in Greece, Indonesia, ….
not even getting into refusal to allow jewish refugees in during WWII

and lets not talk about use of mass starvation as a political tool; surely something could have been done about Biafra….

JT 68: The formality of taking somebody’s citizenship away seems a bit of a distraction. States have always maintained the power to eliminate (with or without legal niceties) those they deem a threat, whether foreigners or citizens. Most people are, of course, ok with that.

> Would the USA cancel your passport if they thought you were a terrorist?

Not sure they can, legally, btw: you’re not supposed to make people stateless. Not that this stops them, of course…

[but this drives me to a realisation about oversight: corrections and suggestions based on better-knowledge-than-yours are going to look pretty arbitrary, precisely because that which motivates them is invisible to you. And dealing with arbitrary interference is extremely frustrating and something that people seek to avoid, even if the interference is actually motivated and only appears arbitrary to you on account of your ignorance.]

#76 Collin Street

> Would the USA cancel your passport if they thought you were a terrorist?

Not sure they can, legally, btw: you’re not supposed to make people stateless. Not that this stops them, of course…

The UN resolution that started this rumor was #2178
http://www.un.org/press/en/2014/sc11580.doc.htm

I didn’t read it closely but it looks like they have an international committee that decides on an individual basis who to honor passports from. If the international committee thinks you are probably a terrorist then no nation in the world is supposed to let you in. And if you’re in, they’re supposed to detain you and not let you out.

But it’s a much smaller deal when they have a short list of people who are suspected of being terrorists by a lot of nations, than when any one nation including your own can hold you because they suspect you are a terrorist and they aren’t responsible to anybody.

And that last appears to be true of the USA. Am I wrong? If they decide you are probably a terrorist do they have to give you a public trial now? Do you have habeas corpus?

Or can they still grab you secretly and hold you secretly and dispose of you secretly?

reason 58
I mean that almost all modern states recognize some higher authority to which they in [some] matters are subservient. As far as I know the only exceptions to this are Cuba, North Korea and the US.

In the absence of elaboration, I’m not sure what you’re referring to here. Do, e.g., Russia and China recognize some ‘higher authority’ that the US doesn’t?

correction: “guessed” s/b “guess”

L.M. Dorsey:
“Legitimacy” may be viewed as a reconsideration of Westphalian “sovereignty” that has a keen interest in discovering the latter’s limits and exceptions

I thought C. Bertram made clear @66 that he was not talking in the OP about what he terms “recognitional legitimacy”; hence the discussion of state sovereignty above, incl my own remarks on it, are pretty much off the point of the OP.

But FTR, ‘Westphalian sovereignty’, while an enduring norm, has always had exceptions and limits and been violated in practice, as I had occasion to mention above (citing Krasner). The notion of ‘humanitarian intervention’, for instance, has a long, if controversial, history; it’s not something invented in the 1990s or 2000s. (H. Farrell’s colleague M. Finnemore has a quite good discussion of some of the relevant history in her The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs About the Use of Force).

“OK, do you have evidence whether that has stopped?”

What would ‘evidence of no renditions’ look like?

(note the number references just above are wrong b/c a couple of comments upthread just came out of moderation)

Or — maybe — agree that they don’t know what they’re talking about and they don’t in fact know whether it has stopped or not.

There are a lot of things we don’t “know.” It’s a question of less-reasonable and more-reasonable suppositions. Obvs. you are inclined to automatically discount all official statements on these matters. Others may not be.

“Not my problem. Anybody who wants to claim that it has stopped, has the responsibility to provide evidence that it has stopped. Or — maybe — agree that they don’t know what they’re talking about and they don’t in fact know whether it has stopped or not.”

Isn’t this a bit like putting your fingers in your ears and sticking out your tongue?

Seriously, it was a secret program. Prior to telling us it was stopped, they were telling us it wasn’t done. Maybe now we’re being told the truth.

But I see no reason to be confident of it.

> Isn’t this a bit like putting your fingers in your ears and sticking out your tongue?

You can’t unfuck the chicken. Your past actions shape how people perceive and interpret your current actions and intent: if you want to be trusted, you have to have been — past tense — trustworthy. If you haven’t been trustworthy and you still want to be trusted… guess you’re fucked, ay. The CIA can’t get there from here, they can’t get what they want, and it’s their own damned fault.

If you need to do Y and Y is impossible then it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to do Y, it just means you’re fucked. And that’s your/the CIA’s problem, not JT’s.

#97 Mattski

“Anybody who wants to claim that it has stopped, has the responsibility to provide evidence that it has stopped.”

What about the claim that it hasn’t stopped?

Same thing, anybody who says they know should show us how they know.

I don’t claim it’s still happening. I say there is no reliable evidence at all, either way.

If you know nothing about it, then you should give it a probability of 50 percent, with a confidence interval of 100 percent. That is, you just plain don’t know.

You can judge some by a priori terms. Like, if somebody swears they’re innocent and you’ve never found them to be guilty before or to tell lies before, that’s some evidence that they’re likely innocent this time. Do you want to make that argument for the CIA?

On the other hand if they’re known liars but there’s never been any evidence against them about *this* particular crime, then that’s some indication they might still be innocent of it. Just because the CIA has done lots of bad stuff is not strong evidence that they have replaced Obama with a body double who does what they say. Or that Putin is a CIA agent who is intentionally looking threatening because the CIA wants to influence public opinion. Or that the CIA has stolen nukes from a foreign power and is smuggling them into the USA to blow up Boston to influence US politics. The more implausible the claim, the less plausible even if they’re known bad guys. This is something that they were caught doing a few years ago, and they implied that they’d quit doing it.

What next?

Yes, you say that while knowing full well that there can be no such thing as reliable evidence that it isn’t happening; so your demand for it is just silly.

If you need to do X, and X is impossible, then it doesn’t mean you don’t need to do X: it just means you’re fucked.

#101 Layman

By all means, distrust official statements to that effect. I certainly do. But if you can’t produce any evidence that it is happening – if you never find any such evidence – don’t you at some point have to concede that it is likely not happening?

I take it you are an atheist? If you can’t find evidence that there is a god, then don’t you have to concede that there is no god?

And since you have no evidence that the CIA has done anything that improves US security, should you concede that likely the CIA has done nothing to improve US security?

I’m surprised to find such basic logic errors on Crooked Timber.

if you don’t know, it means you don’t know. Not knowing does not mean you should therefore assume one way or another.

J T @93
We can break it down into categories.

I. Maybe they found that renditions etc were on average not worth doing, so they quit.

II. Maybe they think they’re still get valuable results.

IIA. Too many people didn’t like them doing it, so they quit.

IIB. They didn’t like the bad publicity, so they stopped admitting they were doing it.

IIB1. They kept doing it and told key members of Congress they were still doing it, getting their permission and holding them to secrecy.

IIB2. They kept doing it and lie to all of Congress about it.

Maybe. OTOH maybe:

I. New pres. takes office Jan ’09, issues exec order banning EITs (torture) and also (I assume this was included) the practice of rendition that was often tied to it.

II. CIA officers have to decide whether to disobey/disregard exec order.

III. On one hand, disregarding might be worth it if easy to do and probability they won’t be discovered and called to account is reasonably high.

IV. On other hand, if probability they won’t be discovered is low (i.e., they are likely to be discovered), they will prob decide it isn’t worth it, b.c consequence of discovery is dismissal from agency and end of their careers.

—

I assume it’s true that the U.S.’s history in this respect is not great, tho I’m not sure I agree w RP that “if we aren’t torturing people unofficially it would be the first era in our history in which we didn’t do so.” But I’m not in a position to debate the history here. Suffice to say the record is prob. not esp. encouraging. OTOH, CIA from Church Committee to 9/11 was under considerable scrutiny and was reined in by other parts of govt, to some extent.

JT

Like, if somebody swears they’re innocent and you’ve never found them to be guilty before or to tell lies before, that’s some evidence that they’re likely innocent this time. Do you want to make that argument for the CIA?

No, I don’t. I don’t trust the CIA at all. I just wanted to see if you were keeping an open mind about the question.

RP

Based on the history of the U.S., if we aren’t torturing people unofficially it would be the first era in our history in which we didn’t do so, so I’d be pretty surprised by it.

Do you really know this? I’m skeptical.

CS

If you need to do X, and X is impossible, then it doesn’t mean you don’t need to do X: it just means you’re fucked.

A sentence that might be fun to write, while signifying nothing.

Good points in both OP and thread.

I do see a few points on which I would disagree:

As to the OP:

“a state has earned legitimacy if it is willing and able (a) to protect its members against ‘substantial and recurrent threats’ to a decent human life – threats such as the arbitrary deprivation of life or liberty, and the infliction of torture – and (b) to refrain from imposing such threats on outsiders”

I’d add qualifiers to the above as follows: “a state may have earned legitimacy if it is reasonably willing and able….”

In other words, the above should be necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for legitimacy (in the sense intended to be discussed by the OP), and those conditions are vague and highly subject to a variety of other factors. The original statement is also quite vague of course. The qualifiers make the statement less helpful as a bright line rule for dividing legitimate from illegitimate states, but the qualified statement has the virtues of being much more in keeping with a useful and morally coherent approach to the issue, and of not making any pretense at being less vague than it really is.

the United States routinely tortured on an industrial scale after 9/11.

119 people were detained by this program.

39 were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which range from being pushed into a shock-absorbing wall to water-boarding.

3 were water-boarded.

The numbers don’t excuse the program, but they also indicate that it was anything but “routine”, or at an “industrial scale.” There’s no need to exaggerate, and it’s misleading to diminish the extraordinary nature of the program.

As to the comments in the thread doubting whether we know that such a program is no longer in existence, the balance of the evidence indicates that no such program currently exists.

This program produced at least 6.3 million pages of documents (certainly more, but that’s how many were released to the SSCI) and resulted in a 6,700 page SSCI Report.

Before CIA was willing to undertake that program, they required legal opinions from the OLC, they extensively briefed senior officials, and they continuously investigated and altered the program over the course of its existence.

None of the above is contested by the SSCI Report or the CIA (both agree that their briefings sometimes omitted the full truth or contained false statements, though they disagree as to the extent, and both agree that their early oversight and management was inadequate).

So the notion that there’s currently such a program in existence, but one in which officers participating have no legal cover at all, in a time when there seems to be less justification for such measures, and which has not leaked, seems quite dubious. Possible, certainly. But very unlikely.

“If you need to do X, and X is impossible, then it doesn’t mean you don’t need to do X: it just means you’re fucked.”

I’d say the problem begins in the first 6 words of that argument.

Pick any other unknown – for example, the question of whether the government is concealing the remains of aliens in New Mexico. There’s some evidence for that notion (yes, it’s not very good evidence, the I know). The government denies it, but they’ve lied to us before, so we know what that’s worth. And, there’s no evidence they aren’t doing it. What’s more, I can’t produce evidence they aren’t doing it. Am I fucked? Must I do the impossible in order to argue that it is unlikely to be true? Or can I opt for the simpler explanation?

“If you can’t find evidence that there is a god, then don’t you have to concede that there is no god?”

Did you intentionally drop ‘at some point’ and ‘likely’ from this paraphrase of my argument? If you restore them, doesn’t it suddenly seem quite reasonable? “If you can’t find evidence of unicorns, don’t you at some point have to concede that there likely are no unicorns?” What is your view on unicorns, BTW?

#112 Layman

“If you need to do X, and X is impossible, then it doesn’t mean you don’t need to do X: it just means you’re fucked.”

I’d say the problem begins in the first 6 words of that argument.

Pick any other unknown – for example, the question of whether the government is concealing the remains of aliens in New Mexico.

I think you’ve mis-parsed that.

If you have to get people to trust you, but there is nothing you can do at this point to get them to trust you, then you’re fucked. There doesn’t have to be a way to get them to trust you just because you need them to.

I see no reason to trust the CIA about anything at this point. They have no credibility. While it’s true that there’s nothing they can do to restore trust and still keep their black secrets, that is not an argument that I or anybody should trust them.

(Actually I have nothing much against the various analysis units except that their published analysis has been so awful so often. My concern is almost entirely with the ops wing.)

It isn’t urgent whether the US government is hiding UFO evidence. I hope. If the UFOs can stay secret that’s OK. If at some point we get hundreds of thousands of UFOs bombing our cities and we could have stopped them if we’d known we needed to then I’ll be pissed until I’m bombed away, but unless things go wrong I won’t worry. I don’t need to have an opinion whether it’s true.

If the CIA is kidnapping people and torturing them and disposing of them afterward, that’s a problem. Even worse, if they’re doing black propaganda, spreading false rumors and trying to make their propaganda look like it’s coming from reputable sources, perhaps intending to affect other nations but also affecting us, that’s unacceptable. We have too much of that sort of thing done by amateurs, much less professionals doing it on a government budget.

“If you need to do X, and X is impossible, then it doesn’t mean you don’t need to do X: it just means you’re fucked.”

There is no possible way the CIA can show that it follows the President’s guidelines or Congress’s rules, without giving up the secrecy it depends on. This does not mean that we should trust that it does so.

If we can’t trust them, we can’t afford them.

111

I have the amazing power of being able to read wiki pages.

Apologies, but you also have the amazing power of being a dick about it.

I wasn’t aware that the Confederacy constituted the federal gov’t of the United States. Nor was I aware that lynching was a federal program. Nor was I aware that slavery, awful as it was, was synonymous with torture.

Have a nice evening.

Apology not accepted. I specifically wrote that we tortured people unofficially, not as part of a Federal program. Your ignorance about slavery is itself pretty shocking if you think that a) slavery only existed under the Confederacy, rather than being supported by the laws of the United States all the way up until the Civil War, b) slavery did not involve torture. But I’m not surprised.

OK, Rich. Based on your definition of torture there has never been a time or a place in history where it wasn’t practiced.

So good for you.

Oh, and Obama kills instead of torturing – predictably there’s is much less outrage about killing people, not sure what that says about humanity other than that ethical principles seem to be subordinate to aesthetic considerations and vague intuitions.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/is-obama-s-drone-policy-really-morally-superior-to-torture-20130214

novakant @124
Oh, and Obama kills instead of torturing – predictably there’s is much less outrage about killing people, not sure what that says about humanity other than that ethical principles seem to be subordinate to aesthetic considerations and vague intuitions.

Me @79:
Someone will bring up killing-by-drone: yes, but a somewhat separate issue; which is not to defend it.

novakant:
Obama kills instead of torturing

Wd you rather he were both droning and torturing, a la GWBush? No, which means he gets credit for stopping (or at least ordering the stopping) of torture. Obama did increase use of drones over Bush, but I believe there has been some (though probably not that much) decline in use since Obama’s Natl Defense Univ speech.

JT:
If it was arab-american citizens missing and their families had a pretty good idea what happened to them, would they add them to the database?

If a branch of the US govt were “disappearing” Arab-American or other citizens, I wd think not only wd families they add them to the database, they wd raise hell w their congressional representatives, the press, and anyone else, and also be demonstrating on the streets, etc. And filing lawsuits. The US in 2014, despite its v. substantial flaws, is not, e.g., Argentina during the “dirty war” or Brazil during the dictatorship, so it’s a somewhat unlikely scenario to begin with. CIA can’t make a habit of picking up, say, a 20-year-old Arab-American college student at a shopping mall on a Saturday, secretly fly him somewhere, torture him, and kill him. Even if he often misses his early Monday morning class (or whatever), in a week or so at the outside someone will notice he is missing. Now people are victims of mysterious criminal abduction from time to time, true, but if CIA made a habit of this and a pattern developed, pretty soon it wd start to be noticed. Plus why wd they bother in the first place? Seems an odd use of their resources, to put it mildly, to be picking up, torturing, and killing young Arab-American men solely on the basis of their ethnic background.

LFC: “Plus why wd they bother in the first place? Seems an odd use of their resources, to put it mildly, to be picking up, torturing, and killing young Arab-American men solely on the basis of their ethnic background.”

Please have somebody explain to you the history of the past 15 years.

Good luck on recovering your strength – a 15-year coma is pretty bad!

“Wd you rather he were both droning and torturing, a la GWBush? No, which means he gets credit for stopping (or at least ordering the stopping) of torture. Obama did increase use of drones over Bush, but I believe there has been some (though probably not that much) decline in use since Obama’s Natl Defense Univ speech.”

This is too much. Ask the average person whether they’d prefer to be tortured or killed, and they’ll surely chose tortured. Killing is so final! Obama gets no credit of any kind here. In fact, he’s probably created an argument or basis for future torture, in several ways. First, it’s madness to argue that the has the authority to order the extrajudicial murder of a citizen while maintaining that he does not have the authority to order the extrajudicial torture of a citizen; but this is in fact what he claims. Second, by preventing the investigation, indictment, and trial of those responsible for those crimes, he’s made it clear that future officials and officers will be similarly immune to prosecution for their crimes so long as they are claimed as necessary to protecting the ‘homeland’. Third, he’s stopped torture through executive order, even though torture was already illegal. The implication of that is that it isn’t illegal, and all that’s necessary is another executive order reversing or modifying the current one. Fourth, he’s cooperated in covering up much of the facts – he’s an accessory after the fact! – and continues to do it. He’s the reason we only see a fraction of the Senate report. And most recently, he’s offered excuses for these criminals, saying that it’s understandable that they overreacted as they did.

Whenever the Republicans start talking about impeachment, I marvel at the trivial causes they rail about. If ever a President put himself in a position to be rightly impeached, this one has. Aside from his gross dereliction of duty in this matter, he orders the death of American citizens who are not combatants on any battlefield, and who apparently never were – solely on the basis of the words they say, or fears of what they might do! And you say he deserves credit for that?

#133 Layman

“For them to collude with aliens, first there must be aliens who want them to collude. That might be, but there’s no credible evidence for it.”

Then I’ve convinced you that the absence of evidence is meaningful, and my work is done.

You don’t seem to get the concept of Bayesian priors.

If you believe the chance that a secret government organization would lie to the public about what it does is the same as the chance that space aliens are getting the the US government to do their bidding, then I doubt I can help you.

“Nor was I aware that slavery, awful as it was, was synonymous with torture.”

Mattski I like you, but this is absolutely ridiculous ! Of course slavery was synonymous with torture. Both conceptually (in how it defined people and the sort of power owners were allowed exert over slaves) and practically (in the day to day practice of slavery).
I don’t disagree with Rich more generally, personally, I just also don’t think America has an exceptionaly cruel history in this respects, which seems to be where this always comes back too. (And I do agree there is a distinction to be drawn between the torture carried out – even systematically – by specific police depts, in foreign policy etc and torture institutionalised by law in a country’s criminal justice system.

“OK, Rich. Based on your definition of torture there has never been a time or a place in history where it wasn’t practiced.”

I think, as a liberal, it’s worth having an open mind as to what constitutes torture. I would guess that in time something like, for example, solitary confinement as practiced in US prisons will be seen more commonly as torture, and that would be a good thing.

mattski: “Based on your definition of torture there has never been a time or a place in history where it wasn’t practiced.”

No. I could back that up with plenty of easily available comparative evidence about different times and countries, but I generally don’t bother to argue with denialists. If you’re not familiar with what happened during U.S. chattel slavery, and not familiar with how some countries really have pretty much given up on torture, that’s by choice, and me finding links for you will not help you.

“OK, I’ll bite. What did you think I originally said?”

You’ve attempted to shift the argument in every post. Reread your last one, and my objection to it (that two things need not be equally unlikely in order for them to both be unlikely), and respond to that. Consider the reasons why you framed your side of the argument differently then that to which you’re comparing unfavorably: ‘does the government lie’ vs. ‘is the government lying about aliens’. Why not frame the former as ‘is the government lying about current, ongoing torture & rendition’? Doesn’t that more honest framing make the distinction you’re trying to draw much less stark? Should I take these rhetorical tricks as, well, tricks, or just assume you don’t know any better?

Layman 134
he orders the death of American citizens who are not combatants on any battlefield, and who apparently never were – solely on the basis of the words they say, or fears of what they might do! And you say he deserves credit for that?

I never said he deserved credit for the use of drones. That is nowhere in my comment.

madness to argue that he has the authority to order the extrajudicial murder of a citizen while maintaining that he does not have the authority to order the extrajudicial torture of a citizen; but this is in fact what he claims.

I don’t think that’s what he claims.

he’s stopped torture through executive order, even though torture was already illegal. The implication of that is that it isn’t illegal, and all that’s necessary is another executive order reversing or modifying the current one.

How wd you have preferred him to stop torture, if not by executive order? By waving a magic wand?

p.p.s. The National Defense University speech, as you may or may not recall, indicated a change of view on drones, suggesting that he was going to reduce their use. Unfortunately I’m not sure how much that has happened; there has been, I suspect, predictable resistance and bureaucratic footdragging by those who have interests of one sort or another in continuing the use of drones. But I believe there was a sharp decrease for at least several months, in fact a rather prolonged period of no drone strikes in Pakistan (but they have now resumed, tho I’m not sure at what pace).

“That takes time. The virtue of the exec order was speed.”

Obama has systematically blocked all prosecutions, including those of the worst cases in which people were murdered by torture, and including pressuring other countries not to investigate. One of many possible cites is here (chosen because it collects various claims up in one place).

Just like others in this thread, you’re writing on the basis of what you want to believe, not on the basis of easily available evidence that would be familiar to you if you cared to make it familiar to you.

LFC: That takes time.

It requires righteousness, which is apparently lacking.

I would note that Manning was tortured after the executive order and the President . . . .

LFC: “The implication is that he stopped torture precisely because it is illegal.”

The use of an executive order implies that stopping torture is executive policy and that torture was previously policy and can be policy again, within the scope of existing law. It is a kind of deception, in that it fails to acknowledge the executive responsibility to meet legal and treaty obligations, and by failing systematically to enforce the laws, has practically voided the law against torture by the U.S. intelligence services and, of course, their contractors.

mattski: “Slavery might involve torture, but it might not. ”

Notice how the actual, historically existing practice of U.S. chattel slavery has been stripped of all content. I made it clear that I wasn’t equating slavery to torture in some ahistorical sense: I was saying that the entire period of U.S. history during which we held slaves involved torture as a matter of routine, day-to-day, historically documented practice. It was also fully allowable under U.S. Federal law, if that matters.

If people wonder why the U.S. has never given up on torture, the people in this thread offer an object lesson. They are still defending torture, both in the present day and by historical denialism. And they are “on the left” by any reasonable definition.

#142 Layman

“OK, I’ll bite. What did you think I originally said?”

You’ve attempted to shift the argument in every post.

I asked you what you thought I originally said, and you sidestepped that. You are not being responsive at all.

OK, if you won’t tell me what you thought it was I was saying, tell us what you think. Do you think it’s unlikely that the CIA is still doing torture? You say that logically it could be unlikely. Do you in fact think it is unlikely?

You said that at some point, when the CIA refuses to provide us with any evidence, we have to decide that they aren’t doing it. Have you reached that point, where you have decided that they aren’t doing it? Tell us what you think.

And while you’re at it, tell me what you think I said originally.

Should I take these rhetorical tricks as, well, tricks, or just assume you don’t know any better?

It looks to me like you’re the one doing rhetorical tricks.

So anyway, consider these two questions:

1. Have you been abducted by aliens?
2. Have you stopped beating your wife?

I wouldn’t ask you the first question if I knew the answer. But while many people think they have had UFO experiences of one sort or another, only a few people believe they have been abducted by UFOs. It’s plausible that you will probably answer no.

With the second question, I am assuming that you used to beat your wife, and that makes it plausible that you are still doing it.

That’s our situation with CIA. There’s no question they were doing it a few years ago. The question is only whether they have secretly stopped doing it. What they say about whether they have stopped doing it is irrelevant — they appear to have no concept of telling the truth. Have they secretly stopped, or do they secretly continue?

#152 Bruce Wilder

The use of an executive order implies that stopping torture is executive policy and that torture was previously policy and can be policy again, within the scope of existing law.

I don’t see that using an executive order implies that. There’s nothing wrong with saying “You boys stop breaking that law right now.” What implies the things you said is that he hasn’t done any more than the executive order.

Usually he’d find a scapegoat example, and punish him severely, and that tells everybody that he really means it. Like Lieutenant Calley, or Sergeant Graner, or Private Bradley Manning.

But he didn’t do anything to show that he meant it except tell the media that he’d sent the order.

#159 Layman

“You said that at some point, when the CIA refuses to provide us with any evidence, we have to decide that they aren’t doing it. “

No, I said no such thing. Which is to say, you lie.

Ah, the next tactic in the game. When I start to ask you to take a stand, you pretend to get angry and lose your civility.

Here’s from your #101

“I don’t claim it’s still happening. I say there is no reliable evidence at all, either way.”

Yes, you say that while knowing full well that there can be no such thing as reliable evidence that it isn’t happening; so your demand for it is just silly. By all means, distrust official statements to that effect. I certainly do. But if you can’t produce any evidence that it is happening – if you never find any such evidence – don’t you at some point have to concede that it is likely not happening?

What you said is not exactly what I said. You said “likely” not happening, not that you’ve decided they aren’t doing it. And you were talking about me not having evidence that they were doing it, not that they refused to provide evidence.

I regard those differences as trivial. Of course they refuse to provide evidence, so naturally I don’t have evidence. And what will you do different if you think they aren’t doing it, versus they “likely” aren’t doing it?

Oh well. Your argument is devolving rapidly. I can’t say it was ever a lot of fun.

J Thomas @ 160

Yes, this is the problem in a nutshell. You read:

“Yes, you say that while knowing full well that there can be no such thing as reliable evidence that it isn’t happening; so your demand for it is just silly. By all means, distrust official statements to that effect. I certainly do. But if you can’t produce any evidence that it is happening – if you never find any such evidence – don’t you at some point have to concede that it is likely not happening?”

And then recast it as:

“when the CIA refuses to provide us with any evidence, we have to decide that they aren’t doing it. “

I said nothing about evidence provided to us, or not, by the CIA. If you took a moment to reflect, you’d realize that the evidence of torture the first time around wasn’t provided to us by the CIA – it was provided to us by other people despite the CIA’s desire to keep it secret. The likely source of evidence about torture going on now is not the CIA, but other people who want to expose it, despite the CIA’s desire to keep it secret. The absence of such evidence, in the face of the difficulty of maintaining such a secret, makes it seem more likely to me than not that it isn’t happening now. Your demand for evidence that it isn’t happening now (evidence of absence), coupled with your refusal to describe what such evidence would qualify, is simple childish nonsense; and everything you’ve written since then is an attempt at obfuscating that childishness.

bob mcmanus @ 157

An authoritarian regime has come into being with a curious absence of opposition — many people seem so incapable of even imagining alternatives that it is difficult to identify the actual regime for what it is.

What can we make of the residual spirit that published this redacted summary of a report?

I’m not at all surprised to find mcmanus comparing the present US govt to Vichy France, Latin Am dictatorships, etc.

I am a bit surprised, however, to find Bruce Wilder saying that the present US govt is “an authoritarian regime.” Authoritarian regimes don’t allow the kind of demos vs police behavior that took place in major cities yesterday. It’s true that pol scientists (Levitsky & Way is the standard cite) have come up w an intermediate category, ‘competitive authoritarianism’, but that doesn’t, I don’t think, fit the US v. well either. As a description of the present US system I might suggest “a highly imperfect democracy with certain marked oligarchical characteristics, in which the wealthy and other elites exercise grossly disproportionate influence on policy and on electoral outcomes.”

It’s more like the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Ronan 155

Yes.

“It’s more like the Austro-Hungarian Empire.”

It’s like any empire.

LFC @ 165
“On the question of prosecutions: yes, I think he should have pursued prosecutions, shd not have pressured other countries not to conduct their own. Even if he had announced it in his inaugural address, however, I think it still wd have taken some time, as such things do. So ideally he shd have announced investigation/prosecutions on taking office and issued the executive order as well.”

Do you agree that, by not enforcing the law, he’s broken the law himself? And / or violated his oath of office? If not, why not? If so, what do you recommend?

#162 Layman

The likely source of evidence about torture going on now is not the CIA, but other people who want to expose it, despite the CIA’s desire to keep it secret. The absence of such evidence, in the face of the difficulty of maintaining such a secret, makes it seem more likely to me than not that it isn’t happening now.

Thank you! For the first time you have taken a stand.

So would you give better-than-even odds that they aren’t doing it, if we were to make a bet?

Say, $600 from you, $400 from me, held in escrow for 7 years. If no evidence surfaces that they were doing torture since Obama said to stop and until Obama steps down, then you win, if there is evidence by then, I win?

Are you less confident than that? $550 to $450?

It wouldn’t be a money-making bet since I’d expect to make more investing the money over that time, but just for fun.

Ze Kraggash 175
Well, the aspects Mr. mcmanus chose to emphasize: wars, violent, repressive, expansionist, etc. – they are common features of any empire.

Actually these are not “common features of any empire” (if one cd come up w a list of such features, they wd be more ‘minimalist’, given the variation one sees historically).

Andrew F.:
Executive Orders can be used to implement existing laws, and often cite the statutory authority under which they are being issued.

Yes.
(The EO in question here said, in effect: If anyone in the USG is not presently complying with the requirements of [see the statutes and treaties listed], which there is reason to believe is the case, comply with them, immediately.)

“Thank you! For the first time you have taken a stand.”

Are you completely unable to acknowledge your misrepresentations of my words?

I’ve said before that it’s a mistake to respond to your rambling monologues. I’ll try to do a better job maintaining my resolve to avoid it. Sorry to have troubled you.

LFC @ 166 Re: authoritarian regime

mcmanus conspicuously did not use the term , authoritarian, @ 157. For that reason, I introduced it, partly to see what he might do with it.

Doing “Types” has its hazards. I don’t know of any definitive list of qualifications that we could use formally, as dispositive criteria. I can tell you why I think “authoritarian” is useful for highlighting certain emergent organizing principles of American politics c. 2014.

The etymological core of “authoritarian” is individual obedience or subservience to authority. The political organizing principles associated with authoritarianism, to my mind, revolve around exploiting the psychology of right-wing authoritarian followers, to support a political regime of limited scope and purpose and even less responsibility. The regime is not responsible, except for certain self-assigned tasks (like protection of the society from some “outside” malignancy, a pose with special appeal to the psychology of right-wing authoritarian followers; cf “homeland security”), and acknowledges dependence for legitimacy in only very limited or symbolic ways (emotional attachment to abstractions, symbolic dependence, ritual plebiscites, etc.) Authority and convention are not to be questioned. The individual is to be a passive supporter of the regime. Expedience is favored over deliberation in constructing rationalization of policy, and corruption guides policy practice.

An authoritarian legal regime tends to devolve toward administrative process and sets aside advocacy and individual rights, at least for individuals. Large business corporations and wealthy individuals can still avail themselves of the judicial system in the U.S. to resolve disputes among themselves, but for the rest of us, the court house door has been closing on a variety of fronts.

Our political system still privileges claims of racist and sexist discrimination, and those categories have become the last remaining channels for legitimate and effective push-back against authoritarianism. There’s probably some connection between the way identification with the two political parties is organized, but it should be noted that beneath these two tenuous channels, an highly authoritarian regime has been put into place, obviating many civil liberties and eroding individual autonomy for the individual not possessed of considerable personal wealth. Practices like civil forfeiture are pretty extreme: your money or property can be seized with no practical due process by which an affected individual can push back. Union organizing is very handicapped and labor law protections have been eroded — this latest Supreme Court decision allowing companies to tax employees’ time for security procedures is just one instance, and comes against a background in which drug-testing and credit-checks are a standard part of employment practice. The practice of foreclosure in many states — notably Florida — basically obviates all home “owner” rights — people who don’t even have a mortgage have great difficulty when a bank makes a “mistake” and forecloses on them.

One characteristic of an authoritarian regime is that it is basically “self-appointed” at the top. I suppose that’s not necessarily obviously true in the U.S., because we still follow the republican form of the Constitution, roughly, in conducting elections. You’d have to be brain-dead not to get that Bush v Gore made clear that form is not function. But, also, the patterns of partisan and Media competition — Media consolidation has played a major part in shaping the machinery of authoritarian propaganda — has created a system in which elective politics is very effectively resisting mass dependence on the left and on the right.

While the mass dependence of elective politics holds on by a slender, largely ritualized thread, the dependence of the bureaucratic state and its nominally private symbiotes in Media and Finance and the various industrial-complexes (military-industrial or pharma/health-care) seems to have been erased entirely. We don’t hold elites accountable. Obama does not prosecute the banksters, let alone the torturers or war criminals. The media scarcely acknowledges abject failure, even after 12+ years of enormously expensive war.

When we are discussing what the Obama Administration policy has been — and playing the wanker’s game of speculating about what dramatic gestures he should have taken — we should notice that the military and intelligence communities have had a remarkable continuation of reactionary leadership from the previous Administration. There’s a Deep State here, which can spy on the Congress and get away with it. The spectacle of U.S. Senators whining like small children about what the CIA will let them know or let them say is a clear indication that the constitutional institutions are not in control.

I think you are mistaken to believe that authoritarian regimes never allow protest. Authoritarian regimes are selectively repressive. They don’t want effective mobilization of the population, for or against anything, even the regime itself. But, they are not totalitarians. There can be considerable pluralism in the economy and society. They manage protest, and permit the letting off of steam. There can be a number of measures in an authoritarian regime that are somewhat paternalistic or offer at least a show of protection against obvious predation, at least of the kinds that might get the miserable manning the barricades.

As far as the U.S. is concerned, the creation of a remarkably elaborate apparatus for monitoring political activism and responding in a coordinated fashion with paramilitary power is already far-advanced. The laws on mass protest and relative to civil disobedience have been systematically modified to facilitate repression. The response to the Occupy protests and the short-order repression of that incipient movement was nothing, if not administratively well-resourced and effective.

USG’s position gives the President the sole authority to determine all those factors. In practice, the criteria don’t matter, because the President can say they apply, and order the killing, an no one can gain say him.

Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that in an authoritarian regime, the executive authority becomes a vague and ill-defined pleni-potentiary, all requirements for deliberative due process cast aside as expedience becomes an end in itself.

Andrew F, you should read the op-ed apologies of Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. He’s not in jail. His fee-fees have been hurt.

Well, the aspects Mr. mcmanus chose to emphasize: wars, violent, repressive, expansionist, etc. – they are common features of any empire.

The best pre-digested burgers are available in Generalizationville.

mcmanus conspicuously did not use the term , authoritarian, @ 157. For that reason, I introduced it, partly to see what he might do with it.

No, I didn’t use it, because I believe power trickles up. We are radically free and responsible, although we like to claim otherwise. Noticed that I used, will always use if I remember, the word “we.” We embody authority. We tortured.

Oh, inverted totalitarianism of Wolin, the “soft authoritarianism” of Japan according to Sugimoto, apartheid goes way too far.

There are always those who benefit from and support/legitimize the authority, usually on a local level, and it is those who make command and control possible and efficient. Hitler and Stalin needed bureaucrats and soldiers, Mao wasn’t all that responsible for the cultural revolution, etc.

The alternating regimes of the US, Britain, Israel etc gain power from their direct supporters and from the acquiescence and cooperation of the opponents. “Bush is President, the votes were somewhere above 50%, now we torture and kill a million. Fair’s fair, the law is the law, I gotta work with that woman on Monday. And spring training is starting. Not my job, Not my fault.”

This may not be the optimal counter-hegemonic rhetorical strategy, but “Authority is derived from the consent of the governed” is the essential necessary counter-hegemonic fact. Not a goal, not an ideal, a fact.

We can burn it down. Those like mattski and LFC who feel empowered and protected will get in our way.

As far as the U.S. is concerned, the creation of a remarkably elaborate apparatus for monitoring political activism and responding in a coordinated fashion with paramilitary power is already far-advanced.

I think it will, at least at the start, need to be a collective rage expressed individually and idiosyncratically. Anarchically. Manning. Assange. Snowden. Break something close and overwhelm the system. “Broken windows” can be a strategy.

Is Red Skin, White Masks zombie Fanon?

#193 bob mcmanus

I am just an armchair revolutionary, pajamas in my basement. Honest. But you already know that.

You know that, and I probably know that, but do they know that?

It might not matter. Next week or next spring, sometime when they have trouble meeting their quota of revolutionaries to go after, they might go after you just so they won’t look like they’re slacking off. They have no obligation to be efficient or to make sense.

J Thomas @ 189: Maybe you’re wrong and we in fact don’t have a government like that. We’re safe to say whatever we want, we’re safe to say that our government is a violent repressive regime similar to Fascist Germany, because it isn’t. I really hope that you’re wrong and that you will continue to be wrong. Because I am a patriot. I support the USA and what it stands for. I stand behind my oath to the flag and there will never be justification for acts of resistance here. Never.

Too late. Nobody’s going to believe you, now.

“The trouble with saints and martyrs is that you have to be dead to be one. Not a price of admission I’d volunteer to pay.”

Good point, though heading into the hills with a couple dozen friends, a few hundred rifles and a couple thousand bullets doesn’t sound anymore appealing to me.

I truly think our best bet is hoping for sort of shift we saw in the 30s with FDR and the new deal.

One other thing: LFC @62 mentions the distinction between normative political theory and international law. Again, a totally valid distinction. But in a way, the problem seems to me to be almost the opposite. If we had a fair and effective system of international law (which I’m assuming we don’t), then we good give better and more effective content to related notions in normative political theory. Whereas in the current context, otherwise important notions in political theory can seem oddly barren.

(LFC, I don’t mean to be picking on you — you’re talking a lot of sense! Just some useful points of disagreement/clarification.)

In the U.S., the official oaths are to uphold and defend the Constitution.

Too late. Nobody’s going to believe you, now.

Can’t blame me for trying, can you?

Sometimes small efforts at conciliation can eventually lead to big results. Even survival.

“Just for instance, LFC @63 notes–rightly—that “few states are attacked, and fewer destroyed””

He was quoting some source, but that sounds like nonsense. I would guess, offhand, that a majority of states have been attacked since WW II. On the other hand, a tiny number have been “destroyed” since one the of most lasting arrangements post WW II has been that whenever you destroy a state, you create another government that holds the same territory and you call it the same state. For instance, when the U.S. conquered Iraq and put in a client government with a different ethnic backing they didn’t rename the county to Neau Iraq even though they might as well have.

RP @206
I am using the word “state” differently than you. You are using it to mean “regime,” the particular govt in power. I was/am using it to mean the (formally independent) territorial entity designated by the country’s name.

Sure, so if another country conquered the U.S. and put in a dictator, dropping the whole Constitutional setup, it wouldn’t be “state destruction” but only “regime change” as long as the territorial boundaries of the area ruled by the dictator didn’t change and as long as they didn’t change the name. As I said, nonsensical. Territorial boundaries are not states.

Andrew F, you have given some remarkable performances. You constantly reassure me that malignancy shall never lack for imaginative apologetics.

The limited-to-nonexistant legitimacy of really existing states means that they cannot legitimately exclude immigrants from the full positive economic rights of citizens indefinitely. They ought to always provide a reasonable path to full citizenship to all. This is certainly true in the USA, which is extremely lacking in legitimate sovereignty over it’s acquired territory.

And even fully legitimate states should never ever exclude even undocumented non-citizens from essential negative human rights, including rights to be free from torture and indefinite detention.

#211 Andrew F

“But if it looks like something that in fact brought in vital information, then if you do it and you are likely to get info that changes everything, that’s a great career move. I’m out of the loop myself, I don’t know what they think.”

The results overall from the program appear arguable at best.

I still don’t understand this about you. Why do you keep assuming you know about more than the cover story?

You have heard about prisoners in publicly-known, navy-supervised Gitmo.

If they were truly important prisoners who were likely to reveal important information, why would they ever have been sent to Gitmo instead of some place secret that could get results?

Why do you repeatedly assume that you know something about what’s actually going on, from reading reports made by people the CIA gave stories to?

You keep doing this. You should have known better the first time. You should have known better after the first time it was pointed out to you. Or the second time. But you keep talking as if you think you know something.

RPuchalsky @210

I’m not sure these definitional questions actually matter that much, but w/r/t

Sure, so if another country conquered the U.S. and put in a dictator, dropping the whole Constitutional setup, it wouldn’t be “state destruction” but only “regime change” as long as the territorial boundaries of the area ruled by the dictator didn’t change and as long as they didn’t change the name. As I said, nonsensical. Territorial boundaries are not states.

My view is that if another country conquered the US and administered it permanently as an occupied territory, that prob wd count as state destruction. Invading the US, installing a dictator, and leaving doesn’t count as state destruction, imo. [My intended reference in the earlier comment (to which you objected) was to Fazal’s State Death, which presumably goes into the definitional issues in some detail. (I haven’t really read it, just am aware of it).]

js. @200

… If we had a fair and effective system of international law (which I’m assuming we don’t), then we [could] give better and more effective content to related notions in normative political theory. Whereas in the current context, otherwise important notions in political theory can seem oddly barren.

I think there might be a book/article/dissertation/whatever hiding in this, which is one way of saying there are probably deep issues here I’m not very competent to address. It does occur to me this might have some relevance to notions like a “right to development,” which for some years some people have been trying to enshrine in international law — and, on one argument, it prob. already is part of international law. But I’m not sure whether it is or not matters that much, unless there’s some way to effectively hold states to it, which gets us to the problem of enforcement, which has long bedeviled international law as a whole. What this has to do w normative theory I’m not quite sure, but I found myself typing the sentences, so I’ll just leave them.

In case anyone is wondering how the people on the other side are viewing this issue:

http://www.redstate.com/2014/12/15/god-bless-dick-cheney/

Enough to make you lose hope.

Ze Kraggash
Couldn’t you say the same about, say, the Lincoln’s regime in the US, and every other government involved in a civil war?

Not every govt involved in a civil war drops barrel bombs on noncombatant villagers, repeatedly shells cities, uses chemical weapons, etc, etc. If you want to equate Sherman’s march with what has been going on in Syria, I suppose that is yr prerogative. I don’t do so.

That’s not ‘legitimacy’. What anyone in the US or Russia thinks about Syria is irrelevant.

In his comment @66, Chris Bertram, the author of the front-page post that set off this thread, distinguished two sorts of legitimacy: “political legitimacy (‘right to rule’), which is a different and stronger notion than recognitional legitimacy (being recognized by other states as a member of the international order in good standing)….”

I made it clear in my comments just above that I was referring to “recognitional legitimacy” as defined by C. Bertram @66. Thus, contrary to your claim that what other governments think of Syria is “irrelevant,” it is the very definition of “recognitional legitimacy.”

Now, if you don’t like the phrase “recognitional legitimacy,” that is your prerogative. (Anyway I can’t pretend to follow the thought processes of someone who equates Bashar al-Assad and Abraham Lincoln.) But I don’t especially appreciate your implicit portrayal of me as a complete idiot. If I were to make such a suggestion about you, I assume you would not appreciate it.

At the time it was enacted, the American constitution was a modern and liberal enlightenment-era document. Given that, it’s surprising if neither the original 1787 Constitution nor the 1791 Bill of Rights includes a ban on the use of torture. It surely wouldn’t have been strange if a late 18th century constitution did, as this was a well-known issue at the time. E.g. the practice of Peine forte et dure was abolished in Britain in 1772, torture was abolished in France in 1780/1788, the Norwegian constitution of 1814 banned torture, etc.

Eighth amendment: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

So, yes, it does ban torture. Unfortunately the courts have apparently decided that the 8th amendment doesn’t apply if it isn’t a “punishment”. If they’re not doing it to “punish” you, but for some other reason, the courts apparently won’t admit the 8th amendment is relevant.

“Take the case of the Assad regime in Syria. It has acted genocidally (or quasi-genocidally) toward its own people. (…) Not every govt involved in a civil war drops barrel bombs on noncombatant villagers, repeatedly shells cities, uses chemical weapons

The difference between the US and “rogue states” is simply that the US government is smart enough not to kill its own people, but instead drops “bombs on noncombatant villagers, repeatedly shells cities, uses chemical weapons” in other countries – the lives of their citizens are considered less valuable and can be taken or made miserable without much fuss about rights or dignity.

js. @226
I think your position is coherent and that you may end up with a view something like: (1) most peoples are justified in rebelling against the (politically illegitimate) governments that rule them, but (2) because most governments are and should be sovereign, outside powers/governments usually can’t interfere with them. IOW, people living in a particular country generally have to determine their own political fates by themselves. If they can’t secure their own ‘freedom’, however defined, outsiders can’t do it for them (and shouldn’t try to).

It seems close to Mill’s position in “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,” described by Walzer (Just and Unjust Wars, p.88) thus:

The (internal) freedom of a political community can be won only by the members of that community. The argument is similar to that implied in the well-known Marxist maxim, “The liberation of the working class can come only through the workers themselves.” As that maxim, one would think, rules out any substitution of vanguard elitism for working class democracy, so Mill’s argument rules out any substitution of foreign intervention for internal struggle.

Not to put words in your mouth, but this is roughly where you seem to be going @226 (at least as I read it). It leaves some practical issues/questions hanging, but most general positions do.

LFC, I absolutely didn’t mean to insult you or anyone else. Obviously this is my personal opinion; all I’m saying is that your definition of ‘legitimacy’ doesn’t make sense to me.

“Not every govt involved in a civil war drops barrel bombs on noncombatant villagers, repeatedly shells cities, uses chemical weapons, etc, etc.”

Not only the US government burned Atlanta, but they also, for example, bombed New York city during the draft riots. These kind of things happen in every war, much more so in a civil war.

“I don’t do so”

Why not? If you allow your patriotic/sentimental feelings (if that’s what it is) to affect your logic (and you seem to realize it yourself), then everything you say is a suspect for being biased.

#233 Layman

So what I said earlier is true: The administration claims the legal authority to kill American citizens without any transparent due process, or judicial review, for reasons which cannot be verified.

You said that so clearly, and it’s so clearly true, that I don’t see how anyone could reasonably disagree. Well done!

Layman @232: So you say, but how can these constraints and remedies be applied? The ‘evidence’ the President uses to determine whether to strike is secret, as is the subject of the attack. The President declares that this power is not subject to judicial scrutiny, and indeed the courts have resisted efforts made to force them to address the question, on specious grounds such as that the parent of a target lacks standing to sue to prevent the killing of his offspring. The courts in fact confirmed were powerless to review the President’s rationale for these killings, Of course the Congress could impeach the President, but in fact they can impeach the President for anything at all – impeachment requires no offense, just the requisite number of votes in each house. So impeachment is not so much a remedy for this particular overreach as it is a perennial threat from any hostile Congress.

Impeachment is a remedy for many forms of Presidential abuse, and the remedy itself (as you note) is also subject to abuse.

But as to the difficulty of review of the President’s actions, the answer is yes. We are discussing a military action in a mostly ungoverned, foreign country, ordered by the President in his role as Commander in Chief pursuant to an authorization for the use of military force by Congress. This is where the Constitution gives the most power to the President, and the least checks by other branches, for it is here that unified executive command is of greatest importance. Neither the courts nor Congress has any authority to sit with the President in the situation room and decide whether a given target is properly or improperly selected. That is not their function (after the fact, as part of an investigation or case, is a different matter).

This really isn’t anything new, for that matter. Although the nature of the conflict, and US choice of strategy, has emphasized the targeting of individual leadership in this conflict more than in others (it occurred in others, of course, but its importance relative to other strategic objectives was less), with the result that, because a few US citizens have joined the enemy in its efforts overseas, we are now more aware that a specific target is a US citizen (where previously he might have just been one soldier out of a thousand serving in a unit targeted by the US military). But, the legal analysis doesn’t change.

Keep in mind that we’re talking about a very narrow context, and very special circumstances.

Well, this is what you say, and in fairness it is what the President says. But, again, his reasons for so saying are secret, and in his formulation, need never be revealed to anyone. You trust that Al-Alwaki was an enemy soldier because the President says he was, but you can’t point to any evidence that he was, because there isn’t any public evidence that he was.

Well, there is public evidence, but you’re right that much of what the USG has is classified. This is also not a new feature of warfare.

So what I said earlier is true: The administration claims the legal authority to kill American citizens without any transparent due process, or judicial review, for reasons which cannot be verified.

The problem with that statement is that you it ignores all the qualifications and limitations on that legal authority. As a result you sound as though you are saying that the President claims the legal authority to kill any American citizen, anywhere, on a whim, when in fact that is very, very far from what he claims. The basic claim is at its heart that you cannot put on an enemy’s uniform, take up arms on a foreign battlefield in an armed conflict against the United States, and then with a wave of your passport ward off US military efforts against you and your organization.

All the thinking goes away, as one labors on reinforcing the thesis that one side is “obviously unacceptable” and the other is somehow not “obviously unacceptable”, and the two candidate “sides” aid the the process for their own manipulative purposes.

“I don’t think these rioters deserve to be called “innocent civilians.””

Sure, but what about those allegedly bombed and killed by the Assad’s government? Did you spend any time considering the Assad’s side of the story? Did you even read any of the stories from top to the bottom, or just the headlines?

Ze Kraggash
“Sure, but what about those allegedly [sic] bombed and killed by the Assad’s government?”

Is it your view that Assad’s govt is only alleged to have killed civilians, i.e. that there’s no hard evidence that it’s done so? Assad’s claim, as I understand it, is that his govt has only killed ‘terrorists’. That something like 170,000 people have died so far in the Syrian civil war suggests either that he is using a meaninglessly broad definition of ‘terrorist’ or that the claim is false. (And here I’m assuming, of course, that only some of those 170,000 were killed by Assad’s forces.) Do you think reports of the Assad forces dropping barrel bombs on villages have been hallucinated or fabricated? If not, why are using the word “alleged”?

The Syrian conflict has produced, what, close to a million refugees (or is it more by now), plus a very large number of internally displaced persons. Several months ago I read a story, I think on the BBC, about Syrian families who had fled their village for their lives and were living in caves in what used to be a city a long time ago and is now apparently some kind of abandoned archaeological site. The dire conditions facing the refugees, and the stresses faced by NGOs and neighboring countries in trying to accommodate and feed and house them, are well known. For you to use the word “alleged” in these circumstances seems absurd.

When I brought up Assad I actually was not intending to open a debate about Syria but to make another point, which I think you’ll see if you go back to the comment in question. But I guess I should have known that any mention of Assad would be bound to set something off. Fwiw, I’m sure all the blame in the Syrian civil war is not on one side (and there are multiple ‘sides’), but that doesn’t mean it’s evenly distributed either.

Ze Kraggash: “Sure, but what about …”

“Sure …”? Then you admit that what you said about “our government” during the Civil War was total ignorant b.s.?

#244 LFC

Assad’s claim, as I understand it, is that his govt has only killed ‘terrorists’. That something like 170,000 people have died so far in the Syrian civil war suggests either that he is using a meaninglessly broad definition of ‘terrorist’ or that the claim is false.

Terrorists don’t wear uniforms, unfortunately. But it looks like you’re blaming all the deaths on Assad. That’s kind of appropriate if his government is not legitimate and he should have avoided all those deaths by stepping down. But then, look at the people his enemies are accused of killing — for being Christian or Shia or supposedly for doing immoral things — and maybe he couldn’t have prevented so many deaths by stepping down.

Anyway, by the same reasoning we could say Lincoln was responsible for every Civil War death if his cause was not legitimate. That would give you something like 700,000 military deaths plus an unknown number of starved civilians during and after the war. And if he’d had barrel bombs would he have used them? I dunno. Did he have weapons he thought should not be used, so he didn’t?

(And here I’m assuming, of course, that only some of those 170,000 were killed by Assad’s forces.)

Sure, but if Assad is wrong to fight then he’s responsible for every death that happens because he fights. Same as Lincoln. We just have to decide who’s right and who’s wrong, and then it’s settled, right?

Do you think reports of the Assad forces dropping barrel bombs on villages have been hallucinated or fabricated? If not, why are using the word “alleged”?

I dunno. Lots of reports from war zones get fabricated, or assigned to the wrong side. The story about the babies killed in Kuwait so the incubators could be shipped home to Iraq were fabricated. Not to say it didn’t happen, I can’t prove it never did, but at least the people who made up the story didn’t know about it when they made it up. If you tell a lie and then by accident the lie comes true, does that mean you aren’t a liar?

When Saddam gassed some Kurds there were all sorts of stories. There were claims it was the Iranians gassing them, or gassing some of them. Based on which gas got used, etc. I never got it straight. Both sides had it in for Kurds, I can easily imagine both sides gassing them, but it was a war zone and I’m not confident the truth came out. I’m sure that Iraq did it, in areas they controlled. They were of course fighting a civil war while they were fighting a foreign war, and while it would be nice if we could expect marquis-of-queensbury rules for that sort of thing, mostly it doesn’t seem to work out that way. So I have to figure, if Saddam was wrong to rule over Kurdistan in the first place, then all of that was his fault. But if they were wrong to rebel en masse, then most of it was their fault.

In that sort of situation, I imagine — what if somebody made an offer to stage a fair election, and if the insurgents won in some contiguous area they could have their nation there and stop fighting, and if they didn’t win anywhere then stop fighting anyway…. And then if either side refused to go along with that, all the deaths would be their fault. Every side that refused would be responsible for all the deaths.

But if we had done that in 1860, we might still have a Confederacy today. Mr. Lincoln’s war cost us possibly a million casualties out of less than 32 million. It killed 8% of all white US males age 13-43, and 20% of all blacks who volunteered to fight for the Union. But it was the right thing to do, which made it worth all the lives sacrificed.

“Sure, but what about those allegedly bombed and killed by the Assad’s government? Did you spend any time considering the Assad’s side of the story? Did you even read any of the stories from top to the bottom, or just the headlines?”

DO I SPEND ANY TIME WORRYING ABOUT THE BRUTAL DICTATOR”S SIDE OF THE STORY?????

No. No it don’t.

Andrew F @ 237

“We are discussing a military action in a mostly ungoverned, foreign country, ordered by the President in his role as Commander in Chief pursuant to an authorization for the use of military force by Congress.”

No, we’re discussing what is alleged to be a military action, etc. Was it properly a military action? We don’t know. We’re not permitted to know.

“because a few US citizens have joined the enemy in its efforts overseas”

In fact, we don’t know that these people did join the enemy. We’re told that, but there is no forum in which to challenge that claim.

” The basic claim is at its heart that you cannot put on an enemy’s uniform, take up arms on a foreign battlefield in an armed conflict against the United States, and then with a wave of your passport ward off US military efforts against you and your organization.”

Yet, oddly enough, we don’t know that these people put on the enemy’s uniform, or took up any arms on any foreign battlefield. While the administration likes to use that sort of language, they haven’t offered any evidence that Al-Awlaki ever carried a weapon or gave an order to any combatant. It seems to be the case that he said and wrote some words we didn’t like; so we called that combat, and killed him. I say ‘seems to be’, because no one knows. We’re not permitted to know. Because we’re not permitted to know – because the courts aren’t permitted to interfere – this is a claim of extraordinary scope and power, one I don’t think has ever been made before. We must sit quietly, and trust that when a President unilaterally and extra-judicially kills a citizen, he had what he thought was a good reason.

#251 Barry

“Did he have weapons he thought should not be used, so he didn’t?”

Yes. Assassination was specifically forbidden, as was murder of prisoners, and wanton mistreatment of civilians.

OK! Murder of prisoners has side effects if it happens too much. The other side will murder your own soldiers who become POWs, and they will fight harder rather than surrender. It makes the war harder to win and you win less after you’re done.

Wanton mistreatment of civilians, likewise. It makes them fight harder, which is why the Union only started doing it when the Confederates were essentially beaten already and could not fight harder.

Assassination, though. He could have done that and maybe shortened the war. It might have had various good results. And he chose not to, out of a sense of morality. (Of course, it’s possible that if he had gotten Confederate leaders assassinated then somebody might assassinate him back, and then where would he be? There’s an element of self-interest in it too.)

So anyway, if Lincoln had the personal decency to forbid assassination, maybe if he’d had barrel bombs he would also have had the decency not to use them. It’s possible.

B. Wilder @252
Having just looked up the word “expedient” in my dictionary, I’m not sure it’s the best word for your purposes in the last paragraph there, though I think I understand the point you’re getting at.

I’ve just read some descriptions of Cheney’s recent appearance on Meet the Press (since a blogger I follow [more or less] linked a number of these, incl. A. Sullivan’s, and related articles), and it appears from Cheney’s horrifying statements on that program that his primary motive for the torture program was not even expedience, in the sense of (perceived) usefulness or convenience, but an immoral and twisted notion of revenge. Asked directly about the detainees whom the Senate report says were detained mistakenly — including Gul Rahman, who died of exposure in a ‘black site’ in Afghanistan run by someone the CIA, by its own standards, should never have hired — Cheney said, in effect, he was unconcerned by these cases. Sullivan’s designation of Cheney as a “sociopath” seems right.

“Asked directly about the detainees whom the Senate report says were detained mistakenly — including Gul Rahman, who died of exposure in a ‘black site’ in Afghanistan run by someone the CIA, by its own standards, should never have hired — Cheney said, in effect, he was unconcerned by these cases.”

It’s easy to blame everything on Darth Cheney. But half of the American public think the CIA’s torture was justified. And a good amount of the remainder, I’d guess, is based on partisan opposition to Cheney, not on any kind of principled resistance to torture. (Look, for instance, at how apologists like Scott Lemieux can both sound angry at torture and heap scorn on people who object to drone assassinations, basically because Bush did the first and Obama is doing the second.) I think that there is a substantial bread and circuses element to what’s going on. A majority of the American people vicariously enjoy the idea that people are being tortured, and Cheney is giving them what they want.

@257
Yes, large segments of the American public have weak to non-existent moral objections to torture and the like, once you frame it in terms of ‘us’ versus ‘the enemy’.

This is why I firmly believe that members of the left need to engage with the ‘efficacy’ question. Some people that I know and respect object to this – ‘torture is wrong regardless of its effectiveness, debating on that terrain concedes too much!’ – but I think that for the majority of the American public, the question regarding efficacy, rather than abstract morality/law, is dispositive on these sorts of issues.

But you also bring up the ‘enjoyment’ element to all of it – the psychology of making the ‘bad guys’ suffer cannot be discounted. I still remember when the collective Id of the American public was put on full display in the wake of the 2001 attacks. It was absolutely sickening. Calls to ‘glass them’, where ‘them’ could refer to anyone inhabiting an area encompassing millions of square miles; Tom Friedman’s infamous ‘suck on this’ argument for the Iraq War (Obama still has 1 on 1 interviews with Tom on the Iraqi situation, to this day); and the collective denunciation as a traitor of anyone who suggested that the drive to war should proceed from a rational assessment of outcomes.

Some people are happy that we used torture. The watched it avidly on the Tee-Vee, then on the Big Screen, and come a decade or so when we have another bit of blowback, you can bet your money that they will be itching for a sequel.

J Thomas @225: Isn’t there a chance you are looking at the cover story as described by the SSCI Report etc?

Let’s take a look at two competing hypotheses here.

H1: CIA fabricated 6.3 million pages of cables, emails, reports, and transcripts to produce a cover story to the SSCI which portrayed CIA as, at a minimum, negligent in its handling of its RDI program.

H2: CIA produced 6.3 millions pages which are authentic, but withheld some documents from the SSCI. It did not expect the SSCI to publicize as much of their report as they did.

H1 requires a massive investment of personnel hours, the existence of a very large number of people who engaged in an enormous conspiracy to illegally deceive the SSCI on a breathtaking scale, perfect operational security (no leaks of any kind, to anyone), the complicity of CIA’s attorneys and staff and employees from other agencies, and the skill of fitting together actual emails that involved parties external to CIA (e.g. with the Justice Department) with fabricated reports, internal emails, etc.

H1 is a conspiracy theory in the worst sense of the term. It’s not remotely plausible.

H2 however fits well with what we know about the nature of bureaucracies, the time and resources available to CIA in responding to the SSCI investigation, and the self-interest of proponents and defenders of the RDI program, of those interested in simply minimizing the damage to CIA from a program with, shall we say, some disturbing flaws, and of those interested in aggressively publicizing those flaws to the public.

So I’m inclined to go with H2.

Not if maintaining the cover story was more important than looking good. Which is particularly true if the methods that actually got results (if there were such methods, which is secret) would make them look worse.

If CIA had the ability or will to create and maintain such a cover story, presumably they’d produce a cover story that did not involve gross negligence on the part of any of their officers, destroyed videotapes, evidence of prior false statements to Congress and the Justice Department. The narrative you’re putting forward just doesn’t make any sense.

There you go again. OK, you’ve heard about detainees from more sites than Gitmo. Why would you think you’ve heard about all the sites?

You’re moving the goalposts from your initial claim that we only know about detainees held at Guantanamo. But, sure, it’s possible that there are sites we haven’t heard about. We have however heard about those at which the detainees of greatest value were detained and interrogated, and we’ve heard about sites that contained detainees of substantially less value. This leaves room for the possibility of some undisclosed but truly horrific site where even worse abuses were practiced upon detainees not of high value. But, given the way bureaucracies function and the evidence we have of continuous investigation by the CIA’s IG into these matters, it is unlikely that such a site could have existed and then be successfully covered up.

Yes, of course. And some of the ones that could be spared got sent to the cover-story sites to make the cover story look more realistic. So what?

No, detainees such as KSM would not be intelligence sources that could be spared for the sake of preparing a possible cover story to be used many years later in case of a possible Congressional investigation. Again, this is conspiracy theory territory. You’re inventing epicycles to save a theory stumbling into enormous difficulties.

The better approach, given a large budget which they had, is to proceed with parallel programs. The mickey-mouse version does things they can sort of justify to the public. This group does stress positions and sleep deprivation and waterboarding. They talk to lawyers about whether it’s torture. They don’t get high-value prisoners unless the prisoners are mostly undamaged and have mostly been drained.

The other groups do modern interrogation. They do things like addict prisoners to super-addictive drugs and then provide-and-withhold the dose, ESB, implant electrodes in brains for various purposes, create brain lesions, old chestnuts like remove one testicle while injecting drugs to prevent shock-induced unconsciousness, and then ask what the prisoner is willing to do to keep the other one, etc etc etc.

So when selecting a cover story, the CIA chose to invent one which exposed them to criminal prosecution, made them look, variously, incompetent or barbaric, and damaged both their own standing and that of the United States. They also decided to sacrifice intelligence held by detainees like KSM for the sake of this bizarre cover story, even though they had a much more effective, even more secret program.

This doesn’t pass the smell test. It’s conspiracy theory territory again.

J Thomas, a response to your last comment seems to be stuck in moderation. Should be freed at some point, but if not I’ll post a modified version.

Bruce Wilder @212: Andrew F, you have given some remarkable performances. You constantly reassure me that malignancy shall never lack for imaginative apologetics.

And you constantly impress me with your psychologically efficient dismissal of any form of cognitive dissonance. Very well done.

Layman @252: No, we’re discussing what is alleged to be a military action, etc. Was it properly a military action? We don’t know. We’re not permitted to know.

So your objection, which is consistent throughout your comment at 252, is one of oversight, rather than to the actual power claimed by the President. Let me quote the rest of your comment before responding further.

In fact, we don’t know that these people did join the enemy. We’re told that, but there is no forum in which to challenge that claim.

and…

Yet, oddly enough, we don’t know that these people put on the enemy’s uniform, or took up any arms on any foreign battlefield. While the administration likes to use that sort of language, they haven’t offered any evidence that Al-Awlaki ever carried a weapon or gave an order to any combatant. It seems to be the case that he said and wrote some words we didn’t like; so we called that combat, and killed him. I say ‘seems to be’, because no one knows. We’re not permitted to know. Because we’re not permitted to know – because the courts aren’t permitted to interfere – this is a claim of extraordinary scope and power, one I don’t think has ever been made before. We must sit quietly, and trust that when a President unilaterally and extra-judicially kills a citizen, he had what he thought was a good reason.

Well, there’s a good deal more in the public domain than that, but what you’re stating here is true of any other targeting decision in war. Suppose that the military ordered a strike on the leadership of an Italian military unit during WW2 that was, according to the USG, being led by an individual who was also an American citizen. Would the USG be obliged to show a court evidence that this individual was in fact leading an Italian military unit? Of course not. These are decisions that the Constitution gives to the President to make.

In other words, under current law and practice, the President acted legally in determining that Awlaki met the criteria as a legitimate military target within the scope of the AUMF. Our system doesn’t provide for a mechanism like judicial review of a military targeting decision before the fact of a strike. It does provide for notice of a Presidential finding to certain members of Congress in the event of a covert action, which the strike on Awlaki was.

I think the root of your discomfort, and to some extent I share it, is that given the nature of the present conflict, particularly the ways in which it differs from more conventional interstate conflicts, the existing rules and law pose greater danger of abuse. But while that may be true, the danger is still minimal, and this is unlikely to be a case of such abuse. Awlaki was a vehement supporter of AQ and affiliated movements, who lived and traveled in Yemen among other members of AQAP, and was sought by the Yemeni government for his involvement with AQAP. While the USG hasn’t shared surveillance photographs or video, or communications intercepts, or human intelligence reporting, on Awlaki, it seems fairly plausible that he was an operational member. Awlaki had ample opportunity to turn himself into US custody, and the strike occurred in an area obviously outside US control.

Outside of the circumstances set forth by the Obama Administration, such an act would be the subject of much greater scrutiny, ranging from Congressional to criminal investigations.

#262 Andrew F

Let’s take a look at two competing hypotheses here.

H1: CIA fabricated 6.3 million pages of cables, emails, reports, and transcripts to produce a cover story to the SSCI which portrayed CIA as, at a minimum, negligent in its handling of its RDI program.

That is a stupid strawman which is nothing like what I said except that I used the words “cover story”. Forget that, we both agree it’s a worthless red herring.

H2: CIA produced 6.3 millions pages which are authentic, but withheld some documents from the SSCI. It did not expect the SSCI to publicize as much of their report as they did.

We both agree that this probably happened.

H3: CIA ran several programs in parallel. This has several advantages, for example if one organization gets stuck in a blind alley another might not. Somebody at a higher level can correlate the various results in case they fit together in ways no one of them noticed, and results that they have in common are more likely to be true. Also all the least competent political appointees etc can be stuck in one group where they’ll be mostly harmless.

Then later, when they’re supposed to reveal what they did, they reveal the scapegoat program that looks the least offensive, and none of the others.

H2 however fits well with what we know about the nature of bureaucracies, the time and resources available to CIA in responding to the SSCI investigation, and the self-interest of proponents and defenders of the RDI program

Your hypothesis is testable. Check how many CIA agents and how much money was devoted to the program you think you know about, and compare it to the total CIA budget and the total CIA personnel figures. If it’s a high enough fraction of either number, then CIA did not have enough resources to run other programs in parallel! You can prove you’re right! Just get us those four numbers and verify them. If you do it before the thread is closed I’ll apologize and agree that you are right and I was wrong.

The CIA has a long history in which its successes had to stay secret but many of its failures were made public. Intelligence work is often that way. Tap German chancellor Merkel’s phone? Success. Merkel finds out her phone is tapped? Failure. They have to settle for knowing among themselves about the good work they do. Why would this example be different? They release the records of their screw-up group of incompetents, because they have to release something. It doesn’t make them look that good. What should they do instead? Forge millions of pages of reports? Release the important stuff, that shows they were effective using methods that would utterly horrify the US public? They don’t need to look good. They’ve never looked good before.

…sure, it’s possible that there are sites we haven’t heard about. We have however heard about those at which the detainees of greatest value were detained and interrogated, and we’ve heard about sites that contained detainees of substantially less value.

Back up a minute. Why do you think you have heard about the detainees of greatest value? Why would they announce the real ones at all? The point of announcing that they had valuable detainees was to make the Bush administration look good to the public. Why should that have anything to do with operational reality?

But, given the way bureaucracies function and the evidence we have of continuous investigation by the CIA’s IG into these matters, it is unlikely that such a site could have existed and then be successfully covered up.

It’s refreshing to see young people with their simple sincere beliefs. You know that the CIA Inspector General’s inspection staff is composed of senior CIA officers, don’t you? They are likely to be good at finding CIA officers who steal money etc, but why would you expect them to inform the IG about actual secret programs that would only disturb him?

No, detainees such as KSM would not be intelligence sources that could be spared for the sake of preparing a possible cover story to be used many years later in case of a possible Congressional investigation.

Do you have any evidence that KSM had valuable information? AQ used him as a public figure, as a propagandist. Why would they tell him anything that they wanted kept secret? Under torture he admitted to a central role in many terrorist events, which he later denied. Did his information actually match up with the known, secret data? I don’t know and neither do you.

He might easily have been precisely the sort of prisoner they’d want to give to the third-string to play with.

Again, this is conspiracy theory territory.

Well, duh! If you want to assume that the CIA does not have a conspiracy to keep what they do secret, go right ahead. It looks like a pretty idiotic theory to me, though.

Since they do try to keep their secrets, then we have the question whether they actually manage to do that sometimes. Do they have sufficient budget and staff to run multiple operations at the same time? If so, why wouldn’t they?

If you assume that they had been avoiding modern interrogation methods because the politicians told them not to, and then Bush and Cheney told them to “take the gloves off”, would you expect them to go through long involved arguments with the Justice Department about exactly which methods they could use out of the obsolete Soviet methods that were mostly good for false confessions? They wouldn’t actually use any modern methods to get the job done?

I don’t argue that the CIA is actually competent. I don’t have any real information about them, just some autobiographies of former agents etc. Stories from a simpler time. But you are arguing that you know that they are just as incompetent as they look, because you’re read about what they reported about themselves.

I figure it’s possible that’s all true. But you think you know it’s true. Why do you assume that this time they’re telling the truth? Why are you so totally convinced that they’re too incompetent to lie and get away with it?

B/c sometimes one has to escape, or something.

You speak true, LFC. But is McCarthy an escape from mayhem?!

On the premise that behind our little escapes there is no escape I am reading this.

:^)

mattski 268
McCarthy and mayhem: it’s The Orchard Keeper, which is relatively light on mayhem, so far. (Yeah, there’s been one murder, but hey…)

You want to interpret these facts in a favorable context – and you want to interpret some other facts in an unfavorable context, or completely out of context (a village was bombed, period) – and that’s your choice, but it’s also your inconsistency. Of course you don’t even notice this inconsistency, and you don’t want to notice. You get annoyed. Fine, whatever.

Finally he trolls himself.