On any given day, the odds are pretty good that Obsidian Wings will be the best blog in existence. Take this post by hilzoy.
Members of Congress say they receive a negligible number of letters and calls about the (torture) revelations that keep coming. ”You asked whether they want it clear or want it blurry,” Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, said to me about the reaction of her constituents to the torture allegations that alarm her. ”I think they want it blurry.” “
“Wanting it clear” means wanting an honest, open debate about what we want interrogators to do in our name. In the course of that debate, those who favor torture would have a chance to make their case. Is it useful in interrogations? Do ticking time bomb scenarios actually occur, and if so, how often? How much actionable intelligence have our “stress positions” and our “Fear Up Harsh” and “Pride and Ego Down” tactics actually yielded? Those who oppose torture would have a chance to ask: do these benefits, if they exist, outweigh the dangers of adopting a policy that seems to invite abuse? Do they create more terrorists than they allow us to capture or thwart? Have they made enemies of people who might have supported us? And are these methods consistent with our values as a nation, and with our noblest aspirations? When both sides had made their case, we could then decide openly what we want to do, and decide it as a nation.
“Wanting it blurry” means wanting to avoid that debate. It means caring less about considering the extremely serious issues at stake and getting them right than about being able to duck the uncomfortable knowledge that debating those issues might force on us. It means caring less about our country, its ideals, and its honor than about our own peace of mind, even when we have reason to think that that peace of mind might be undeserved. It means being willing to let taxi drivers whom we know to be innocent be beaten to death, detainees be sodomized with chemical lightsticks and have lit cigarettes stuck in their ears, and fourteen year olds be “suspended from hooks in the ceiling for hours at a time” while being beaten, in order to preserve the illusion that our own hands are clean.
Wanting it clear is for adults. Wanting it blurry is for children, who hope that problems they don’t attend to will go away. And it is unworthy of citizens of a great democracy.
Susan Collins thinks that her constituents “want it blurry”. Apparently, other members of Congress agree. As citizens of a democracy, we cannot react to this insulting idea by bemoaning the apathy of some unspecified group of other people. We are the people Collins is talking about, and it is up to us to prove her, and those who agree with her, wrong. So let’s do it.
She goes on to lay out exactly what we ought to do.
{ 21 comments }
Uncle Kvetch 06.16.05 at 1:50 pm
And to think that Susan Collins is, according to conventional wisdom, one of the few remaining “reasonable” “moderates” among the Republicans in Washington…
Donald Johnson 06.16.05 at 2:07 pm
More like “On every other day Obsidian Wings will be the best blog in existence.” Some days it’s the conservatives who post.
Richard Bellamy 06.16.05 at 2:25 pm
Collins is saying “My constituents aren’t complaining, and he’s why I think they’re not complaining.” I think it is appropriate to criticize the citizens of Maine, but not really Ms. Collins for identifying how her constituents feel.
Ted 06.16.05 at 2:31 pm
With the possible exception of Charles Bird, I’m rather fond of the Obsidian Wings conservatives. I obviously don’t agree with them 100% of the time, but their arguments and rhetoric tend to be well developed. I’d trade just about any conservative columnist for one of them.
BigMacAttack 06.16.05 at 2:33 pm
Great start.
You are right. Everyone wants everything about this issue blurry. From every side of the spectrum. It seems no one wants to discuss how we should handle the entire issue of illegal combatants. Or at least I haven’t seen anyone discussing it. I think you should really run with this from top to bottom. It is a huge issue that is being ignored and should be discussed.
Collectively we want to shove our heads up our errrrs and be left alone.
But I don’t think it is quite right to say we are willing to let those things happen. Close but not quite.
dq 06.16.05 at 3:05 pm
Next time someone wants to blather on about what a great writer C. Hitchens is, perhaps they should remember this post . . . ;)
abb1 06.16.05 at 3:12 pm
They think it’s one of those ‘man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’ things.
I think it’s mistake, but I have to disagree that it’s childish. It’s something they don’t like, they feel guilty about it, but they think it needs to be done. We all have situations like this (not torture, of course, just something we have to do that we’re not proud of) from time to time and we’re also trying to blur it out and forget. It’s not childish, it’s a normal human reaction.
hilzoy 06.16.05 at 3:32 pm
Which is why we need to let our representatives know that we do not want it blurry. They’re talking about us.
And thanks, Ted ;)
dglp 06.16.05 at 4:03 pm
Since when do children want things blurry?
That’s one of the most god-awfully patronising things I’ve heard in a long time. Perhaps adults want children to want it blurry, so that adults can continue to avoid the hard questions. But kids? If you recall correctly, it was a child who cried out that the Emperor had no clothes…
Brian 06.16.05 at 5:13 pm
So now we’re getting our theories on child psychology (what children do and don’t want) from fairy tales?
If there has been actual examples of unprompted children complaining about the Bush handling of detainees, or the budget disaster, or anything really, that would back up dglp’s claim. Until then, it’s a fairy tale.
am 06.16.05 at 5:19 pm
You know, don’t you, that this posting contains a fallacy?
The instances of prisoner abuse which you cite as typifying US actions were in fact illegal and the perpetrators have been punished.
It is incumbent upon you to substantiate your insinuation that these actions do in fact typify US behaviour.
We await with interest.
Barry 06.16.05 at 5:37 pm
am, please stuff it. By now, the ‘a few bad apples’ theory’ belongs with “vast stockpiles of WMD’s”, ‘cakewalk’, ‘rice and flowers’ and ‘flypaper.
hilzoy 06.16.05 at 6:12 pm
am: read my whole post. The part excerpted here only says: Susan Collins apparently thinks we don’t want to debate these issues openly. If we don’t, things may continue to go wrong. That does not say that those abuses typify US actions, nor that they were legal; only that unless we have an open discussion in which we try to decide what limits we, as a country, want those who act in our name to abide by, why these things happen, and how any things we think should not have happened might be avoided, they might go on happening, and we (the people) need to say that we are more concerned with getting clear on these things than with our own peace of mind. I do not myself believe the ‘bad apples’ theory, but nothing in this post contradicts it.
Think of me as calling for something like the military’s “lessons learned” exercises, and as calling for all of us to make it clear that we want to debate these issues, not hide from them.
jet 06.16.05 at 9:04 pm
am,
Whether you believe the abuse/torture/rough interrogations are warranted, you have to agree that the military is seriously screwing the pooch on the public relations front. The next 20 years will not see the F-16/15 and certainly not the JSF challenged by any country in the world. So scrapping the F-22 would free up billions of dollars of which a couple of million could be spent on putting together a system of rough interrogation/torture/whatever that would never cross the lines/laws, and thus leak out and cause every newspaper to spend thousands of gallons of ink on it.
There is just no excuse for Abu Gharib and the stories from Guantanamo. The damage done by those stories is on the hands of those generals who lost some of their humanity when they gained the ability to sacrifice humans for hills, and thus require strict civilian oversight. I’m sure the general in charge of Abu Gharab thought very little of a few roughed of innocents while reading through the daily reports of dead US soldiers. The military has just never been good at strict adherence to laws protecting civilians. And I’m not coming down on the military, I’m just saying that judgment is understandably clouded when you can’t stop thinking about your dead friends or worrying about your own skin.
Publius 06.16.05 at 11:02 pm
Torture by the military: don’t ask, don’t tell.
Seth Finkelstein 06.17.05 at 5:19 am
Debating it “blurry” is easy – there’s “It might help prevent terrorism” on one side, and “Ends don’t justify the means” on the other. Debating it “clear” is hard – it involves either admiting there’s some cases torture might *work* (thus opening an immediate slippery slope), or there’s some cases torture is done to innocents (thus opening an immediate slippery slope).
One notable aspect of Alan Dershowitz’s advocacy here, is that while he presents himself as making pragmatic arguments, they’re in fact a collection of rhetorical flourishes. And that’s symptomatic of the debate.
Uncle Kvetch 06.17.05 at 10:16 am
The instances of prisoner abuse which you cite as typifying US actions were in fact illegal and the perpetrators have been punished.
AM, if you read the NYTimes article that Hilzoy links to in reference to “fourteen year olds […] ‘suspended from hooks in the ceiling for hours at a time’ while being beaten,” you’ll see that there’s no reference whatsoever to the perpetrators being punished.
Uncle Kvetch 06.17.05 at 10:28 am
The instances of prisoner abuse which you cite as typifying US actions were in fact illegal and the perpetrators have been punished.
AM, if you read the NYTimes article that Hilzoy links to in reference to “fourteen year olds […] ‘suspended from hooks in the ceiling for hours at a time’ while being beaten,” you’ll see that there’s no reference whatsoever to the perpetrators being punished.
abb1 06.17.05 at 12:16 pm
The problem is that we need some ‘open debate’. The problem is that these people who run Gitmo have no judicial (or, indeed, any civilian) oversight, that’s all.
Here’s what the wikipedia says about gestapo in its early years:
abb1 06.17.05 at 12:18 pm
Ooops. The first sentence should read: The problem is NOT that we need some ‘open debate’.
abb1 06.17.05 at 12:33 pm
Come to think of it, this kind of an open debate in the times when a significant part of the population is swept by some sort of nationalistic fever seems like a distinctly bad idea.
So, thanks, but no thanks. When it comes to torture, I’ll take the good old law of the land over a referendum every freaken time.
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