Takin’ Care of Business

Barry, that change over will be easy. Instead of having the fantasy figure do the government’s bidding, they’ll take on a Dirty Harry sort of outlook: taking care of business despite the government. That myth is just as present in America – the rogue vigilante/good guy working in a bad system.

Probably because anything that Hillary says or does automatically become the antithesis of anything these guys stand for. So, y’know, if Hillary is for gun ownership and capital punishment, then it’s automatically necessary to oppose guns and capital punishment. Same with Iraq, the economy, whatever. It’s the ultimate in negative psychology. Jane Fonda has nothing on Hillary in this regard. I think she should register as a Republican.

As for the radical milieu of Madison: Huh? That was over before Paul Soglin sat in the mayor’s chair. What’s that dude on about?

um, “spoiler”

damned Treo

“It would be nice to have a secret government that can get the answers and take care of business—even kill people”
Yeah. And maybe while they’re at it, they could get the trains to run on time.
It’s not just reminiscent of the Shah — sounds like a proposal for a home-grown American Gestapo, or KGB. Those guys certainly “took care of business”.
Handing the country over to a ruthless, unaccountable security service — yep, that sounds like a good way to safeguard democracy.

The power-fantasy aspect comes out fairly clearly in Surnow’s final quote too (scroll down to the end), which shifts from ‘what works’ to ‘what I would like to do’.

“In a more sober tone, he said, “We’ve had all of these torture experts come by recently, and they say, ‘You don’t realize how many people are affected by this. Be careful.’ They say torture doesn’t work. But I don’t believe that. I don’t think it’s honest to say that if someone you love was being held, and you had five minutes to save them, you wouldn’t do it. Tell me, what would you do? If someone had one of my children, or my wife, I would hope I’d do it.”

‘Pathological’ seems a weak word for the repeated fantasized return to the outlandish scenario of ‘five minutes to save the helpless woman and child’. The reference to “a young interrogator” learning his craft is priceless too – torture as artisanal tradition…

Cyrus Nowrasteh should know all about a secret government that “would take care of business – even kill people….” His daddy used to run with a crew that did roughly that for the deposed Shah of Iran. Not that the Islamic Revolution was ever a knight in shining armor come to save Iranians; that is not the point. Rather, it bears some scrutiny that the son of a Shah adviser has embraced rabid American neo-conservatism and pines for a murderous order that could secretly maim and kill people.

Americans beware. You can take the boy out of monarchist Iran but you can’t take monarchist Iran out of the boy.

The best bit of the article is here: ‘Virtually the sole exception to this rule (i.e. that everyone cracks under torture) is Jack Bauer. The current season begins with Bauer being released from a Chinese prison, after two years of ceaseless torture; his back is scarred and his hands are burnt, but a Communist official who transfers Bauer to U.S. custody says that he “never broke his silence.”’.

You see? This is why the ticking time bomb scenario can never be used by ‘them’ against ‘us’. For example, would it be permissable for Iraqis to torture an American? (If that American knew where and when an airstrike was going to take place that would inevitably lead to civilian (Iraqi) casualties). And the answer is, of course not. Because true, real Americans don’t crack under torture.

Seriously though, 24 is a piece of shit isn’t it? It’s depressing that in an era of The Wire, The Shield, Deadwood and others, 24 gets more publicity than all of them (there are no competitions on Radio 1 for listeners to become extras on The Wire). I blame the (usually reliable) Charlie Brooker, although I think even he has gone off it, as it heads off towards series 78 (or whatever) and its ‘realistic’ plotlines become increasingly absurd.

Unwillingness to face up to the ugly necessities of societal self-protection is a very common democratic vice. My favorite example is the widespread (in America, at least) and often disturbingly jovial invocation of prison rape as the inevitable fate of monstrous criminals, by people who would never in a million years tolerate a criminal justice system that actually sentenced even the most monstrous criminals to be raped. In effect, such people refuse to shoulder the morally painful task of directly sanctioning a genuinely effective deterrent to criminality–but they’re happy to farm it out to burly convicts acting on their behalf, with their tacit collusion and without any of their moral constraints, as long as they can pretend complete lack of responsibility for the consequences.

One of my reasons for opposing an official ban on all coercive interrogation techniques is precisely that I fear it will lead to the Mark Bowden/Jack Bauer solution: those in a position to do so will “take care of business” and “do what needs to be done”, while society both tacitly approves and abdicates all responsibility. This is grossly unfair to the interrogators, who are expected to jeopardize their own freedom and safety on behalf of a society who could at any time disavow them completely; to the interrogated, who are at the complete mercy of the effectively unconstrained interrogators; and to those among the public who care about their society’s moral foundations.

To put it another way, governments exist to “take care of business”, including such ugly business as the capture, punishment and deterrence of domestic criminals and the destruction and deterrence of external threats. This business can be taken care of in the open, with public knowledge and democratic accountability; or it can be taken care of secretly, by nameless unaccountable officials whose deeds society would rather not know about, much less control. Personally, I greatly prefer the former option.

How’s about we just don’t torture people, Dan @17, and don’t allow rape in prisons, and prosecute those who take it on themselves to do either? Believe it or not, it is possible to imagine a functioning democratic society that doesn’t ground itself on rape or torture.

“Nowrasteh” is an anagram of “The War’s On”.

Coincidence? I think not.

Dan Simon’s argument: “If we don’t openly allow X, then X will happen secretly.” If we don’t openly allow a dictatorship to flourish, there’ll be a secret dictatorship. If we don’t openly allow pedophilia, there’ll be secret pedophiles. And so on. Of course, I don’t buy it.

Not to mention that, as Randy Paul and Brendan points out, the claim that torture are 100% effective against Devout Islamic Terrorists and 0% effective against Devout Patriotic Americans is, um, totally screwed.

And if you talk to those who actually do interrogations, they will tell you that it is a painstaking process and you gain more reliable information by careful understanding of the interogee.

I refer you to the Mark Bowden article to which I linked above. Apparently, at least some eminently qualified people are convinced that some coercive interrogation techniques work very well indeed.

I think it can be safely stipulated that morally troubling practices that are also ineffective should never be used. But Kieran’s post, it seemed to me, implicitly granted the possibility that coercive interrogation might in fact be effective, and then argued that it’s nevertheless inherently corrosive to democracy, because of its link to secrecy and unaccountability, and therefore to tyranny.

My claim is that this link is not a necessary one, any more than it is for any other governmental use of force to maintain order and safety. Rather, I argue that democratic societies are often sorely tempted to create this link by banning, then tacitly condoning, morally troubling but effective practices by unaccountable authorities, thus abdicating broad moral responsibility for them, while enjoying their benefits.

Hence, if a given morally troubling practice is in fact effective, and widely believed to be so, then those who advocate banning it on moral grounds may end up playing into the hands of those who want to ban it purely to avoid moral responsibility, while allowing it to continue in secret.

And just in case I’ve not mentioned this before:

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/24-news-cycle.php

We need more of this.

Whatever the utility of torture as a way of getting information, its popular appeal is undeniable. There may not be any overwhelming need to torture people, but to judge from the enthusiasm of its supporters there is an overwhelming desire to engage in it. What surfaces in the defenders of torture is simply the allure of moral evil. Why devise complicated explanations for something perfectly obvious?

Dan Simon,

You can be counted on to miss the point. I never argued that torture never works. I merely argued that there is a historical precedent that there are very effective methods to get information that involve neither torture nor coercion.

The Bowden article, by the way effectively shreds the “ticking bomb argument.” Assuming what Keith Hall says is true, it took more than ten days of steady torture to break Elias Nimr. According to this, Ramzi Yousef’s accomplice, Abdul Hakim enduring 67 days of this before he broke:

According to journalists Marites Vitug and Glenda Gloria, authors of the book Under the Crescent Moon, agents hit him with a chair and long piece of wood when Murad didn’t talk. They forced water into his mouth, and crushed out lit cigarettes on his genitals. Murad’s ribs were completely cracked. Agents were surprised that he survived. According to an investigator, he finally confessed out of fear of Jews after an agent masquerading as the Mossad told him that he was being sent to Israel.

That ticking time bomb better have a calendar attached to it or a very long fuse . . .

Following up Randy Paul’s point there seems to me to be a fundamental problem with the ticking time bomb scenario, this time conceptual rather than the fact that in reality you can rarely get the guy to talk in reasonable time frame.

The problem is this: Say your time period is ten minutes, or fifteen minutes or whatever. Now, in that time period clearly your suspect, assuming that the bomb (or ‘bomb’) isn’t in the next room or whatever, could simply give a false address as to where the bomb is. In that time period you would never have time to get to the place where the ‘bomb’ is, find out that it’s not there, and then get back in time to torture him some more and find out where it REALLY is.

So that’s the Ticking Time Bomb Scenario (TTBS) more or less out the window when the time period is extremely limited. BUT the TTBS is only justifiable, morally, when all other methods of obtaining information are impossible.

But the longer you have, obviously, then the more and more possibility there is that other, ‘non-torturous’ (or whatever….) methods will become available and might actually work. Normal police work, for example. Forensics, forceful (but non-torturous) interrogation and so forth.

So in other words, the TTBS can only be morally justified when we have an extremely short time period in which we can use it. But this presupposes that the suspect will tell the truth. But, precisely because of the short time period, the suspect will have an extremely good incentive to lie.

In any case as Randy Paul points out, since it normally takes days or weeks or months to actually break a hardened terrorist, it’s very difficult to see why torture should be used when other (less time consuming, and more efficient) ways of gathering information could be used.

Irresponsible TV execs like Mr Surnow slant the evidence by implying

a: Everyone who is tortured tells the truth

b: Everyone who is tortured breaks quickly and

c: There are never any (more efficient, more cost effective) alternative to torture.

I think the fact that one might have a good reason to expect such events as massive terrorist attacks, bombs planted in cities, bio-attacks and so on – this is already a clear and undeniable proof of your government’s complete failure to “to maintain order and safety”, as Dan would put it.

Clearly something’s wrong with Simon’s “democratic society” if there’s such a strong impulse out there to destroy it. Frankly, I suspect that this democratic society stinks and if it won’t survive without torture, it most certainly won’t survive much longer with torture either.

Can anyone name a US TV series or film from the last 30 years in which the protagonist, while not wearing spandex tights, was confronted with the option of torturing someone, chose not to, and that decision worked out for them?

‘Torture works’ as much a genre convention as ‘the guy gets the girl in the last reel’, a way of signifying ‘gritty realism’, ‘this is not a comic book’. A film based on any kind of realistic depiction of interrogation would seem as wierd as a romantic comedy in which the two leads met, liked each other immediately, started dating, moved in together after a year and got married some time afterwards with the approval of both families.

I don’t watch “24”, but it does seem a bit strange that Kiefer Sutherland should be playing such a character. Max, I doubt anyone outside Canada understands your reference, but Sutherland has made it clear that he supports his grandfather’s values.
http://www.ndp.ca/page/4254

‘How about CSI? ‘

I can’t say I have seen every episode of every spin-off, but can you point to one that actually dealt with torture (or ‘torture-lite’) as something that either came up and was rejected, or was tried and failed, by the protagonists?

You can’t counter a point about sexual stereotypes in rom-com movies by pointing to two characters in a political thriller that happen to be married in a way that is not focused on in the plot or dialog.

Fact is, if you make movies that perpetrate false racist or homophobic sterotypes, sooner or later some jerk-wad politician is going to come along and attempt to win the votes of those people who believed the story you just told.

What is needed is not censorship, but for someone somewhere to make a populist movie that treats things more realistically, so that the genre conventions become recognised as such.

“…can you point to one that actually dealt with torture (or ‘torture-lite’) as something that either came up and was rejected, or was tried and failed, by the protagonists?”

Goalpost moving at work. First you said that the protagonist should be “confronted with the option of torturing someone”, now you say that “torture” should be “actually dealt with”.

And besides, if your very definitions of specific “genres” include such things as “actually dealt with torture” or “perpetrate false racist or homophobic sterotypes”, then your idea of what a “genre” is is a pretty wacked one. I mean, can anyone imagine an entry on IMDb that goes like this?

Genre: Drama / Deals With Torture

= = =

Again, 24 apparently tells us that a Devoutly Islamic Terrorist will break immediately under torture, while a Devoutly Patriotic American can keep his silence for two years. In short, 24 is a series for stupid people. Which is why I stopped watching it.

‘In a January 2006 debate’

In my understanding of the world, cause and effect tends to move in a forwards direction in time. An explanation of events that doesn’t involve a time machine is that movies influence voters, who influence politicians, who influence the military.

‘Goalpost moving at work. First you said that the protagonist should be “confronted with the option of torturing someone”, now you say that “torture” should be “actually dealt with”.’

I would have thought the word ‘confronted’ implied the issue was dealt with, or at least mentioned? You can hardly use Friends as an example of protagonists confronting the torture issue.

I can actually think of one recent example of what I would like to see, an episode of the excellent UK ‘Life on Mars’ (series 2 starts tonight…). Maybe if the rumoured US version of that is made, my question will become answerable.

‘In short, 24 is a series for stupid people.’

Just to be clear:

stupid events in a film -> whatever.

stupid genre conventions -> worth pointing out

One black guy dies first in a horror movie: *shrug*

Noone can think of an example of a black guy making it out alive: hmmm…

soru, to make things even clearer than they already are:

When you talk about “genre conventions”, you need to say which genre specifically you are talking about. Is it the genre of action movies? Or crime movies? Or what?

Then, you need to look at the entire genre to see if such and such really is a “genre convention”. Not just a subset of the genre which you define arbitrarily.

Again, stop being stupid.

soru, I say again, you need to look at the whole genre, not just some subset of the genre. And if you decide the genre is “contemporary thriller/action movie”, then let’s look at all “contemporary thriller/action movies”, not just “contemporary thriller/action movies which deal with torture”.

And in the genre of “contemporary action/thriller movies”, torture “sometimes” comes up. That is, it sometimes doesn’t come up. Which means it’s not a genre convention.

Not that 24 even fits neatly into the “action/thriller” genre, at least if you consider that to be distinct from the “police procedural”. 24 is a sort of weird cross between the lone superhero movie and a procedural. In superhero movies you won’t find stuff like the President of the United States engaging in a long discussion with his cabinet on the pros and cons of arbitrary internment, or long digressions into office politics.

= = =

Also, in the first 24 series, Ted Cofell decided to let himself die rather than surrendering information to Jack Bauer. I don’t think that’s supposed to show the efficacy of torture.

“I haven’t seen that episode”

Well, you should. The first series has its own share of cliches (like the “oh no we’re going to die but at the last minute a miracle happens” device) and is slightly on the dumb side, but at least it’s not too stupid. But the later ones, from what I understand, seem to have totally jumped the shark.