That’s Some High-Quality Wank There

Free the Indianapolis 500!

You’re remembering an old Not The Nine O’Clock News sketch:

Look, I know these kids, I’ve worked in the areas we’re talking about – round Lambeth, Lewisham – I know their problems, I know their frustrations – lack of community facilities – I know their parents. And in my opinion, Professor Duff’s suggestion that we should cut off their goolies … is the only solution!

The people who by the end of the sketch are foaming at the mouth and yelling “cut their goolies off” are both academic sociologists.

There’s an outside chance Clive Crook may use this fact to sneer at you. If he does, try to hold out for a few minutes before you fold.

Thanks Bert – I am pretty sure that my memory is accurate here, not least because I have never seen NTNOCN (we didn’t have BBC when it was being broadcast) so I imagine that I heard Irish comedians ripping off the original version you link to and transposing it into a cod commenters.ntext where nuns rather than sociologists were the softhearted commenters.

Funny how during the Cold War the nuclear strategists, such as Herman Kahn, who engaged in ‘thinking the unthinkable’, thought that sacrificing a few medium sized American cities and their inhabitants was a reasonable price to pay for ridding the world of the Soviet Union and right wing hawks in the US government agreed. Only unpatriotic anti-Americans questioned that wisdom and considered it barbaric.

Boise, Idaho or a world free of communism?

The Democratic party’s civil libertarians seem to believe that several medium-sized US cities would be a reasonable price to pay for insisting on ordinary criminal trials for terrorist suspects.

People aren’t going to believe this, but there actually were acts of terrorism before September 11, 2001. One of them even involved the World Trade Center! I know, I know, it sounds crazy. But it’s true. And guess what? The United States convicted a bunch of terrorists in ordinary criminal trials and put them in jails on U.S. soil. As Lawrence Wright pointed out in The Looming Tower:

On May 29, 2001, in a federal courtroom in Manhattan, a jury convicted four men in the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa. It was the capstone of a perfect record of twenty-five terrorist convictions accomplished by the prosecutors of the Southern District of New York, which was headed by Mary Jo White, with her assistants Kenneth Karas and Patrick Fitzgerald.

Yep, twenty-five convictions in open court, not in secret military tribunals. Complete with habeas corpus — and no “enhanced interrogation” or “prolonged detention.” And all we crazy civil-libertarian types wanted, after that, was a President who wouldn’t respond to a memo titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” by telling the intelligence official, “all right, you’ve covered your ass now.”

If Crook has any substantial evidence that ‘several medium sized cities’ have been put at risk, or are likely to be put at risk, because of civil libertarians’ tiresome insistence on trials and such, I invite him to produce it.

Um, is there any substantial evidence that ‘several medium sized cities’ would be at put at risk if the USA opened its border with no identification required to anyone who wanted to enter?

The trouble is that there are no real figures for anything when n is small or zero. So, everybody is reduced to using their best guesses. And not surprisingly, we’re back to square one: How threatened do we feel we’d be with different courses of action.

You can’t really have a factual argument when there are next to no facts.

Preventing 9/11 wouldn’t have required the extremes of “enhanced interrogation”, just, in fact, putting facts together and a coherent response from various agencies.

The reaction to it brought us all that.

15 – Yeah quite right – it was some lingering impression that hadn’t been corrected. Above comment does have an afterthought that goes most of the way there. Now done a full sweep to update my neural records.

The scary thing is that Crook is only repeating what Obama himself said:

On one side of the spectrum, there are those who make little allowance for the unique challenges posed by terrorism, and who would almost never put national security over transparency. On the other end of the spectrum, there are those who embrace a view that can be summarized in two words: “anything goes.” (…) Both sides may be sincere in their views, but neither side is right.

What Crooke says doesn’t matter one bit, what Obama says is of major importance, so one might as well focus the ire on him, rather than on some hack.

I imagine that I heard Irish comedians ripping off the original version

Must have been a direct knock-off then. I remember knowing the NTNOCN version from (audio) tapes of the series. In that sketch Mel Smith is the law-n-order academic type and Pamela Stephenson is the social worker from Lambeth.

18 fair point, though he was supposedly talking about state secrets rather than about torture wasn’t he?

Just heard a headline reporting that St. O is now saying “N Korea’s nuclear programme is a major threat to world peace”. (BTW does anyone else in the UK feel compelled to try and turn off the radio before the Archers theme starts? And disproportionately annoyed when that doesn’t work because it’s also on in another room?)

I think he has a slight point on his side. People sometimes say “liberties should always trump security” or something of that sort. If you read that literally, then as a natural consequence, “several medium-sized US cities would be a reasonable price to pay for insisting on ordinary criminal trials for terrorist suspects”. In fact, several large-sized US cities would even be a reasonable price to pay if one believes that liberties always trump security.

Of course, the problem is that basically no one actually literally means that preserving civil liberties is worth any price in security – they just mean that it’s worth some modest price, and it seems exceedingly unlikely to cost more than this modest price, if even that. So Crook’s slight point about the rhetoric of some civil libertarians really doesn’t do anything to address what they actually believe.

Henry et al., I really don’t see where Obama is falsely dichotomizing or where he is in a business of deprecating views (if anything he doesn’t deprecate one views enough). It’s quite clear that what he says before novakant’s (..) is accurate although overstated for clarity. What he says after (..) is his point of view and I don’t see why he shouldn’t go & state it. After all, he clearly drew the line at torture and at due process. What’s left is to deal with the mess created before him; and there’s no easy solution to that. Thinking it is so is daft.

I also wonder why nobody so opposed to him on this (and I hope many will be opposed to him on all kinds of things) gives concrete policy advise like “get in the ICC”.

BTW does anyone else in the UK feel compelled to try and turn off the radio before the Archers theme starts?

When I’m doing the washing up and The Archers starts up, it’s straight to Radio 3 for me. Usually stays there, unless I decide to switch back to Radio 4 for Front Row at 19.15.

I don’t actually hate The Archers or anything; I just don’t have any use for it. I’m sure other people enjoy it just fine. I mean, Inspector Morse was a fan of it (in the books), so how bad can it be? Still….

31: I admit I don’t know the details on the judicial side of things (I’m not American) – I did think that going against a court decision was odd, to say the least. Clearly if there’s a compelling non-appealable decision to publish and that’s the argument: I concur that he should publish and stop babbling about it. Is this so?

As to independent commisions, I disagree. Ignoring Congress because Congress has a different opinion than the President is one of the worst advises one can have. I do not see why we should proliferate independent commissions and why suddenly it would be easier to make a commision independent than to make a Supreme Court neutral in all of its members (after all this is not the UK).

It’s not a question of ignoring Congress. It’s a question of not depending on a Congress that has shown itself to be extremely susceptible to exactly the sort of “culture of fear” that Obama was decrying.

I can’t quite tell if Ginger Yellow and Cranky Observer are agreeing with me or disagreeing with me. All I’m saying is that there’s a hypothetical position someone might hold, on which any preservation of civil liberties is worth any cost in destruction of cities. It seems clear that such a position is wrong. However, this position is also pretty much a pure straw man – almost all civil libertarians base their positions at least in part on the empirical claim that violating liberties in these sorts of cases will add nothing to our security, and therefore there’s no need for liberty to trump security. Rather, we need to pay attention to liberty because it is a value that comes with little or no cost, and may actually help improve security, both by putting proper checks and balances on governmental power, and by cutting off a major source of recruitment for violent groups.

So I think that Ginger Yellow and Cranky Observer agree with me about the overall point, though they might be criticizing me for joining in the critique of the straw man position.

The link didn’t work but I assume Bert was referring to Jerónima de la Fuente.
Google images for that name. She is impressive, if that’s the word.

I’m not categorically opposed to preventive detention with some checks & balances—some smart people whom I respect have suggested it’s worth a look—but I have trouble imagining just whom we would need to confine in this manner. People we kind of think maybe might be terrorists? That’s asking a bit much.

Perhaps this includes people who were radicalized by their treatment in prison. That is self-justifying imprisonment, which is bullshit, but if these people want to strike back if they are freed where do you draw the line?

Hotlink protection with a session cookie, or some such.
Thanks Sleepy, and you’re right, that’s the one.
How’s this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8449304@N04/2497594662/sizes/l/.

The Latin reads “It’s a good thing to wait and praise God in silence.” (More loosely, “Speak up and see what you get, pal.”)

The part of this debate that catches my attention is its ab initio tendency. I keep waiting for someone to list the other episodes in the past when the US has employed torture, when it has executed prisoners, when it has massacred opponents who had a credible claim to be non-combatants, when it has recklessly inflicted large-scale civilian casualties as a side-effect of military action.

What debates took place in those cases? What arguments were produced to justify such violence and violations of human rights, and what were the long-term consequences? Were public officials prosecuted, and did the scale of violence inflicted by the US decrease in the year, decade, or half century following the public debate? Or did the US public, reassured by the debate, simply fall asleep once more.

In other words, is this a real debate on either side, intended to lead to a correction to US behaviour, or is this just more kabuki, intended to reassure the US public that no matter what we have done, we sure take it seriously, yup, we sure do, when in fact we really want to air the dirty linen for just long enough before packing it away and passing on to the next episode of brutality?

Crook and co are really just militarists, they see no solution to any problem that does not require the use of copious amounts of force. This has the dual benefit (for them) iof first excluding civilians from the decision making process and allowing them to derride their opponents as being unable to take ‘hard choices’. When in fact the choices they make are not hard for them personally at all: They like starting wars.

The problem for the rest of us is that the statistics show that militarism is not particularly good at anything other than starting wars. It is not particularly good at finishing wars and it is positively disastrous when it comes to fighting terrorism.

The ‘War’ on Terror is unfortunately just the latest militarist excuse to arrogate supreme, unchecked power and then use it for violent ends. Before that it was the cold war which the militarists would like us all to believe was ‘won’ by the actions of the US when a more realistic assessment would recognize that the Soviets really destroyed themselves and did so because they were even more corrupt and militarist that the brothers Dulles, J. E. Hoover and the institutions they founded.

There are plenty of people who know more about terrorism than the purported War on Terror experts. The British tried the same tactics used by the Bush administration and switched to the ‘criminalization’ policy because they failed. Torturing IRA prisoners only drew sympathy for their cause – in particular from New York City where Rudy Giuliani attended as many IRA fund raisers as he could fit in his calendar and gave their political leader Gerry Adams a ‘crystal apple’ as a humanitarian award.

This is the crucial sentence: Obama will put those who he is certain can be convicted before a regular court, those who he is unsure about getting convicted before military commissions and those he knows cannot be convicted at all will be held in indefinite preventive detention.

What this means is: there is a predetermined desired outcome and the law is only applied in so far, as it does not endanger this outcome. It is the classic method of a totalitarian state and makes a mockery of the law.

While I think it’s rather farfetched that “enhanced interrogation” was the last and only step left to consider as Cheney would like us to think in preventing anything, I’m more inclined to imagine a real reality, if you will, is the evidence might actually be compromised against one or more dangerous individuals (either the evidence itself, or methods used to extract it).

Is it somewhat reasonable that Obama will have to answer for any of these people turning up again in some prominent activity directed against the U.S should he do the right thing?

Here, I see the potential for a frying pan and into the fire sort of result. Not good either way, if you ask me, (though no one did). Had Obama created the problem, I would not feel so conflicted.

@47: I’m more inclined to imagine a real reality, if you will, is the evidence might actually be compromised against one or more dangerous individuals (either the evidence itself, or methods used to extract it).

While IANAL, it appears that the question of admissibility of evidence is left to the discretion of a judge; there is no fast-and-hard rule . According to wikipedia:

Even in a criminal case, the exclusionary rule does not simply bar the introduction of all evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth, Fifth, or Sixth Amendment. In Hudson v. Michigan, 547 U.S. 586, 126 S.Ct. 2159 (June 15, 2006), Justice Scalia wrote for the U.S. Supreme Court:

“ Suppression of evidence, however, has always been our last resort, not our first impulse. The exclusionary rule generates “substantial social costs,” United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 907 (1984), which sometimes include setting the guilty free and the dangerous at large. We have therefore been “cautious against expanding” it, Colorado v. Connelly, 479 U.S. 157, 166 (1986), and “have repeatedly emphasized that the rule’s ‘costly toll’ upon truth-seeking and law enforcement objectives presents a high obstacle for those urging [its] application,” Pennsylvania Bd. of Probation and Parole v. Scott, 524 U.S. 357, 364-365 (1998) (citation omitted). We have rejected “indiscriminate application” of the rule, Leon, supra, at 908, and have held it to be applicable only “where its remedial objectives are thought most efficaciously served,” United States v. Calandra, 414 U.S. 338, 348 (1974) – that is, “where its deterrence benefits outweigh its ‘substantial social costs,'” Scott, supra, at 363, (quoting Leon, supra, at 907). Whether the exclusionary sanction is appropriately imposed in a particular case is an issue separate from the question whether the Fourth Amendment rights of the party seeking to invoke the rule were violated by police conduct. ”

And so, why should this cost/benefit analysis be performed by the executive rather than judiciary?

Clearly Obama (and too many Democratic Senators, and congresspeople), believe that the political danger of taking the right position here is too great. So the answer, is that this is less of a moral failing, then of our political class determining which public policy goals can be sacrificed in order to insure their ability to pursue other worthy policy goals.

I used to think that this was the case, but since have seen so many formerly liberal politicians turn into paranoid control freaks once they had reached a position of real power and responsibility, that I’m now more inclined to believe that they actually think they’re doing the right thing, rather than just giving in to public opinion.

Is it somewhat reasonable that Obama will have to answer for any of these people turning up again in some prominent activity directed against the U.S should he do the right thing?

Well, yes, the media and opposition politicians will make sure of that, should something like this happen. But we let off suspected murderers, rapists, child molesters, drug dealers, wife beaters and dangerous drivers every day because there’s not enough evidence or even on mere technicalities and we can be sure just by looking at the statistics that a certain percentage of those will go on murdering, raping, molesting, dealing, wife beating and driving dangerously. If we held all of them in preventive detention, it is certain that the number of these crimes would be reduced, but we don’t and few are complaining about that.

49 Henry VT: And so, why should this cost/benefit analysis be performed by the executive rather than judiciary?

Surely it should only be performed, if at all, by legislators/constitutional drafters. When it is applied by the judiciary, it’s because:

1) the executive has already wrongfully let the cat out of the bag and the courts must be concerned with the actually available evidence (contrary to popular mythology where villains are always ‘getting off’ on ‘technicalities’). Having said that, I think that the 5th Amendment is treated a bit differently, particularly wrt self-incrimination, possibly because the evidence itself (rather than the way it was got) is seen as tainted. This is only my fairly vague layperson’s impression though.

2) executive violations of constitutional rights are not in such cases properly investigated and punished in separate proceedings, and instead the weird situation has arisen whereby the ‘sanction’ applied is reduced likelihood of getting a conviction – a sanction not only rather ineffective but with substantial negative side-effects: the ‘social costs’ mentioned; and injury to complainants, if you think they have a special interest in criminal proceedings.

The latter seems to be part of a more general trend of keeping officials out of the criminal justice system – presidential pardons (!!?!) for Scooter Libbies come to mind, as does the situation in the UK whereby politicians like Blunkett etc get ‘punished’ for fraud by being made to pay back what they stole. A simple (informal, ‘by inspection’) cost-benefit analysis (especially bearing in mind a detection rate < 1) will confirm that this is notably deficient as a deterrent. Imagine the outcry if such a system were introduced for shoplifters!

[Quick response to an accidentally Parthian shot on another thread: zdenekv – the comment you quote was fairly clearly proposing a simple sociological/psychological hypothesis for discussion (now not forthcoming), rather than propounding an argument.]

Henri Vieuxtemps – while my knowledge of US judicial history is mostly confined to Miranda, it would seem premature to suggest that anything Scalia has to say is the last word on the subject.
Quite aside from the benefits of a fair judicial process in protecting America, it seems the discussion has finally gotten around to pointing out the dimunition of the US’ authority when it comes to commenting on judicial practices elsewhere in the world. And when Obama talked about Sri Lanka when he said he’d block the release of torture photos, I thought perhaps he would praise the government there for keeping the media out of the war zone, in case they should report anything that might adversely affect the image of the Sri Lankan military.

cleethorpes 55: Crook refers to mass deaths, rather than a vanishingly small increased risk of mass deaths, as the price for continuing existing legal processes. That’s a massive distortion. Crook doesn’t suggest extraordinary martial-law powers for use during the emergency that would arise if mass deaths were imminent.

And more broadly, this kind of authoritarian propaganda is presented as a neutral and balanced reexamination of an issue, but by treating the status quo as one extreme of a spectrum, the propagator attempts to force any ‘compromise’ solution to move toward the other extreme.

Henri VT 57: But it’s not a separate issue is it. The source you quote, at any rate, frames the issue as a trade-off between, on the one hand, something like the best fit of verdict to extant evidence and, on the other, deterrence of unconstitutional behaviour. The reason given for excluding evidence is to impose a ‘sanction’ (punishment) against the offending officer(s). That’s why I contrasted the distinct questions of ‘inherently’ tainted evidence (e.g. that which is of a type which is unreliable) .

On ‘it should only, if at all, be performed by the legislature’: the ‘cost-benefit analysis’ involved is surely rather intractable in individual cases and apt to produce wide variation in outcomes according to the particular prejudices of judges. Given that we assume the ideal legislature is competent to deal with teh issue sensibly, I would say that it would be better if the (informal) cost-benefit analysis were applied to possible systems of detailed rules, rather than case by case. But it’s a fair cop: the point wasn’t well-expressed or perhaps particularly well thought-out or cogent. Perhaps I should have concentrated on the main issue which is the inappropriate use of exclusioanry rules as a sanction against officials, which renders the issue of how to implement such a system irrelevant (the antecedent ‘if at all’ is false, so the rest is superfluous.)

Heck, we could save 40,000 lives a year if we made the national speed limit 5 mph – Bring it on – medium city lifesavers!

Tim, I agree that punishing prosecution by letting criminals go free is silly, but this is a result of what the system is, fundamentally: a game, competition between prosecution and defense with an arbiter (judge). Justice is defined as the outcome of this game. Hence “legal dream teams”, hence the rich are destined to win, the poor are destined to lose.

Anyway, I was only responding to 48, who thinks that compromised evidence = inadmissible evidence; that is, apparently, not true. That’s all I’m saying.

Henri, in a police state you would be safer from all criminals … with one exception: criminals in the police. Also, anything can be seen as a game but ‘tainted evidence’ clauses are in this case to be seen as specific rules applied to the police to counterbalance the specific powers granted to a police. I do think however that we have driven this too far, specifically in the US. Abusers of the power of the state are rarely prosecuted or sanctioned but criminals are often released – balance can be better in this game.

Taking us back to “Actually, according to Zizek, it’s a classic M.O. of the liberal order.” Now that’s some high-quality wank, to which the above discussion of how police-states work is apposite. But of course, for friend Zizek, the only true freedom is in a revolutionary dictatorship, where habeas corpus means ‘where should I put the bodies?’…

cleathorpes (what is cleathorpes?) 67: what about the fact that the trade-off has already been done (e.g. prisons etc etc) and you and Crook seem to want to apply a ratchet effect by treating the status quo as though it were at one end of the spectrum?

JoB 64 (& HVT): Part of the problem is that danger from criminals (trrists, invaders, etc) gets treated as worse than the same amount of danger from any other source, tapping into some emotional response or something. Try this one: I’d prefer my son to be (moderately!) sexually abused by a paedo than crippled by a car. Shocked? Disagree?

anything can be seen as a game yes agree; it’s not very helpful is it.

I’m genuinely not sure what you are getting at with ‘tainted evidence’ clauses are in this case to be seen as specific rules applied to the police to counterbalance the specific powers granted to a police. I am very intersted in the point about sanctions as it seems to get missed(it’s how the system works’) even by the legal types I’ve run it by. Can you clarify/expand?

On the original point from Fortuna 48 – most of these poor bastards have been rounded up more or less arbitrarily, in some cases no doubt because they were on a list of the names that some other torture victim could think of. Though they might be a bit less well-disposed to the US now – the prophecy fulfils itself, a bit like the notion of ‘Al Quaeda’ as a rallying point. So I’m inclined to put most of said compromised evidence on the ‘intrinsically tainted’ – i.e. in this case totally made up – side of the ledger. But as Tom W 61 points out, the attention has been so disproportionately focussed on the possibility of one of them doing something nasty, so there’s a kind of hindsight-waiting-to-happen trap set for Mr O.

Tim-68,

Shocked? No. Disagree? No. Nonsense? Yes.

I was replying to Henri, pointing out that the main reason not every evidence is allowed isn’t to allow criminals to play games but is to avoid the police play certain games. IMHO — disallowing such evidence is to be seen in that light. In other words: if the evidence is established as real – & it is not impossible to corroborate certain suspect evidence without the suspectness remaining – and the crime and potential for recidive is high enough then the evidence should be allowed and the person responsible for its original suspectness dealt with in a separate trial.

I haven’t read enough of you to know where you are going with the emotion-thing. But it seems overstated. I don’t know the cases but I know it’s a bit emptier there as times go by, so this does not suggest to me that people are overly emotional even considering the hindsight-trap.

@69: Maybe ‘seem to want to’ would have to be counted weasely, as applied to you at least, and I should have read back through and deleted it. On the other hand, your #55 would suggest that there is no such problem.

According to Crook, The Democratic party’s civil libertarians are non-compromisers for insisting on ordinary criminal trials for terrorist suspects. This is equated with the view that There can be no trade-off between freedom and security’.

And #55 says:
If you hold the position that a compromise is necessary…then of course you believe that those on the two uncompromising sides are both wrong… [here one of the uncompromising sides is the pro-status-quo-ante ‘civil libertarian’, isn’t it?, and the other an absolute authoritarian?] …that does not amount to asserting that both are fundamentally the same kind of extremist zealot – quite: and why is that? because in fact one of them has already compromised liberty in favour of security, even though you treat them as opposite extremes between which any compromise must fall.

Tim

say there is a continuum between an “absolute focus on liberty with no concern for security” at one extreme, and vice versa at the other extreme. Clive is certainly positioning himself in the middle of what he sees as two extreme positions, but I don’t see that he really implies the two extreme positions are symmetrically placed on the continuum or absolutely at the extremes of the continuum either, so long as they are both extremes relative to his position. I know you could read his words “non-compromisers” to mean he’s saying the ‘civil libertarians’ are actually at the extreme limit of the continuum, but I’d guess if you actually challenged him on it, he’d say that was a loose label rather than an assertion that their position actually entails absolutely no compromises whatsoever. When I used the world “uncompromising” I should really have preceded it with “relatively”. Say you place the status quo 1/4 of the way along the line, Clive 1/2 way along, and Cheney & Co 9/10ths along. That’d work. So I think his argument is still coherent, accepting, as you say, that “one of them has already compromised liberty in favour of security”. (you could probably find some nut jobs that think we have already compromised in favour of liberty, but never mind them). That doesn’t mean I’m saying Clive is right; his position requires two things, first that ‘civil libertarian’ arguments are (relatively) uncompromising, and second this trade-off exists. He could be wrong about both of those counts, I couldn’t say. I only piped up because I thought Henry’s response to him was off the mark.

if you actually challenged him on it: too late – what was read was what he wrote.

you could probably find some nut jobs that think we have already compromised in favour of liberty I am one of them. We have not compromised all liberty in favour of security, therefore we have compromised some security in favour of liberty. And a bloody good thing too.

Right, back to work!

Henri Vieuxtemps 05.27.09 at 7:20 am

“@59, intuitively, though, it does seem that police state should be a safer model. Empirically too: places like Dubai, Singapore, Cuba.”

Wow! There are only *three* police states left in the world!!!!!!!!!

I never knew. I would have placed the number in the double digits.

Henry,

your clear and plain reading of his words has Clive saying something extremely stupid (civil libertarians would be happy to see hundreds of thousands die rather than slightly compromise). Do you think that:

a) he really does think that (he is a moron)
b) he thinks no such thing, but wrote very sloppily
c) he thinks no such thing, but purposely wrote a “disgusting and offensive slur” anyway (he’s a loathsome rat bastard)

me, I think d) he meant something else and his meaning is plain enough; I don’t think it takes much of a “tortuous effort” to see it. When I read him, I did not think “OMG! He’s saying that civil libertarians … etc.!! How disgusting!” because I didn’t think he’d say anything so daft, and there was a more generous interpretation readily available (he meant “the civil libertarian position would imply …. [and implicitly] because they are mistaken about the nature of the world and/or don’t see the implications of their own arguments”).

but hey ho, I could be wrong and maybe Mr Crook is the kind of shit you say he is – and if the true state of affairs is either a) or c) then I’m in wholehearted agreement with you. But maybe you’re guilty of an offensive suggestion of your own.

> Then we will lose all credibility on these kinds of questions
> and there will be more torture rather than less.

Whilst those who violated the law, the Constitution, and 99.9% of the moral codes recognized by humanity, and enshrined torture and dictatorial government as the future path of the United States (*) whilst simultaneously making the United States LESS “safe” (whatever that means, but in this case by their own definition), did not harm their credibility at all. No SIR! And they must not be questioned or held to account for their actions. No, never: those who so question might be branded “extremists”. Unlike Dick Cheney that sensible centrist man.

Cranky

(*) There is no question in my mind that an Obama presidency is better than any of the alternatives. But knowing the South Side of Chicago as I do I was fairly certain from the start that Obama was a conservative, and that is proving out. A kinder, gentler conservative Democrat to be sure, but a conservative nonetheless. And one who firmly believes in the primacy of Presidential power. He will take actions around the edges to reduce the horror, but he will leave the structures intact for the next Republican president (the Cheney daughter?) in 2016.

Whilst those who violated the law, the Constitution, and 99.9% of the moral codes recognized by humanity, and enshrined torture and dictatorial government as the future path of the United States (*) whilst simultaneously making the United States LESS “safe” (whatever that means, but in this case by their own definition), did not harm their credibility at all. No SIR! And they must not be questioned or held to account for their actions.

Who said that? Certainly not I. I despise torture. Bush faced nothing like the TTB and deserves to be tried for his many crimes, including war crimes that include torture.

There is troll history to keep in mind with The Fool.

Empirically speaking, it is an open question just how likely the TTB is. I have already agreed that it is unlikely. But over the next 50-100 years, as more and more countries like Iran and Iraq and North Korea develop nuclear weapons?

Completely and utterly irrelevant. The structure of the TTB is: our use of torture is justified because we know in advance with perfect certainty that it will prevent a greater evil. Exactly the same argument could be used to justify pre-emptively executing future terrorists, or for that matter pre-emptively imprisoning future murderers – if we had perfectly certain advance knowledge. In real life we never can have that kind of certainty, so we have to do what we can consistent with our own ignorance and the suspects’ rights. Hence, due process.

> To spin out a hypothetical scenario that would satisfy the condiditons: if
> we had a group of terrorists who had been under surveillance for some
> time and if we had bugged their quarters and had recorded daily
> conversations for the last month in which they planned in detail
> their nuclear terrorism plot, and if we had other evidence that
> they had acquired a nuclear device, and if some of those conversations
> included statements that the bomb was in place in New York City and if some of
> those conversations indicated which of them knew the location of the bomb and if
> we had gotten the names of which ones those were and if we then arrested one of the
> ones whom we knew to know the location, then we would have sufficient cause to use
> whatever force was necessary.

Let’s just continue your hypothetical a bit, since by your rules we can continue adding suppositions until we get the result we want: after 6 hours of agonizing torture, including crushing the testicles of the suspected terrorist’s 6-year-old son in front of his eyes, the suspect breaks down and provides The Fool with the location of the nuclear device in New York City and the necessary disarming code. The Fool personally leads a team of trained commandos across New York City to the location of the bomb, killing several pedestrians in haste to get there. The Fool and his team smash into the device’s location through the side wall. As they charge into the room, guns and Geiger counters ready, they hear a loud recorded “bang”. At that instant Boston is vaporized by the terrorist’s real device.

I mean seriously, if anyone actually has such a device and is both stupid and utterly evil enough to use it they will bring it into the US in a shipping container, load it into a heavy-duty delivery van, drive it directly to the location where they want to detonate it, and then … detonate it. The idea that utterly evil, hardened, dedicated terrorists add ticking timers to their weapons and play “24” type fictional games is so ridiculous that it would be insulting to 2-year-olds to call it “childish”.

It also fails to address the growing evidence that Dick Cheney and his gang derived personal satisfaction and enjoyment from ordering torture – as torturers throughout history have eventually so derived. At first they tell themselves that it is “necessary” to “avoid ticking time bombs” that they make the “tough decisions”, but it always and everywhere rapidly degenerates into a sick personal (and possibly sexual) satisfaction.

Finally, if The Fool absolutely thinks that torture is necessary then the correct procedure is to (1) personally order and conduct the torture (2) Save New York from Terrorist Annihilation (3) turn himself in to the nearest police station, FBI office, or US Attorney’s office, waive his Miranda rights, waive his right to counsel, and make a full confession of his crime. Is that what Dick Cheney did? David Addington? John Yoo? Hmmm… back to that sexual satisfaction thing…

Cranky

The bottom line is it is really idle to pretend that the TTB couldn’t possibly happen. You can raise all kinds of pragmatic obstacles but in the end the terrorists might not have a flawless plan. Few plans are flawless, even ones that are carefully devised. It COULD happen. Probably won’t. But it could.