Maybe It's Time to Reread Orwell
Over at The Corner, Cliff May offers another bureaucratic defense of the Bush administration's torture program:
Is it possible to be less self-aware? What's the matter with these people?
Under a strict set of rules, every pour of water had to be counted — and the number of pours was limited.Actually, I think I'll let Marcy do the math. May then concludes:
Also: Waterboarding interrogation sessions were permitted on no more than five days within any 30-day period.
No more than two sessions were permitted in any 24-hour period.
A session could last no longer than two hours.
There could be at most six pours of water lasting ten seconds or longer — and never longer than 40 seconds — during any individual session.
Water could be poured on a subject for a combined total of no more than 12 minutes during any 24 hour period.
You do the math.
I [don't] see how — except in an Orwellian universe — lawyers from the current administration can prosecute lawyers from the previous administration because they disagree with their legal opinions.Yeah, that's the Orwellian universe. Not the place where lawyers draft "legal opinions" dictating exactly how many hours per day we can subject prisoners to simulated drowning or what kind of insects we can lock them in a tiny box with. Has May ever actually read Orwell? It might be time to reread 1984.
Is it possible to be less self-aware? What's the matter with these people?
posted by A.L. at 10:36 PM
20 Comments:
Allow me to quote myself quoting the great Paul Phillips from your fine blog here on May 24, 2007 (while predicting a certain Dem victory in 2008):
"If you self-identify with the republican party as it stands today, there's something SERIOUSLY FUCKING WRONG WITH YOU."
Even truer today.
P.S. As a bonus, here's Tom Maguire in that same thread on Obama:
"If I were a Dem strategist contemplating the prospect of Barack Obama v. McCain, Giuliani or Thompson, I would blanche - a 46 year old with no discernible resume versus guys with something that looks like relevant experience?"
Incisive as ever. Some things never change I guess.
I love archives!: May 24 2007
What's the matter with these people?
What's the matter with all Americans?
We knew what Bush was doing even as he lied to us. We just didn't care if a bunch of Muslim terrorists were tortured and disappeared forever.
This is what's missing from all the debate over torture. At the time (and maybe still today), most Americans were just like George Bush and Dick Cheney. We'd read enough spy novels and watched enough movies to know exactly what we wanted Bush to do to the terrorists and the ungrateful Iraqis.
I'm not excusing the behavior of the Bush administration, but the blame should be more widely shared among all of us. What's wrong with us is not that we are Republicans but that we are human. Our morality is a fragile thing. It is easily discarded at a convenient time. To suggest that the Bushies acted without our consent is just as much a lie as Bush's assertions that the US didn't torture.
A truth commission that does not address these issues is an exercise in scapegoating. Do we really want to go there?
Let's talk about how we treat actual Americans in real American prisons. From the Wikipedia article on prison rape:
"According to Human Rights Watch, at least 140,000 inmates are raped in the US each year,[1] and there is a significant variation in the rates of prison rape by race. Stop Prisoner Rape, Inc. statistics indicate that there are more men raped in U.S. prisons than non-incarcerated women similarly assaulted. They estimate that young men are five times more likely to be attacked; and that the prison rape victims are ten times more likely to contract a deadly disease."
Do we care? Not enough to do anything about it. Climb down off your high horse. A little Obama humility is in order.
Some of us do care quite a lot, Neil D, and some of us make the effort to do something about the abuses of the American judicial system. For example: http://eclecticradical.blogspot.com/2009/02/corporations-strike-again-jailing.html
The fact that American prisons have a problem that needs to be addressed does not mean that we should shut up about other problems that need to be addressed, like the government torturing people.
On a more general note about the poor reading of Orwell, some people appear to learn all the wrong lessons from 1984. Freedom is slavery: http://eclecticradical.blogspot.com/2009/04/define-irony-applauding-arrest-of.html
And I salute the brave few who are willing to stand up to an apathetic and vengeful America. I'm just saying, well, that Americans are apathetic and vengeful.
Scapegoating the few does not excuse the sins of the many. When a society is as sick as ours, we must find creative ways to teach rather than indulge our self-righteousness. Our sickness is to be expected. It's that part of our humanity we struggle with every day.
Keep up the good work.
AL- how does one know if one is "self-aware"? I take it that conservatives would be self-aware if they realized they were immoral, illogical, inconsistent, hypocritical and possibly plain evil. Presumably, though, they wouldn't be conservatives if they realized those things.
So how do liberals know that they are self-aware?
mls, I would say that a lack of self-awareness is confined neither to conservative nor liberals, but I would certainly note that the straw man argument you advance is not the general view of most liberals of most conservatives. Self-awareness constitutes of genuine knowledge of one's own abilities, limitations, virtues, and failings regardless of one's dogma.
In recent years it has been very popular for reactionaries to use words like 'fascist' and 'Nazi' when describing liberals, either without genuinely understanding how their statements sound or else simply not caring. One conservative blog recently condemned protesters exercising their right to disagree with a speaker as violating said speaker's free speech rights, while failing to condemn the protesters' arrest... a much more egregious violation than the mere exercise of one's right to disagree. Yet the blogger in question had no qualms about comparing the protest to the Holocaust. The entails, I would say, either a certain lack of self-awareness or a total lack of regard for validity in one's metaphors. Statements written by conservatives such as Maggie Gallagher and Robert Stacy McCain describing themselves as the victims of persecution for articulating their religious beliefs fall into that category as well. They fail to understand they are not merely articulating their religious beliefs, they are advocating holding everyone to their religious beliefs regardless of the religious beliefs of others. They even go so far as to deny the Christianity of those who disagree with them.
On the flip side, many liberals retaliate by attacking religion and religious people rather than the ideas with which they disagree. This shows an equal lack of self-awareness, when they display their own bigoted behavior in criticizing bigots.
A lack of self-awareness in one's criticisms of others is a human failing, not merely a conservative failing. However, many of the loudest voices on the conservative side of debate appear to fall prey to it with a great deal of frequency.
mls:
Despite the fact that all truth is relative and absolute knowledge foreclosed to humanity, if a man believes his arm is made of scrambled eggs, he's an idiot.
MLS,
Thank you for your existentialist musings. If you read my post, though, the question was directed at Cliff May, not conservatives generally. After giving an quintessentially Orwellian defense of torture, he then used the term "Orwellian" to describe those who want the authors of these memos held accountable.
This isn't a my team good, your team bad, kind of rant. There were Democrats who were complicit in this too. And there were conservatives, even many within the Bush administration (Goldsmith, Comey, Mueller, Zelikow, etc.) who realized how wrong this was and wouldn't dream of defending it.
Speaking of Orwellian, how about the current talking point (launched by Rove) that anyone interested in investigating how torture became the Bush Administration's policy is intent on turning America into a "Banana Republic"? I suppose that makes those defending said torture freedom-loving defenders of justice.
It's the classic Rovian turn-their-strength-against-them political tactic taken to a whole new despicable level.
“A lack of self-awareness in one's criticisms of others is a human failing, not merely a conservative failing. However, many of the loudest voices on the conservative side of debate appear to fall prey to it with a great deal of frequency.”
ER- I have no disagreement with that statement whatsoever. My only observation is that in every debate the “loudest voices” on both sides are those who present the issues as black and white, which generally rules out “self-awareness” as an attribute. If one disagrees with the loud voice, it is easy to criticize the over-simplification, distortion and lack of self-awareness. Of course, if one agrees, it is just as easy to perceive these attributes as “moral clarity.”
On the torture debate, the conservative side insists, as a matter of faith, that the interrogation methods used were not torture, either legally or morally. A conservative friend of mine told me that “this isn’t even a close question.”
This strikes me as foolish. One can make a reasonable distinction between certain methods of coercive interrogation, which are designed to wear down a subject’s will to resist questioning over time, and torture. But if you propose to waterboard someone for less than a minute on the theory that the pain and terror of the experience will cause him to crack, common sense suggests that that is torture. If it wasn’t torture, how could one expect it to work against a hardened terrorist?
I think the legal question is not as one-sided as some make it out to be. There is, as Al Gore would say, no controlling legal authority, and one can make a (barely) plausible argument that the methods authorized by OLC did not fall within the statute’s definition of torture. Nevertheless, I think it was a huge mistake to base government action on such a parsing of the statutory language, particularly in light of the common sense test I just mentioned.
On the other side, liberals are equally insistent on maintaining, as matter of faith, that (a) the torture in question did not produce any useful information, (b) that torture never works, and (c) that torture can never be justified even if it did work. The idea that torture never works strikes me as nonsense. Any method of interrogation must work sometimes, and I suspect that torture works more often than most. Whether or not the torture in these particular cases worked is an empirical question. Those who want to prejudge that question with little or no evidence are mostly just revealing their own biases.
As for the morally absolutist position, this is what strikes me as showing the most lack of “self-awareness.” If one is a pacifist, this is a completely consistent viewpoint. But the vast majority of those who hold this absolutist position are not pacifists, and accept in other contexts that wartime decisions often require choosing the lesser of two evils. Whether one is talking about missile strikes or bombings that are certain to cause mass civilian casualties (Afganistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Kosovo, to say nothing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), military action based on sketchy or incomplete information (the missile strike on Sudan in 1998), or even non-violent sanctions designed to cause economic pain, they acknowledge that protecting the national security often requires inflicting enormous damage on completely innocent people. Yet somehow a person like KSM, who was not only responsible for planning 9/11 but evidently boasted to the CIA that there were new attacks coming, elicits far greater sympathy from these paragons of virtue.
Is it “self-aware” to decry the use of torture without any acknowledgement of the very real danger that the CIA was trying prevent? Is it self-aware to forget that the interrogation program, whatever one may think of it, pales in comparison with FDR’s Japanese internment program? Is it self-aware to focus on the gruesomeness of the torture program, when one doesn’t give a whit about the gruesomeness of partial birth abortion? Is it self-aware to focus all of one’s moral outrage on the CIA interrogation program as if greater injustices did not occur everyday (see the torture video from the UAE)? Is it self-aware to act as if a handful of terrorist detainees are the greatest victims in the war that Bin Laden launched against us?
ER, you seem to be a fair-minded person. If you think that I am wrong in my perspective, I would welcome a thoughtful explanation of why I am wrong.
I expect that others will respond with insults or dismissive comments about existentialism or moral relativism, etc. These people are not, IMHO, self-aware.
mls,
You don't need to determine this issue ab initio. Torture is a very ancient human institution, and we have the experience and judgment of far wiser people than us to learn from.
Of course, we can just transmute it into an argument about what judgments can be made from history, but I myself think that argument already has a winner and history's verdict is quite clear.
It was Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of today's apologists, who stated the following upon signing the International Convention Against Torture:
"The United States participated actively and effectively in the neotiation of the Convention... It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today."
MLS,
A lack of self-awareness might be indicated if someone who considers himself a Christian criticizes others who accept "as a matter of faith" that torture is wrong. Another indicator would be if someone who claims to be for the rule of law also claims to see some legal basis for the execrable Bybee memos.
Given that the belief that torture is morally wrong spans multiple religions, it may be a marker for something fundamental to human nature.
Of course, not everybody has the mirror neurons, empathy, or imagination to be able to understand what the rest of us are seeing and feeling when we hear of someone being waterboarded dozens of times.
That's why we have laws and require the agents of our government to abide by them.
C2- you are undoubtedly right that I could use work in the empathy department. I am also sure that I am very imperfect in carrying out the great commandment.
As I indicated, if one believes that there is an absolute prohibition against violence, even in self-defense, it makes perfect sense to have a similar absolutist attitude regarding torture. Otherwise, it is a little hard to understand how someone can justify lethal violence (even against civilians) on grounds of military necessity and reject the notion that torture (even against the most hardened terrorists) could ever be justified on similar grounds.
With regard to legality, I thought I made clear my view that the Bybee memo was wrong. But I don’t see the point in pretending that the legal issue is more black and white than it actually is. To the extent that it is possible to pull this issue out of its emotional and political context, my best judgment is that the Bybee argument is weak, but not frivolous.
I did not criticize anyone who feels empathy for the detainees. But at the same time, lets not confuse empathy for the detainees and a desire for revenge or retribution against the CIA interrogators who were doing their duty. That would be like saying that those who oppose torturing KSM must lack empathy for the victims of 9/11.
MLS,
I do not believe we are seeing much desire for "revenge or retribution" against the torturers. For one thing, we don't know who they were. A wish to see the law upheld is not remotely the same as a wish for revenge. On the other hand, I, for one, feel a great deal of anger about the fact that Bush lied to us on national TV and on a matter of much greater import than a sexual peccadillo -- and wasn't impeached. I will express my anger when the people, like my representative, come up for re-election.
There has been no mention here of total pacifism, other than by you. This is a false dichotomy, as the choice is not between total pacifism and torture.
We have the right of self-defense, and this extends to violence. In defending ourselves, however, we should take care not to descend to inhumanity. It appears that you are on the verge of making the "24" argument in justification of torture. An understanding of the factors which prevent our ever knowing anything for certain renders that argument ridiculous -- which actually dovetails into the current subject: part of self-awareness is understanding our fallibility. Those who think, somehow, that the people who determined to torture the "detainees" knew, beforehand, that they would obtain actionable, precise information, are deluding themselves.
Some information that now appears worthwhile may have been obtained during EIT sessions. That the people who performed or authorized the EIT knew, beforehand, which of the 83-183 sessions would produce valuable information is obviously ridiculous, as then there would have been perhaps 6 sessions.
Perhaps your contention about the law not being black and white is justified -- in which case I have to observe that, if this is true, the law seems rather more equivocal than useful -- but, based on a perusal of a few legal blogs, there seem to be very few people who see the Bybee memos as anything but a blatantly unconscionable CYA exercise.
MLS - I can give you my argument about the effectiveness of torture, which is based on the history of torture and general facts about torture.
It goes without saying that I believe torture to be morally wrong and that I do not believe there to be a significant gray area here. My personal moral compass is pretty black and white. I do not believe that 'necessity' and 'right' are the same thing. 'Necessary evil' is still evil, even if it brings desirable results. It is not that I entirely oppose utilitarian or pragmatic decision-making, but I believe that utilitarianism and pragmatism alone are not enough. A firm moral compass is equally important. One must be able to understand when the actions taken are wrong and must be prepared to deal with the consequences of necessary wrong actions.
There is a lot of history and commentary on the subject of torture. Historically, the purpose of torture is not to gain access to previously unknown information. One has no way of knowing, without verification processes which are usually equally valuable without torture, whether information gained by torture is accurate. The verification processes required mitigate the value of torture for interrogation purposes, and many of the processes used to verify such information are equally useful to get that information in the first place. So the Dick Cheney torture excuse does not hold water.
What torture IS good for, historically, is to get someone to confirm something already known or believed regardless of the truth of that knowledge or belief. Most prominently, torture is used to secure confessions, whether those confessions are true or not. History and science show that, given enough torture, the victims will confess to anything the torturers wish.
Prime examples include the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch trials (and witch hunts throughout the centuries), the tactics used by the Cheka/NKVD/MWD/MGB/KGB during the Russian Revolution, the tactics used by the Viet Cong in the Hanoi Hilton, etc.
The history and science about torture is why conservatives such as John McCain and Ron Paul are against torture. If one looks at the ranks of torture advocates and apologists, one sees the Cheneys, Bushes, and Boehners... people whose primary view of national security is through a lens of macho fantasy rather than reality.
As far as the legality of the matter goes, torture is illegal in every qualifying category. A legal opinion to the contrary does not make it so, and a legal opinion saying that torture is not torture is legal malpractice and hardly a valid shield against prosecution.
There is my opinion in full, on the specific case in point. :)
ER- thank you for your well-argued “brief.” Broadly speaking, I agree with many of the points that you made. Our area of disagreement, I think, is narrow, but is significant in the context of the current debate. Let me try to explain by reference to two examples.
First, a real-life example. As I am sure you know, horror regarding the use of poison gas in WWI led to an international ban on such weapons. As far as I know, this ban was enacted with the best of intentions and I don’t have any particular problem with it. However, there is little evidence that it made the conduct of war any more humane or any less destructive. The main reason that the ban was generally respected, even by the Nazi regime during WWII, was the development of new weapons that were more militarily effective.
Was the ban on poison gas nonetheless a step, however small, in the direction of a better world? Maybe. But suppose that toward the end of WWII Truman was told that he had two equally effective options for forcing the Japanese to surrender: (1) dropping an atomic bomb and (2) using poison gas. The first option would kill ten times as many people, but the second option would be “illegal” and probably incite an international backlash. I suspect that Truman would have still picked the first option, but I hope that he would recognize it as a difficult moral dilemma, not a black and white choice between the “legal” and the “illegal.”
Consider one more thing about the poison gas ban (which eventually became the chemical weapon ban). The major factual predicate for our invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein had developed and used poison gas, both in his war with Iran and against the Kurds. Because these weapons were considered both illegal and immoral, no one ever seems to have asked the question, even to this day, how these weapons were any more dangerous, either to the United States or to anyone else, than conventional weapons. Asking such questions prior to the invasion would, no doubt, have gotten one labeled as a “poison gas apologist,” which, like being a “torture apologist,” is obviously a bad thing.
Second, consider this hypothetical. Suppose during the Obama Administration we capture a high-ranking Al Qaeda official comparable to KSM. The CIA has reason to believe that AQ is planning to launch simultaneous attacks on major Western cities and that this detainee knows the names of the key contact person in each city. They have tried conventional interrogation techniques and have been unsuccessful in getting useful information. They now want permission to use the same techniques approved in the Bush OLC memos (but for purposes of this hypothetical assume that this is a question of first impression).
How should President Obama respond to this request? One response would be that “torture never works,” ie, it never produces any useful information. As I indicated before, common sense suggests that this can’t be right. More importantly, if the intelligence professionals at the CIA believe that this is the best remaining option, Obama can’t reasonably dismiss their recommendation on this basis.
Another possible response would be for Obama to reject the recommendation on the ground that no amount of necessity can justify torture. Obama could take this position, but he would have to do so with the realization that should the feared terrorist attacks occur, the resulting backlash would not only be bad for him politically but would make it far more likely that torture would be used on detainees in the future. One of the things that the Bush Administration should have taught us is that taking a rigidly dogmatic position may cause the American people, in disgust, to turn to the exact opposite of that position.
Obama also could respond by trying to get congressional authorization to use the interrogation techniques. The problem with this is that there might not be sufficient time to get a change in the law, and asking Congress for authority would risk compromising the secrecy of the intelligence operations. This, therefore, may simply not be a viable option. And of course even if that option were taken it would not mitigate the moral (or international law) objections to torture.
It seems to me that this hypothetical is not all that different from the one facing the Bush Administration after 9/11. It further seems to me that, while one can debate the proper response, it is difficult to maintain seriously that this is an “easy” call, and that it is as simple as knowing the difference between right and wrong. I even suspect that some here might have sympathy for Obama if, in the hypothesized scenario, he authorized the CIA to use waterboarding and similar techniques.
Now you might say that this is not what the Bush Administration did, and you would be absolutely right. Instead of simply providing a limited presidential authorization to use specific interrogation methods against specific detainees, Bush essentially outsourced the whole issue to OLC, which was encouraged/pressured to write legal opinions that pushed the boundaries of the law at least to the breaking point.
This was wrong, but I do not believe that the CIA should be held accountable, criminally or otherwise, for these political decisions. I am dubious that the criminal law is the right mechanism to address this issue at all. As Talleyrand would say, this was worse than a crime, it was a blunder.
MLS,
The Bush administration had no significant reason to believe that there was any imminent danger of an attack. As we have learned, they apparently were most interested in demonstrating a connection between AQ and Iraq. Even if they had claimed to have that evidence, how could we trust them to be honest either before or after the fact?
Carefully crafted hypothetical cases to justify torture demonstrate nothing except that the person coming up with them has a twisted imagination. And, since you've just recited, yet again, the infamous "ticking bomb" canard, you haven't even demonstrated much originality.
"One response would be that “torture never works,” ie, it never produces any useful information. As I indicated before, common sense suggests that this can’t be right. More importantly, if the intelligence professionals at the CIA believe that this is the best remaining option, Obama can’t reasonably dismiss their recommendation on this basis."
I explained just what torture is and is not good for. If one already knows something or knows what one wants to hear, torture is GREAT for getting someone to say exactly what you want them to say or what you already know... even if it is not true or they do not know it.
This is the fundamental problem with torture as an interrogation technique. The natural reaction of the victim of torture is tell the torturer whatever he wants in order to get the torturer to end the torture. CIA briefs say this explicitly and explicitly question the value of torture for straight interrogation purposes. At no point in this entire controversy have I ever heard the CIA specifically advocate torture, it was advocated by political figures for political reasons due to macho fantasies about national security realities. Ignoring this fact is one the central weaknesses of apologist arguments.
The fundamental issue being argued in the OLC debate, however, is the OLC's statement that the techniques in question were not torture. As several bloggers and journalists have pointed out, Japanese military officers were hanged after WWII for 'torturing' American military prisoners by just the methods used in interrogations. This amounts to legal malpractice by the OLC and legal malpractice as I have said repeatedly, is not a defense for criminal action. We executed people for similar actions.
Individuals who commit crimes should be held accountable. Those who do not cooperate in prosecuting those responsible for the political decisions are choosing to remain active participants in the criminal conspiracy. This is why I keep repeating 'RICO.'
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