Safety At Any Cost?
Well, if we are allowed to mention the "unmentionable" then there are some other bad reasons why this subject has not come up during the present round of electoral antics. One is extremely depressing: a large number of people secretly approve of "harsh" methods but do not want - or expect - to be told about them. (Nor, necessarily, do they want to have to justify them: there's an upside if you like!)
Knowledge of this fact I think inhibits the Democrats from making a big noise about the problem. It has a "knock-on" effect in the intelligence "community" as well: American opinion demands safety and will most certainly demand accountability if that safety is once again violated. Thus some field agents must see themselves in the unenviable position of being asked for decisive results and then potentially having to hire a slew of lawyers in case they turn out to have crossed a line. There's a "stab in the back" mentality in the making, and that is never good for democracy.
Another reason for Democratic reticence is the sheer fact that McCain is better on the issue and the issue is "better" for him. He was at his best at Ole Miss when he not only denounced torture but said that it undermined professionalism. That's a good combination of outrage and what you might call realism: the resort to torture methods is an axiomatic degradation of our intelligence-gathering capacity. Phrased in such a way, accountability becomes an imperative but not perhaps one that will dominate the debates of the next month.
Alex Gibney's film is, as Jane says, of the very first importance and must be seen by all.
Sorry, but this is claptrap. No sane human being fails to know the difference between acceptable and unacceptable when it comes to torture. For centuries torture has been easily identified, and it still is.
The Geneva Conventions are also easy to understand. Perhaps a "good" lawyer, actually an unscrupulous lawyer, can find ways to argue that the Geneva Conventions are ambiguous, but no rational person can do that. And, the Geneva Conventions outlaw torture of POWs. A POW is a person captured while engaged in military activities against your armed forces. Those captured in Afghanistan and Iraq are POWs, not the fictious "unlawful combattants" that the Bush administration dreamed up.
Voters will expect our government to be men of honor. That is not a difficult standard to meet, so the argument that we want the government to be our daddy is invalid.
September 29, 2008 2:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
For the record: Hitchens Rules.
September 29, 2008 3:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh please. John McCain is the only American politician who has immunity on the issue of torture. It's easy for him to be "better" on the issue, no matter what the electorate secretly believes.
There's no downside for him to reiterate his stance when it comes to this election.
A test of McCain's mettle would be his leadership on an effort to hold the Bush administration officials accountable for their policies.
September 29, 2008 3:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Immunity" in the sense that no politician in America has "prison cred" sufficient to empower him to contradict anything McCain chooses to say about torture.
On Torture, John McCain is Da Man.
September 29, 2008 8:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Scalia seemed to rationalize torture based on the TV show "24."
Using the same logic, I advocate the construction of a half man half robot 'cyborg.' This man (name Steve Austin) will be the property of the US government and be sent on various thrilling missions around the world to defeat sinister bad men with irritating foreign accents.
I call it "the six million dollar man" argument for a law enforcement approach, rather than sending armies.
Hey, I saw it on TV - the same TV where Scalia gets his ideas on the efficacy of torture.
Hitchens presumes a great part of the electorate are mean spirited hypocrites - probably not a false assumption, but an assumption nonetheless. I've found through experience when I start imagining the motives of people I don't respect much, things get ugly quickly. I have soon conjured an imaginary monster. Maybe we're not so bad - we just we're never asked were we?
People never got to have a debate. Suddenly we were faced with these torture pictures - it was already there before we ever got to discuss the merits of torture.
September 29, 2008 5:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
It is difficult to strike a balance here, but we must try. At the risk of being labeled as "for" torture (I'm actually very much "against" it in ordinary human terms: I can't personally tolerate mistreating a dog, for example), let me suggest that as a matter of fact, atrocities of all sorts happen in ALL wars.
Much of what happens is calculated to obtain a certain result (ie, get info) or to (even more brutally) establish a climate of terror to your "advantage". The rest lacks even those vaguely utilitarian excuses: It is simply an eruption of meanness or of fear, given free reign by the inherently chaotic and atrocious atmosphere of ANY war.
As such, my quarrel is NOT with anonymous soldiers or field agents who may go over the norms of ordinary human conduct in the stress of an active operation (I KNOW the argument that "It doesn't work!", but that is simply not 100% true. It "works" just often enough that it may sometimes appear to be worth a try in a desperate situation with many lives at stake). Excepting the most egregious and gratuitous situations, leave those people alone to sort-out these difficult moral dilemmas as best they can. They are taking a great deal onto their consciences, in what are (for the most part) sincere efforts to protect the mission, or their comrades, or the country. They have no time to consult lawyers beforehand, and they have every right to wonder what "law" has to do with the active battlefield in the first place.
My quarrel is with the political types who TALK constantly about all this. Not content with the REAL toughness required to silently accept the fact (and the responsibilty) of Black Ops (in ANY war), they insist on getting us ALL in on it. Instead of quietly doing their duty as they see fit and everything else be damned, they layer themselves in political and legal "cover", and fan the public into opposing camps by too much extraneous posturing. We elect leaders (among other reasons) to sometimes spare us, and take difficult matters onto themselves. We KNOW the American ideal of fair play and humane treatment is sometimes violated, but we still enjoy believing in it. Don't ask us to PARTICIPATE in publicly dismantling it - that is a bridge too far, and puts everything at risk.
September 30, 2008 7:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
"McCain is better on the issue and the issue is "better" for him. He was at his best at Ole Miss when he not only denounced torture but said that it undermined professionalism."
You do know, Christopher, that McCain supports torture by Americans, as long as it's not conducted by uniformed military personnel, don't you?
September 30, 2008 4:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am not prepared to give the voters as much credit as hoppycalif2 does. As sad - and cynical - as it may be, we will not come any closer to abolishing torture by simply focusing on how "inhumane" the techniques are and how adversely they affect our "standing" in the world.
Instead, we really need to connect the unassailable truth about what has gone on the past eight years with our national interests and security. Too few voters know that some of our biggest coups in the global hunt for terrorism have come not from torture, but from good old fashioned bribes. Too few know that the case for war in Iraq was based, in part, on false intelligence elicited from detainees under inhumane duress. Too few know that we will be unlikely to ever bring Mohammed al-Qahtani (the reputed 20th hijacker) to trial because the torture to which he subjected renders a fair trial nearly impossible.
The ends-justify-the-means threshold of voters is disturbingly high. I'm thinking of the unidentified woman who led the al Qaeda desk at the CIA. She was so eager to witness torture firsthand and so recklessly order the continued detention of Masri. I am willing to bet there are plenty of Americans who don't vote based on some objective line between 'interrogation' and 'torture' that they hold dear. I am not submitting that those running the state necessarily reflect the character of the nation. But when the question of Americans' vindictiveness again 'those who hate us' is not disputed and only a matter of degree, I am pessimistic that most voters will ever view the torture issue through the lens of "right" and "wrong."
October 2, 2008 1:04 PM | Reply | Permalink