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Moral Bankruptcy at the New York Times
The moral bankruptcy of the NY Times and its 'news analyst' Scott Shane is on full display today. A front page (web) headline and blurb read:
The comments are quickly accumulating, and a substantial number of them attack the premise of Mr. Shane's absurd article. Again and again, readers point out that the debate over the Bush administration's torture policies is, at it's core, about the rule of law (torture is illegal by US law and international law and treaties that the US has subscribed), and about morals (torture is evil.)
Shane even makes the astonishing assertion that " the moral balancing would be far trickier if the C.I.A. methods were demonstrated to have been crucial in disrupting major plots."
No, Mr. Shane, the moral balancing would not be trickier.
The US media's fondness for 'reporting the controversy' -- "Is the earth round? Opinions differ" -- reaches its apotheosis in this article.
There is little debate among those familiar with the historical record that torture is never an effective way of eliciting information. It did not work when the Inquisition tortured heretics and Jews. It did not work when judges tortured witches. It did not work when the Nazis tortured Communists and liberals, nor when Stalin's thugs tortured anybody. Torture does not produce reliable information.
Yet a headline and the body of an entire "news analysis" article in our leading national newspaper treats this question as open while entirely ignoring the "core" issue that has indeed driven the debate over the Bush administration's policy: is torture depraved and illegal, or should states have the power to torture when they feel threatened, as Dick Cheney suggests.
At Core of Detainee Fight: Did Methods Stop Attacks?
By SCOTT SHANE
The comments are quickly accumulating, and a substantial number of them attack the premise of Mr. Shane's absurd article. Again and again, readers point out that the debate over the Bush administration's torture policies is, at it's core, about the rule of law (torture is illegal by US law and international law and treaties that the US has subscribed), and about morals (torture is evil.)
Shane even makes the astonishing assertion that " the moral balancing would be far trickier if the C.I.A. methods were demonstrated to have been crucial in disrupting major plots."
No, Mr. Shane, the moral balancing would not be trickier.
The US media's fondness for 'reporting the controversy' -- "Is the earth round? Opinions differ" -- reaches its apotheosis in this article.
There is little debate among those familiar with the historical record that torture is never an effective way of eliciting information. It did not work when the Inquisition tortured heretics and Jews. It did not work when judges tortured witches. It did not work when the Nazis tortured Communists and liberals, nor when Stalin's thugs tortured anybody. Torture does not produce reliable information.
Yet a headline and the body of an entire "news analysis" article in our leading national newspaper treats this question as open while entirely ignoring the "core" issue that has indeed driven the debate over the Bush administration's policy: is torture depraved and illegal, or should states have the power to torture when they feel threatened, as Dick Cheney suggests.
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I am not, in any strict sense, a Christian myself, but it seems odd to me that the Bush administration, which at least associated itself with Christianity, should ignore Jesus' advice:
(Luke 9:25)We know (though I could not find any good citations quickly) that the act of torturing inflicts psychological harm on the torturer, at least often if not always. So we might win something (property and/or lives) but "lose ourselves" (or some important part of ourselves) in the process.Of course, many serious Christians have objected to both torture and "torture lite" for quite a while now.
April 23, 2009 3:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not being a Christian myself, I tend to refrain from trying to decide what the 'real' Christian position on anything at all might be.
That said, I grew up in enough of a Christian (mostly Protestant) milieu that the behavior of self-describing Christian conservatives on this an many other issues strikes me as the rankest hypocrisy. But, again, history suggests that no religious system, no matter how virtuous its founders or how pure its texts, is immune from interpretations that, (at least to the outsider) appear to blatantly violate the very words being interpreted.
This is the predicament that 16th-century Protestants used with great effectiveness against the existing Western Church; soon, however, one sees those same Protestants and their descendants down to the present using the same interpretations in favor of violence, authority, and exploitation.
April 23, 2009 11:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
"No, Mr. Shane, the moral balancing would not be trickier. "
That seems simplistic. Practical moral balancing often involves seeking the lesser of two evils.
I don't get this as being a quibble about whether the earth is a spheroid, an oblate spheroid, or pear-shaped.
If people in power convinced themselves that what they were authorizing and doing was not strictly torture, they might have been right or wrong, and also might have been deluded, evil, or ignorant.
Where is the line between acceptable interrogation practices and unacceptable torture?
April 23, 2009 6:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Um, well the fact that that question didn't need to be asked for a good 50 years may have clued them in.
All this dithering is what is evil. Sometimes, eds, the devil wants to argue details, especially when the issue is pretty matter of fact. Black and white. No brainer.
It's simple.
Torture is always wrong. Period. Now, want to quibble?
I suggest, again, that you review the DoI. That's a mere 200+ years old. Things haven't changed.
April 23, 2009 10:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
eds, I understand what you are claiming, and in fact I am often a supporter of 'prudence'--an approach that recognizes that many political questions cannot or should not be resolved on 'principle', but rather by the kind of balancing that you suggest might be appropriate, here.
My point, however, is that abundant evidence (as opposed to TV shows) really shows that infliction of pain is not an effective technique for eliciting information from an unwilling informant. I put it in such bland language exactly to make the point: there is a long record in human history about the use of torture, and this record simply does not support the view that infliction of pain works to inflict information. Torture has been used to various effects for centuries, but never as a reliable way to learn information.
Even if a person subjected to torture sometimes gives true information that s/he previously withheld, such a person will also and simultaneously give non-information, and there is no way, generally, for the torturer to reliably distinguish the true from the non-information. This follows directly and inescapably from the torture victim's mentality, which is to STOP the torture, which is best done by telling what the victim THINKS the torturer wants or expects to hear.
Because this of this logically evident and historically verified finding, the question of 'prudence' is irrelevant when assessing torture. The prudent response to interrogation is not to torture. And when the prudential argument drops, then all that is left is the moral and legal argument, and according to both of these, torture is unambiguously (a) evil, and (b) illegal.
----
As for your second point about 'opinions differ': I objected to Scott Shane's 'reporting the controversy' ('did torture work, or not') as if it was a real controversy. It is not.
By the way, this argument is not of the "oblate spheroid" type, as you suggest -- that is, about different terminology or the fetishism of small differences. Rather, it is a critique of the media's tendency to 'report the controversy' when any well-informed citizen can easily establish that there IS no real controversy (unless you want to admit epistemologies founded on old books or television shows as serious contributions to public debate in the public sphere).
April 23, 2009 11:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think you protest too much, PQ.
"Where is the line between acceptable interrogation practices and unacceptable torture?"
I'm sure we all agree that some techniques are unacceptable. The refusal of just about everyone at TPM to engage the substantive issue is curious. Are y'all ignoring the elephant in the room for some good reason, or are you simply afraid to deal with it?
I don't know what makes a controversy "real" in politics other than political leaders on different sides of the aisle talk different and apparently conflicting spins about some issue. Are we not talking about politics here?
April 24, 2009 5:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
eds, thanks for the thoughtful comment. Again, I actually think the distinction between interrogation and torture is pretty clear and straightforward. It's not an elephant I'm ignoring, nor are the other posters.
You phrase it this way, and fair enough, I'll take a shot: ""Where is the line between acceptable interrogation practices and unacceptable torture?"
Being old-fashioned, let's start with a dictionary, the OED, who tell us that torture is "The infliction of severe bodily pain, as punishment or a means of persuasion." (For a documented historical analysis of why torture was thought, in medieval and early modern Europe, to elicit truth, you might consider looking at Lisa Silverman's book Tortured subjects : pain, truth, and the body in early modern France, which has its flaws, but goes into the literature on the subject.)
So, acceptable interrogation practices are those that do not involve the 'infliction of severe bodily pain.' In fact, I'd go further and say that interrogation in general should involve no infliction of pain (thus removing the red herring of deciding whether pain is 'severe' or not). Interrogation can involve persuasion, the presentation of facts and evidence (including shocking evidence), and in cases of great seriousness, it can involve lying or false information given to the subject. Interrogation in the cases we're talking about here always meant imprisonment, as well. There's no need to play down that interrogation is not a pleasant experience for the person interrogated, nor that it may involve attempts to affect the subject's psychological state (including making the subject fearful, angry, or intimidated). But interrogation does not and should not involve the infliction of pain, including psychological pain.
The reason, as I said above, is that once pain is involved, the subject has overwhelming incentives to say whatever the interrogator wants...or whatever the subject thinks the interrogator wants to hear. And under such circumstances, the subject's answers become utterly unreliable, since they will likely contain truths and untruths mixed indiscriminately -- an outcome that is worse for an investigation than either truth, or untruth, or even evasions.
Pain, or the immediate threat of pain, renders the subject's statements into nonsense. This is why interrogation, no matter how intense, cannot and should not involve inflicting pain at all. Is that clear enough for you?
We've heard a number of very experienced interrogators, and a major agency (the FBI) stand behind this view that interrogation does not need, and should avoid, the infliction of pain. The FBI has no strong institutional incentive to speak up, here, as far as I can see. Of course, everybody like to be the 'hero' of the moment, but that's hardly relevant. In contrast, when people who did inflict pain--that is, the torturers-- (like Hayden, the other day), they have every incentive to distort the truth of what they report, and even NPR is reporting that Hayden's statements appear to be baldly contradicted by the available evidence.
April 24, 2009 11:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Washington Post reporters Joby Warrick and Peter Finn today also wrote a long article on the phony debate about "does torture work." Given the Post's rapid decline towards neo-conservative ragdom -- David Broder's editorial in the same issue reveals this so-called 'dean' of the Post's and the city's journalists to be a moral vacuum lacking even residual concern about human suffering or anger that torture was conducted in his name -- this is not surprising.
Warrick and Finn do avoid the gross amorality of Shane's article in the NYT, and do cite sources who point out the illegality, immorality, and likely ineffectiveness of torture as an intelligence-gathering technique in either the short or the long run, to their credit. But they still fall into the trap of reporting as if there were any serious controversy about these issues. They thus miss the torturers' strategy of sowing confusion by their self-serving claims about how well torture worked: the reporters thus become inadvertent agents of defending torture even though they themselves may well abhor it.
Warrick's and Finn's start OK, describing the immediate abuse that Khalid Sheik Mohammad received upon capture, rather than the application of traditional interrogation techniques. It seems that the CIA barely considered traditional interrogation, but turned immediately to brutalization and threats (thus compromising from the outset the value of the information they sought from Mohammad).
The article then detours away from reality. The reporters begin by reporting the torturers' assertion that congressional Democratic legislative leaders briefed on torture techniques did not object. This is false: several did, including Jane Harman, but in secret as the terms of the briefings required; additionally, such claims are disingenuously misleading, since these briefings were under tight security rules that prohibited the Democrats from talking about, much less objecting to what they learned about. The reporters treat CIA leakers' evidence as of equal value as reality, which under the circumstances shows a lack of critical facility on the reporters' part: the sources they quote here had every reason to lie and distort, no?
They also cite "former high-ranking officials" at the CIA (Hi, Porter!) claiming that all sorts of juicy information was obtained by torturing Muhammad. Here again, the value of such assertions is extremely dubious, as close analysis elsewhere has shown over and over.
Indeed, when the reporters turn from CIA insider's spin and consider the actual evidence that 'torture worked', they quickly reveal it to have been a pretty thin brew. Although the article repeats the assertion that post-9/11 urgency and a fear of imminent attack facilitated the turn to torture -- (something that is plausible enough, but not a justification) -- when they report the actual results, they show that the claims for success are either temporally impossible, or not about immediate prevention at all. For example, they pass on a CIA claim that several torture victims were "pivotal sources because of their ability and willingness to provide their analysis and speculation about the capabilities, methodologies and mindsets of terrorists." No ticking bomb in sight, I'm afraid: for this kind of work, torture would actually lessen the value of anything these men said, for obvious reasons.
In short, they write an article that is critical and balanced about the torturers' claims...but don't see that their very desire to be 'balanced' supports the torturers' agenda. It's a difficult situation as a reporter, I'm sure, and they do a much more credible job than Shane's 'analysis' in the NYT, I'd say.
April 26, 2009 12:38 AM | Reply | Permalink