It would be nice if I never had to write another post about torture — not, admittedly, as nice as never having had to write one at all, but since my standards are dropping, right now I’d take it. No such luck. The Washington Post reports:
“A confidential report to Army generals in Iraq in December 2003 warned that members of an elite military and CIA task force were abusing detainees, a finding delivered more than a month before Army investigators received the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison that touched off investigations into prisoner mistreatment.
The report, which was not released publicly and was recently obtained by The Washington Post, concluded that some U.S. arrest and detention practices at the time could “technically” be illegal. It also said coalition fighters could be feeding the Iraqi insurgency by “making gratuitous enemies” as they conducted sweeps netting hundreds of detainees who probably did not belong in prison and holding them for months at a time.
The investigation, by retired Col. Stuart A. Herrington, also found that members of Task Force 121 — a joint Special Operations and CIA mission searching for weapons of mass destruction and high-value targets including Saddam Hussein — had been abusing detainees throughout Iraq and had been using a secret interrogation facility to hide their activities.
Herrington’s findings are the latest in a series of confidential reports to come to light about detainee abuse in Iraq. Until now, U.S. military officials have characterized the problem as one largely confined to the military prison at Abu Ghraib — a situation they first learned about in January 2004. But Herrington’s report shows that U.S. military leaders in Iraq were told of such allegations even before then, and that problems were not restricted to Abu Ghraib. Herrington, a veteran of the U.S. counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam, warned that such harsh tactics could imperil U.S. efforts to quell the Iraqi insurgency — a prediction echoed months later by a military report and other reviews of the war effort.”
Some interesting aspects of this story: first, the report described the practice of holding “ghost detainees” well before this practice came to light in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib. Second, it also made it clear that torture was not limited to Abu Ghraib. Third, the report argues that these practices did damage both to our intelligence efforts and to our efforts to win over Iraqis. Its author is described as “an expert in human intelligence operations, [who] ran programs during Operation Desert Storm and in Panama and was part of the controversial Phoenix Program, which targeted the roots of the Viet Cong insurgency in Vietnam”, from which I conclude that he has a lot of relevant experience and is not likely to be squeamish.
Fourth, Task Force 121 sounds, to me, a lot like the ‘Special-Access Program’ Seymour Hersh described in one of his original articles on Abu Ghraib. Hersh: the SAP “recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from America’s élite forces—Navy seals, the Army’s Delta Force, and the C.I.A.’s paramilitary experts.” The Post: the predecessor to Task Force 121 “incorporated Army Rangers, members of Delta Force and Special Forces units working with CIA agents. … Task Force 121 added Navy SEAL units.” Hersh: ““Rumsfeld’s goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target—a standup group to hit quickly,” a former high-level intelligence official told me. “He got all the agencies together—the C.I.A. and the N.S.A.—to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go.” … In theory, the operation enabled the Bush Administration to respond immediately to time-sensitive intelligence: commandos crossed borders without visas and could interrogate terrorism suspects deemed too important for transfer to the military’s facilities at Guantánamo, Cuba. They carried out instant interrogations—using force if necessary—at secret C.I.A. detention centers scattered around the world.” The Post: TF 121 “planned their missions nearly autonomously and answered either directly to the theater commander or to officials in Washington, the source said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the missions were classified.” Obviously, I have no idea whether this is the program Hersh wrote about, but the parallels seemed interesting to me.
Finally, the report and another military report cited in the Post article both describe our taking the family members of suspected insurgents as hostages.
“Herrington … added that some detainees were arrested because targets were not at home when homes were raided. A family member was instead captured and then released when the target turned himself in — a practice that, Herrington wrote, “has a ‘hostage’ feel to it.”
A separate report by the Center for Army Lessons Learned, issued this past May and intended for internal use, gave the sense that some Army tactics served to “alienate common Iraqis who initially supported the coalition.”
The 134-page CALL report singled out the practice of detaining female family members to force wanted Iraqi males to turn themselves in, similar to Herrington’s findings.
“It is a practice in some U.S. units to detain family members of anti-coalition suspects in an effort to induce the suspects to turn themselves in, in exchange for the release of their family members,” the report stated.
This violates the Geneva Conventions. (Convention 4, Section 1, Part 3, Article 34 reads, in its entirety: “The taking of hostages is prohibited.”) Besides, it is wrong, as is torture. We should not engage in either. If some people in our armed forces do, we should try to figure out who is responsible and hold them accountable. Instead, this administration has prosecuted a handful of enlisted men and women, while allowing the Pentagon officials who supervised what seems clearly to have been a policy either of torture or at the very least of doing nothing to prevent it to remain in their jobs. And President Bush has nominated the man who provided them with a (completely farfetched) legal rationale for torture to be our next Attorney General. President Bush promised to restore honor and integrity to the White House. He talks a lot about personal responsibility and values. Apparently, this is what he has in mind. We should not forget it.
whee.
I thought we already knew about abuse at Camp Cropper and one or two other locations, and the use of hostages.
Meanwhile, on the extraordinary rendition front:
—The Sunday Times of London tracks the planes used to transport prisoners. More than 300 flights in total from one plane–though this does not correspond to 300 prisoners, obviously, as it presumably includes stops to pick people up, refueling stops, and return flights, and some prisoners are taken to Guantanamo rather than to Egypt, Syria, Jordan, etc. On the other hand, there are other planes we don’t know about.
—This is a Boston Globe report on the Massachusetts company that operates the jet. Most interesting detail:
–I may have discovered what happened to one of the prisoners whose fate was heretofore unknown–I think he may have turned up at Guantanamo. I’m trying to confirm this with the Center for Constitutional Rights but they’re not returning my emails. So I’m not real sure what to do about this.
–The intelligence reform bill has not made it out of committee and is looking kind of dead. I don’t know whether the draft Hastert rejected still contains any provisions related to rendition.
Also, there have been several recent stories from Guantanamo that corroborate some of the detainees’ allegations about mistreatment there.
I tell myself people didn’t knowingly vote for this, but after a certain point you’re choosing not to know.
But we (certainly, all regular readers at Obsidian Wings and, before ObWing, Tacitus) knew that the US army in Iraq was in the habit of taking hostages and torturing prisoners.
One reason why I became a regular reader at Tacitus was a lengthy post and a longer thread last year in which Tacitus strongly condemned this practice.
One of the most chilling moments for me, pre-Nov2nd, was when a regular reader/committed Republican, explained that as far as he was concerned, despite Katherine’s meticulous documentation, such things were just “bureaucratic blunders” and the Bush administration ought not to be held responsible for them: an intelligent, compassionate, likeable person, who nevertheless had an unalterable faith that the President he supported could not have endorsed torture, in the face of the evidence that the Bush administration clearly had.
You can’t argue against faith.
I appreciate posts like this: they keep me informed. (I do the research myself sometimes, but it gets horribly depressing.) But against faith, they achieve nothing.
But against faith, they achieve nothing.
I have faith too, Jes. Of a sort.
The mill of God grinds slow, but it grinds exceeding fine.
Check out this wiki on Task Force 121–mainly quoting from newspapers and magazine articles. I’ll do a Nexis search tomorrow and see if I turn up anything else.
The hell of it is, we need special forces to look for these guys. We need secrecy. We need to work with nasty foreign governments to some extent. I hope no one on the left thinks anymore that we can dismantle the CIA, and I don’t particularly want to tie their hands. But absolute power and absolute secrecy corrupt absolutely–especially when overseen by an administration that it is so utterly untrustworthy.
The Democrats should prepare a list of specific, important documents they’re stonewalling Congress on about ghost detainees and rendition and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and which the Republicans are refusing to cross party lines to vote to subpoena. And we should filibuster Gonzales & say we’d be delighted to allow a vote as soon as the documents are released or subpoenas are issued.
We don’t have many opportunities to drive press coverage. This is one of them. And if you’ve read the NY Times or Washington Post editorial page at all, I think press coverage would be unusually favorable. Not only would they say nice things about us–good, but ultimately trivial; they might wake up and start investigating this on their own.
We’re obstructionists? They’ve been obstructing an investigation for months and months while we’ve waited politely. Enough is enough. They control every branch of government. They won’t allow debate in the House or vote on bills that too many Democrats support. The White House made undecided voters sign loyalty oaths to go to campaign rallies; they’re not exactly willing to answer our questions. This is our only option left.
They want to force an actual filibuster? Fine. It’s not like we’ll have to reach far for material–there are thousands of pages of damning government documents and human rights reports and prisoners’ testimony for us to read aloud, which have been released since the initial Abu Ghraib scandal broke, gotten one story on page A16 in one daily, and been promptly forgotten.
I doubt this has occurred to the Congressional Democrats, and I doubt they’d have the guts if it did. But if anyone knows Harry Reid or Patrick Leahy’s staff, please suggest it.
This IRRC report about torture in Guantanamo Bay I read before too I think. But NYT brings it as new?
This is what Americans voted for!
ditto what Don said.
51% of voting Americans gave tacit or explicit approval to this and everything else Bush has done.
Among the people I know who voted for Bush, there seem to be two different ways of responding to the torture allegations:
a. This is just the ugly side of war, it happens some in every war, especially a guerrilla war like we’re fighting now, and wouldn’t be substantially different under a Democrat.
b. This is awful in principle, but I’m so scared of the terrorists, I’m willing to have it done. (This thread of response also usually includes the fact that the terrorists are genuine bad guys, inclined to execute aid workers and indiscriminantly blow up crowds of people to get their way.)
Item (b) is the one that really creeps me out, because fundamentally good people are willing to support this stuff, largely (in my opinion) because they’re pretty sure it won’t be done to them or their loved ones, and because they think it will make them personally safer. I suppose this provides some genuine insight into all sorts of history, but it’s a damned uncomfortable way to get that insight.
–John
“We should not forget it”.
But, it was designed to be hidden. And it was forgotten on November 2 and will ever be so. There will not be justice. And more is coming, overseas and domestically.
Here is something else I will not forget, as Hilzoy and Katherine and others shouldn’t either: the utter contempt and hatred possessing the inhabitants of my White House and the majority of my Congress for those of us who seek to expose the truth and bring those responsible to justice.
You guys are hopeful people. I’m not. The situation is utterly hopeless and desperate.
Item (b) is the one that really creeps me out, because fundamentally good people are willing to support this stuff, largely (in my opinion) because they’re pretty sure it won’t be done to them or their loved ones, and because they think it will make them personally safer.
That’s a very nice and diplomatic way of putting things, JK.
Unfortunately, ‘nice’ and ‘diplomatic’ masks the truth and is only useful in instances when you must tell your wife’s best friend her dress doesn’t make her look fat or pretending Uncle Fred’s combover means he’s not really bald.
No, fundamentally good people aren’t fundamentally good if they can rationalize torture. What it means is that some people are quite capable of–perhaps willing to–overlooking evil.
“It is a practice in some U.S. units to detain family members of anti-coalition suspects in an effort to induce the suspects to turn themselves in, in exchange for the release of their family members,” the report stated.”
This has always been one of my fears about inching the line toward torture. From a purely philosophical view (and I’m probably not making friends saying so) I can understand torturing terrorists whom you know to be guilty in order to obtain information (though there is some indication that torture works no better than other techniques anyway). But from a practical view, you A) can’t always be sure you have the right person and B) people always go a little bit past the norms–so if the norm allows for torture, the abnormal will be even worse. In a previous post I wrote:
The idea that people push further than normally allowed has been a guiding principle in my understanding of law. The good news is that this is precisely the type of subject where merely exposing the practice in the US will go a long way toward fighting it.
Look! There’s a silver lining to torture:
Possible other silver linings include providing meaningful and rewarding work for sadists and furthering our understanding of the body’s limits to pain and injury.
The good news for people who want to stop it is….
Was I really that unclear?
Was I really that unclear?
Yes.
Look, if this Government truly wishes to stop torture, the path is clear: adopt a zero-tolerance policy. That means you don’t nominate folks to the highest law enforcement position in the land who write papers condoning and justifying the use of torture. It also means holding people accountable when the systemic use of torture occurs under their aegis; not just the PFCs and SGTs–but the flag officers and their civilian superiors.
It means actual oversight and public visibility.
Sebastian.
Total agreement here on the boundry pushing concerns.
And yet I understand you voted for Bush?
How do you feel about the new Attorney General?
Buyers remorse yet?
Would you defend (at redstate and other repub supporting sites) the tactics Katherine suggests for the Democrats in her 8.32 post?
Do you mean tactics like: “The Democrats should prepare a list of specific, important documents they’re stonewalling Congress on about ghost detainees and rendition and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and which the Republicans are refusing to cross party lines to vote to subpoena. And we should filibuster Gonzales & say we’d be delighted to allow a vote as soon as the documents are released or subpoenas are issued.”?
Why wouldn’t I support that? That would be filibustering with a specific, resolvable, public point about a specific nominee. Why would I oppose that? I oppose general whiney filibustering because someone is ‘too conservative’ which doesn’t lead to further discovery of new information and which isn’t interested in debate. The point of a filibuster (so much as there is one) is to continue debate and get new information before the public. That would be appropriate in the way Katherine outlines above.
Torture is immoral, dangerous, and ineffective at obtaining information. It’s pretty good at terrorizing people though.
[bitter]
In any case, if the govt insists it needs torture, there should be an open process. There should be a torture warrant, the torture should be public or viedotaped and available to the public, and it should all happen within the US.
This extraordinary rendition crap is so dishonest and hypocritical.
Public stonings in the Middle East are more honest.
[/bitter]
Dave Neiwert in his excellent book, In God’s Country, writes about a professor of his:
This is what the red staters voted for.
Cool. We voted for WWII-era Germany? I’ve always wanted one of those.
The good news is that this is precisely the type of subject where merely exposing the practice in the US will go a long way toward fighting it.
I think your meaning is perfectly clear, Sebastian, but my fear is that your hopes are misplaced. What evidence do you have to support them? What, for example, has the conservative media had to say about this subject?
In any case, if the govt insists it needs torture, there should be an open process. There should be a torture warrant, the torture should be public or viedotaped and available to the public, and it should all happen within the US.
And, like all excrescences of the human soul, it’d be broadcast on FOX during prime-time. With boobies.
Jadegold said….
…
>No, fundamentally good people aren’t fundamentally good
>if they can rationalize torture. What it means is that
>some people are quite capable of–perhaps willing
>to–overlooking evil.
Well, I’m talking about people I know, who in their day-to-day lives are compassionate and kind; people I would never hesitate to leave my 3 year old son with, or to trust with important decisions. They meet all my definitions of fundamentally good people, except that they’re willing to support really horrible things being done in their name, out of sight, on the promise that it will keep them and their kids safe from the terrorists.
I guess this does happen a lot in wars. How many Americans in WW2 protested the internment of the Japanese, or the firebombings of German cities late in the war?
It would be a simpler world if people who supported evil actions or causes or ideas were simply always bad guys–sporting black hats and sinister appearances, tying women up and leaving them on railroad tracks, etc. But that’s not the world we live in.
–John
Myself, I’m still waiting for Sebastian’s apologies to Amnesty International for the bitch slapping he gave them when they had the audacity to suggest that there was torture going on in Gitmo.
Bernard: I think your meaning is perfectly clear, Sebastian, but my fear is that your hopes are misplaced.
I think Sebastian’s meaning is perfectly clear, but if he voted for Bush, we may assume he’s also insincere: he voted in an administration that he knew endorsed torture.
“I think your meaning is perfectly clear, Sebastian, but my fear is that your hopes are misplaced. What evidence do you have to support them? What, for example, has the conservative media had to say about this subject?”
Hopes? Conservative media? Why would you rely on either? I strongly suspect if you could merely get the mainstream media to report on it, you wouldn’t have to worry one way or another what the conservative media has to say on the subject.
Jesurgislac, you can speculate on the balance of my choice-making procedure all you want. But you are wrong about me being insincere about wanting to ban torture. I was never thrilled with Bush. If the Democratic Party had been serious about the war on terror I could have voted otherwise.
Sebastian: The idea that people push further than normally allowed has been a guiding principle in my understanding of law.
Pardon my bluntness but perhaps this would be a good time to start applying that principle in practice. Failing to enforce a law “moves the line” just as effectively as repealing it.
Talk is cheap. If you want to demonstrate the courage of your convictions then write a letter to the White House (CC your congresscritter and a local newspaper) reminding them that the executive branch is constitutionally enjoined to “take care that laws be faithfully executed” and endorsing investigations, and if necessary prosecution, of service personnel who have allegedly engaged in hostage taking.
Rule of law? Rule of men? The metaphorical ashes are comin’ down Sebastian, and all that is required for evil to prevail is… er, what was required exactly? Oh well. Do whatever you gotta do, or don’t. Whatever…
Sebastian’s meaning was clear to me. I also think that there’s no need to assume he’s insincere: he could, for instance, think that something else was more important, as I believe he does, or that Kerry would have been worse in general, even if better on torture, ditto. I disagree with him on both points, of course, but we haven’t gotten to insincerity yet. — I also disagree with him on the effects of disclosure: beforehand, I would have imagined that he was right, but now that six months and an election have gone by without anyone in high positions paying a price, I am a lot less hopeful.
They meet all my definitions of fundamentally good people, except that they’re willing to support really horrible things being done in their name, out of sight, on the promise that it will keep them and their kids safe from the terrorists.
Unfortunately, we do have the lessons of history to draw upon: slavery and Jim Crow, the internment of American citizens, the firebombing of German and Japanese cities, My Lai, etc. We can’t expect everyone to have become enlightened but we shouldn’t excuse a failure to have reflected on these past lessons.
Moreover, we’ve always prided ourselves that this country isn’t like those repressive dictatorships or banana republics that routinely utilize torture.
People willing to overlook the evil that is torture aren’t fundamentally good.
Jadegold, you are being utterly unfair to Sebastian. Saying that “the good news is we can stop torture” is not saying that “there’s a silver lining to torture”–quite the opposite.
From a purely practical standpoint, the time for “a vote for Bush is a vote for torture” is past. The election is over. They have power. We do not. We have to convince some of them if we are going to succeed. We do not do this by calling them torture-lovers.
The fact is, it’s a partisan issue in that there’s a real difference between the parties, but it’s not a purely partisan issue. The practice of extraordinary rendition began under Clinton. Powerful Democrats have been largely silent about this. Most people do not know the extent of what has happened. And while I firmly believe things would have been very, very different under President Kerry, he did not promise that let alone prove it.
We have to work on the assumption that people either did not know about this or voted for Bush despite this, not because of it. Otherwise it’s hopeless. Fortunately, I think it’s also true.
And remember, we do not need to convince every Bush voter. Convincing half of them changes the dynamic in Congress. Convincing 5% of them to vote on this issue changes the election result. Convincing just a few Republican senators to do something about this changes things.
“If the Democratic Party had been serious about the war on terror I could have voted otherwise.”
This is just BS, and (yet again) a violation of the posting rules (or if not, it’s as close to the line as you can possibly get).
Every Democrat I know is extremely serious about the threat of terrorism. We just disagree with the tactics employed by the Bush Administration.
It’s one thing for you to prefer the Bush Administration’s tactics over Kerry’s proposed tactics. However, when people highlight concerns with the Bush Administration’s tactics it’s ridiculous and offensive to justify support for the Bush Administration by saying that the “Democratic party” isn’t “serious” about the war on terror.
Sebastian: But you are wrong about me being insincere about wanting to ban torture.
You voted in an administration that you knew endorsed torture. How can you possibly expect anyone to believe you are now sincere in claiming you want to ban torture?
Katherine: We do not. We have to convince some of them if we are going to succeed. We do not do this by calling them torture-lovers.
*shrug* You know what, Katherine: I don’t believe you can succeed. Sebastian knew that Bush endorsed torture – indeed, the fact that Bush was willing to have non-Americans imprisoned and tortured is part and parcel of the Republican party line on how they’re “serious” about the war on terror and the Democrats aren’t. If you can’t convince an intelligent, well-informed person, who has enough sense of moral values to know that he should be against torture, that it matters not to cast your vote for torture, who can you convince?
Sebastian, I am working on a short paper for my international law class, which argues:
–it is a tactical error for Democrats and lefties to always have these conservations in terms of international law. It is not very hard to come up with an argument that in fact the administration is not violating international law. Some of these are good arguments, some aren’t, but they don’t need to be all that good to be successful. All they have to do is sound plausible enough for newspapers to write another “Administration says X, opposition says Y,” article that implies the truth is somewhere in the middle, for the average voter to conclude that it’s too hard a question to answer, to give the Secretary of Defense enough plausible deniability to be able to testify that we’re in full compliance with international law.
–If we do persuade most people that these policies violate international law…it’s not like there’s a court to enforce international law, and it’s not clear that most people care. There is a lot of justified skepticism about the extent to which international law even exists. And there is also a lot of justified skepticism about what international law has done for us lately. It’s not doing a damn thing to protect our soldiers from the insurgents, to protect Margaret Hassan from the thugs who murdered her, to protect us from the next 9/11. When it comes to the law of force, there’s an analog to the gun control debate in the U.S.: “if we outlaw war only outlaws will use war.” (“If we outlaw torture only outlaws will use torture” is much less persuasive, of course, but people remember the debates about the Iraq war and fall back into their respective roles. And the right’s role is, international law = U.N. = France = global test.)
–We’re much better off finding out and documenting exactly what happened, and making people aware of it, and asking whether this is really making us safer, if these guys are even all guilty, and if we want to be the sort of country that tortures people or sends them to be tortured.
Would you agree with this?
Sebastian,
You seem to hope, or believe if you prefer, that
“exposing the practice in the US will go a long way toward fighting it.”
That is the hope I was referring to.
If the mainstream media hasn’t covered the story, and I’m not sure I agree that they haven’t, then don’t we have to conclude that in the judgment of an awful lot of editors and reporters the story is not of any great interest to the general public?
And if they have covered it, where is the reaction you would expect?
As for the conservative media, they reach an audience that I would think was influential in the government these days. And to snark a bit, they do go on about morality and such, so why shouldn’t they be expected to be as upset over this as over, say, the Lewinsky scandal?
Bernard to Sebastian: You seem to hope, or believe if you prefer, that “exposing the practice in the US will go a long way toward fighting it.”
But demonstrably, it doesn’t work. It’s been tried. And people still don’t care.
Sebastian: But you are wrong about me being insincere about wanting to ban torture.
Jes: You voted in an administration that you knew endorsed torture. How can you possibly expect anyone to believe you are now sincere in claiming you want to ban torture?
He didn’t sign a loyalty oath when voting for Bush.
As a general matter, I think it’s a posting rules violation to question his sincerity in this way. You can challenge his consistency all you like.
Jes–
“Now each day brings reasons for despair, a new one for every shattered body on every bloodstained gurney…And yet to stop at despair, in matters political as well as spiritual, is the unforgivable sin. There is no future in it.”
(“In a Dark Time”, David Remnick, the New Yorker, 3.18.02. It’s an article about Israel, but applicable pretty much everywhere. As far as human rights violations go, the United States has done worse than this and come through it. Much worse, actually.
What threatens to drive me to despair is NOT the stuff about torture but the fear that the terrorists are trying to get a nuclear weapon, which they will use, probably in Manhattan or Washington, and they will kill people I can’t imagine losing, and the President is doing very little to stop this and too much to make it more likely, and we will go off the deep end afterwards, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about any of it. If I believed Bush had condoned torture but Kerry’s policies would make it more likely that my family be murdered, it would have been a hard choice on election day.
As it happens, of course, I think Bush has condoned torture and is making it more likely that my family will be murdered, so my choice was easy. But…
My grandmother was devoutly Catholic and very much opposed to abortion, but she was not a single issue voter; she almost always voted Democratic. Saying every Bush voter is “objectively-pro torture” is too much like those bishops who would have told her she was pro-abortion and committing a mortal sin by voting for Kerry.
It’s not quite that simple, of course. As you say, the Democrats’ opposition to Abu Ghraib, Kerry’s opposition to equal horrors in Vietnam, the left’s opposition to the Contras and to the Pinochet coup, is precisely what leads many Republicans to say we are not serious about terrorism. And even when they’re not saying that–Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition are directly contrary to the storyline that Bush is selling about how he will win the war on terror and why the Iraq war was needed because freedom is on the march. Whereas appointing pro-Roe v. Wade judges does not directly harm the economic and foreign policies that my grandmother preferred, and even with the judges themselves, except for abortion she had about 1000x more in common with William Brennan than Antonin Scalia. But even so.)
And, like all excrescences of the human soul, it’d be broadcast on FOX during prime-time. With boobies.
And probably 800 numbers to do an instant vote on the torturer or the week.
Rilkefan: As a general matter, I think it’s a posting rules violation to question his sincerity in this way. You can challenge his consistency all you like.
You’re right, you know, and I hate it when that happens. Very well, Sebastian sincerely loathes torture but is sincerely happy with the Bush administration’s policies on terrorism which include, and he knows it, torturing “suspects”. I feel, right down in my soul, that he ought to be insincere for one of those, since the two are completely irreconcilable, but yes, I concede that it’s perfectly possible for the human mind to sincerely entertain two mutually contradictory beliefs without ever being aware of it.
“We’re much better off finding out and documenting exactly what happened, and making people aware of it, and asking whether this is really making us safer, if these guys are even all guilty, and if we want to be the sort of country that tortures people or sends them to be tortured.”
This is absolutely the way to go about it. It also gets around the huge variation in potential violations of international law. I can and regularly do argue that talking about the US bombing a Baath-controlled TV tower and Iraqi soldiers using civilian human shields as both ‘war crimes’ in the same conversation is horrifically debasing to the term and not at all helpful to discussion (because any context where you want to talk about grabbing human shields cannot be the same useful context as talking about bombing a state controlled propaganda outlet. Either can be useful in its own context, but rarely can the term ‘war crime’ be usefully employed to label both in the same discussion).
You get back to the real meaning of things when you say “The US is torturing people, and many of them might not be even be terrorists” rather than “The US is guilty of War Crimes”. Back in the old days, when groups such as AI wanted to highlight US abuses that many people might not think were important, it made sense from a propaganda point-of-view to use ‘violations of international law’ or ‘war crimes’ to describe the problems instead of “not a sufficiently religion-sensitive diet”. But the obfuscation habit does no favors when you talk about torture because too many people caught on to the broad variation of ‘violations of international law’ in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
Much better to say, torture is wrong and WE ARE DOING IT.
This is absolutely the way to go about it.
But it’s been done, and it was ignored. Completely, absolutely, ignored. The person who blew the whistle on the torturers got treated like this:
You wanted the Bush administration in power because you admired their policies on terrorism, which you knew included torture. What do you intend, now, to do to show the Bush administration that your vote for him was not a vote intended to endorse torture – if, as you now assert, it wasn’t? And what makes you think the Bush administration will care?
Whew, Sebastian’s a strong guy, having to, in a sense, represent an endorsement for Bush, so therefore an endorsement of torture. He’s not the administration, and I don’t agree with him, but come on now…
Two things – going back to John Kelsey’s item a – “This is just the ugly side of war, it happens some in every war, especially a guerrilla war like we’re fighting now, and wouldn’t be substantially different under a Democrat.”
Is this, or is this not, true? Historically speaking, I mean?
I would say that the historical examples are, yes, it is true, sad to say. War is hell – that’s why you should only enter war when there is a pressing need to do so – and why we should have never gone into Iraq.
I don’t think “allegiance” to Geneva Conventions has ever really been followed well. It certainly wasn’t in Vietnam. I don’t know about Korea, but I’ve heard enough stories about Japan, where the geneva conventions certainly weren’t followed in WWII, in a lot of cases.
So, is the idea that a war can be fought within the Geneva Conventions, in fact, not theory – wrong?
Jadegold, you are being utterly unfair to Sebastian. Saying that “the good news is we can stop torture” is not saying that “there’s a silver lining to torture”–quite the opposite.
Baloney. If anything, I’m being too fair to Sebastian. After all, he’s trying to have it several ways at once; he doesn’t want to endorse torture but he’s fairly keen on flirting with it (“From a purely philosophical view (and I’m probably not making friends saying so) I can understand torturing terrorists whom you know to be guilty in order to obtain information (though there is some indication that torture works no better than other techniques anyway). “) OTOH, he says we can now stop torture by ‘exposing it’–yet, there’s no call for any accountability from folks like Bush, Rumsfeld, Gonzales and the other enablers.
I think you are going too far, jes.
It is not necessary to be “perfectly happy” with everything a candidate does or says to vote for that candidate. I am sometimes unhappy with Democratic positions, but find myself able to vote Democratic anyway.
In any case, as Sebastian has made clear, he voted for Bush because of concerns about terrorism and national security. One way to look at this decision is that he felt fewer innocent people would suffer or die with Bush in the White House than with Kerry. Like you, I think this is wrong, but there is nothing inconsistent or insincere or unworthy about it.
Katherine: It’s not quite that simple, of course.
The question is whether it’s simple enough that you’re confident of your own ability to tell when the time has come to put down your foot and say to some other human being “this far, no further.” (see my comments elsewhere on leadership and conscience)
Alternatively, is it so complex that you’ll never really be able to tell for sure whether it’s time to speak out?
To state the obvious: to vote for a candidate it is not necessary to approve of everything that candidate does. I voted for Bill Clinton in 1996 despite being incredibly disappointed in his non-reaction to the genocide in Rwanda, and I can’t imagine on what grounds one could argue that this vote shows that my (at the time rather vehement) view that we should have gone in to stop the massacre was insincere. Likewise, I assume, Sebastian.
have I been hesitant about speaking out on this?
Bernard: In any case, as Sebastian has made clear, he voted for Bush because of concerns about terrorism and national security.
Yes. But part of Bush’s policies on terrorism and national security, and Sebastian knew this, was the policy to lock up “suspects” and torture them. Part of the policy of the invasion of Iraq was to take family members hostage and hold them hostage until the person actually wanted (who still often only a suspect) gave themselves up. None of this is news to Sebastian: if he voted for Bush explicitly because he liked Bush’s policies on terrorism and national security then it’s fair to ask him “But you knew that those policies included torture of terrorist suspects and indefinite imprisonment of innocents: why are you now claiming that you’re against it, when you’ve consistently said that you favor it?”
JC: Whew, Sebastian’s a strong guy, having to, in a sense, represent an endorsement for Bush, so therefore an endorsement of torture. He’s not the administration, and I don’t agree with him, but come on now…
Eh, JC, you’re right in that it’s not fair to pick on Sebastian just because he’s the only Bush supporter who’s brave enough to show up on this thread. He’s not the only person who knew Bush endorsed torture and who didn’t care enough about it before the election to let it change his vote: he’s just the only one trying to argue his case in this thread, and since his opinions are mutually contradictory, he’s not making a great fist of it.
it’s not fair to pick on Sebastian just because he’s the only Bush supporter who’s brave enough to show up on this thread.
It’s unfortunate that bravery is required of conservatives in order to post here these days. Whatever you feel about Sebastian’s voting history (and I wish you would listen to the many voices on this thread pointing out that voting for a candidate is not equivalent to endorsing all his/her actions), I think it’s long past time that you let it go, for the sake of polite discussion if nothing else.
To state the obvious: to vote for a candidate it is not necessary to approve of everything that candidate does. I voted for Bill Clinton in 1996 despite being incredibly disappointed in his non-reaction to the genocide in Rwanda, and I can’t imagine on what grounds one could argue that this vote shows that my (at the time rather vehement) view that we should have gone in to stop the massacre was insincere.
Utterly astounding. I thought the ‘what-about-Clinton?’ excuse was the licensed property of the GOP and could not be reproduced, rebroadcasted, or otherwise transmitted without the expressed written approval of the RNC.
Clinton’s sin WRT Rwanda was one of omission; that is, he did not take action. But his view was at least echoed by his opponent, Bob Dole, who stated, “I don’t think we have any national interest there.”
Clinton would later say Rwanda was his administration’s biggest mistake and failure. However, he did take a valuable lesson away from his failure in Rwanda–a lesson which he would later apply during the crisis in Kosovo.
But one doesn’t (or shouldn’t) need an Abu Ghraib or Bagram to understand torture is wrong. And if we see evidence it is happening in our names, we must take steps to stop it.
That hasn’t happened. To the contrary, those responsible have been rewarded.
I think one of the reasons this question hasn’t gotten the attention it needs is that key information hasn’t been coming out. Key information like evidence that these practices were policy. The anecdotes need internal governmental documents for the real story. Between the Gonzales torture memo and the stories of tortured Iraqis, there’s a lot of blanks that need to get filled before an editor or a politician will be willing to piss off the administration.
Without more leaks, the filibuster idea sounds like perhaps our only hope. For some reason, everything out of Amnesty and the Red Cross disappears into disbelief.
Jadegold: I was stating what I take to be an obvious point: namely, that one can vote for a candidate whose positions on one issue one finds not just misguided but morally bad without insincerity, so long as one takes that candidate to be better, all things considered, than the alternative. Since I think this is, well, true, I see no reason to cede it to those I disagree with. It wasn’t meant as an excuse: I think I was right to vote for Clinton, and also sincere in my view of his conduct in Rwanda.
I think we have reached the point where further questions about Sebastian’s sincerity would be unproductive, and (depending on the form they take) potentially in violation of the posting rules.
Katherine: have I been hesitant about speaking out on this?
Yeah, you’ve been a regular bloody wallflower… 😉
Sebastian: Whatever you feel about Sebastian’s voting history (and I wish you would listen to the many voices on this thread pointing out that voting for a candidate is not equivalent to endorsing all his/her actions), I think it’s long past time that you let it go, for the sake of polite discussion if nothing else.
Seconded.
Thirded.
Aw fer pete’s sake and cryin’ out loud and blue blistering barnacles…
I can’t speak for anybody else, but the question of Sebastian’s sincerity — or anybody’s really — strikes me as a red herring, and I’m very disappointed that Sebastian is letting you guys get lost in political correctness. You probably think you’re doing him some kind of favor, but I doubt it. I think I’ll do him my own kind of favor. I think I’ll encourage him to ask his conscience whether his endorsement of W and the “war on terror” platform means he bears some small measure of personal responsibility for preventing US torture, regardless of whether he endorsed the “torture” plank of that platform in particular.
Here, Sebastian, lemme be blunt some more:
Sebastian: Much better to say, torture is wrong and WE ARE DOING IT.
Roger. Torture is wrong, and a very very small, excruciatingly tiny, trivially miniscule, vanishingly infinitesimal part of the reason “we” are doing it right now today is that some of “us,” including Sebastian Holsclaw, voted for W.
Now either oppose torture actively and vocally or shut up about it altogether.
a very very small, excruciatingly tiny, trivially miniscule, vanishingly infinitesimal part of the reason “we” are doing it right now today is that some of “us,” including Sebastian Holsclaw, voted for W.
Actually, since Sebastian is a blue-stater, his vote for W in and of itself has exactly nothing to do with the US’s participation in torture.
Now either oppose torture actively and vocally or shut up about it altogether.
Sebastian has in fact opposed torture actively and vocally (electronically speaking), having posted an essay bemoaning the administration’s endorsement of torture (specifically in connection with the 9/11 commission bill) both here and at RedState (where it’s more likely to reach an audience that could do something about it). Now you’re telling him to “shut up about it” since he voted for Bush. Please explain to me how that helps the cause.
I’d also ask everyone who continues to blame Bush voters for every sin of the administration just what they expect to gain from these attacks, beyond the selfish pleasure of nursing their own bitterness. Calling Sebastian or Slart or Moe a de facto supporter of torture (or fiscal mismanagement, or fascism, or whatever) for the 10th or 20th or 100th time isn’t going to magically turn them into Democrats. And it sure as hell doesn’t make for interesting conversation.
Besides not picking on Sebastian for reasons stated above, remember that Sebastian’s sincere opposition to torture, however expressed or not expressed, matters not one whit to the inhabitants of the White House, regardless of who voted for them.
These people are impervious to criticism. Nothing has happened. No one is responsible. No one of any importance will be punished.
Sebastian’s missives to the White House will be ignored just as Katherine’s and Hilzoy’s fine writings on the subject are little more than spitting into a howling, black wind.
A higher Daddy has been appealed to and has answered absolutely. Everyone else can shove it.
Please explain to me how that helps the cause.
I wasn’t trying to “help the cause,” I was trying to shame Sebastian. Which is to say that for better or worse I was following my own conscience. I choose where to draw lines for reasons of my own, and it happens that I don’t consider a policy that permits the torture of children and civilians to be a “negotiable” moral issue of the type that allows for fine-grained distinctions between endorsing it per se and merely tolerating it in order to endorse a politician who has that policy.
I’m capable of distinguishing between endorsing hate speech and endorsing bigots. I can distinguish between endorsing abortion and endorsing an abortionist. I can distinguish between endorsing war and supporting warriors. But some places that distinction breaks down. Rape. Torture. Genocide.
And bitterness? Dude, I’m not even capable of true bitterness, but I’ve seen it, and in my experience you can’t hardly find true bitterness in this country.
So let’s say that on 2 Nov a principled person believed a) Bush is more likely (despicably) to torture 100 people than Kerry but b) a Kerry admin adds an extra (unacceptable) 1% chance that NYC will be nuked in the next 10 years and an extra 10% chance that we will have a fiscal meltdown a la Argentina and cut our AIDS budget to $0. Who should that person vote for?
The other day I posed the following scenario to myself: an alien says to me, “If you let me abduct, euthanize, and dissect you, I’ll arrange for Kerry to win”. I found it hard to imagine myself taking the deal. So I find it hard to take a super high moral road attitude on these things (moral superhighway attitude?).
p.s. it’s not just this site, but there seems to be some malaise going on here – so could the powers-that-be mail out a shot of Maker’s Mark or whatever to all commenters, or something?
You’re right about the malaise but I don’t know how to fix it. Since election day…the personal bitterness towards Bush voters has faded a bit, but I am walking around a lot of the time feeling Doomed By Forces Beyond My Control.
Staying away from the news helps some, but is not sufficient. I’m taking classes in International Law and U.S. Foreign Relations Law, so I can’t insulate myself entirely if I’m going to pass my finals. I’m writing a paper on rendition & I can’t stop researching it. I am going to probably be living in a separate city from my husband next year. Both of us will probably live in likely terrorist targets, and I can’t stand the idea that something would happen when we weren’t even in the same state let alone together. I’m a giant worrywart, but people who aren’t are worried too these days. My in-laws are talking semi-seriously about the possibility that they will have to move away from New York City one day. Not to mention the close relative with a serious illness and no health insurance, and God knows what the deficit will do to my loan interest rates….All of these things are much worse after the election. It’s impossible not to take politics personally when it affects you personally. And I am better insulated than a lot of people.
I’m not sure why right-of-center folks aren’t more cheerful, but I guess being around people who believe (whether they’re too polite to say it or not) that you just personally helped consign them & the country & some anonymous prisoners to an awful fate for no explicable reason–that can’t be so much fun either. And the news from Iraq, Iran, etc. is not heartening.
I’ve been following the Ukraine story, mainly because there seems to be some real chance of things changing for the better somewhere in the world. (Same reason I became obsessed with the topic of gay marriage–and then I became convinced it was a more important issue in its own right than I had realized, and then things started going rather badly. But I still think we can win in Massachusetts, at least.)
radish: I’m capable of distinguishing between endorsing hate speech and endorsing bigots. I can distinguish between endorsing abortion and endorsing an abortionist. I can distinguish between endorsing war and supporting warriors. But some places that distinction breaks down. Rape. Torture. Genocide.
Seconded.
“The ones who walk away from Omelas” (Variations on a theme by William James), by Ursula K. LeGuin.
Ah. All these pixels, just to induce an emotion in someone who’s effectively a complete stranger. Whatever. It just might be that your efforts would be better spent directly applied to larger objectives, unless it’s the case that you hold the shaming of Sebastian to be a higher goal than, say, accomplishing the cessation of torture. In that event, Jesurgislac’s now going to be on your case.
Prepare to be pilloried, rilkefan.
Which is the perpetual state of things. Still, unpleasant to be reminded of it.
When I first read the post, I thought that there is not one issue here, but a few related problems that have been lumped all together:
1) Torture – which is morally wrong and also counterproductive
2) Interrogation under duress – which is practiced not only by the military but also by police departments in the US. This is mainly psychologicalintimidation. Dire threats are made or implied. Typically there is also a “good cop” that makes an appearance later.
3) Detention, which is often part of duress, but certainly can be a legitimate effort to keep bad guys from escaping. This holds true whether the detainee is the suspect, or the detainee might tip off the bad guys, or the detainee is a material witness.
4) Unauthorized prisoner abuse that is not a part of interogation procedures.
5) Denial of asylum, leading to deportation or extradition.
6) Extraordinarry rendition or delivering a detainee into the custody of a country other than the US or the country where the suspect was apprehended, without formal deportation or extradition procedures.
7) Interrogation by US agents of a prisoner that is in custody of a third party.
8) Abuse or torture of a prisoner that is in custody of a third party.
The persons affected may be
1) A suspect that is an innocent bystander.
2) A suspect or material witness that may be sympathetic to the enemy.
3) A prisoner of war.
4) An illegal combatamt.
5) A terrorist that has not yet committed a terrorist act.
6) An active terrorist leader or conspirator.
7) A spiritual or political leader of terrorists that is not an active participant in combat or aparticular terrorist conspiracy.
*****
But in the comments I see that the discussion is about whether Sebastion or Moe is the worst murdering torturing fascist because they voted for Bush, etc. There is not any room for a real discussion here.
radish: I’m capable of distinguishing between endorsing hate speech and endorsing bigots.
I think you all are bigots (against Bush voters) and participating in hate speech.
I used to think ObWi was interesting and had meaningful discussions and have commented here before a few times, and tried to convince Blue to continue to add to the discussion. I was wrong. I’m done with Ob Wi as well. This internet thing is an echo chamber. Bye.
If you want to shame someone, which is (to my mind) the sort of goal that one should think hard before adopting, there are ways and ways of doing it. I have been shamed by people, but for the most part they have not been trying to shame me. They have, instead, just been living their lives in a way that makes me ashamed of the way I’ve been living mine. One can try to live one’s life in such an exemplary manner, and if you want to actually produce shame in others this is probably the best way to go about it, but that’s not the same as actually trying to shame people, and may in fact involve the sacrifice of the desire to shame them.
You can also try to make vivid to people the effects of their choices. This works best in cases in which those effects are not already clear, as (I think) they are in the present case. You can also ask Sebastian what, exactly, it was that he found more important than torture; if my sense of human nature is at all accurate, this is (again) most likely to produce shame if shaming someone is not your goal, and yo ask instead in a spirit of genuinely wanting to know the answer. You can make arguments for the claim that nothing is more important than torture, which are probably more aptly described as trying to change his mind than trying to shame him.
Trying to shame someone on purpose, in my experience, only works when that person already acknowledges guilt, and you for some reason have to drive home what that person did. E.g.: I once had to deal with a student who had stolen a friend’s paper and turned it in under his own name. At least, that’s what they said had happened, and (for various reasons) I believed them, but all I really knew was that two identical papers had been turned in, which was of course consistent with scenarios in which the friend was not just an innocent victim. The student who had stolen the paper begged me not to penalize his friend, and I said, in a deliberate attempt to shame him: you should realize that you have put him in a position where he might very well be failed for the course, and where the only reason I have to believe that he does not deserve this is the word of an acknowledged liar and cheat, namely you.
But cases like this are disanalogous to the case at hand in almost every imaginable respect. It was clear why I, the professor, had to speak to him like this; it is not clear why it is incumbent on any commenter on this blog to try to shame another. This student already knew he had done something wrong, but I did not think it was clear that he understood all the details of its wrongness; in the case at hand I don’t know that Sebastian does think that he’s done anything wrong, but this particular consideration — that in voting for Bush he was voting for someone whose administration has been (at best) cavalier about torturing people is something he cannot possibly not be aware of. Etc., etc.
And it’s particularly unlikely that one will succeed at shaming someone by relying on what is clearly a false premiss, namely that if they voted for Bush they cannot sincerely oppose torture. You might ask why someone thinks that torture is the sort of issue that might be outweighed by something else, or what other issue, in particular, the person takes to outweigh it. You can then argue that they are wrong. But to argue that that person is insincere. you would have to have some reason for thinking that they did not think there was any issue that could outweigh torture, and it would be good to acknowledge this assumption up front.
On this blog, though, I think that trying to shame someone by any means other than asking questions and making arguments is — I don’t quite want to say out of line, but at least something one should think long and hard about.
Hilzoy, I went away and read “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” – or rather, I sat down with one of my favorite LeGuin anthologies, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, but that’s one of the stories collected in it, and is somewhere on the short list of my-favorite-stories-ever.
It occurred to me after re-reading it, and digesting it, and thinking about what other people had said, is that one reason why I and others have been attacking Sebastian for his claim to oppose torture while supporting Bush’s policies against terrorism, is that the fact is we are all mired in the muck of what our governments do in our name. I as much as anyone. I am not one of those who, in LeGuin’s story, walk away from Omelas – who are willing to give up the easy life that comes from living in a rich Western country like the US, or the UK, or any of the other countries – though I honor and admire those who are doing so. In that group I count Rachel Corrie, who died trying to protect Palestinian civilians from Israeli armed forces: and many others who have walked away from Omelas, who have chosen a life where they will not be protected by those who endorse torture. Most of us don’t do that: as LeGuin points out in her story, most of us simply accept, with regret, with pain, with bitterness, that somewhere in the city there is the child living in misery, and this misery is the price of our happiness.
One thing that LeGuin doesn’t explore in her story is what happens when the child she describes dies. Another one must be chosen – it’s clear that no child living under those conditions can live long. It may be that every time the child dies there are those who think that the child should not be replaced – that it would be wrong to choose another. Or it may be that they find some collective way of choosing which all must take part in, or become one of those who walk away. I doubt, though, that someone who took part in the choosing – who not only did not walk away, but who actively supported and helped having the child put in that awful closet that LeGuin describes – would then be treated kindly by the rest of Omelas if he claimed he was against having the child in the closet. It’s a choice: you benefit by it, or you don’t. Sebastian has, in the past, criticized those who speak against torture. He is, perhaps, a little more mired in it than those of us who did not support the Bush administration, who actively criticized their policies on torture: but none of us are clean. Those who are a little less guilty will tear at those who are a little more guilty.
I am bitter about it: personally so, because for me one of those injured by the Bush administration’s decisions in Iraq is a personal friend. She is currently serving in Iraq, and her hatred for Bush and his policies is far more personal than mine: she had to arrest people who ended up in Abu Ghraib. She does not know if any of them were among the tortured: but she doesn’t know that they weren’t. She knows it’s possible that she handed over people to be tortured. That’s something that Bush did to her, and to many other serving soldiers who feel real horror at torture: something for which no one in his administration has ever expressed the slightest contrition. Admit a mistake? Promise to do better? Try to fix what they’ve done wrong? That’s just not what the Bush administration does, not even for something as horrific as torture.
And no, I cannot understand how anyone who feels sincerely horrified by torture can possibly then sincerely support the Bush administration’s policies against terrorism: because, from January 2003 onwards, we have known that those policies include torture. The pictures from Abu Ghraib in April this year made public and visible how horrifying torture is: but the Red Cross and Amnesty International have been warning us about this for nearly two years, and for two years no Bush supporter has been listening, and many of them have publicly criticized both organisations for speaking out.
I think you all are bigots (against Bush voters) and participating in hate speech.
I’m against Bush being president, so I’m against voting for Bush. I’m against Bush being I think he is, among other things, harming the vast majority of Americans and the country itself with his policies.
What I would like to happen is for people who voted for Bush to see “the error of their vote”. I hate the vote, not the voter; to paraphrase the old “hate the sin, not the sinner” line.
I raised this question earlier – but I would really like Hilzoy or Katherine to prove my supposition wrong.
Namely, that modern wars/police actions can, or have, been fought without torture/abuse. (and understand I want you to convince me. I am one of those who thinks that Rumsfeld’s head should have rolled, as soon as Abu Ghraib came to light if not sooner.)
Because the thing is, if war always has torture/abuse as part of war, then you really can’t hold Bush to “blame”, much less hold Sebastian to blame for voting for the guy.
Please prove me wrong? But the argument and historical analysis must be valid and true.
DaveC,
Well, like you, I don’t post here often, but I would think this particular thread is actually an example that this area isn’t an echo chamber. There have been many different views expressed, at least.
For myself, I think your analysis of pulling apart issues that had been lumped together, contributes to the discussion – and in this case, in a more thoughtful manner than the “dissing” of Sebastian.
“Because the thing is, if war always has torture/abuse as part of war, then you really can’t hold Bush to “blame”, much less hold Sebastian to blame for voting for the guy.”
Except for, I don’t know, starting a war of choice that made us less safe and probably made the people of Iraq less safe, and giving legal protection for torture. (I’m talking about the administration here, not Sebastian or Slarti, obviously).
I assume you are referring to the actions of the United States–that Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany or North Korea or Ho Chi Minh did it too seems like about the worst justification possible. I am not aware of torture of captives by U.S. troops in the first Gulf War, the Korean War, World War 2, or World War 1. I would not swear it didn’t happen, I would not be at all surprised if it did, and we did other things that are arguably as bad or worse in intent and certainly did more harm to more people, but I am not aware of our use of torture. Then again, I only learned about the Phoenix program a few years ago.
Abuse by prison guards in federal and especially state prisons is common enough. Does that mean it’s okay to make it official policy to legalize it, or to take to steps to make it more likely if not inevitable and look the other way when it happens?
I consider FDR a great President, but he ordered the Japanese internment. This means it’s not fair for me to complain if Bush orders the internment of Arab-Americans? Jesus. What kind of logic is that?
On the other hand, according to some people’s logic evveryone who voted for FDR is clearly insincere when they say the internment was a horrible mistake. That’s also pretty lousy logic. I blame FDR for the internment camps and I blame Bush for the torture of prisoners that his administration has condoned–it’s just that FDR helped save the country and the world, so I cut him some more slack.
This idea that we are either as pure as the driven snow or as bad as anyone else–it sounds like moral clarity, but it’s often the opposite. It leads too many people on the right to conclude that United States is all that is pure and good, and if we tortured people they must have deserved it; and too many on the left to conclude that we’re imperialists and war criminals.
Neither is correct. We have done some truly awful things, but there is absolutely no question in my mind that the world is better off for our existence–and I’m not sure there is a single moment in our history that you can’t say that. Then again, if the wrong guy had been President during the Berlin Crises or the Cuban Missile Crisis that would have suddenly and dramatically ceased being true. It may cease being true in the next few years; I don’t know.
You can admit there are shades of grey while maintaining that some shades of grey are much darker and lighter than others, and that the difference matters.
there is absolutely no question in my mind that the world is better off for our existence–and I’m not sure there is a single moment in our history that you can’t say that.
eh?
Sorry Katherine, I admire your posts, including this one, but this statement strikes me as quite hubristic.
By “the world”–let me just be clear that I don’t mean every person in the world, not by a long shot. Many, many, many, many people are worse off. But I think more are better off. Then again, some of this is sheer luck.
I’m pretty sure on the net gain over our entire history thing; much, much less sure that whatever year you pick, that’s true.
And yeah, it may be naive or hubristic. As I don’t think that “past performance is any guarantee of future results”, or that our grandparents good deeds’ justify our bad deeds, I don’t think this belief harms anyone even if I’m wrong.
Anyway, I really don’t want to get into whether the U.S. government is a net gain to humanity or not. The point is, countries, like people, aren’t absolutely good or absolutely evil–they are better and worse. And sometimes much better and much much worse.
It’s very hard to discuss these things without sounding stupid. Read a book of essays by Albert Camus-that’s what I’m trying to get across, and he says it about 100,000 times better than I do.
Votermom: Sorry Katherine, I admire your posts, including this one, but this statement strikes me as quite hubristic.
It’s pretty standard thinking (so far as one can tell) for a normal citizen of empire. You would have heard the same kind of thing from Brits when the British Empire was a world power: and indeed, you may read pretty much the same thing from Roman citizens writing back when the Roman Empire was a world power. It is necessary for people of goodwill to believe that their empire is a force for good. It is hubristic, yes: but so are empires.
For what’s wrong with this reasoning, see This Week’s Target: Our One Way To Play: it may not be Albert Camus, but I think it’s at least as applicable.
(written with a fever running, so apologies in advance for incoherence.)
accusing anyone, right or left, of being “objectively pro-[fill in the blank]” simply due to that individual’s support of a candidate is WRONG, COUNTERPRODUCTIVE, and CHILDISH.
WRONG: it’s a mind foul. Only Sebastian is privy to Sebastian’s thoughts. He may be utterly appalled at the admin’s use of torture, but honestly believe that a Kerry admin would result in nuclear war. If he holds those two beliefs concurrently, he is (a) NOT pro-torture and (b) NOT being a hypocrite. He is making the best of a difficult situation honestly.
COUNTERPRODUCTIVE: The hosts of this blog deserve great credit for creating an environment where we often get a useful exchange of views, ideas, impressions etc. I find the threads at Tacitus, Atrios and Washington Monthly utterly useless. I’ve given up completely on Dkos and Redstate. Persistently accusing people of holding beliefs which they do not, in fact, hold, is a great way to degrade the quality of comments here. I regret the departure of any commenter who is willing to be thoughtful, listen to opposing views, and engage on the merits. All of us who comment here on a regular basis (myself included!) have an obligation to maintain the environment.
CHILDISH: to my (feverish) mind, too much of recent threads have read like the (barely) grownup equivalent of schoolyard taunts. We can all find that elsewhere (like redstate and atrios). I don’t recall a single schoolyard exchange that ever proved anything or changed someone’s mind, except for showing who was the biggest bully. I’d very much like to keep this space as more of a debating society.
cheers,
Francis
“there is absolutely no question in my mind that the world is better off for our existence–and I’m not sure there is a single moment in our history that you can’t say that.”
By “us” do you mean the US? If so, I think there is little question that most people in the world are worse off for our existence. Consider it case by case…North America: the only word for what the US did here is “genocide”. Multiple peoples and cultures were destroyed so that “we” could gain access to their lands and wealth. Nor are the other current countries better off for their several wars with the US, particularly not Mexico, which lost a signficant chunk of its territory to the US. Central and South America: the US has supported virtually every dictator and suppressed or subverted virtually every independence or democratic movement in Central and South America in the past century or two. The occasional overthrow of a dictator, especially one originally put into power by the US, does not make up for this history. Africa? Except for Liberia, the US didn’t colonize Africa much, but it did kidnap Africans, resulting in the destabilization and destruction of a number of cultures. The Middle East? Need I even go into it? Asia? I don’t think many people there thank us for the Vietnam War, bombing of Cambodia, support of the Khmer Rouge by the Reagan administration, or nuclear attacks on two Japanese cities. Europe? Well, we saved Britain a couple of times. We helped France in the world wars, but France helped us during the Revolution so no great reason to expect them to grovel in gratitude. Germany? Henry Ford funded the Nazi party and kept them from disappearing in the 1920s. And if the US hadn’t intervened in WWI, the peace might have been more of a negotiated settlement and WWII might never have happened: if Germany hadn’t been in such bad shape the Nazis would have been laughed out of existence. So, who’s better off?
Because the thing is, if war always has torture/abuse as part of war, then you really can’t hold Bush to “blame”, much less hold Sebastian to blame for voting for the guy.
If I may chime in without being asked…
Dave, I think this falls into the category of “making the perfect the enemy of the good.” Have Americans at war engaged in torture previously? I would be quite surprised if we hadn’t. So what? That does not mean we should condone it.
Nor does it mean we should authorize it at the highest levels of government. I personally am not aware that previous wartime Administrations have viewed torture as a legitimate weapon. And that is part of what is so terrible about the current incidents. They represent a conscious policy adopted by our political leadership.
My own opinion is that this policy alone was sufficient to disqualify Bush from reelection. But I also know that I would have voted for Kerry regardless, so it’s easy for me to say that. On that basis it strikes me as unfair to blame the torture on Bush voters. I do think it’s fair to criticize them if they defend the policy, or the Administration’s evasions of responsibility.
Yesterday I asked about the conservative media. Out of curiosity I went to the Weekly Standard’s web site and did a search on “Abu Ghraib.” What I came up with was disheartening. The few articles generally adopted the “rogue soldiers” line, and exonerated Rumsfeld. That response is revolting.
JC,
That´s a tough question.
I know you asked Hilzoy and Katherine but let me add my two cents here. 🙂
And by the way, you didn´t clarify your question if “modern wars/police actions can, or have, been fought without torture/abuse.”
How do you define a “modern war/police action”?
Do you count WW 1, WW 2 or the police actions in Bosnia or Kosovo?
There is a difference between systematic, official, state-sanctioned “torture/abuse” by the armed forces and “abuse” that might have happened during an interrogation by a unit intelligence officer for example.
In one case it´s an act by individual soldiers or a unit, in the other case it´s sanctioned by the government.
And that is a huge difference IMHO.
You see, looking back at the last 50 years, I can just remember right now one instance where a Western DEMOCRATIC government sanctioned outright abuse/torture.
And that was France in Algeria.
France lost….
(You understand, I´m just speaking about “us” here, Western countries. Although abuse/torture obviously didn´t help the SU in Afghanistan for example.)
War is always “dirty” (and because of that probably not shown on CNN) and there is/was probably always a certain amount of abuse/torture and atrocities going on.
(Kind of like, if that “guy” will talk, I could probably save some soldiers of my unit.)
The difference here is that the leading country of the Western World, the USA, has declared now that a certain amount of abuse/torture is officially sanctioned.
Likewise “ghost detainees”.
And that´s simply not a smart move!
Even if I could ignore all the ethical reasons against torture. (And the practical ones. As Sebastian said torture is not reliable.)
And where is the new “border”?
Once you Americans legalized a “bit” of abuse/torture, reports started coming out mentioning people dying from too “vigorous” interrogations.
Suffocations, beatings….
It´s a slippery road and I´m afraid the USA is already walking on that road…
Not to mention that some of the female “hostages” taken in 2003 (because the real suspect was unavailable) maybe ended up in Abu Ghraib.
Remember the news reports about sexual abuse in Abu Ghraib?
If you can explain to me how that is supposed to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi population?
Just forget that “war always has torture/abuse as part of war”.
Remember, you´re liberating them so you´re not supposed to abuse/torture them, right?
How would YOU feel as an Iraqi man if a member of your family spent some weeks or months in an American detention center? Being innocent?
Especially if it might be your sister or mother?
Not at all unlikely given the serious lack of translators (Arabic-English) available.
To add to what Katherine said: I think it’s important to distinguish several questions. First, is it possible, in practice, for someone in Bush’s or Rumsfeld’s position to adopt policies that ensure that no torture will ever occur? Here I assume that the answer is: no, not based on any lengthy historical analysis, but because I do not believe that policies generally ensure their own implementation. They are implemented (in this case) by commanders at various levels (which is to say: by fallible human beings), and those whose behavior they are meant to govern are also human. Even if war did not present all sorts of greater than normal temptations to throw well-crafted policies to the wind, I would doubt that any policy could ensure this result. So I would not hold Bush or Rumsfeld responsible for the fact that someone, somewhere hit an Iraqi prisoner during the course of the war, all by itself.
But of course that’s not the situation here. We have an administration that has crafted legal justifications of torture, including the claim that our President, in virtue of his war powers, is bound by neither law nor treaty (in which case one might ask why we bother signing treaties at all, or who would believe that we’d abide by them if we did); on whose watch repeated episodes of torture have occurred in various different locations; and in which those responsible (above a certain level of authority) have never been held to account. (Gonzales: appointed to be Attorney General. Bybee: now a federal judge. Rumsfeld: still in office. And so forth.) One way to interpret these facts is to say: this administration allowed torture as a matter of policy. This has not been true in any war during the last hundred years, as far as I know. Another is to say: the administration didn’t actually have a policy of allowing torture; it did, however, have a policy of aggressive (yet legal) interrogation, and an atmosphere in which toughness and pushing the envelope were rewarded and concerns for law scoffed at, and as a result, torture happened. Again, this would also be new.
It’s one thing to recognize that in war, bad things happen and people break the rules. If you recognize that and you don’t want the rules to be broken, you should work hard on training people not to break the rules, and react immediately and seriously to those cases in which they are broken. This the US has generally done throughout the 20th century. This administration has not.
What I blame them for is, again, not the fact that someone broke the rules; it’s that they themselves seem to have been at best indifferent to the fact that those rules were broken, both before and after the fact. And given the rules in question, that’s serious and unprecedented.
Don’t forget that the military’s lawyers were kept out of the process of interpreting the laws of war, and that they protested the administration’s interpretations and interrogation policies when they discovered them. They know that this is not a necessity of war; indeed, “career military officers at the Pentagon were “greatly upset” by what they regarded as the deliberate destruction of traditions and methods that have long protected soldiers as well as civilians.” (From last link.) What I blame Bush and his administration for is that deliberate destruction and its consequences.
Has anyone read the article “A Fighting Faith,” by Peter Beinart, in today’s New Republic? I would love to see this discussed on this blog. Is this another, “The Liberals have to out-right the right,” or do you feel there is more to the message that we should consider? Hmmm. I hope that I am not breaking any posting rules by putting this here…..If so, my deepest apologies! Not anticipating that I would post, I have not read them, and will go do so now.
“North America: the only word for what the US did here is “genocide”. Multiple peoples and cultures were destroyed so that “we” could gain access to their lands and wealth.”
I’m only talking about independence onward. I realize that a whole lot of this happened after independence in North America but most of the deaths in the New World as a whole happened beforehand.
No one powerful has clean hands. No one. I will take the U.S.’s record over the record of any other country with comparable power. If we were less powerful we would have cleaner hands–England does now, Canada probably does over the course of its history, Denmark seems nice–but it takes a superpower to sucessfully oppose a superpower, and for all our flaws, the second and third most powerful countries in the twentieth century were just incomparably worse than us. The British Empire was not so hot either. Spain killed many more Native Americans than the United States ever did. Belgium was horrendously brutal in the Congo. Ancient Rome invented a word that meant “kill every tenth person”; that tells you something, I think.
I don’t think these questions are answerable; there are so many things to tally on each side of the ledger that you lose count. You get into matters of belief. I believe we’ve done a lot of harm but more good, and I don’t think acknowledging the harm undoes the good.
Please, hilzoy. What Gonzales wrote was a description of what was legally allowable. You might disagree with his assessment. But what you just referenced is NOT administration policy, it’s an assessment by WH counsel of what the law actually reads. I know you’ve been careful about how you described this particular document, but every time this comes up, somehow it appears that this memo is a justification for some activity or other.
Gonzales has said just this in public on at least one occasion. Bottom line: feel free to critique Gonzales’ findings. If you feel that he’s arrived at invalid conclusions, that’s a fair criticism of his being nominated for the AG slot. But maybe, just maybe, you’re disagreeing with the law. If the body of law on this subject needs amending, I suggest some energy be devoted to this end, rather than to effectively demonizing Gonzales.
Slarti–
trust me when I say that Gonzales’ memo was not a neutral legal analysis, anymore than his death penalty memos in Texas were neutral.
This is the weakness in the international law argument for the left: experts arguing in bad faith can usually convince people who want to believe them.
I think there is little question that most people in the world are worse off for our existence.
That’s quite an indictment, Dianne, including even laying the blame for Nazism at the US doorstep.
Tell me, though, against what alternative are you comparing the US? The land is here. There were always going to be people on it. Who do you think these people would have been, and why do you think they wouldn’t have had slaves, fought pointless wars, etc. If perfection is the alternative then no, we don’t measure up. But perhaps that’s not the right standard. I strongly agree with Katherine’s statement, and her 5:28PM comment as well.
(It is not, however, nearly as bad as the OLC memos–but Gonzales commissioned those, and given his willfully misleading statements about extraordinary rendition, I do not trust for a moment his claims that the White House rejected their conclusions.)
I think it’s clear that this administration’s thinking, and, yes, policy, regarding the use of torture is demonstrably more permissive than that of previous administrations, and I don’t think that the memorandum Gonzales wrote can be honestly segregated from that evolution of policy simply because it was not, itself, an executive order.
Just because we didn’t find a copy of the Gonzales memo rolled up in Lynndie England’s fatigues, that does not mean that a legal memorandum concluding that torture is justified in the context of the war on terror was simply a thought experiment, completely unrelated to the fact that torture was, in fact, utilized by the United States in the conduct of the war on terror.
Slart: Katherine knows better than I: she, after all, has actually taken courses in law school, while I am an amateur. However, while I defer to actual lawyers on most points of law, on this one I feel confident agreeing with her on my own. This memo argues that the President has an unlimited power, as Commander in Chief, to do literally whatever he wants so long as it can be said to be part of waging war. It doesn’t have to be on the battlefield: it extends, for instance, to Guantanamo, thousands of miles away. It doesn’t matter if it violates US law or treaties, since (p. 20) “Congress lacks authority under Article I to set the terms and conditions under which the President may exercise his authority as commander in chief to control the conduct of operations during a war.” I have no idea how to square this with the fact that the Constitution also says that Congress has the power to enact laws, and the President is bound to faithfully execute those laws, or with the fact that it also says that treaties are the supreme law of the land. In briefs in the Padilla and Hamzi cases, the government has used the same basic argument to say that the President has the authority to imprison, without trial or access to counsel or charges or anything, anyone he deems to be an enemy combatant, including US citizens. It is even more fantastic there, since it is in conflict with large chunks of the entire Bill of Rights.
So, to be clear: I think that, considered as a piece of dispassionate legal analysis, this memo is incompetent. I assume that it was not created as a piece of dispassionate legal analysis, but as an attempt to find legal arguments for (take your pick) (a) what the administration wanted to do anyways, or (b) maximum flexibility to design interrogation procedures (in other words, the narrowest possible construction of legal obligations, in this case, our obligation not to torture people. Which is to say: it’s an attempt to find legal rationales for torture. If I’m wrong about this — if this is in fact Gonzales’ considered and dispassionate view of the law — then I think he should not become AG because he is incompetent. It is in part because I don’t think he is incompetent that I adopted the other point of view.
But what you just referenced is NOT administration policy, it’s an assessment by WH counsel of what the law actually reads.
Let’s see; this appointed administration’s WH counsel apparently had nothing better to do, so he commissioned several memos by the Justice Dept–who also apparently had nothing better to do–that attempted to justify the use of torture, prisoner abuse, and to unilaterally wipe out US obligations under international law.
And this was all done without the knowledge of Dear Leader?
Though there has been a bit of score settling in this thread, which I have a bit of a problem with, but they also think that it is a manifestation of karma/dharma, as we get into questions of guilt for larger historical manifestations, I would recommend steve gilliard’s blog entries about colonialism. Unfortunately, the latest is about Vietnam, which will probably give some on the right a reason to automatically reject the pov they hold, but I would urge you to take a look at the earlier ones in the series. We spoke about Dutch colonialism in an earlier thread and also the Mau Mau rebellion was mentioned as an example of a successful suppression. Reading the entries might be a bit eye opening.
Hey – busy here – thanks for all the thoughtful responses.
I realize that the question was a bit overbroad – but I truly wondered whether torture might have been engaged in by US forces in the Korean War, for example. I suppose the first distinction needed is the distinction between torture and atrocity – especially regarding official policy.
You hear stories of the fanatacism of the japanese during WWII, as the US forces advanced towards Japan, US forces would run into booby-trapped men, women and children, who would pretend to surrender, and then blow themselves up. Soon, “unofficial policy” was to gun down any civilian close to a killing area – surrender flag up or not. .
That doesn’t count as torture, and I don’t know if that counts as an atrocity – similar to what happened recently with the Iraqi prisoner recently.
Katherine, I appreciated your answer on the practical realities of power in a powerful nation. And I agree.
Whether one assumes that there was some small amount of torture by US troops for WWII, Korean War or not, your comment is apt. There ARE differences that make a difference. And it was never “official policy” in those previous wars.
One thing to keep in mind of course, is the always-on media – the awful stuff that happens in war/conflict is spread very very quickly throughout the world now – which wasn’t the case in wars past. (The first media war being Vietnam.) That has to be kept in mind as atrocity/torture claims are weighed against the past.
Of course, none of this situation had to occur. And as we have seen, no one has been fired in the administration because of the “permissive” abuse, which has happened/is happening throughout Iraq.
“this appointed administration’s”
Why would anyone seriously have a discussion with this person?
Isn’t the rehashing of blatant lies somehow against the posting rules?
Did we not just go through an election?
wwc: the appointed counsel
Dutchmarbel (who is still stunned about the piece on Kevin Drum’s blog, stating that any foreigner can be detained in Cuba for aiding terrorists, even unintentional and unknowing)
Oops, forgot the link.
The working link.
“No one powerful has clean hands.”
Agreed. I won’t argue the relative merits of whether the US was worse for the world than the Soviet Union or not: both are/were atrocious. So were the Spanish, British, Belgians, Dutch, etc in their colonial periods. In fact, I don’t know of any colonial country that was good to its colonies. My conclusion from this observation is that it is not good to be a colonial power, muchless an unopposed superpower. Saying “but we have to to stop this or that evil” sounds to me too much like an excuse. Do you really want nothing better for your country than that it be remembered as a slightly less evil superpower than the Soviet Union?
“I won’t argue the relative merits of whether the US was worse for the world than the Soviet Union or not: both are/were atrocious.”
You’re begging the question. No offense, but I think it’s ludicrous to even make the comparison.
Good deeds done by the US empire: toppling/democratizing/enriching the (former) Axis powers; support of South Korean and Taiwanese democracy; a sane China policy; some good India diplomacy; the UN/WHO/… system; a great deal of low-profile but important conflict resolution because the UN is still weak; the relatively sane low-tariff global market; science; spreading the good parts of the Enlightenment and the American revolution…
Dianne: I don’t have a problem with saying “we have to stop this or that evil” per se. I think, for instance, that we should have intervened in Rwanda to stop the genocide. You can (like me) disagree with Bush on how we decide which evils to stop, but why oppose the idea of intervening to stop evil per se?
I do not want us to be remembered as a slightly less worse superpower than the USSR. But — and I say this is a vociferous opponent of Bush — I think we have quite a ways to go before we reach that territory.
“I don’t have a problem with saying “we have to stop this or that evil” per se.”
I don’t have any problem with trying to stop genocide, atrocity, or torture either, if any way of usefully intervening can be found. I do have a problem with committing genocide, atrocity, and torture using the justification that our opponents would have committed the same or worse evils. Take Iraq for example. Saddam Hussein was undoubtedly evil. (He was welcomed by the US and other western governments as a “moderate” at one point and supported by same during the Iran/Iraq war, but never mind that right now. For the sake of the argument assume that the US always opposed his government.) In any case, he appears to have killed a good 300,000 or so civilians in his 25 year tenure as “president” of Iraq. Bush, on the other hand, has killed at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians in a little over a year. Has the US helped Iraq?
I had a longer version of this post that got eaten when my browser crashed so, alas, this short reconstruction will have to do:
First, Rilkefan is exactly right that even the implicit comparison of the Soviet Union and the US as moral equivalents is bunk. Even if you give the Bolsheviks a pass on their tactics during the civil war, there’s still the Kazakhstan famine, the Stalinist purges, the disastrous Five Year Plans, the annexation of the Baltic states and the attempted annexation of Finland, Stalin’s horrific indifference to casualties in WWII (best exemplified in his diktat that the primary motivating force of the Red Army should be fear of the NKVD, and in the crossing of the Oder)… and that’s just 1920-1950.
While I agree that no imperial power — or superpower if talk of empire is disagreeable — can ever be clean, we’re much better/nicer/more humane than almost any other great power in history. About the only great powers I’d say would be in the running would be the Persians (specifically the Achaemenid dynasty) and some of the Chinese dynasties (Han and Ming, mostly). You could also throw in the Dutch and the British into contention, although I think it’ll strongly depending on how you choose to measure such things. And I say this as someone whose criticisms of the US, particularly its foreign policy, are legion.
[In particular, I’d like to point out that AFAIK we never committed genocide, or attempted to commit genocide, against the indigenous peoples of this content. We were brutal, murderous and savage, yes, but there was no systematic policy of annihilation like there was in Turkey, Germany, Indonesia or any of the other exemplar genocides.]
One thing that’s vitally important for those of us on the left (or in general those who criticize the US) is to recognize, and appreciate, is just how much better we are than most other nations in our position. The flip side, of course, as hilzoy pointed out, is that our epitaph should be something more stirring than “slightly less worse superpower than the USSR”.
“First, Rilkefan is exactly right that even the implicit comparison of the Soviet Union and the US as moral equivalents is bunk”.
Pretty much. We’re not close to equivalent even if you delete Stalin. (Who, I would not think it necessary to remind people, is one of the two worst mass murderers in the history of the planet.)
Hilzoy, to be fair to Gonzales–I think you are confusing his memo with Bybee’s. He wrote a different one, which is not good, but it’s also not half as bad. The legal conclusions are mainly defensible, he just completely stacks the deck while claiming to give an objective analaysis. The Bybee memo is in a completely different category.
Yikes, I’m sick for just one day and:
“I won’t argue the relative merits of whether the US was worse for the world than the Soviet Union or not: both are/were atrocious.”
Probably just as well I missed it before everyone else hit it, I would have blown a fuse.
Probably just as well I missed it before everyone else hit it, I would have blown a fuse.
That’s why we’re here, Sebastian. Now get better, ya big dope! 😉
Spain killed many more Native Americans than the United States ever did.
And yet — the countries that used to be Spanish colonies are now populated and run by brown people (either natives or mestizos), not white Spaniards. Sure, they’re poor countries — but their races have survived in vastly greater numbers than the natives of what is now the USA and Canada.
As brutal as the Spanish conquista (or pacificacion, as the Church liked to call it) was, and it was plenty brutal, it was about subjugation, not genocide.
K: I originally linked to the Bybee memo (the 6 Jan. 2003 ‘Working Group Report on Detainee Interrogations’, at any rate), which I took to be what Slart was referring to when he said: this isn’t a justification, it’s an assessment of the law.
Anarch to Sebastian: Now get better, ya big dope! 😉
Seconded.
“we never committed genocide”
Tell it to Iowa, Iroquoi, Peoquot, Seminole, and so on. The “final solution to the Indian problem” was debated in Congress in the 19th century. Yes, they meant exactly what you think they meant by that. No genocides in the 20th century I’ll give you, but not no genocides period.
hilzoy: More ramblings on the issue of being a superpower…I agree that the US is a much nicer superpower to live in than the USSR ever was and maybe even nicer to its client states. So what? The US has, so far, killed fewer people in Iraq than Stalin did in his purges. Does that excuse Bush’s killing 100,000+ Iraqi civilians and 1200 US soldiers? Can we say that the overthrow of Allende on September 11, 1973 and the death of 10s of thousands of Chileans ok because the USSR probably killed as many in its invasion of Hungary? (Relatives of mine lived and nearly died in each of these countries, incidently, which is part of the reason that I’m really not fond of certain actions of either superpower.) Was it ok for the US to recruit the Mujahadeen and train them in terrorist tactics until they mutated into al Qaeda and attacked the US? Were the attacks on civilians committed by the Contras ok because they were US backed and therefore “good”? What about the Khmer Rouge? One can hardly call them a nice bunch yet Reagan supported them during his administration.
These are not isolated actions of a single bad leader. As long as the US is a superpower, it will committ atrocities. But why should it stay a superpower? The Soviet Union is no more, so, even if the US had to “stay strong” to counter it, that threat is gone. The US could increase the amount of good it does by a few simple maneuvers. It could get rid of the security council and make the UN a true international organization. (I know: it may not be so easy to get France, England, Russia, and China to agree. But the idea could at least be proposed.) It could stop supporting oppressive governments (ie Pakistan, Saudi Arabia) and subverting elections in other countries. It could get rid of its weapons of mass destruction. It could join the ICC and be willing to be held accountable for its actions (if the US is such a nice superpower, how come it isn’t willing to be held accountable by an international body anyway?) It could inact the Kyoto protocol and other environmental and human rights treaties. We have the power to do these things (barring, perhaps, getting rid of the security council.) But do we have the political will to do so? If the most recent election is any indication, no.
Dionne: No genocides in the 20th century I’ll give you, but not no genocides period.
True, but not something modern Americans mostly wish to even acknowledge, much less publicly discuss.
When comparing the USSR to the US, we may also note that America imported 10 million people to work as slaves – that the history of slavery in the US covers a period of time longer than the USSR ever existed, even if we only count from 1777: and the legacy of this slavery is still with the US: lynching, terrorist attacks on black institutions, terrorist organizations intended to wreak fear on black people: all supported by mainstream America.
If you’re going to compare the history of the US to the USSR, you have to at least compare it all. Maybe you can stack up the institution of slavery and the institutional racism that was slavery’s legacy and assert that it still wasn’t as bad as the behavior of totalitarian rulers in the USSR – bearing in mind that for every person imported to the US as a slave, odds are at least three other people died. Given the difference in population size, I’d say that makes the impact of slavery equivalent to a Stalinist legacy.
“Maybe you can stack up the institution of slavery and the institutional racism that was slavery’s legacy and assert that it still wasn’t as bad as the behavior of totalitarian rulers in the USSR – bearing in mind that for every person imported to the US as a slave, odds are at least three other people died.”
I don’t know. I don’t think that you can really compare them one against the other that way. Slavery doesn’t excuse Stalin’s purges or vice versa. That’s why I originally said I didn’t want to compare the two: there are plenty of atrocities and acts of evil on both sides and the atrocities of one don’t excuse or justify the atrocities of the other.
Incidently, on the subject of the evils of the slave trade, there are also the medical-genetic consequences of the middle passage to consider. During the middle passage, the kidnapped Africans weren’t given much water or food. So the ones whose kidneys retained salt and water the best and the ones who could make due with the least food were most likely to survive. Good for them, but in a society of plenty, such as 21st century US, retention of salt leads to high blood pressure and efficient use of food leads to obesity and diabetes. So one reason that African-Americans have higher rates of high blood pressure than European-Americans may be this mistreatment in the middle passage (which, most likely, continued in the US, leading to further evolutionary pressure). Maybe free medical care should be part of reparations.
“As long as the US is a superpower, it will committ atrocities. But why should it stay a superpower? The Soviet Union is no more, so, even if the US had to “stay strong” to counter it, that threat is gone.”
It should stay a superpower because relinquishing that position through retreat will not leave the position empty. Someone else will fill it (probably China possibly Russia) and we are far more benevolent than either.
I originally said I didn’t want to compare the two: there are plenty of atrocities and acts of evil on both sides and the atrocities of one don’t excuse or justify the atrocities of the other.
No, of course not. I just meant, well, take a look at the whole history of the US, at all of it – not just the nice fluffy bits. I think you’re right: comparing two such different countries with such different histories is like comparing chalk and cheese. But the argument that there’s never been a time in the US’s history when people weren’t better off for it existing does kind of write out of history all the people for whom the US meant genocide, death, slavery… and we haven’t even got out of the first hundred years of its existence.
I was serious when I said upthread that this kind of rosy thinking is typical of empire: it is. I recognise it because my own country has that history: and it’s done by writing out of history as unimportant all the millions of people whose lives and livelihoods and freedoms were destroyed by the empire, and pointing to the good parts – all empires have good parts.
Tell it to Iowa, Iroquoi, Peoquot, Seminole, and so on.
I stand by my assessment: we were brutal, savage and murderous, but there was no systematic campaign of eradication. That’s a cold comfort to those we shafted — and yes, we shafted the Indians pretty damn hard — but there is something qualitatively different about the Turkish attacks on the Armenians, on the Nazi attacks on the Jews (and Gypsies and homosexuals and so forth), on Suharto’s crusade against the Timorese, and that something is genocide.
This isn’t my area of expertise so I’ll be happy to hear evidence to the contrary, but unless that evidence consists of a stated governmental policy of annihilation you’re not going to get much traction.
Well, then perhaps a little highly vocal, highly public critique of said analysis would have been just the thing.
There’s not even a vague outline of an equine skeleton to be found here.
And how is it that this was claimed not once but twice without being challenged? Dianne, please substantiate or withdraw.
There’s not even a vague outline of an equine skeleton to be found here.
Nice to see you and your thesaurus have reconciled and she’s let you back in under her covers.
And how is it that this was claimed not once but twice without being challenged?
Because it’s true. Unless, of course, you’re going to attempt to argue Bush has personally spent very little time in Iraq.
There’s not even a vague outline of an equine skeleton to be found here.
Nice to see you and your thesaurus have reconciled and she’s let you back in under her covers.
Well, here were the two responses I considered posting when I saw the “appointed administration” reference yet again. Which do you prefer:
(1)
Dude, I think it may be time for you to delete that particular macro.
(2)
<horse status=”dead” action=”beat”>
Slarti And how is it that this was claimed not once but twice without being challenged?
Well, if you can challenge the Lancet study that suggests 100 000 deaths as a direct result of the US invasion/occupation, you should do so. (I would provide a direct link to the Lancet study, but that section of the Lancet website seems to be suffering from overload – understandably so.)
Obviously the 100 000 figure isn’t an exact count: the study provides a probabilistic projection, and the exact figure may fall below 100 000, or be considerably above it. But it’s a reasonably substantiated figure: if you wish to challenge it, it’s for you to show that the Lancet study has been proven faulty on scientific grounds.
Please, go ahead.
“Dianne, please substantiate or withdraw.”
Certainly, I’d be happy to. I didn’t post the reference because I thought it was rather old news by now.
The number of 100,000 comes from an article in Lancet, published November 2004. A link follows:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15555665
In this study, an estimate of the number of excess deaths was derived from random sampling of housholds in various places in Iraq, including Falluja. However, the numbers in Falluja were so extreme, that in the end they were excluded from the analysis. Even without the Falluja numbers, an estimated 100,000 excess deaths have occured in Iraq since the invasion. Most of the deaths were women and children, most were from bombings. They also estimate that there were about 200,000 excess deaths in Falluja, but the data was very uncertain, leaving a huge confidence interval for this area. So Bush may hae already killed as many people as Saddam Hussein. That’s American efficiency for you: it took Hussein 25 years to kill so many.
Another source of evidence is the following article published in July 2004 in the New England Journal of Medicine. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15229303
In this article, military personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were asked, among other things, if they had killed any civilians. 14% of all military personnel and 28% of all Marines returning from Iraq said yes. Considering the number of military personnel that have been through Iraq, extrapolating this figure gives a number of civilian dead in the upper 10s of thousands. Of course, a single soldier may have killed more than one civilian, especially a bomber pilot, and not everyone would admit to killing a civilian. Besides which there is recall bias: nearly any study that depends on people’s recall of a certain event undercounts. Once these factors are taken into account, 100,000 again seems like a low estimate.
Finally, there is iraqbodycount.net. Iraq body count records every civilian death reported in the media. They give an estimate of about 14-17,000 deaths. It is well established in the literature that studies using this methodology of passive collection generally only count 5-10% of actual events. So, if Iraq body count has the usual error, one should estimate 140,000-340,000 civilian deaths based on their numbers.
Anarch: but unless that evidence consists of a stated governmental policy of annihilation you’re not going to get much traction.
It was taken for granted – you will find it again and again in writings throughout the 19th century – that by 1900 Native Americans would be extinct, or virtually so, and that government policies were being enacted to speed this process along. These writings are not by people critical of this, but by people who agree with and support the idea that the Native Americans ought to become extinct – after all, they had the presumption to claim they owned land which white settlers could farm.
Sounds pretty much like planned genocide to me. Would you really argue that a culture that originated the proverb “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” was not aiming at genocide?
I think the Lancet article has been slain multiple times. But in case you missed it, you might want to investigate just exactly how they computed the 100k number, and then ponder what might be wrong with the sampling methodology.
I suggest reading this, not that you ought to believe it, but that it makes several points worthy of consideration. There’s lots of other critiques of the Lancet paper out there; just Google and read. And Debunkers.org has a pretty decent thread on the subject; feel free to go, register and discuss.
Slart: you know more statistics than I do (though I did ace biostat!), but in my judgment, the best post on the Lancet study (specifically, on its methodology and the criticisms of it by someone who knows whereof he speaks) is here.
slarti: You did note that I didn’t rely entirely on the Lancet article, but used multiple sources, didn’t you? “Slain” is an appropriate word choice for a Bush supporter, since that’s all they do, but not very appropriate for a description of the criticism of the Lancet article. Your source of criticism is from a group of people who are not epidemiologists. Their primary criticism is that the results are skewed when there is a particularly violent cluster, as there was in Falluja. The authors of the study recognized this and did not include Falluja in their estimates of total dead. 100,000 is the number of excess deaths estimated if one discounts Falluja entirely. The estimate goes up to more like 300,000 if Falluja is included. Have you read the Lancet article, incidently? It might be easier for you to evaulate its accuracy or lack thereof if you read it yourself rather than relying on others to do it for you. I really don’t think the “Chicago Boyz” know much about epidemiology. Certainly their “debunking” was not very sophisticated. I’m not all that sophisticated in statistics myself, but even I could tell that. Incidently, are you a U of C grad yourself? Just wondering from your choice of site.
Sorry to be a snob about this, but can anyone point to a criticism of the Lancet article that’s been published in a peer reviewed publication? For example, a letter to the Lancet criticizing the article? Or, even better, to an estimate by another group demonstrating a much lower civilian death rate? I’d be much more impressed by either of those than by random bloggers.
Then there was the claim on the Chicago Boyz web site that the authors of the Lancet article demanded that it be published before the election. Get real! The Lancet has an impact factor of 18.3! Demand anything from their editors and they’ll laugh in your face and reject the article without even bothering the reviewers with it. The authors may have pushed to get it out in time for it to be published by the election (if they were lucky and it got accepted with no revisions) but I don’t see them having the power to demand publication on or by a certain date. The claim that they did really blew the web site’s credibility to me.
“Bush, on the other hand, has killed at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians in a little over a year.”
I believe that a) the “at least” should be dropped, as 100K is an estimate not a lower bound and b) the study does not measure civilians and c) writing “Bush has killed” and not “Bush’s policies have led to the deaths of” is unreasonable.
However the Lancet study methodology seems sound, as discussed in various places at Crooked Timber and by Tim Lambert.
“I believe that a) the “at least” should be dropped, as 100K is an estimate not a lower bound and b) the study does not measure civilians and c) writing “Bush has killed” and not “Bush’s policies have led to the deaths of” is unreasonable.”
Ok. How does “at least 14,000 civilians and most likely very many more have died in Iraq as a direct result of Bush’s policies” grab you as a correction? 14,000 is almost certainly an order of magnitude underestimate, for reasons I and others have discussed, but given Iraq body count’s meticulous documentation of civilian deaths reported in the media, the number really can not be below that.
Dianne: Sorry to be a snob about this, but can anyone point to a criticism of the Lancet article that’s been published in a peer reviewed publication?
That’s not being a snob: that’s a reasonable objection. Of course pro-war debunkers will want to object to the Lancet study: they have obvious political motivations for doing so. If that’s all Slarti can come up with, and no scientific opposition, it’s not worth much.
The Lancet study just came out – I don’t see how there could be peer-reviewed follow-ups yet.
Rilke: The Lancet study just came out – I don’t see how there could be peer-reviewed follow-ups yet.
Yet Slarti was claiming that it had been “slain repeatedly”. Heh.
Yet Dianne wanted a peer-reviewed response. This would basically mean that we can’t discuss any hot science for months.
Let’s regroup here. The news on torture is coming out of the Associated Press.
“U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of foreigners as enemy combatants are allowed to use evidence gained by torture in deciding whether to keep them imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the government conceded in court Thursday. The acknowledgment by Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle came during a U.S. District Court hearing on lawsuits brought by some of the 550 foreigners imprisoned at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.”
See Crooked Timber for an update.
Rilke: Yet Dianne wanted a peer-reviewed response. This would basically mean that we can’t discuss any hot science for months.
No: it just means you can’t claim that it’s already been shown up to be false, which is what (I take it) Slarti meant by “slain repeatedly”. (If he just meant that “people who have a political interest it in not being true have said it’s not true”, well, that’s kind of different from “slain”, isn’t it.)
Laura: “U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of foreigners as enemy combatants are allowed to use evidence gained by torture in deciding whether to keep them imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the government conceded in court Thursday.
This doesn’t surprise me; we know the Bush administration is pro-torture. And? Is anyone objecting with the fact that (a) evidence gained by torture is most likely not true and (b) it’s illegal.
I think the Lancet article has been slain multiple times.
You think incorrectly.
There are a number of very good ‘debunking the debunkers’ analyses; here are a few:
Tim Lambert
Please note Lambert has many other ‘debunking the debunkers’ WRT the Lancet study. I believe he has over 20 posts on the subject. This is just the latest.
Chris Lightfoot
Daniel Davies
Please note Lambert has many other ‘debunking the debunkers’ WRT the Lancet study. I believe he has over 20 posts on the subject. This is just the latest.
Would you really argue that a culture that originated the proverb “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” was not aiming at genocide?
Yes.
Toture
In this post, I swear at people who use the Ticking Time Bomb Scenario to justify torture, and do not justify this with anything. It is, essentially, contentless unless you like swearing. But who doesn’t like a good swear?
Toture
In this post, I swear at people who use the Ticking Time Bomb Scenario to justify torture, and do not justify this with anything. It is, essentially, contentless unless you like swearing. But who doesn’t like a good swear?
The Lancet study is effectively useless because it refused (or was unable) to distinguish between those killed while fighting us and civilians. Not to mention the unusually wide error issues.
Anarch: Well, obviously, it’s possible to argue that the deliberate destruction of an entire people wasn’t “really” genocide – since you’ve just linked to an article that does so.
Doesn’t prove it wasn’t, though.
Sebastian: The Lancet study is effectively useless
…because, after all, 100 000 people don’t really matter?
The Lancet study is effectively useless
Notice the progression? It’s a familiar pattern among conservatives.
A story comes out they don’t like–they attack it. They claim it’s been debunked (usually demonstrating not the slightest shame for not having even a passing understanding of the subject area they’re opining about).
Of course, when their wild debunkings are refuted, then the story doesn’t matter.
Are the Indians that were decimated by disease part of the intended genocide?
Just wondering…
Are the Indians that were decimated by disease part of the intended genocide?
Are you claiming it doesn’t count as genocide when you deliberately spread diseases you know will kill the people you want to make extinct? Interesting view of genocide.
Absolutely, I am such an idiot and you are so smart that I have no concept of what genocide could possibly mean.
I am sure that you can reach into men’s minds who lived over a 100 years ago and understand their true intentions. You should market that power and make a little money for yourself.
Please offer some documented proof of the U.S. having a calculated plan. Other than two blankets given out by Captain Eucyer at Fort Pitt of smallpox infected blankets you won’t find any.
And maybe in your brilliant understanding you can explain to me how two blankets constitutes a planned and implemented genocide by the U.S.
Letters by General Amherst and Colonel Bouquet mentioning spreading smallpox to Indians does not mean that the plan was ever carried out. Even in his reply he stated how it would probably hurt his own men more.
There is no proof!
I can sit here and talk about how many people on the Internet should not be allowed to spread lies and half-truths and that they should be jailed, but that doesn’t mean I have actually jailed anyone for doing so.
Many times when reading posts, I think to myself that a really good plan would be to take some of the idiots who post on the Internet and give them a good public whipping for being so stupid. But, that doesn’t mean I have done it.
Get real, even today there are people that reject the small pox virus and link it to many other ills.
Jes Well, obviously, it’s possible to argue that the deliberate destruction of an entire people wasn’t “really” genocide – since you’ve just linked to an article that does so.
It looks like you’ve missed the point: there was no systematic policy of annihilation which, yes, means that it wasn’t “really” genocide since that’s part of the definition.* Vague gesticulations about “deliberateness” aren’t sufficient, since you’ve omitted to specify a) who it was that was being deliberate, b) what they were actually being deliberate about, and c) whether they were in a position to effect their deliberateness.
* So that we avoid the various dictionary flames: I’m aware that some people have a looser definition of genocide (indeed, the UN Convention on same uses what is to my eye too loose a definition although I’m not familiar with how that definition is actually applied) and that this argument is probably as much semantic as anything else. I, however, strongly believe that we should refrain from this more casual usage and stick to the original definition; the word “democide”, although of suspect origin, seems appropriate to describe what happened to the Indians.
Are you claiming it doesn’t count as genocide when you deliberately spread diseases you know will kill the people you want to make extinct? Interesting view of genocide.
Except that, as the article I linked pointed out, that was only done once (maybe twice) that we know of. That’s hardly the same thing, especially given the 18th century knowledge of communicable diseases. Furthermore, claiming that the early colonists “deliberately spread diseases” in order to make the Indians “extinct” is ludicrously begging the question; you’ve yet to demonstrate anything even approximately close to that.
I repeat: we were brutal, savage and murderous, but there was no systematic campaign of eradication — nor have you offered any evidence of one — and thus no genocide.
Anarch: but there was no systematic campaign of eradication — nor have you offered any evidence of one — and thus no genocide.
The campaign of eradication was sufficiently systematic to kill off all but 250 000 of the original inhabitants of the land area that is now the United States. Extermination was routinely referred to as the only way to deal with Native Americans. So you have persistent and consistent cultural references to exterminating an entire people: you have documented accounts of entire tribes being slaughtered, including small children: and you have the end result: virtually an entire people eradicated.
To refuse to call this genocide because only parts of it can be verified as a deliberate extermination policy carried out by the US government, such as the “Indian Removal Act”, seems to me to be like demanding a death certificate for a life insurance payout for a victim of Auschwitz.
Sure. If you’re looking to the Lancet study as a definitive, accurate assessment of the true number of Iraqis killed by the U.S. occupation forces, slain is an apt term.
Yes, I’ve read the various bits over at Crooked Timber, and I find them unconvincing. The reliance on a symmetric distributon is just the least of the problems. Crooked Timber’s likening cluster sampling of Iraq to cluster sampling of a minefield was…odd, to say the least.
Immaterial, since the study in question has nothing to do with epidemics. Let’s be clear, here. The study in question is not a determination of deaths due to combat with U.S. or Iraqi guard troops. Nor is it an accurate assessment of excess deaths at all. But I ought to make it clear that I don’t consider myself to be anything resembling a subject matter expert, just that this assessment is an order of magnitude higher than previous estimates originating from sources that have a political axe to grind, to the extent that it effects the science.
There’s a reason for my disbelief, and it’s not that I refuse to believe it. It’s that this study is so completely out of bed with previous estimates that the discrepancy is going to need a whole lot more explanation than The Lancet‘s provided to date.
Jadegold, full quotes are a wonderful thing. My actual quote was: “The Lancet study is effectively useless because it refused (or was unable) to distinguish between those killed while fighting us and civilians.”
In other words, while I have the educational background to delve into the methodology, I’m not bothering because the (even ignoring the huge range of possible deaths offered) the study isn’t morally interesting to me because it refused to attempt to determine which deaths were a result of intentionally killing insurgents, and which deaths were a result of insurgents intentionally killing civilians, and which deaths were unintentional war killings. It hyped as ‘civilian’ killings yet it shows no such thing. The study doesn’t need to be ‘debunked’ by pro-Iraqi war advocates because even if wholly true it doesn’t provide useful information for determining practically anything useful about the war.
Jesurgislac: So you have persistent and consistent cultural references to exterminating an entire people…
…and you have persistent and consistent cultural references decrying that extermination.
you have documented accounts of entire tribes being slaughtered, including small children…
Do we? I know we have accounts of entire villages being slaughtered but I don’t recall there being massacres of entire tribes, at least for “tribe” being greater than “village”. There’s the infamous Sand Creek massacre, but a) that wasn’t a tribe that was destroyed, and b) Chivington — he of the despicable “nits make lice” comment — was lambasted by Congress and forced to resign, contradicting your claims of an extermination policy.
[Not that it did the massacred people any good, of course.]
Incidentally, so we have some kind of normalization: there are also many documented slaughters of entire white villages and settlements on the part of the Indians. There’s a fairly “persistent and consistent” strain of eliminationalism documented amongst the Indians in the 19th century, and small bloody wonder. Does this also count as [attempted?] genocide in your book?
…and you have the end result: virtually an entire people eradicated.
Yes. No dispute there.
Although, a fun fact from my dad the historical demographer: there are more Indians alive in the United States now than at any point in history. This isn’t nearly as meaningful as some people think — there are proportionally fewer Indians alive now than at any point in history — but, to quote the Matrix, “history, it seems, is not without a sense of irony”.
To refuse to call this genocide because only parts of it can be verified as a deliberate extermination policy carried out by the US government, such as the “Indian Removal Act”…
No, it’s because the US goverment did not have a deliberate extermination policy. You’ve offered no support whatsoever for this contention — the Indian Removal Act as exterminationalism? Please… — and I fail to see how merely repeating that such a thing existed is supposed to stand in lieu of argument.
When you can demonstrate the existence of an American Todtenkopfverbund, we’ll talk about Auschwitz. When you can document an American Wannsee Conference, we’ll talk about Final Solutions. Until then, I stand by my earlier statements.
Slarti: Sure. If you’re looking to the Lancet study as a definitive, accurate assessment of the true number of Iraqis killed by the U.S. occupation forces, slain is an apt term.
Really? Yet you haven’t linked to the scientific, peer-reviewed rebuttal of the Lancet study which enables you to claim it’s been refuted. All you’ve done is link to sites where people who have a political need to object to the Lancet study’s figures are so objecting – which makes your objections to it unconvincing.
Sebastian’s objections – that the Lancet study doesn’t distinguish between civilian deaths, resistor deaths, and military deaths – are actually to the point: no, the Lancet study doesn’t provide that information, and he’s right to point it out. Nevertheless, the fact is that around a hundred thousand people were killed as a direct result of the US invasion, who would (most of them) still have been alive today if the US had not decided to launch its attack on a country which was no threat to the US.
Anarch: Well, you have at least convinced me that even when genocide is a provable, historical fact, there are enough people out there who won’t call genocide genocide unless it comes with documentation. Further you will not convince me, and evidently I won’t convince you.
Slart, Sebastian: suppose you sincerely wanted to estimate the number of excess deaths (either civilian-only or aggregate) which have resulted from the US invasion? How would you go about it exactly?
One of you doesn’t like cluster counting methodology and the other doesn’t think an “excess deaths” measure is interesting unless it distinguishes between innocent and guilty. So what would you propose as an alternative to the Johns Hopkins approach? Or if you don’t feel qualified to do it yourselves, then whose services would you engage to design and implement such a methodology within the constraints of the facts on the ground? Heck I’d even settle for some of those “previous estimates” Slart mentions so we can see who’s got axes to grind and oxen to gore.
Or do you prefer the official Pentagon policy of never even mentioning the darkness, let alone lighting a single candle?
BTW I dunno bout MDs, but among biologists “epidemiology” is usually taken to mean the study of pretty much any determinant of morbidity and mortality, not just infectious disease.
even when genocide is a provable, historical fact, there are enough people out there who won’t call genocide genocide unless it comes with documentation. (emphasis mine)
Um, how can you confidently assert that it’s a “provable fact” if there’s no documentation?
Well, you have at least convinced me that even when genocide is a provable, historical fact…
But Jes: you haven’t actually established that it is a fact!* At the moment, it sounds to me like you’re either repeating an article of faith, using a different definition of “genocide”, or making a fundamentally broken leap of logic. Either way, all of you’ve done is to state that this was genocide without actually justifying the claim; the few examples that you’ve given (smallpox blankets and the Indian Removal Act) don’t support the argument you’re trying to make.
* Assuming that one can ever talk about a dispositional act like genocide as fact. That someone died is a fact; whether they were murdered is a much murkier question.
Oh, one other thing:
…there are enough people out there who won’t call genocide genocide unless it comes with documentation.
They’re called historians. [Among many, many others.] What, you think we’re all taking the Holocaust on faith?
PS: Since I’m guessing that no-one else here is interested in our conversation, feel free to move it to email if you want to continue it.
PS: Since I’m guessing that no-one else here is interested in our conversation, feel free to move it to email if you want to continue it.
…or, given kenB‘s pointed, but incredibly accurate, question… perhaps I was wrong.
Slarti — what political axe do the study’s authors have to grind? (Asking seriously — they’re my colleagues, though I don’t know them personally.)
KenB: Um, how can you confidently assert that it’s a “provable fact” if there’s no documentation?
By the fact that the population of Native Americans that ought to be there… isn’t. They were, in vast numbers, killed off through the centuries – to the point almost of absence. There is considerable contemporary evidence throughout that this genocide was intentional, approved, and welcomed. I
I promise that I am not bringing this up in a “Godwin’s Law” sort of way: I’m trying to draw what I think is a legitimate historical parallel. I was discussing the Holocaust with a friend, and we were talking about “Holocaust deniers”, in the context of his recent visit to Auschwitz, which (a gay man and a Jew) he’d found an appalling experience. He brought up the point that he supposed that if the Nazis had succeeded in destroying all the documentation of their genocide, and destroying the camps as they’d intended, there would be no proof that the Holocaust had ever happened, outside the testimony of the survivors. I thought about it, and said, no, there would be one uncontestable proof: before the 1930s, all across Europe, for there was contemporary accounts of a large population of Jews. Assuming that the Holocaust never happened, where did these people go? Where are their descendents? Their absence is an intrinsic proof that requires no documentation on the part of those who committed genocide.
And that is to be my last comment on the topic. I’m convinced that I won’t convince Anarch of genocide unless I can produce documentation: and Anarch equally won’t convince me that genocide isn’t genocide even if there isn’t documentation.
Jadegold, Jes, wwc, Anarch: the policy of killing all aboriginals in the territory now known as the US, either before or after independence, never appears to have been widespread or consistent. That is pretty clearly the case, and while one might, with a bit of legwork, provide particular instances where extermination was deliberate, I’d recommend a different tack: if we shouldn’t call it genocide, what should we call it?
What Lewy and Anarch are saying about the absence of a systematic campaign only applies to actual killing, not relocation. The modern term for this particular kind of “democide” would be “ethnic cleansing.” The environmental coincidence (see Jared Diamond) that the vast majority (>=75% by anyone’s measure and possibly as much as 99.9+%) of one ethnicity happened to die in the process makes it appear genocidal. But it was definitely not genocide, just a spectacularly (if accidentally) successful ethnic cleansing. Is that better Anarch?
Be advised though, that stuff like “because the US goverment did not have a deliberate extermination policy” (per Anarch) and “There is no proof!” (per wwc) is inherently incompatible with the technical argument against calling it genocide. For one thing you don’t have to expand that very far at all before Rwanda, on account of the inadequate paper trail, becomes nothing more than a bunch of people who listened to the same radio station coincidentally happening to also kill their neighbors. Just a statistical anomaly, the kind which some people find interesting and some people don’t.
And more to the point (IIRC), if you wish to apply a modern intlaw standard then there is no need for a government at all, only an explicit consensus among individuals and some actions taken as a result.
Jadegold, full quotes are a wonderful thing. My actual quote was: “The Lancet study is effectively useless because it refused (or was unable) to distinguish between those killed while fighting us and civilians.”
Sebastian: This is still another canard; the study makes clear what the findings were and weren’t. The study also makes clear the limitations and difficulties of their survey.
Clearly, I should have added another part to the conservative pattern: claiming a study didn’t prove what it never studied. I probably also should have added the fact conservatives also tend to claim bad news is always aimed at influencing elections.
Immaterial, since the study in question has nothing to do with epidemics.
You should do some research into epidemiology and its applications in the modern world.
“The reliance on a symmetric distributon is just the least of the problems.”
Maybe, but it sounds fascinating. I really think we should be told (unless you just pulled that observation from a space which is topologically equivalent to a torus).
“Sebastian: This is still another canard; the study makes clear what the findings were and weren’t. The study also makes clear the limitations and difficulties of their survey.”
Note that people upthread cited the study as referring to civilians. I think SH is fairly responding to that.
However a lot of the non-civilians are probably just proud Iraqis who I’m not pleased to see my govt kill, so part of his argument may be weak.
Rilke: However a lot of the non-civilians are probably just proud Iraqis who I’m not pleased to see my govt kill, so part of his argument may be weak.
Oh, it’s weak, yes: but it’s a fair point, unlike Slarti taking the side of politics against science.
“fact conservatives also tend to claim bad news is always aimed at influencing elections.”
10 yard penalty for mind reading. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Jadegold understands what is exactly is in the minds of ALL conservatives given that he also the ability to reach back into time and understand exactly what men were thinking and their motivations for every action they took a couple of 100 year’s ago.
Gosh, did I say refuted? Silly me.
Sorry if that was misleading, hilzoy, but the axe-grinders I had in mind was Iraq Body Count, which makes the same errors in representation that Sebastian attributed to the Lancet study.
Ah, the mud-slinging resumes. Really, one might suspect that mud is the only weapon at hand.
radish: But it was definitely not genocide, just a spectacularly (if accidentally) successful ethnic cleansing. Is that better Anarch?
Yes, which is what I was getting at earlier when I said that I preferred to keep the term “genocide” in its original meaning and use a term like “democide” (odious though its creator may be) for what happened in North America.
I think it’s actually more complicated than that, though. There was a definite element of “ethnic cleansing” in the US government’s attitude towards the Indians — although I prefer the more accurate and less falsely-sanitized term “forcible relocation” — and a general sense of hostility throughout the West towards Indians, ranging from a devalued sense of Indian life up through Chivington’s “nits make lice”. From what I know of the details of the various Indian massacres, though (which I freely admit isn’t much), it wasn’t so much democide as democide-by-accident: a whole lot of people more-or-less independently and unsystematically slaughtering their way through thousands (and sometimes doing so in an ordered fashion at the behest of the government, but relatively rarely), while infecting and starving their way through millions.
In other words, we killed off almost all the Indians not because we were trying to exterminate them but because, as a general rule, we truly did not care whether they lived or died as long as they did it somewhere else. Which may be the most damning thing I can possibly say.
[There are a few other problems here that have gone unremarked. Perhaps most important is that the time-frame is remarkably important; all the genocides that everyone can agree upon took place within a relatively limited period, no more than about ten years and usually less than five. The Indians were brutalized over a matter of decades, if not centuries, and there are a lot of problems with trying to generalize the definition to such a scale.]
Be advised though, that stuff like “because the US goverment did not have a deliberate extermination policy” (per Anarch) and “There is no proof!” (per wwc) is inherently incompatible with the technical argument against calling it genocide.
I disagree per my remarks. You’re correct that, as a matter of modern intlaw*, government collusion was not necessary to prove the allegation of genocide; I’ve been primarily addressing that both because I thought that was Jes’ main contention and because we have actual, copious documentation regarding the US government’s attitudes towards the Indians and the Indian-slaughterers which paints a fair more complicated portrait than Jes’ allegation of eliminationalism.**
[For example, Congress described the Sand Creek massacre thusly: “As to Colonel Chivington, our committee can hardly find fitting terms to describe his conduct. Wearing the uniform of the United States, which should be the emblem of justice and humanity… he deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the veriest savage among those who were the victims of his cruelty.” I don’t think you’ll find any analogous remarks from Hitler about Auschwitz or, more pointedly, from Himmler about Poznan.]
I simply don’t follow your logic with respect to wwc; if you can’t prove that it is a genocide (under whatever metric) then that would seem to me to be precisely the technical argument against calling it a genocide. In fact, that goes to exactly what Jes and I have been debating and why I’ve been so scrupulously and circuitously avoiding saying she’s wrong: it could well be a genocide by all standards without being known, and therefore being designated, as such. By way of analogy, person X could murder person Y without being us being technically entitled to label them a murderer (i.e. absent a conviction in a court of law for the crime of murder); the same seems entirely possible in the realm of genocide. My contention is that, based on my understanding of the history, I think what happened was not genocide and that I have yet to see any compelling evidence to the contrary.
Which is a somewhat roundabout way of saying that I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here. I’d normally ask for a clarification, but since I think this topic is long past the point of utility it’s probably not worth the bother.
* A somewhat related question is whether modern standards should be applicable to older events and, if so, how far back they should be allowed to go. I think it’d be downright silly to judge the Assyrians and the Babylonians by modern standards, for example — they’d both be considered barbaric, and rightly so — when, given the world at the time, one was a bastion of civilization and the other was one of the most brutal imperial powers in existence. I don’t have much of a problem with (loosely) applying today’s moral standards to the US of the 18th and 19th centuries; I do, however, have a bit of a problem applying modern legal standards to the same situation. YMMV.
** Added in proof: Upon rereading the thread, I see that I had in fact already assumed the genocide in question was governmental. Mea culpa.
For one thing you don’t have to expand that very far at all before Rwanda, on account of the inadequate paper trail, becomes nothing more than a bunch of people who listened to the same radio station coincidentally happening to also kill their neighbors.
I don’t think Rwanda was a governmental genocide, much like the Armenians weren’t killed by the Turkish government; I am a bit leery about talking about non-governmental genocides precisely because it’s harder to make the “systematic” allegation stick. What happened in Rwanda was, AFAIK, a deliberate and (crudely) systematic attempt to exterminate a group of people — it’s just that it was decentralized (“mob-coordinated” might be a better phrase) so the systematization was less a matter of creating laws and regiments and death camps and more a matter of a crudely coordinated effort to whip people into a frenzy and then tell them where to find targets.
That’s somewhat ad hoc because I’m not particularly familiar with the details of what happened in Rwanda. FWIW, though, I would feel no particular shame or discomfort if, upon examining the evidence, I came to the conclusion that what happened in Rwanda was a massacre but not actually a genocide, nor would I regard what happened in any more favorable a light. Not everything monstrous needs to be deemed a “genocide” in order to remain monstrous, and I’d rather the term kept its specificity and thus its utility.
But then again… we have the radio broadcasts (or records thereof), so it’s not like we’re lacking documentation, is it?
As an aside, an interesting question: suppose there’s a very volatile relationship between two groups of people, innovatively dubbed A and B. [Instantiate with I/P, race relations in the South of the US, Muslims in France, or whatever floats your boat.] Out of this attitude of ferment, a number of voices in group A — they could be on the radio, on TV, in print, whatever — spontaneously call for eliminationalist violence against group B. No collusion, no coordination, nothing, just a bunch of lunatics howling for blood. Incited by these rabble-rousers, a mob of group A surges forth and kills a large fraction group B. Would that count as genocide and, if so, how should the culpability be apportioned? Would it matter if the rabble-rousers weren’t specifically advocating mass slaughter, only generally screeching hate? Would it make any difference if the violence failed to kill a large fraction of group B? Would it make any difference if group B’s retaliation killed a significant portion of group A?
And what if it were the other way around?
[I know more or less what the UN Convention on same says; I’m wondering whether it’s in accord with people’s intuitive feelings on the matter.]
Jesurgislac: You’ve bowed out of the conversation, so it’s not really fair to respond. That said, I drafted a response anyway… but since it clocked in at about five pages I decided it would be probably better left unposted. [Anything that long probably isn’t blogworthy; email me if you want a copy, though I suspect it’s not worth it.] I’ll satisfy myself with this one remark and then withdraw:
Anarch equally won’t convince me that genocide isn’t genocide even if there isn’t documentation.
I’m not trying to; truth is what it is extrinsic to our attempts at proof. I’m trying to convince you that you’re begging the question into oblivion by assuming a priori that what happened was genocide (that somehow managed to be perpetrated without evidence of same) and that, absent more compelling evidence, you’re asserting something tantamount to an article of faith. That’s fine as far as it goes… but it only goes as far as your beliefs, and not a whole lot further.
This is probably just a mess of semantic hogwash — it’s not like we’re disagreeing on the core facts or, really, the moral valuation — so I’ll withdraw from the public discussion. My email address is functional (though rarely-checked) if you want to continue the discussion privately.
10 yard penalty for mind reading.
As an old CO of mine used to say, ‘It ain’t bragging if you can back it up.’
One need only visit Tech Central Station or various blogs of keyboard warriors to find numerous instances of claims the Lancet survey was ‘timed’ to affect elections. The usual suspects are included: LGF, Roger Simon, Red State, the cretins at the Corner, etc.
“This is still another canard; the study makes clear what the findings were and weren’t. The study also makes clear the limitations and difficulties of their survey.”
Except the did not. Lancet on its own website and in its hyping of its own report said that it measured excess civilian deaths at the 100,000 level when in fact it did not measure CIVILIAN deaths and did not have a high confidence interval for the 100,000 number. Which is why the study has the appearance of being politically motivated. The scientists knew full well tht they did not measure CIVILIAN deaths, but they reported it as CIVILIAN deaths in their press releases. Normally such a mistake/misdirection is because of confusion on the reporter’s part. That was not the case with this study. The releases to the press touted the study misleadingly. Annoyingly, lancet has removed its press releases on the paper.
Slarti: Gosh, did I say refuted? Silly me.
You said “slain”. Did you mean something other than “refuted” when you said “slain”? If so, please explain what you meant. You couldn’t have meant literally slain, since a scientific study cannot be physically killed: it can only be refuted, or superceded by a more accurate study. (Or, of course, attacked on the grounds of politics or religion.)
Ah, the mud-slinging resumes. Really, one might suspect that mud is the only weapon at hand.
Really? You linked to a number of sites which you claimed had “slain” the Lancet study: but none of those sites provided a scientific refutation of the study, and all of them were clearly politically biased against the results of the study. You are, with respect to the Lancet study, taking the side of politics against science. How is it “mud-slinging” to point this out?
Sebastian: Which is why the study has the appearance of being politically motivated.
The attacks on the study certainly have the appearance of being politically motivated; the study itself does not: the press releases apparently showed some confusion between the 100 000 figure showing total civilian deaths and total Iraqi deaths, but the study itself does not.
Anarch: My email address is functional (though rarely-checked) if you want to continue the discussion privately.
No thanks. I think we’ve gone through it enough: I thank you for your courtesy, making it an interesting discussion even though we have such different viewpoints.
Lancet on its own website and in its hyping of its own report said that it measured excess civilian deaths at the 100,000 level when in fact it did not measure CIVILIAN deaths and did not have a high confidence interval for the 100,000 number. Which is why the study has the appearance of being politically motivated.
A useful clue that will serve you well in this instance–as well as others–is to read the report or study in question. Don’t go by what newspapers or Rush Limbaugh or LGF tells you; go directly to the source material.
Jade,
You have condemned all liberals as being left wing nuts by your own logic.
Good work!
If I were the author of an important high-profile paper (say, measuring the mass of the tau neutrino) I would be more than incensed and embarrassed if the press release and my lab misreported my central result. However, I’d still assert the validity of my work and would insist that sceptics address my data and analysis.
Anarch, thank you, I like a thoughtful reply, and while I suspect that preserving the specificity and utility of inflammatory terms is a lost cause in this Orwellian age, I would like to say that this pretty much sums up my position as well:
Not everything monstrous needs to be deemed a “genocide” [or an ethinic cleansing or whatever] in order to remain monstrous, and I’d rather the term kept its specificity and thus its utility.
I think that’s the bottom line. My preference just isn’t as strong as yours, because I think most people feel that if you can deny that it is/was genocide (or whatever), that magically makes it okay. viz Sudan.
I have no particular interest in getting into the larger topic of our treatment of Native Americans, largely for lack of detailed knowledge. One point, though: I do not think that the fact that they are absent proves a lot by itself. While there were the aforementioned two episodes involving attempts to infect Native Americans with smallpox, a huge amount of death was the result of inadvertently exposing them to diseases they had never previously encountered, and to which they had no resistance. In New England, for instance, I’ve seen estimates (in scholarly books; if anyone wants I’ll try to find them) that over 90% of the aboriginal population died in epidemics of European diseases.
This is not meant as in any way a defense of our conduct towards Native Americans; just a (horrible) historical point about why the fact that really huge numbers of people are missing doesn’t necessarily imply that they were killed.
Just to recap and update the conservative MO on scientific studies that don’t conform to the partyline:
1. Attack, attack, attack. The substance and merit of these attacks don’t matter. The objective is to get a lot of criticism out there, hoping something might stick. Quantity, not quality, is key; more smoke, people will assume there’s a fire.
2. See 1.
3. After debunking efforts have failed based on sloppy or nonexistent understanding of epidemiology, statistics, and basic math, misrepresent the study. Assert it hasn’t proven something never examined in the study.
4. Proclaim author bias or political motivation; preferably both.
5. Assert study means nothing anyway.
Sebastian: …and in its hyping of [Lancet’s] own report… …but [the scientists] reported it as CIVILIAN deaths in their press releases [sic].
As a purely practical matter maybe you should get your characters straight before you start feeding them their lines. Popping down to the nearest university library and taking a quick look at the magazine which is causing you all this grief might be good too.
AFAICT none of the “scientists”* to whom you refer wrote the press release, and the report which resulted from their study was not, by any normal definition, “Lancet’s” report. A PR flack at Johns Hopkins (possibly Tim Parsons?) wrote the press release (there was only one AFAIK); Lancet published the study (something they do from time to time), and I believe they drew from the press release as well, but had nothing to do with the creation of either.
I may be mistaken about whether anybody at Lancet, independently of the JHSPH press release, used “civilian deaths” in place of “excess deaths.” But I’ve seen no evidence that that’s the case, so I’m reserving judgment.
If you’re going to insist on crossed Is and dotted Ts and scientifickal distinctions, could you at least take a few minutes to inform yourself about the difference between authors, publishers, and media contacts? Maybe even investigate the mechanics of “peer reviewed publication” while you’re at it…
Then maybe you can explain how to get a “confidence interval” for a particular value. I’m no statistician, but I had previously assumed that a confidence interval must necessarily refer to a range of values.
* For the record, there’s no doubt in my mind that the study was both submitted early and published early in an effort to undermine Bush’s election prospects. That’s a separate issue from the matter of its content, but if anybody thinks they can build a case against this particular early release without simultaneously indicting other timed releases they would prefer to defend, then I’d really love to hear it.
Jade,
“Attack, attack, attack.”
Your analysis of conservatives is so impressive. It must have been keen analytical abilities like this that won you guys the election.
Slartibartfast: “this study is so completely out of bed with previous estimates that the discrepancy is going to need a whole lot more explanation than The Lancet’s provided to date.”
As the “various bits over at Crooked Timber” make perfectly clear, there is no discrepancy to be explained.
Have you managed to compose an explanation of why “reliance on a symmetric distributon” is a problem?
The confidence interval is typically about the parameter that’s being calculated; in this case, the most likely parameter (one that makes sense in this context) is the expected value. So, when reporting on said parameter, you’re going to place some confidence interval about the calculation to reflect your uncertainty in the calculation. For tallies of deaths, then, a confidence interval is going to be between some positive (or zero) number and some larger positive number, and the calculation will be bracketed somewhere in between. In this case, what this means is that the study represents that excess deaths due to the war fall somewhere between 8,000 and 196,000 (with 95% confidence). Either JH or Lancet decided to place the expected value at 98k deaths, for reasons not disclosed. I’d thought their estimate was squarely in the center of the range, which is why I brought up distribution to begin with. Davies seems to imply that he thinks the distribution is symmetric, only he doesn’t say why that is, either. And the number of hoops he jumps through to diamond-stamp the prewar infant mortality figures the study used is…well, maybe he has a career waiting for him in the circus.
Unfortunately, Lancet seems to be unable to serve up the article, for at least a few days now. The article also appears to be unavailable anywhere on Johns Hopkins sites.
Oh, and just for the record, “slain” was used in the same vein as Daniel used it. For ironic effect, dontcha know.
hilzoy: This is not meant as in any way a defense of our conduct towards Native Americans; just a (horrible) historical point about why the fact that really huge numbers of people are missing doesn’t necessarily imply that they were killed.
In my unsent post to Jes, I actually made a list of massive disappearances of cultures throughout history. I’ve since deleted it, but it included the Harappans, the Hittites (borderline; the Achaeans probably nabbed’em), the Minoans and the central-European Celts. There really aren’t any equivalent disappearances in modern Eurasiafrican* history, in large part because of a) the tremendous advances in sanitation technologies, b) population densities, and c) geographic continuity implies a natural spread of diseases and thus immunities.
Put another way, by about 100 AD there really wasn’t any way of killing large numbers of people in Eurasiafrica other than, well, massacring them. The two major exceptions — the plague that brought down the last of the Western Roman Empire c. 600 AD and the Black Death — were horrific (and killed far, far more people than died in North America) but, because of the vastly greater population and the natural immunities, left enough people standing to continue “Europe” unabated.
[The same is true of why cholera, for example, didn’t annihilate Europe. It was killing ridiculously high numbers of people in Europe, probably one of the top five killers of all time (along with plague, smallpox and influenza) due to the high population density, but due to the vastly greater population of Europe a large number of people survived and promulgated their immunities.]
* Yes, I just made that up. I hope.
Slarti: Davies seems to imply that he thinks the distribution is symmetric, only he doesn’t say why that is, either.
At my (statistical) layman’s guess without having read the paper: Central Limit Theorem, most likely. I’d certainly assume that any reasonable sampling process should produce a near-symmetrically distributed confidence interval for that reason; any stat-head should feel free to correct me.
Also, I’ve never seen any paper in which the CI was something like [10, 25] with expected value 12; are you expecting something like that here and, if so, why?
Only if you’re sampling random variables from different distributions, Anarch. If you’re sampling a single distribution, what you get is, eventually, that distribution.
“Either JH or Lancet decided to place the expected value at 98k deaths, for reasons not disclosed.”
98K was the value calculated from the data obtained. The 95% confidence intervals were then calculated from that number, the sample size, etc. Although the calculated confidence interval goes down to 8000, it is possible to say with certainty that the lowest possible real value for excess deaths is a bit over 14,000. I say this because Iraq body count has documented 14K deaths, setting a hard lower limit on the range. Additionally, because Iraq body count’s system is a passive surveillance system, it is expected to be falsely low. In cases where passive versus active surveillance systems have been evaluated, it has been found that passive systems may pick up as few as 5% of all cases (ie, if the number documented by Iraq body count is 14,000, the true value might be 280,000–even higher than the higher end of the confidence interval in the Lancet article, which does use a method prone to underestimates and leaves out the deaths in Falluja.) If you read the Iraq body count web site carefully, you will find that they acknowledge this problem and that they are almost certainly undercounting.
Only if you’re sampling random variables from different distributions, Anarch. If you’re sampling a single distribution, what you get is, eventually, that distribution.
If you’re sampling the distribution straight up, yes; that’s essentially Monte Carlo integration. If you’re doing looking at some kind of “average” sample, then no; CLT says that (for large numbers) the distributions will be normal, irrespective of the original distribution(s), provided the variables in question are independent. See, e.g, here.
I think, although I don’t know for certain, that the CLT usually applies to error estimates since you end up looking at an “average” aggregate error. Could well be wrong, though.
Either JH or Lancet decided to place the expected value at 98k deaths, for reasons not disclosed. I’d thought their estimate was squarely in the center of the range, which is why I brought up distribution to begin with. Davies seems to imply that he thinks the distribution is symmetric, only he doesn’t say why that is, either.
Actually, Davies does address this. He calls it, rightfully so, an attempt to ‘mislead with statistics:’
This is not to say the distribution could not be asymmetrical. After all, the use of cluster sampling is prone to asymmetry. However, the authors of the Lancet study took several reasonable steps to mitigate possible over-estimation: 1. a large CI; and 2. they excluded perhaps the most violent outlier: the Anbar Governorate, which includes Falluja, Ramadi, and other violent areas. The authors also included Kurdish areas where insurgency is and has been nonexistent.
And the number of hoops he jumps through to diamond-stamp the prewar infant mortality figures the study used is…well, maybe he has a career waiting for him in the circus.
Mind you, Davies is responding to some of the more erroneous and false claims attacking the prewar infant mortality figures. To pretend otherwise is, well, to drive the funny little car with 12 of your funny friends around the three rings.
This assumes that Iraq body count is itself an accurate representation of deaths as a result of war.
Depends on your expectations. The key thing to know about both of these studies is they don’t distinguish at all between civilians killed by insurgents and civilians killed by U.S. troops. For all we know, it may even include insurgents killed by U.S. troops.
Then again, it might be 8,000. You’d have to make a good case for either number for me to believe it. You’d have to make a really, really good case for your number in order for me to give the notion that we’ve killed over one percent of Iraq’s population any consideration.
Slartibartfast,
I second what Anarch says about the CLT. You seem to be confusing the underlying distribution (which may indeed have chronic skewness, kurtosis and so forth), from which a sample is taken with the distribution of the estimator (which in most cases should be approximately normal and centred on the parameter being estimated). In this case crude mortality rate is estimated at 5.0 pre-war and 7.9 post-war. The 95% CIs quoted for these are symmetric. The reason for skewed CIs for relative risk of death (and hence excess deaths) is probably just the fact that a log-linear regression was used to estimate the relative risk. There may be other complications arising from the fact that the study uses cluster sampling and adjusts for the bias this creates; or maybe not: that’s not familiar territory for me.
As the study points out, similar surveys have tended to under-report infant mortality. Davies drew attention to the fact that the study says this; hardly an indication of a taste for gymnastics. That applies to both pre- and post-war figures. Maybe surveys impart a bias to the relative risk figure for infants and maybe that bias is upward. Then again maybe not.
“The key thing to know about both of these studies is they don’t distinguish at all between civilians killed by insurgents and civilians killed by U.S. troops.”
Untrue. Will you please read the Lancet study before pontificating further?
From the Lancet report: “Table 2 includes 12 violent deaths not attributed to coalition forces, including 11 men and one woman. Of these, two were attributed to anti-coalition forces, two were of unknown origin, seven were criminal murders, and one was from the previous regime during the invasion.”
However: “When violent deaths were attributed to a faction in the conflict or to criminal forces, no further investigation into the death was made to respect the privacy of the family and for the safety of the interviewers.”
Other relevant remarks include:
“Many of the Iraqis reportedly killed by US forces could have been combatants. 28 of 61 killings (46%) attributed to US forces involved men age 15–60 years, 28 (46%) were children younger than 15 years, four (7%) were women, and one was an elderly man. It is not clear if the greater number of male deaths was attributable to legitimate targeting of combatants who may have been disproportionately male, or if this was because men are more often in public and more likely to be exposed to danger. For example, seven of 12 (58%) vehicle accident related fatalities involved men between 15 and 60 years of age.”
“Of the 28 children killed by coalition forces (median age 8 years), ten were girls, 16 were boys, and two were infants (sex was not recorded). Aside from a 14-year old boy, all these deaths were children 12 years or younger.”
The rest of the report is also worth reading.
slarti: Iraq body count’s number is, as the name implies, a simple counting of each civilian death reported in the media. The site only lists deaths confirmed by two independent sources. Frequently, they give the names and other details about the dead. There is no way that they could be overcounting. The minimum number of civilian dead can not be less than 14,000. To say that it is is to deny a well documented reality and withdraw all intellectual honesty.
A simple google or medline search (or a quick look at a biostatistics book) will show that any passive surveillance method will undercount, usually by a substantial margin. Even in cases where a passive surveillance system should work very well, such as documentation of “reportable diseases” in US hospitals, for which there is a complicated protocol designed to ensure that the reporting happens, there is a 25% undercount. Of course, the situation in Iraq makes it much harder for a passive surveillance system to work: if a person is hit by shrapnel and dies, who is there to report the incident to? The US is bombing and taking over hospitals and they have made it clear that they don’t want to hear about civilian casualties. 5% is an optimistic estimate.
Finally, there is the New England Journal study that no one seems to want to discuss. In this study, a members of a unit returning from Iraq was asked, among other things, whether they had killed a civilian. 14% of a non-Marine unit and 28% of Marines said yes. (In contrast, only 1% of military personnel returning from Afghanistan said yes to this question.) How many military personnel have been through Iraq? I don’t know the actual number, but I think there are about 150,000 there now, so the number must be at least 150K. That puts the minimum number of civilians killed by US military personnel at 21,000. Since this survey relied on self-report, and self-report of a shameful act, it is also almost certainly an undercount.
The number is not 8000. It is not even 14,000. I think a reasonable case could be made for as few as 20,000, but the true number is almost certainly higher. You can deny this if it makes you feel better about the war, but it won’t bring any of those killed by US bombs back to life.
An interesting analysis of the Lancet article from a pro-war newspaper: http://economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3352814
Who killed them? Iraqbodycount doesn’t know, either.
Following your lead, though, I read a little more about them, until I got to this:
If you think Herold’s work was valid, I can see how this sort of thing would appeal to you.
Because it doesn’t tell us anything. It certainly doesn’t tell us how to extrapolate, say, the reporting of being responsible for the death of a noncombatant into how many noncombatants were killed. If your unit directed fire into an area where civilians were killed, would you report “yes” if you didn’t actually draw a bead and fire at a noncombatant, or would you report “yes” if there was some uncertainty as to exactly whose actions killed the civilian? No answer. How much combat experience did the 1st EMF see, versus the average? No answer.
This you know for a fact, but seem unable to tell us exactly how you know. Actually, I’m pretty convinced that 8k is unreasonably low, but having seen little evidence that allows a lower end to be put forth with any degree of confidence, I’m not going to wave my flag for that number versus another number. Certainly, I’m not going to take the word of a website that proudly marches in the footsteps of Marc Herold, or that (for example) uses Commondreams.org as a source of information.
I like their conclusions, Dianne. It’s really the only way to settle the various objections to the JH study.
Slarti: Oh, and just for the record, “slain” was used in the same vein as Daniel used it. For ironic effect, dontcha know.
Which Daniel? Drezner? Davies? The one in the lion’s den?
Seriously: I assumed when you said that the Lancet study had been “slain”, you meant that you thought it had been refuted. You’ve explicitly denied this, so you don’t think it has been refuted – right?
Can you just tell me, directly, without reference to “Daniel”, what you meant when you claimed the Lancet study had been “slain”?
Slarti: I like their conclusions, Dianne. It’s really the only way to settle the various objections to the JH study.
Duplicating the Lancet study on a larger scale will not settle the objections of the pro-war people attacking the Lancet study for political reasons: rather, it will increase them, because it will make more solid their reasons for objecting to the results of the Lancet study – that a hell of a lot of Iraqis have been killed by the US occupation of Iraq. As Dianne points out, the number can’t be lower than 14 000: there is good reason to suppose it’s higher than 20 000: as the Economist analysis points out, “The farther one goes from 98,000, the less likely the figure is”. Yet the political attacks you linked to, which you claimed “slew” the Lancet study, made nonsense of the figure 98 000 because it was so high, and wanted to believe it was much lower.
IraqBodyCount will find themselves strangely popular among the pro-war crowd: 14 000 is so much more acceptable a figure to believe in than 98 000…
“If you think Herold’s work was valid”
I really don’t know anything about Herold’s work, I must admit. However, I think the methodology outlined– ie counting only reports from mainstream media (the only possible “questionable” source they use is al Jazeera…well, they use Fox too, but they’d be biased in the other direction) and a few NGOs, adding to the database only when the accounts are confirmed by at least two sources and fact checked by three members of the group– is sound, however objectionable you find their co-investigator. Can you explain how they could be overcounting using this method?
BTW: Having now googled Marc Herold, I see that he has been published in peer reviewed journals. Not that that makes him necessarily right or trustworthy, but he does seem to be able to at least occasionally convince experts in his field that he knows what he’s talking about.
Oooh, telepathy and precognition in one post. Well, this is yet another issue that can be settled by the acquisition of more data. Sounds like you’re opposed to that, though.
Daniel is Daniel Davies, the author of the Crooked Timber post I was referring to. Sorry if that was unclear.
Well, this is yet another issue that can be settled by the acquisition of more data.
The Lancet study represented the acquisition of more data – yet it was attacked on political grounds because the data acquired wasn’t what was wanted.
Sounds like you’re opposed to that, though.
Oh really? Yet I’m not the one who has been presenting political attacks on the acquisition of data that wasn’t the right data. The attacks on the Lancet study had no valid objection to make to how the data had been acquired: they didn’t like the data. I conclude, since I see no reason not to believe that the figures in the Lancet study are accurate, that an even more accurate study with harder data will be the target of even more vicious attacks.
Daniel is Daniel Davies, the author of the Crooked Timber post I was referring to. Sorry if that was unclear.
Thanks for clearing that up. Now would you care to explain what you meant by “slain”?
No, it was attacked because the data acquired was insufficient to determine civilian casualties to within an order of magnitude. There were also some liberties taken with prewar data that have still not been justified, and that got past the peer-review process, as things occasionally do.
Me, either. So we’ve got that in common.
No, you’ve somehow failed to understand what the reaction has been. The criticism has been that the data isn’t sufficient to form any conclusion. Don’t you agree that if over 200k civilians have been killed in Iraq, that we ought to know, as soon as is possible? Or that if the number is more like 20k, we ought to cease hyperventilating about nearly 300k casualties as soon as possible?
No, actually. If you don’t get what he meant by “slaughtered”, you’re not going to get “slain”. If you do, no explanation is necessary.
The criticism has been that the data isn’t sufficient to form any conclusion.
Well, that’s certainly an… interesting definition of “slain”, which I will bear in mind when exchanging comments with you in the future, because I tend to think of “slain” as most commonly having the first two meanings:
1. To kill violently.
2. past tense and past participle often slayed Slang. To overwhelm, as with laughter or love: Those old jokes still slay me.
3. To claim that the data isn’t sufficient to form any conclusion.