by liberal japonicus
This seems like good fodder for your weekend open thread (Don't worry, the picture heading the article isn't actually related to the content) and I love the phrase 'Peak Burger'.
Japanese will often ask what food I miss the most, which is always a tough question to answer, but the food I've often used is the hamburger from the days where my dad would cook them on the weekend. So an open thread for your thoughts on burgers, your thoughts on comfort food, or anything else that strikes your fancy.
Actually, I suspect what I would miss most is pizza. Partly because I have it more often that burgers. But mostly because, when I do have hamburgers, I generally fix them myself rather than going out.
I enjoy burgers, but wouldn’t have said that I love them. But you’re right… hot off the backyard grill, they’re the definition of summer. I’d miss them quickly.
On burgers, I’d highly recommend adding some shredded bacon into the patties themselves. Keeps them super moist and helps them stick together.
It’s similar to adding bacon to a burger, but since the bacon never chars, you get a different flavor.
Some crumbled bleu cheese in the mix adds a little something, too.
On comfort food, I’d agree with wj. Pizza. I eat far too much of it and quickly get a craving if I haven’t had it for a week or so.
Pizza and a pint. It’s the perfect end to any day.
for burgers, i recommend mixing up a batch of what you’d make if you were making meat loaf, but then make patties and grill it.
outta sight.
While I really like pizza and burgers, my soul-warming item is a good hot dog. Regrettably, I think they are quite far from being desirable elements of even a modestly healthy diet.
my favorite burger is 1/2 beef, 1/2 lamb.
for food I’d miss if I lived in another country, I’d say fried chicken.
it’s hard enough – way hard enough, now that bob the chef’s is gone – to find good fried chicken in new england, let alone in other countries.
I miss hanging out with my old man’s GA family, those folks surely knew how to eat.
When I’ve lived overseas, I’ve never found there to be any American food that I’ve missed. When I’ve sojourned in vegetarianism, it’s always been sushi and pepperoni. Which is interesting, because those were things I was doing without while living overseas. Presence makes the heart grow fonder, I suppose.
But we’re not prosecuting anybody, because that would be worse:
“We tortured some folks,” Obama said at a televised news conference at the White House. “We did some things that were contrary to our values.”
But hey, he has confidence in his rather truth-averse CIA director. Whee!
any chance they don’t think the legal argument is a sure thing, so they’re opting to skip the drama ?
Could be. They’d have a large hill to climb for anyone acting within the scope of the OLC opinion. But the senate report (supposedly) says CIA folk went beyond that. And lied about what was going on and its efficacy. What does the CIA have to do to be prosecuted?
What does the CIA have to do to be prosecuted?
Surrender their copies of the incriminating photographic negatives.
Or, nowadays, emails and selfies.
When I’ve lived overseas, I’ve never found there to be any American food that I’ve missed
Key lime pie from the bakery in Capitola.
Never quite been able to replicate it.
Why would you miss burgers when you can make them yourself? Don’t they sell ground beef in Japan?
I would miss pizza if I couldn’t have it, but since I finally learned the secret of making it at home (baking steel), I’m good anywhere that sells mozzarella cheese – everything else is easy to do from scratch.
Why would you miss burgers when you can make them yourself? Don’t they sell ground beef in Japan?
Finding decent buns, Bermuda onions (god, I love those on a burger) and firing up a bbq is all a little difficult here. (I have this memory of the first time I came to live in Japan and thought that I had found hamburger buns, brought them home with visions of burgers in my head and finding they were filled in anko paste)
I’ve got friends who regularly bbq here, but it takes on the air of ‘things that ex-pats do’ which is a vibe I try to avoid.
N Carolina pork BBQ.
So you can’t get ground cow in Japan? Or cow meat – you can grind it yourself with various appliances. A hibachi is very good for grilling burgers. Try some other Japanese veggies rather than onions – that would be interesting.
Obama’s press conference
He keeps talking about Israel’s right to defend itself and mentions the Palestinian right to live a decent life. Of course what that means is that Gazans in particular live in a prison and we were fine with that until this war broke out and Hamas made it a front page issue. He forgot to mention that the prison guards sometimes shoot at the civilian inmates–i.e., the IDF shoots innocent Palestinans. It might suggest interesting questions regarding symmetry and self defense rights. Of course this isn’t his fault and I’m not even being sarcastic. There’s hardly a Democrat in DC who’d back him up if he said anything like this and Netanyahu would call him up and read him the riot act.
April HRW report
Obama has sympathy for the patriotic folks who were torturers, and expresses the pious hope that we never do this again. In other words, it’s a mistake, not a crime, and people make mistakes under intense pressure. Gee that’s good to know–people who are under intense pressure get a pass for committing war crimes. Someone phone Hamas. Don’t bother phoning Tel Aviv–it’s understood already.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get a decent burrito in central Italy? Or even to find the ingredients for one?
As for BBQ in Japan: one of the problems is that ground beef is very expensive.
OTOH, the yakisoba is much, much better.
Could be Obama is also afraid and/or complicit.
http://m.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/does-john-brennan-know-too-much-to-be-fired-by-barack-obama/375431/
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2014_08/its_not_easy_to_hold_the_cia_a051481.php?fb_action_ids=10154498688650121&fb_action_types=og.likes
From the Atlantic article:
“There’s inevitably a need to review the job performance of people party to these secrets. They typically keep their jobs. So George W. Bush left us a CIA staffed partly with people willing to torture, and Obama will likely leave us with a CIA that includes torturers, people willing to kill American citizens in secret without due process, and people willing to spy on their Senate overseers. The Senate intelligence committee was established precisely to stop this sort of thing from playing out, but it is failing in its duties, as yesterday’s crimes spawn today’s efforts to spin or suppress those crimes. If the Senate doesn’t act now to rein in the CIA, what will it take?”
who would be prosecuted?
the people who asked lawyers to outline what was legal and what wasn’t? the lawyers who told their employers that these kinds of torture were OK? the people who followed the lawyers’ legal guidance?
Could be Obama is also afraid and/or complicit.
afraid? doesn’t seem likely.
complicit? are we talking about torture, or are we talking about drones? Friedersdorf cleverly tries to conflate the two.
Why am I put in mind of the way that J. Edgar Hoover stayed in office so long because he had dirt on every politician in government?
Especially with all the information NSA has been collecting, it doesn’t seem impossible that the CIA could be doing something similar….
Is it really that easy to commit a felony and escape prosecution? Just ask a lawyer who tells you it’s legal to torture someone and nobody is guilty? I’m not snarking or making a bitter observation about American impunity. But if that’s the sort of argument people can make–A asked lawyer B if action X was legal and B said yes, what couldn’t you do given that B says yes?
The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers 😉
Seriously, if the whole torture mess should ever be dealt with legally, then Yoo and Bybee must be among the first to be hold responsible and to the full degree. The mutual protection of shyster (I only gave a legal opinion) and criminal client (I only followed my lawyer’s advice) is maybe the most pernicious part of this case.
Hartmut, that is why Yoo was advised, before Bush even left office, to not travel overseas, lest he be arrested for war crimes as a result of the legal memo he wrote on torture. (He is reported to have looked shocked at the realization that his actions might have consequences for him.)
Rumsfeld too insisted on a guarantee of free conduct for a NATO conference in Europe while he was still in office. Unfortunately, being limited to ‘just’ the US is not much of a restriction. And he probably still has enough of personal protection not to have to fear the fate of Talaat Pasha.
But if that’s the sort of argument people can make–A asked lawyer B if action X was legal and B said yes, what couldn’t you do given that B says yes?
that’s not an argument i’m making. those aren’t rhetorical questions.
Donald,
But if that’s the sort of argument people can make–A asked lawyer B if action X was legal and B said yes, what couldn’t you do given that B says yes?
My own non-lawyer understanding is that “I acted on advice of counsel” is not a perfect defense. It’s helpful in ambiguous borderline situations, but a lawyer’s memo is far from absolute protection.
I’ve seen this arise in a white-collar case where the matter really was unclear, and it kept things at the civil, as opposed to criminal, level.
Maybe McKinney or some other commenter who knows a lot more than I do could weigh in.
byomtov, your analysis seems correct to me.
Just ask a lawyer who tells you it’s legal to torture someone and nobody is guilty
Lawyers didn’t tell anyone that it was legal to torture. They stated that the activities in question were not torture. The legal opinion was, IMO, invalid and unethical, but since the issue in the context it was presented had never been litigated, the idea that the “torturers” would be held criminally liable (in a prosecution which would require proof of criminal intent), after being advised that their actions would be lawful, is very uncertain. If people have the right to engage in certain coercive acts under particular situations in order to obtain information from a prisoner, and they are told by a lawyer that other coercive acts are also allowed, it’s not as clear-cut as if a lawyer says, “Sure, go ahead, torture!” which is advice that would not exonerate anyone.
That still sounds like an ambiguity one could use to do anything. It’s really not that difficult to understand that waterboarding is torture–I assume that’s part of what we’re talking about, though I’ve now forgotten which techniques were approved. Waterboarding was always seen as torture. So it’s bizarre that if someone says “No, waterboarding isn’t torture”, people can go ahead and waterboard and everything is fine. There’s really no limit to this. Many Americans (judging from what I see on Gaza comment threads) think that you can use as much force as you want in war–if the other guy started it (and nevermind who started Gaza), then you get to finish it. I’m sure some lawyers could be found who could interpret the laws of war in a very elastic fashion to allow the leveling of whole neighborhoods based on the presence of a few snipers.
For Gaza comparing purposes I was looking at Neil Sheehan’s 1971 NYT Book Review piece on war crimes in Vietnam.
link
Here’s a relevant quote–
“Hoopes argued that since the President is elected, since the war was prosecuted from well-meaning if mistaken motives, since Congress voted the funds and there was broad public support at the outset, no official should acquire criminal liability. Judgment, he said, should be confined to voting the Government out of office. Attacking this position in his introduction to the Russell Tribunal proceedings, Noam Chomsky of M.I.T. states that Hoopes is claiming an immunity for American leaders which this country denied to the leaders of Japan and Germany. Marcus Raskin, co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, the think-tank of the New Left, asserts that Congress cannot be held responsible as a body because many Congressmen voted funds merely to ensure that American soldiers had the means to defend themselves. Telford Taylor, a mugwump Democrat, remarks that though good intentions may be mitigating circumstances, they do not negate the fact of a crime, if one occurred.
Taken to its logical end, the Hoopes argument also means that all Americans were responsible for the actual conduct of the war. If so, then the adult majorities of Japan and Germany should have been punished for war crimes. They applauded the beginning of World War II. And if everyone is responsible, of course no one is responsible. The Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals rejected Hoopes’s argument by making a distinction between those in the audience and those who held power, as do the laws of war. The Army Manual denies a collective copout: “The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a war crime acted as the head of a State or as a responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility for his act.”
I know how people feel about Andrew Sullivan around here and with good reason. But I find he’s usually worth reading these days. Still want to strangle him occasionally. But he is very good on this torture piece today–
link
Either the rule of law applies to the CIA or it doesn’t. And it’s now absolutely clear that it doesn’t.
Sullivan’s not my favorite guy, but I have the same take-away as he does in this case.
Sullivan after the part russell quotes above:
The agency can lie to the public; it can spy on the Senate; it can destroy the evidence of its war crimes; it can lie to its superiors about its torture techniques; it can lie about the results of those techniques. No one will ever be held to account. It is inconceivable that the United States would take this permissive position on torture with any other country or regime. Inconceivable. And so the giant and massive hypocrisy of this country on core human rights is now exposed for good and all. The Bush administration set the precedent for the authorization of torture. The Obama administration has set the precedent for its complete impunity.
America has killed the Geneva Conventions just as surely as America made them.
It is inconceivable that the United States would take this permissive position on torture with any other country or regime. Inconceivable.
I understand Sullivan’s rhetorical move (“we used to be not like that and now we are”) but I’m not sure I agree. First of all, we’ve taken a permissive position on torture for any number of our allies and actually have outsourced some of this to them, using black sites. Even earlier, we supported several governments that used torture. I suppose the argument might be made that this was before the UN Convention on torture (1984), though that’s parsing things a bit fine.
But second, it seems to miss the connection between our regime of domestic prisons and what has happened overseas. I believe that the pictures are from the Lynndie English/Charles Graner trials, and it was noted by several that many in that unit, including Graner, were reservists whose regular job was as a prison guard.
This is on my mind because of John Oliver’s recent segment on the problem on Last Week Tonight. If that rhetoric is useful, that’s fine, but I’m not sure that it really homes in on what is really happening: That we are more and more able to treat people who are perceived to be some threat to us in a way that is more and more inhuman.
it can lie to its superiors about its torture techniques; it can lie about the results of those techniques. No one will ever be held to account.
I question Sullivan’s assertion that “lying” to superiors, or “lying” period, is relevant to the torture discussion. Torture was an open “secret” during the Bush administration, and Bush was reelected. The torturers had the votes.
That we are more and more able to treat people who are perceived to be some threat to us in a way that is more and more inhuman.
The evidence of history – and prehistory, as the following three archaeological stories from the last month suggest:
http://phys.org/news/2014-08-violent-era-ancient-southwest.html
http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/07/2014/findings-indicate-ritual-destruction-of-iron-age-warriors
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/worlds-first-race-war-revealed-13000-year-old-skeletons-1456584
– strongly supports the view that treating people in this way is every bit as ‘human’ as traits such as empathy.
Civilisation is very much a work in progress.
The torturers had the votes.
and i suspect they would today, too. the people who truly and deeply care about this appear to be in the minority. the notion that “we” are somehow above those who would torture seems incredibly naive.
“Torture was an open “secret” during the Bush administration, and Bush was reelected. The torturers had the votes.”
This is why I quoted the Sheehan piece-my 8:20 comment above. It’s very often true that entire populations or a good chunk or a majority support a government knowing that it is committing atrocities. But we still make a distinction between the population and the officials. The officials are the ones legally responsible.
If you are saying that all hell would break loose if Obama allowed a prosecution of Bush war criminals, that’s true. Certainly they would come after him in every way possible–it would not surprise me if anti-drone activists even found a significant number of alllies among Republican congressmen. But he doesn’t have to endorse the reasoning that they should be allowed to get away with it.
I agree with LJ that US support for torture didn’t begin with Bush–he’s more the President that legalized it for Americans and made the pro-torture stance a mainstream political position.
That we are more and more able to treat people who are perceived to be some threat to us in a way that is more and more inhuman.
Civilisation is very much a work in progress.
The observation about the long history of human brutality is apt.
The particular problem we face, in this country, is that we pay at least lip service to the idea that the state cannot overrun the rights and integrity of those governed. And, that idea is rooted in the idea that the rights of the individual are inherent – endowed by a creator – rather than simply something granted by the state as a matter of noblesse oblige.
So, it would seem, at least in principle, that we would eschew brutality toward folks even if they weren’t American citizens.
A lot that is of great value has, historically, derived from that basis. When we start carving out exceptional cases where extraordinary brutality is acceptable, we undermine that.
endowed by a creator
Unfortunately fewer and fewer people believe in a creator. Fewer thus believe that these rights are anything more than a few men’s ideas of righteousness. Hardly the level of faith and commitment needed to deprive the masses of whatever level of brutality required to keep us safe and them at bay.
It is sometimes amazing to me that people don’t realize the keystone principle in our countries existence is a statement of faith. No one here included.
LJ – re the Sullivan quote. I almost took that sentence out when I posted as it is manifestly untrue. But it serves as a pivot for the sentence beginning “And” and I also felt I couldn’t leave it out without being misleading.
But yes, he’s gone a little nutty on that one.
It is sometimes amazing to me that people don’t realize the keystone principle in our countries existence is a statement of faith.
There are a lot of different kinds of faith. Some of the people who are most brutal are also most passionate about believing in a creator. Some of the people who are most humane believe in the concept of human compassion and justice. Not saying at all that religious people are all brutal, and secular humanists are all kind, but I don’t think that faith in a creator is the linchpin of human rights.
Clinton is apparently attacking Obama– from the right. Well, I’m not a politician, but this doesn’t seem like the best way to wave the progressive banner. But maybe she’s assuming she’s got the nomination sewed up and is going after those centrist independent voters that (whether they exist or not) seem to represent America in the hearts of some pundits.
link
Not saying at all that religious people are all brutal, and secular humanists are all kind, but I don’t think that faith in a creator is the linchpin of human rights.
I wouldn’t say that the belief in a creator is the lynchpin, but it has been the lynchpin in this country as the very basis of all human rights arguments. That these rights are inalienable, why are they? They are endowed. BY a creator. The very faith that is the brunt of many of the histrionic attacks is the bedrock on which the argument is built.
Clinton is apparently attacking Obama– from the right. Well, I’m not a politician, but this doesn’t seem like the best way to wave the progressive banner.
Well, maybe it will open some room for a moderate Democrat to challenge her for the nomination, instead of just someone from well to the left in the party. It would certainly cheer me up to have some better choices than Clinton and Warren on that side. Especially given what appears to be the way the GOP nomination is likely to go.
Maybe McKinney or some other commenter who knows a lot more than I do could weigh in.
I’m not an expert on the law of torture. I’ve read the US statute prohibiting torture and it has a loophole the size of Dallas, i.e. the torturer has to intend to inflict severe physical or mental injury, IIRC. So, if the intent is to secure intelligence essential to protect innocent American citizens, the statute is not implicated, one could plausibly argue.
Torture does violate the UN Convention which we ratified, so it’s a moot point.
What Yoo et al did was write an opinion letter. I write those all the time, but usually on whether there is or is not civil liability, chances on appeal and other mundane stuff. It is rare to get a definitive statement from me or any other lawyer to the effect that X is or is not of specific legal significance or standing IF reasonable minds can disagree.
Bottom line, anyone who opines that waterboarding is not torture, period full stop, is not giving a legal opinion; rather, that is cover. Clearly, there is a counter argument. I can opine that sex with a 16 year old isn’t statutory rape if he/she looks 18 and has a fake ID, but that doesn’t make it the case and acting on my advice would be just really, really stupid.
If I’d been hired to address the issue, and assuming the client wanted a valid legal opinion and not cover for something that was going to happen no matter what, my opinion would be on the lines of “whether waterboarding, sleep deprivation, extreme temperature exposure or cold water immersion is torture is open to debate (this is how lawyer’s avoid telling their clients they are nuts–we act as if there are two sides to the story and then tell them the other side is, sadly, the better side) and there is no guarantee that these activities would not be held to be torture; however, if the circumstances are exigent, and if you go forward on these activities, *and* if charges are brought, the defense would be ‘necessity'” and I would go on to lay out the defense. Cold blooded? Sure. But, ask a lawyer for a legal analysis, that is what you get. Also, I would qualify the shit out of my opinion, as would any competent lawyer. Finally, I would recommend, in this specific instance, that all downstream employees ordered to do the dirty work be given a presidential pardon and that the senior administrative official ordering the conduct be prepared to take responsibility.
I can, and have, made the argument for an ‘exigent circumstances’ use of some torture techniques. It is a fact that soldiers in the field have gotten nasty to get information they needed in a big way with no time to be nice about it. This goes way back in history. It isn’t right, of course, but it’s like a lot of other things–it’s really easy to second guess from a safe distance and with no skin in the game.
Leaving the religious and/or theistic question aside, it seems to me that the assertion of inherent human rights found in the Declaration is basically axiomatic.
It’s a reality that is held to be, and asserted to be, self-evident. And then, a lot of stuff flows from that.
So, certainly a statement of faith in something, even if not a god in the traditional theistic sense. If nothing else, an affirmation of human dignity and value, independent of and prior to whatever political institutions are in effect.
Not everyone in the world, or in history, is on board with that, and even in this country we haven’t been on board with that for all folks at all time.
But IMO that assertion is the distinct contribution that we’ve made, as a nation and a people (to the degree that we can be considered “a people”) to the overall discussion of what human political life should be.
“Well, maybe it will open some room for a moderate Democrat to challenge”
Wouldn’t Clinton be who you’d want? Or is it the baggage that she carries? Clinton fatigue? (I can see that.) Or is it that you are a moderate, but don’t like some of her particular positions? The Clintons always seemed to be centrist Democrats to me, for better or worse.
Clinton is apparently attacking Obama– from the right. Well, I’m not a politician, but this doesn’t seem like the best way to wave the progressive banner
should she win, Clinton will disappoint the far left a lot more than Obama has. she’s already to his right on pretty much everything, even though she’s completely free of the need to compromise – she apparently comes to her positions naturally.
I’ve read the US statute prohibiting torture and it has a loophole the size of Dallas, i.e. the torturer has to intend to inflict severe physical or mental injury, IIRC. So, if the intent is to secure intelligence essential to protect innocent American citizens, the statute is not implicated, one could plausibly argue.
Serious question here, and not just looking to start an argument: does the law really typically accept the notion that an individual cannot have multiple intentions? E.g., the alleged torturer foremost intended to obtain intelligence, and therefore cannot be held to have intended to inflict severe mental/physical suffering despite having chosen, planned, and systematized the infliction of such as the means by which the intelligence would be obtained? Does the doctrine of double effect really trump what I’d like to say is common sense?
It would seem more reasonable (yeah, I know, not always the best standard to apply) to assume that the loophole would be if the suffering was inflicted without knowing it would be or was being inflicted; i.e., by accident, and/or more pointedly, without foreknowledge and certainly without systematic planning.
“Clinton will disappoint the far left a lot more than Obama has. ”
I don’t doubt that. I’d still vote for her over the Republican nominee, but would probably have to avoid watching her on TV lest I start shrieking or thinking useless third party thoughts.
Clinton will disappoint the far left a lot more than Obama has.
Although I wish that Clinton’s nomination weren’t a done deal, the Supreme Court is at stake, and we can’t have a Republican choosing another Justice. Never, ever again.
A technical question: Since at the moment likely no candidate could be confirmed to SCOTUS and there seems to be no change incoming (unless Senate and presidency both fall to the Republicans), could a president recess appoint justices or is SCOTUS exempted by law from that? If the blockade became permanent, is there a state where SCOTUS would become legally inoperable due to justices parting (death/retirement/impeachment) or could in theory a single surviving chief justice be SCOTUS?
McK: I’m not an expert on the law of torture. I’ve read the US statute prohibiting torture and it has a loophole the size of Dallas, i.e. the torturer has to intend to inflict severe physical or mental injury, IIRC. So, if the intent is to secure intelligence essential to protect innocent American citizens, the statute is not implicated, one could plausibly argue.
You can’t be serious.
Did you point the gun at him? Yes.
Did you know it was loaded? Yes.
Did you know the ammunition was live? Yes.
Did you pull the trigger? Yes.
Did you know the safety was off? Yes.
Did you intend to shoot him? No. I wanted secure intelligence essential to protect innocent American citizens.
Not torture, case dismissed.
Serious question here, and not just looking to start an argument: does the law really typically accept the notion that an individual cannot have multiple intentions?
A fair question. Keep in mind I’m working from memory of 1st year Crim Law–the Model Penal Code (which is pretty widely accepted as the basis for most state penal codes, or so I am told–it was in Texas FWIW) recognizes 4 levels of mens rea: intent, knowledge, recklessness and negligence. You can ‘know’ something is a by product of an act intended for another purpose without ‘intending’ that byproduct. Ergo, the differences in mens rea levels. If the actor intends to save lives (that’s his argument, not a description of objective reality), and affirmatively intends not to cause physical or mental harm (that is what the jury believes), then the actor walks. I’m not saying a judge dismisses the charges, just that it would be tough to convict. Which, BTW, I think would be the case: as much as many folks would like to see prosecutions, for those who thought the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman verdict was controversial and disappointing, I would expect heads to explode after a bunch of torture acquittals.
You can’t be serious.
Yes, I can. See above. Penal statutes are strictly construed. The US statute–IIRC–is ‘intent’-based, not knowledge based. High end criminal defense lawyers walk clients with a lot less to work with than Defending the Homeland Under Attack. Your second post envisions a dismissal. I didn’t say that. It’s a loophole, not a complete defense. The jury would decide the ‘intent’ issue. Also, if the Feds follow most state laws, ‘necessity’ is an affirmative defense to most criminal prosecutions. “Affirmative defense” meaning the defendant essentially or at least inferentially admits the charge and then proves to the jury’s satisfaction that his/her acts were justified by ‘necessity’ which gets us back to Defending the Homeland Under Attack.
it’s really easy to second guess from a safe distance and with no skin in the game.
First, I would say that in the context we’re talking about “safe distance” and “no skin in the game” did not and do not apply.
The difference between people who used torture, and affirmed the use of torture, and folks who are now (and have been for some time, usually) critical of it is that the folks who decided to use it were in the position if having to decide whether to use it or not.
That’s not the same as “having skin in the game” vs “not having skin in the game”. We all had, and continue to have, skin in the game.
If you travel, fly, spend any time in cities, or did or continue to do any of the very many things that expose you to risk of terror, you have skin in the game.
Unless by “skin in the game” you’re just referring to the ongoing CYA shell game of taking or not taking responsibility for the fact that international laws were broken.
In any case it’s not a peanut gallery discussion we are having. The folks who were killed on 9/11 were, in the main, normal people going about their daily lives.
That’s you and me. On the issue of whether torture should be employed to “keep us safe”, we all have skin in the game.
The duration and systematic nature of the torture program speaks against exigence being the driving factor. At least after the first handful of cases.
What we are discussing is a choice to use methods that were derived from torture training programs (both administering and resisting), methods widely known and considered to be torture, and to do so consistently, with careful monitoring and record-keeping, over months and years.
It was a deliberate and thoughtful decision to use, and justify the use of, torture.
Mr Johnson, I’m with you. I really really wish I wasn’t. But the world persists in not being run according to my preferences.
That’s you and me. On the issue of whether torture should be employed to “keep us safe”, we all have skin in the game.
Yes, in the large sense, since we are/were potential victims, we have skin in the game; however, those who decided to use torture, particularly in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 weren’t so much in the larger class of potential victims, but in the very, very small class of those responsible for finding out if there was a follow on attack scheduled and heading it off. The latter is what I meant by ‘skin in the game.’
Sure, it was deliberate. I didn’t say otherwise. I disagree that hypothetical, potential victim status confers standing to judge those who, as anyone in the administration’s shoes would have to see the world right after 9-11: another mass casualty event, of unknown origin, coming down the pike and who knows how much time there is to prevent it.
We have those who think waterboarding is not torture and is just another tool in the intelligence gathering arsenal. We have others who take a bright line, no-torture-of-any-kind-ever-no-matter-what approach. I am of the latter school of thought except in demonstrably exigent circumstances, but I shy away from second-guessing decisions in the weeks and first few months after 9-11. As time passed, so did the exigency.
It was a deliberate and thoughtful decision to use, and justify the use of, torture.
It was, and there is no excuse for it. But the deliberate and thoughtful decision was made at the highest level of government, and supported by the American people, as shown by the reelection of the administration which authorized it.
I wouldn’t object to a truth and reconciliation commission. But, y’know, we’re not going to prosecute my neighbor who still has a Bush/Cheney sticker on his car, even though he knew, and knows, and voted, and endorsed. We are responsible for the people we elect, and we should quit shifting blame to pretend that it was a handful of CIA guys.
I disagree that hypothetical, potential victim status confers standing to judge those who, as anyone in the administration’s shoes would have to see the world right after 9-11: another mass casualty event, of unknown origin, coming down the pike and who knows how much time there is to prevent it.
First, I’m unclear on what you mean by “hypothetical”.
I have family members who work in the financial district in NYC. People from my town were killed in the 9/11 attacks. At the time of the attacks, my wife traveled frequently, domestically and internationally, by air for business.
If you mean “hypothetical” in the sense that “it didn’t actually happen to me”, then yes. If you mean there was no reason to think it would ever happen to me, or to people quite close to me, then no.
That aside, I absolutely disagree that people who live in this country, and who elect and pay for its government, and who live under that government, have no standing to judge what is done in their name.
They not only have standing, they have the obligation and responsibility to do so.
Which brings me to:
We are responsible for the people we elect, and we should quit shifting blame to pretend that it was a handful of CIA guys.
I agree with this completely.
I’m not looking for anybody to round up the “bad apples” at the CIA and send them off to hang. IMO that would turn into more or less an exercise in scapegoating.
I wouldn’t mind if those guys were fired, or moved along to some other line of work, and/or if we stopped hiring contractors whose specialties seem to be knowing a million ways to f***k people up.
Something along the lines of “truth and reconciliation” commission would be good.
What I would mostly like is some clear understanding that we affirm, and comply with, international and domestic law. That we don’t torture people.
Not just don’t waterboard them, but don’t drench them with water and leave them naked in freezing rooms, don’t slam their heads into the wall, don’t chain them to the ceiling for days at a time, don’t keep them awake until they become psychotic, don’t beat them until their joints are pulverized. Stuff like that.
I would like a clear understanding that we don’t do it, that it won’t be tolerated, that we won’t outsource it to some other crappy place to have it done for us.
That’s what I’d like.
That, and for the folks whose decisions created the torture program to be out of the freaking picture, for good.
Not hung, not hog-tied and delivered to the Hague, just not in the freaking government anymore. Get them the hell out of there.
It was a very bad idea. It was a mistake, a colossal blunder, an exercise of incredibly bad judgement. To carry it off, they perverted the law, corrupted the intelligence community, and put a lot of people at significant risk of criminal prosecution.
Get them the hell out of the government.
I’d be more than happy with that.
If the actor intends to save lives (that’s his argument, not a description of objective reality), and affirmatively intends not to cause physical or mental harm (that is what the jury believes), then the actor walks.
Got it. However, I think anything resembling the second part would be a very hard sell given how the “enhanced interrogation” regime was engineered (e.g., reverse-engineering SERE training) and how its efficacy was being argued (basically, it works ’cause it’s brutal). OTOH, as you sorta allude to, one rarely loses money betting that the courts will almost unhesitatingly defer to the executive on matters presented as national security and/or intelligence.
Also, if the Feds follow most state laws, ‘necessity’ is an affirmative defense to most criminal prosecutions. “Affirmative defense” meaning the defendant essentially or at least inferentially admits the charge and then proves to the jury’s satisfaction that his/her acts were justified by ‘necessity’ which gets us back to Defending the Homeland Under Attack.
I must wonder if there is a Constitutional issue here, in that the anti-torture law is a statutory implementation of a duly signed and ratified treaty (with no relevant reservations), and the treaty explicitly excludes necessity as a defense. I have read analysis (e.g., for the first example I can find from Google) suggesting it most certainly is, and that Yoo’s dismissal of this point does not withstand scrutiny; indeed, I find it essentially laughable given that the Senate specifically stated in their advice and consent which portions of the treaty they did not intend to include within the American implementation, and Article 2(2) was at no time mentioned.
(I will concede that a better defense of the necessity defense would be an argument that 18USC §2340a is insufficiently specified in its exclusion of necessity, and as the treaty is enforced in the US exclusively via statute, that is a potential problem for dismissing necessity. However, Yoo’s Congressional intent defense is quite incredible, and attempting to justify an “enhanced interrogation” program founded on that understanding is at best highly problematic… as is an actual assertion of necessity given that there were other portions of the American intelligence community rejecting or decrying said “enhanced” techniques as ineffectual or even counter-productive, and that the unwavering official position of the US as stated by e.g. State is that the US categorically rejects exigency-based justifications of torture in keeping with our treaty obligations.)
Ahem. I appear to have sunk an overly-hyperlinked comment into the spam trap.
russell, I wholly agree with your post of 8:10 p.m. Absolutely and entirely.
That, and for the folks whose decisions created the torture program to be out of the freaking picture, for good.
Yes, yes, yes. John Yoo is at Berkeley. WTF?
As cleek said, who are we going to prosecute? Where do we start? The guy across the street with the bumper sticker also made this happen. If people really wanted the torturers to be out of the picture, they could raise a ruckus. Where’s the ruckus?
Me: Where’s the ruckus?
Actually, where are the votes?
The same Congressional districts that are voting for the current House are those who will keep the torture culture intact.
russell: And, that idea is rooted in the idea that the rights of the individual are inherent – endowed by a creator – rather than simply something granted by the state as a matter of noblesse oblige.
Marty: That these rights are inalienable, why are they? They are endowed. BY a creator.
“A creator” is not, of course, the God of Abraham, or His Son. Young Tom Jefferson and old Ben Franklin knew how to be explicit. Had they meant “God” they’d have written “God”.
They also knew how to NOT be explicit, of course. So they probably figured that “Creator” would fire up the god-botherers without riling up the free-thinkers. Should they have foreseen the likes of Sister Palin? That they apparently did not is a blotch on their escutcheon.
By “the likes of Sister Palin” I mean the modern-day Americans who persist in thinking of the Declaration (if not the Constitution, which they often confuse with it) as “Christian” documents.
Many people are not Christians because they are Jews, or Muslims, or Hindus. I am not a Christian because I am a (d)emocrat. I can’t vote God out of office, sue Him in court, or overthrow Him by force of arms. So I prefer not to construct my mental universe on His existence.
Maybe I’d change my mind if God spoke to me personally, and told me explicitly what rights He has endowed me with. But until He does, I only have the word of the likes of Sarah Palin — who take the word of the likes of Pat Robertson, who purports to take the word of Bronze Age shepherds — for what my rights are. Fie on that.
So let me be clear: foolish, weak, and vicious as my fellow citizens may be, I prefer to risk my “inalienable” rights on their good will, rather than the supposed promises of an alleged god.
–TP
“As cleek said, who are we going to prosecute? Where do we start?”
I don’t see what the problem would be here if it weren’t for the politics. Which is a big “if” and I’ll get back to it. You find the guys who tortured and prosecute. You go up the chain of command. Maybe you get the lawyers who gave the bad advice, but I don’t know if that’s illegal or not. But no, not the guy with the bumper sticker. There’s the same issue with any country guilty of war crimes–you may often find that large chunks of the population agreed with the policies and supported them, but unless they actually committed the crime or gave the order, nobody thinks they should be prosecuted.
Whether a prosecution would be successful is another matter–I tend to think McKT may be right about the likely result. I wouldn’t place any faith in an American jury trying American war criminals claiming to have acted on our behalf. Some of those guys might have had the bumper stickers.
Failing that, because in our wonderful democracy which happens to be a superpower there is no accountability for war crimes since no one can make us accountable, you then go for Russell’s option of a truth commission. Which also won’t happen. People who talk about how democracies are places where there is accountability really need to rethink their position. It’s defeated or overthrown dictatorships which have accountability. Democracies really stink at it, if the criminal is big enough.
I don’t see what the problem would be here if it weren’t for the politics.
Where’s the ruckus?
To me, “where’s the ruckus” and “where are the votes” get to the heart of the matter.
Most folks either enthusiastically support it, are sort of OK with it given the context, or just have other stuff to worry about that’s of greater import to them because the torture thing doesn’t touch them directly.
At some point, somebody – CIA, chain of command higher-up, lawyer, whoever – might make a mistake, leave the country without taking appropriate precautions, and get grabbed and brought before a foreign or international court.
That’s not a hypothetical thing, it’s feasible, has happened to other people, and could happen to some of the folks involved.
Nothing of consequence is going to happen here.
Most folks either enthusiastically support it, are sort of OK with it given the context, or just have other stuff to worry about that’s of greater import to them because the torture thing doesn’t touch them directly.
Is that really true ?
I think the “other stuff to worry about” might be, but that, as much as anything, is thanks to a remarkable lack of political leadership.
For me, the single most disappointing thing about Obama’s presidency is he way in which he has determinedly avoided grasping this nettle.
hear, hear: Tony P.
I was really looking forward to reading a lengthy discussion on hamburgers, just to lighten things up a bit. I guess I’ll just read the obituaries instead.
DJ: You find the guys who tortured and prosecute. You go up the chain of command. Maybe you get the lawyers who gave the bad advice, but I don’t know if that’s illegal or not. But no, not the guy with the bumper sticker. There’s the same issue with any country guilty of war crimes–you may often find that large chunks of the population agreed with the policies and supported them, but unless they actually committed the crime or gave the order, nobody thinks they should be prosecuted.
And that’s the core of the matter. One can argue that those who supported the policy, and/or voted for the politicians who ordered it, are morally guilty. But as a legal matter, we have a lot of precedents running back (at least) to WW II, and they all show the same thing. Those who committed war crimes, those who ordered them, and those who provided the “legal” justifications can be tried. But not the general population.
“I was really looking forward to reading a lengthy discussion on hamburgers, just to lighten things up a bit. I guess I’ll just read the obituaries instead.”
I think Liz Cheney once shanghaied a line of questioning regarding torture by offering the interviewer tickets to “Sweeney Todd” and encouraging a side of freedom fries with a slice of her Dad’s favorite mincemeat pie.
This thread kind of took the same course as Roald Dahl’s infamous short story “Lamb To the Slaughter”.
On the other hand, this beats threads at Redstate or the roundtable discussions at NRA National Conventions wherein the discussants wade about in human blood up to their man nipples while wondering what marinade was used on the raw meat they hold aloft on their hors d’oeuvres spits.
Putin and Netanyahu recently threw a picnic while listening in on American diplomatic phone calls and licked their chops over their joint declaration that soylent green is Obama.
I like my burger elegant, 80/20 good ground chuck with worcestershire sauce added for flavor, grilled to blood red in the middle, a little salt and pepper, plain on a good bun, but maybe a slice of red onion, or some raw horseradish on top.
In closing, how come the food is so bountiful and delicious at wakes?
“I’m in mourning, if you don’t mind, but I will try some of those baby backs. Is that Aunt Sue’s coleslaw I see over there?”
I consider burgers to be an abomination. Buns/breadrolls have to be crunchy (and I prefer meat unminced unless it is sausage). Call me back about the soft stuff when I can no longer afford dental care.
Those who committed war crimes, those who ordered them, and those who provided the “legal” justifications can be tried. But not the general population.
Note that those who are prosecuted are on the side of those who lost. The general population on the losing side of a war probably suffered generally.
Okay, food related but still depressing. I don’t eat warm blooded animals–I may slowly move towards vegetarianism, but that’s gonna be tough.
Sullivan quoting someone on the cruelty of fishing
That is harsh. I mean, it’s nothing I didn’t know, but when I’ve done pescatarian spells, I always managed cognitive dissonance by not actually letting myself think about it. But that’s a really good, unpleasant point, and it’s hard to unthink it once it’s been so clearly stated.
(I’m currently a mostly unrestricted omnivore, but that’s circumstantial, and will probably change back to some stripe of restricted diet in the next eight months or so. That one paragraph makes it pretty hard to countenance only going back as far as pescatarian…)
I must wonder if there is a Constitutional issue here, in that the anti-torture law is a statutory implementation of a duly signed and ratified treaty (with no relevant reservations), and the treaty explicitly excludes necessity as a defense.
Not a constitutional issue; rather, a memory error by me. The UN Convention excludes necessity as a defense, so a prosecution under the Convention would not be subject to that defense as an instruction to the jury. Has the US codified the Convention to make a violation subject to prosecution? I don’t know.
I have family members who work in the financial district in NYC. People from my town were killed in the 9/11 attacks. At the time of the attacks, my wife traveled frequently, domestically and internationally, by air for business.
Ok. Going with this, we have three classes of people: those who fly regularly (I’m in that group–made my second of four flights this week today),those at risk of having been killed in 9-11 because of proximity to NYC’s financial district and those who were killed in 9-11.
Here a question that gets to the heart of the matter:
Would you have authorized torture if doing so would have given authorities a reasonable chance to have prevented 9-11?
9-11 happened. In the weeks leading up to 9-11, it was a ticking bomb scenario: everything was in place, plans made, etc. And, to repeat, it actually did happen. So, would torture have been justified to prevent it?
I suggest the families of those killed, not to mention the victims, would have one view of it. Do they have greater standing than us frequent flyers to weigh in on the torture question?
It’s a difficult question, but it’s fair.
I will answer my own question: yes. The circumstances were exigent. It would have been illegal, but it would have been the right call.
I like my burger elegant, 80/20 good ground chuck with worcestershire sauce added for flavor, grilled to blood red in the middle, a little salt and pepper, plain on a good bun, but maybe a slice of red onion, or some raw horseradish on top.
A friend gave us half of an axis deer he’d shot, with the fillets wrapped in bacon and the rest ground. I use worcetershire, salt and pepper too. Cooked medium for safety reasons. Eaten topped with guacamole, pico de gallo or a bit of pimento cheese. Good stuff.
McKinney wrote:
It’s a silly question, and here’s why:
1) Vagueness. Who are you asking anyone to authorize the torture of in your alternate summer of 2001? Any Arab? Any Muslim? Any American? Any member of the board of the NRA?
The 9/11 attack has not happened yet, by your stipulation. We just happen to know that “bin Laden is determined to attack inside the US”. Do we know the attack is scheduled for a particular day? Do we know that it involves multiple hijackings? Do we know any specific people who might be worth torturing? It seems to me that the less information we already have, the wider the scope of the authorization needs to be, and the less likely the torturers are to ask the right questions. And the more information we already have, the easier it is to thwart the attack without torturing anybody. What happy medium between knowledge and ignorance do you postulate?
2) Asymmetry. We know — we just KNOW — that there will be another Sandy Hook, another Aurora, another Columbine. We could prevent at least some of them by “torturing” so-called “responsible gun owners” with what they would call “oppressive” regulations. Just that; no waterboarding involved. So if you want a difficult but fair question, try this one on for size:
“Would you authorize registration of guns and licensing of gun owners given that there’s a reasonable chance it would prevent a future massacre?”
–TP
TP,
I certainly would, it certainly wouldn’t.
The circumstances were exigent. It would have been illegal, but it would have been the right call.
Assume, for the sake of discussion, that we had any clue about just who to question. The problem is that it has been pretty thoroughly demonstrated that torture is a terrible way to get accurate information.
People being tortured will say anything, true or not, just to make it stop. And once you lose the prospect of actually getting accurate information, the whole justification falls apart.
Here a question that gets to the heart of the matter
No, McK, your question does not get to the heart of the matter.
We’re not talking about hypothetical one-off acts of torture, carried out under extreme duress, we are talking about a fully developed program of torture, carried out systematically and with full-regalia legal justification and how-to manuals.
People were tortured for stuff that was immaterial to 9/11, and in fact was not even in evidence or likely. Like for instance was there a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. Funny about that.
The answer to the question you ask is yes, in certain circumstances it may be justifiable to torture someone to prevent massive loss of life. It’s likely illegal in those cases, but it’s justifiable.
And in those circumstances, the correct direction forward is to lay out what happened, give the reasons why it was necessary, and make your case.
Not 10 years of CYA stonewalling bullshit.
Your question does not describe the situation we’re talking about, so it not only doesn’t “approach the heart of the matter”, it’s not to the point at all.
As far as what “the families of those killed” would wish, the widow of a doctor in my town who was killed on 9/11 gave his medical library to a school in Afghanistan as her response to the attacks.
So, that’s one view of it, from somebody who I imagine has sufficient “standing” in your eyes to have an opinion on the topic.
Sheesh, are we doing the ticking time bomb thing again? McKT’s question is for a jury–nevermind whether it is a realistic scenario, if torturers thought it was the situation they were in, would we let them off or consider it to be a mitigating circumstance? Yes, if someone thought that by torturing a few key people he was saving 3000, that would be a mitigating circumstance or whatever the correct legal term is. I would lighten the sentence. If it keeps happening, then no. There was a massive book on torture by Darius Rejali that I read several years ago. One problem with torture is that once people start using it, they think as McKT apparently does, that it’s the magic bullet, the solution to all one’s intelligence gathering needs. In reality it produces a lot of worthless crap. The signal to noise ratio is tiny. In the Algerian War, I think the most significant piece of info uncovered was that the French Government was secretly negotiating with the “terrorists”, who were of course the future government of Algeria. That upset the military–I forget if this is what led to the attempted coup.
“Would you authorize registration of guns and licensing of gun owners given that there’s a reasonable chance it would prevent a future massacre?”
–TP
Posted by: Tony P. | August 05, 2014 at 06:59 PM
TP,
I certainly would, it certainly wouldn’t.
Posted by: Marty | August 05, 2014 at 08:24 PM
Assuming Marty is not being disingenuous, I think there may be a linguistic derailment here, over the term “a future massacre,” which may (reasonably) be read two different ways.
Would gun regulation prevent ALL/ANY future massacres? Of course not; I certainly don’t think so, and I assume Tony P agrees.
Might gun regulation prevent A (singular, unspecified) massacre? I would bet that it would – sweeping enforcement of draconian regulations would stop at least one gun nut who otherwise would go out and shoot a bunch of people from doing so, because he (and it’s virtually always a “he”) would not, in this instance, have access to the kind of firepower he would otherwise be able to deploy to shoot people.
Marty: do you disagree?
“Here a question that gets to the heart of the matter
No, McK, your question does not get to the heart of the matter.”
Actually, I think it cuts right to the heart of the matter that intelligent people such as McK.T. can still think, after all the debate of the last few years, that the ‘ticking bomb scenario’ is a ‘fair’ basis on which to make policy.
But what about the massacres committed because regulations are impending (now or never acts)?
Okay, that’s a (deliberately) stupid question but it is on a similar level as those torture advocates that condemn those spilling the beans about the torture or object to its condemnation because ‘it encourages the enemy because he knows that we will not harm him’ and instead treat torture like Israeli nukes (not admitted to exist but known to everybody to do so).
There’s the same issue with any country guilty of war crimes–you may often find that large chunks of the population agreed with the policies and supported them, but unless they actually committed the crime or gave the order, nobody thinks they should be prosecuted.
At the risk of further fanning the flames, there is good evidence that many believe that collective punishment – rightly outlawed in the Geneva Conventions – is entirely justified:
http://religiondispatches.org/violent-genocidal-anti-palestinian-rhetoric-moving-to-us/
(That is merely a recent disturbing example amongst many, and is not intended to single out Israel in this regard.)
I guess before we started to torture whomever required torturing after the infamous 9/11 memo was brought to the attention of the White House as al Qaeda prepared their attack in the summer of 2001, first we should have tortured whomever set the memo aside with a “Nothing to see here.”
That would have proven the case that torturing ignoramuses will yield no intelligence, or did they know something?
Yeah, Chris Hayes had the President of the Board of New York Rabbis on his show Friday.
link It was about his little “if you voted for Hamas you are not a civilian” speech outside the UN a little over a week ago. It didn’t seem to occur to him that there are voters for rightwing Israeli parties that could have targets painted on their backs by that reasoning. The rabbi obviously lives in a cocoon where you can say outrageous things and make stupid arguments and everyone just nods, so he was also gave the argument that Hamas is so bad that Egypt and Saudi Arabia side with Israel. Brilliant, given that Sisis murdered 1000 Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators last year. General Sisi along with the Saudi government are people that you really want on your side in any moral discussion.
“was also gave”–
Good lord. Hope no one proposes that people guilty of grammatical atrocities are fit subjects for waterboarding or extermination or war crimes trials. Incomplete editing–I was shuffling sentences around. That’s my defense.
Dr Ngo,
Under that definition, draconian enforcement and one or, even a few, acts avoided my response would change to:
I certainly wouldn’t, it almost certainly would.
But that calculus is not dissimilar to airport security, how much would you be willing to put up with to avoid some number of future potential casualties? Is their an aggravation/benefit analysis?
Marty: A reasonable response, thanks. I suspect there should be some aggravation/benefit analysis, but (1) it would be hell on wheels to calculate and (2) for political reasons, it would be even harder to implement. But yes, moving toward such a calculus (in both cases) seems to me going in the right direction.
Nothing like a tortured discussion of hamburgers, I say.
@bobbyp: evidence that cows were tortured to death in the making of hamburger (“Mmmm, it’s the ‘fear and pain’ that make them taste so good!”) would certainly push me in the direction of vegetarianism, in spite of my omnivore preferences.
Some years ago, I tried an experiment: batches of grilled burgers, mostly the same (ground beef, diced onion, raw egg to help bind, pepper and salt). The only difference from one batch to another was the amount of salt.
Interestingly, there was a clear “optimum salt” amount; but if you were to graph “tastiness” vs. “salt”, it was a linear increase up to the optimum, then a quick drop off to “too salty!”.
I just wish I could remember where I wrote down the results, my vague recollection was 3/8tsp/lb, but I wouldn’t swear to it under torture. Maybe.
I might light myself on fire to prevent my children from being eaten by lions, but so what?
But that calculus is not dissimilar to airport security, how much would you be willing to put up with to avoid some number of future potential casualties? Is their an aggravation/benefit analysis?
Marty, if there was any evidence that the inconvenience that TSA inflicts on us was actually providing security of some kind, rather than just security theater, your question might have a point. As it is, we have inconvenience which maybe gives some people a sense of security, without actually providing security. (Except, I suppose, job security for politicians who are thus able to say “action has been taken” — unconcerned about whether the action taken is relevant, let alone useful.)
Wj, so imagine what the aggravation dide of that equation would be to provide actual security? The plus or minus of the actual effect doesn’t negate the question.
Marty: But that calculus is not dissimilar to airport security …
Not dissimilar to torture, either.
–TP
if there was any evidence that the inconvenience that TSA inflicts on us was actually providing security of some kind, rather than just security theater, your question might have a point
Evidence? The fact that air travel is extraordinarily safe: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/business/2012-was-the-safest-year-for-airlines-globally-since-1945.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Hard to prove that the TSA is responsible for it, but I’m sure glad that when my family flies, they face a negligible risk of crashing. Fingers crossed, of course.
But air travel, specifically within the United States, was extraordinarily safe before all this TSA nonsense.
Only three things, done post 9/11 actually contributed to real security:
1) heavier cockpit doors, kept closed during flights,
2) armed air marshalls on some flights,
3) the fact that passengers know now that they shouldn’t just sit by passively if someone tries to hijack their plane.
All those things make air travel safer, and hijackings less likely (and less likely to succeed). But mess on the ground? All that really does is provide any would-be terrorist with a nice juicy target, with a lot of people standing readily available (and close to a quick get-away, too). In short, it has, if anything, made you less safe when traveling by air.
Maybe, wj, and I’m all for stopping the security theater. But on my list of things to complain about (and I fly a lot)? Not high. I’m indifferent.
On the other hand, pasport security when coming in the country is embarrassingly slow compared to other countries.
About TSA and security: note that post-9/11, all of the “terrorist on planes” incidents have occurred from flights coming into the US from other countries. (Shoe bomber, Underwear bomber, probably another I’m forgetting)
That is, where TSA is not the one doing the screening.
Now, you could conclude that’s because TSA is doing a great job, but I think the reason is much simpler: flights coming in from outside the US are the “first point of contact” for non-US terrorists, and that’s where they make their play.
Any violent terrorists INSIDE the US have lots of options that don’t involve trying to sneak bad stuff past TSA checkpoints: they could set a bomb at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, buy lots of guns at a gun show and shoot up a school, plant a bomb at Times Square, etc etc.
So what wj said above is completely correct, but really, all TSA has to do (and all they CAN do) to prevent air-terrorism is to make it more difficult than non air-terrorism. Which could be accomplished with pre-9/11 levels of security for flights originating in the US.
But that calculus is not dissimilar to airport security, how much would you be willing to put up with to avoid some number of future potential casualties? Is there an aggravation/benefit analysis?
I suppose it’s possible, but surely the burden of demonstrating it is on those who seek to impose the aggravation.
As far as I’m aware, no such formal analysis has been undertaken. Instead, there seems to be an assumption – along the lines of pre-scientific medicine – that whatever creates the most discomfort must have corresponding beneficial effects.
Some degree of correlation is probable, but the extent is quite unclear. And it certainly does not imply causation.
At least in Germany passengers going to the US have to endure far more than those going anywhere else. At Berlin airport I can arrive to check in half an hour* before departure to any EU country but at minimum 4 times that, if I wanted to travel to the US (and it was even longer a few years ago iirc). And only on flights to the US they have to telegraph your choice of in-flight meal to the authorities in advance.
*at other airports it’s 3/4 of an hour but that has nothing to do with security but technical reasons.
Nigel, my sense is that the aggravation is the whole point of the exercise.
Effective anti-terrorism measures are not particularly visible to the public. So these highly visible measures were instituted in order to demonstrate that the government is “doing something” about it.
Better safe than sorry …
Actually, I think it cuts right to the heart of the matter that intelligent people such as McK.T. can still think, after all the debate of the last few years, that the ‘ticking bomb scenario’ is a ‘fair’ basis on which to make policy.
This is as good of an example as any. If some here believe that the planning, preparation and execution leading up to 9-11 was not a ticking bomb, then fine. We disagree. For most people, though, that unfolding of events, if known or detected to some degree, was precisely the kind of ‘in progress’ event we would want to stop. As the days grew shorter, the clock ticked louder.
9-11 isn’t theoretical, if that isn’t already clear enough. What is theoretical is imagining the two part hypothetical of (1) ‘what if’ of a suspect were in custody who had knowledge but who would not talk and (2) who, if tortured, was reasonably likely to provide enough information to foil the plot.
Under these circumstances, if you knew you could save hundreds if not thousands of lives, would torture, albeit illegal, be warranted?
Every juror in a prospective criminal trial would be asked some variation of this question. Most would answer, perhaps reluctantly, that torture would be justified. Then, the evidence from the defense would be that there were many apparent ticking bombs.
The gov’t would then be free to secure a finding of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Good luck with that.
Those who see this as a policy endorsement are welcome to think so. What it really is is an illustration that no matter how firmly one believes the torture apparatus installed post 9-11 was criminal, 9-11 itself is the defense and getting a conviction would be terribly difficult. The blowback of such a trial, with its highly likely attendant publicity, could easily turn out to be stronger support for some forms of torture, not less.
“f some here believe that the planning, preparation and execution leading up to 9-11 was not a ticking bomb”
Of course it was a ticking bomb. And yes it would be used in a torture trial. It would probably lead to acquittals and possibly stronger support for torture. It’s why there’s a need for foreign courts to arrest and convict American war criminals. That won’t happen either, but at least there would be a chance of justice overseas.
Incidentally, the fact that people think the ticking time bomb defense is a good one when in reality torture doesn’t lead to good intelligence gathering is precisely why people hoot at the ticking time bomb example. But no doubt it might work as a defense in a torture trial. Here, at least, when everyone has seen TV shows where torture worked.
If the question on the table is whether a domestic criminal prosecution and trial by jury of folks involved in carrying out torture would result in a conviction, I agree with you.
It likely would not, and the prosecution itself would be extraordinarily polarizing.
If I’m not mistaken, however, the thread has covered more ground than that narrow question.
Your argument here seems to be that the torture regime, as actually conceived implemented and carried out, was simply a case of folks making their best, good-faith effort to respond to an imminent and dire threat.
I don’t think that’s an accurate characterization of the facts on the ground. So, I therefore don’t find it to be a sufficient justification for the things that actually happened.
If we were talking about a time period confined to, let’s say, months after 9/11, and/or a situation where the excesses were reined in after a better organized response was in place, I’d basically agree with you.
That isn’t what happened.
What is theoretical is imagining the two part hypothetical of (1) ‘what if’ of a suspect were in custody who had knowledge but who would not talk and (2) who, if tortured, was reasonably likely to provide enough information to foil the plot.
Under these circumstances, if you knew you could save hundreds if not thousands of lives, would torture, albeit illegal, be warranted?
Let’s say for argument’s sake that the answer is “yes.” What then? How does this apply to anything in the world of things that actually happen?
in reality torture doesn’t lead to good intelligence gathering
I’ve seen this a lot. I’m not sure I’ve seen any reliable evidence backing that up. I suspect it depends on who is being tortured. For example, I’d fold pretty quickly. I imagine there are others who can and do hold out for quite some time and who do a good job of mixing lies with truth and are able to hold back some information.
Your argument here seems to be that the torture regime, as actually conceived implemented and carried out, was simply a case of folks making their best, good-faith effort to respond to an imminent and dire threat.
No. I think it is and should be illegal. I think the law is broken when exceptions are made. As a practical matter, exceptions are easily conceived. I think the people who contend that waterboarding is not torture and that it should be allowed are morally repugnant. The problem is, you can be morally repugnant and still have a legitimate, fact-based argument that a plot exists, that a subject in custody has material evidence of the plot and that, since the subject won’t talk, we have the same fact pattern as existed prior to 9-11.
To illustrate, if you would allow waterboarding in my hypothetical to prevent 9-11, Dick Cheney could also validly allow waterboarding under the same circumstances. Cheney may be an amoral asshole, but in the right circumstances who he *is* is secondary if not tertiary.
I don’t think temporal proximity to 9-11 is relevant. If a group were planning to commandeer commercial jets and fly into another set of buildings next month, it would be essential to stop them and the same exceptions most of us would allow to prevent 9-11 would apply.
Basically, the exception, or the appearance of the exception, swallows the rule.
Bottom line: it’s a suck-ass situation. What a person of reasonably good will would do on a one-time-only basis and be sick about it, another can do with regularity citing the need to prevent another 9-11.
We’d like to think there is a middle ground in which true emergencies can be dealt with and that bad people on our side will be reigned in. I’m pessimistic.
Which is not to say that I am on board with the torture cheerleaders. I’m not.
Let’s say for argument’s sake that the answer is “yes.” What then? How does this apply to anything in the world of things that actually happen?
There is almost always a colorable argument that someone, somewhere is hatching a plot. Once you have that, you have all you need to dress it up into a ticking bomb and there you go. Wishing it were otherwise doesn’t make it otherwise.
Since many of us would, in hindsight, allow some kind of torture to prevent 9-11, it is difficult to draw a line going forward on what constitutes sufficiently loud ticking. The torture proponent just papers his ass with a bunch of lurid projections and the person who denies permission to shake the witness is left holding the bag if the proponent turns out to be right. It seems counter-intuitive, but the prudent intelligence gatherer is better off hyping a threat and being wrong when it fails to materialize than understating a potential threat and being wrong if it does materialize.
It is one thing to be wrong when nothing happens. It is entirely another thing to be wrong when something *does* happen. Now, if something *does* happen, one defense by the people charged with preventing this stuff will be “we weren’t allowed to aggressively question known bad guys who refused to talk.”
For example, I’d fold pretty quickly.
that isn’t the problem.
the problem is that your torturers don’t know what you know and what you don’t know, and they don’t know what your limits are. they might think you know more than you do, and they might think you’re a good actor. so even if you give up everything you really do know, they might just keep pressing you to the point where you tell them anything, even if that means making shit up, if you think it will make them stop torturing you. false confession is a real thing.
so, you confess to a whole bunch of stuff and give all kinds of ‘information’, and then the CIA is going to go tell the President that McTerrorist told them X, Y and Z but only Y is actually true.
This is as good of an example as any. If some here believe that the planning, preparation and execution leading up to 9-11 was not a ticking bomb, then fine. We disagree.
You demonstrate precisely the mindset.
If it was a ticking bomb, then it was a pretty damn silent one.
Without the benefit of hindsight, just who would you have tortured to prevent it ?
And if you knew whom to torture, why would you have needed to do so anyway ?
This is just nonsense.
if known or detected to some degree
Precisely the point.
The pro torture crowd deal exclusively in hypotheticals and hindsight.
Without a thought to wider consequences.
I’m not sure I’ve seen any reliable evidence backing that up.
My understanding is that the overwhelming consensus is that torture does not provide reliable information.
People talk, but what they say is not reliable, because they will say whatever they think will make you stop doing whatever it is you are doing to them.
If you’re interested, there’s a pretty broad literature on it, it’s not hard to find.
There is almost always a colorable argument that someone, somewhere is hatching a plot. Once you have that, you have all you need to dress it up into a ticking bomb and there you go.
Yes, this is correct.
And assuming that we are always going to give folks who claim the ticking time bomb defense a pass, it leaves us with de facto legal torture.
Among the many problems with that is the fact that other countries may, in the absence of meaningful action on our part, decide to act for us.
There are people in the intelligence community who are not currently sitting in foreign jails because (a) they no longer leave the country, and / or (b) we have acted to pull their keisters out of the fire.
At some point, somebody’s likely to screw up and find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Just ask Pinochet.
It can also affect the willingness of other countries’ intelligence communities to work with ours.
And, it can make any information obtained unusable in a criminal context.
Long story short, we can imagine all kinds of one-off hypothetical scenarios where torture seems like the least-bad, necessary evil path to take, but as a deliberate policy and program for intelligence gathering, it sucks, and for a variety of reasons.
My understanding is that the overwhelming consensus is that torture does not provide reliable information.
I am aware of the broadly held view. So, I ask myself ‘why does blackmail work?’ It’s a form of duress far less oppressive than, say, slicing up someone’s face. Force and threats of force, or threats of disclosure, or whatever other kind of threat you want to think of can and does produce results.
If torture didn’t work, organizations like the French Underground wouldn’t use the cell system. The fact is, people can be compromised. As Cleek notes, the torturer may not know when to quit, but if the victim–me, for example–is puking up information that can be corroborated by other sources, an indicia of reliability is established and because I’m a weakling when it comes to pain, I’d sing like a bird. Others are made of sterner stuff.
I think the widely held view is more of a convenient rhetorical device to support the anti-torture argument than it is an objectively established fact. Otherwise, opponents would have to concede its efficacy, and that undercuts the argument. I don’t think this particular brand of conventional wisdom holds up under close analysis. I would concede that unusually well trained and committed individuals do have a much higher pain threshold and a much greater ability to withhold information, but they are the exception, not the rule.
This isn’t a right/wrong issue. One can agree that torture is wrong and disagree that it is ineffective.
Long story short, we can imagine all kinds of one-off hypothetical scenarios where torture seems like the least-bad, necessary evil path to take, but as a deliberate policy and program for intelligence gathering, it sucks, and for a variety of reasons.
Yes we can and yes it does. I am illustrating the counter argument. One can be aware of opposing views without endorsing them. The particular problem with torture is that most, if pushed, will concede that there are rare occasions on which it can be justified. Once that concession is made, school is out so to speak.
As far as the description of facts goes, I have to agree with McKT here. Not sure about the conclusions though.
The main dilemma (if we leave the question of morals aside for a moment) is from my POV:
A ticking bomb scenario requires by its very nature time restrictions. But this means that corroboration of info acquired through torture is very difficult and the ‘guilty’ torture recipient will know that. The innocent on the other hand has been dealt a bad hand there. Since the torturer cannot know (bad faith actors excepted of course) whether he deals with a guilty person lying or an innocent person speaking the truth (or lying in order to get the torture to stop) while at the same time he is under time pressure, the results can only get ugly. An ‘I don’t know’ cannot be corroborated and will lead to intensified treatment (‘we have a hard case here’) and so will an info proven to be false. If there is enough time to find out that one got the wrong guy, then the whole ticking scenario does not apply. In short, if one finds oneself at the receiving end of torture, it is better to be guilty since the more justified the application of torture seems the less likely it is that an innocent will be spared.
I feel reminded of this: If you suffer from A, then drug A* will instantly heal you. But it will kill you instantly, if you do not suffer from A but B. Unfortunately the symptoms of A and B are identical. Is it ever justified to apply drug A* given that risk? Where is the point that the potential success outweighs the potential fatality? And who can make/be allowed the decision?
McKT, if you are so interested in whether torture works, why don’t you read something about it rather than just hypothesize about the subject? There’s an extremely long history and people have examined it.
Link to short Darius Rejali article
I think a lot of this “torture must work and people just don’t want to admit it” comes from people who imagine they are toughminded, as opposed to those woolly-headed liberals who say it doesn’t work because they don’t want it to work. But I used to think the same way–that it probably would work because I think I’d fold pretty quickly. But the fact is that it is not an effective means of getting true information. It is effective with some people in breaking them or getting them to sign false confessions, which is probably its most common use.
McKT, if you are so interested in whether torture works, why don’t you read something about it rather than just hypothesize about the subject?
For me, it’s not a question of “whether torture” works, rather, it’s “does it work to one degree or another, depending on a variety of circumstances?”
You say it doesn’t work. Fine, then the same must hold true for blackmail. Or, armed robbery, or sexual assault under threat of force. I’m sure there are a lot of articles that say victims can’t be compelled to submit even when physically beaten.
It is an odd world, it seems to me, in which people can be coerced by any number of factors to do any number of things, but one of the things that doesn’t motivate people is the infliction of severe mental or physical pain. Someone can write an article, do research, etc. and make that conclusion, and I will consider it, but I will do so critically. Why is torture singularly ineffective as a means of coercion?
I deal with experts on a weekly basis who are full of shit. They cite studies and say things that don’t hold up. Ergo, I am a cynic. People with agendas cite articles, studies, statistics endlessly. People with counter-agendas do the same. FWIW, I am no more impressed with arguments for torture as a means of getting information than I am with the opposite.
But the fact is that it is not an effective means of getting true information.
I read the article. I found the following statements:
1. “Most of the time, the torturers were unable to get any statement whatsoever.”
2. ” torture of the ignorant and innocent overwhelms investigators with misleading information.”
I sense a contradiction here.
I’d like to see the author’s more in-depth study and to know more about his sources. I remain skeptical. Who is going to write, “Torture Works and Here’s Why”? This isn’t a topic in which two or more competing schools of thought hash it out.
As far as the description of facts goes, I have to agree with McKT here
In what sense was 9/11 a ‘ticking time bomb’ scenario ?
I’m genuinely puzzled by this assertion.
I think the widely held view is more of a convenient rhetorical device to support the anti-torture argument than it is an objectively established fact
Equally, I think that the ticking bomb is itself a convenient rhetorical device. (Can anyone give a true real life example ?)
It is a rhetorical advice used to justify or excuse actual torture that has taken place which clearly had nothing to do with any such scenario.
It is amazing to me that a purely hypothetical thought experiment should make defenders of torture feel better about abuse which has actually occurred.
So, I ask myself ‘why does blackmail work?’ It’s a form of duress far less oppressive than, say, slicing up someone’s face. Force and threats of force, or threats of disclosure, or whatever other kind of threat you want to think of can and does produce results.
Blackmail can be effective as a means of coercion or repression. As a means of reliably obtaining secret information, not so much.
Similarly, it would be obtuse to deny that torture ‘produces results’. As a means of coercion or repression, it can be effective on a mass scale. The careers of many dictators testify to that.
As a targeted means of reliably and promptly obtaining particular information, it is pretty well useless – even setting aside the disastrous consequences for a civilised society going down such a road.
If torture didn’t work, organizations like the French Underground wouldn’t use the cell system
A nonsensical argument.
If torture works less well than permissible and legal interrogation (which I believe to be the case) – even if neither thing worked at all – then clandestine organisations still have every reason to use a cell system.
The more you know about a person, the more ways one can triangulate and make correlations and thereby infer the information. The more connections a person has, the more your can go to those persons and threaten/blackmail/etc to get more information. That’s why the French Underground had cells, not because torture was a reliable way of extracting information. That’s why they talk about ‘rolling up’ a network, not because they tortured someone, but because picking up one person leads to another which leads to another. The ticking bomb is invoked in order to eliminate the possibility of having the necessary time to do this so that someone ‘has to’ be tortured.
I’m sure someone else can find the articles, but there was much press given to the fact that you get a lot better information from patiently establishing a rapport with the person you are interrogating and then correlating statements they make. Which points to the notion that all this torture regime is, at its root, is about punishing people for being the wrong ethnicity/religion.
I think, McKt, you just want to think torture works for some reason, so you ignore the fact that he looked at the Gestapo and many other cases and found it didn’t work well as a means of gathering information. That’s the bottom line–a lot of organizations have tried using torture, so if it works it should be demonstrable from whatever records we have. Rejali wrote a large book on the subject. If you are genuinely interested and not just doing the internet debating thing, you’d read it, or at least look around the web for other articles by him or others.
Putting aside studies (because I’m not sure that a valid study could be made), the idea that torture would work in any consistent way defies logic. What is logical is that torturers recite information that torturers want to hear. It might be good information; it might be bad information.
There might be some situations where torture is useful in gathering information. But do we want to be the people who do that whenever torture is “useful”? I don’t. And, as others have said, the “ticking time bomb” issue is pretty rare, and would be an affirmative defense if it actually happened. It shouldn’t be a license.
McTx: For me, it’s not a question of “whether torture” works, rather, it’s “does it work to one degree or another, depending on a variety of circumstances?”
I feel the same way about “gun control” as McKinney does about “torture”.
In fairness, I am willing to give McKinney the benefit of the linguistic doubt. In the quote above he speaks like a juror (cf “for me”) but elsewhere he states that he’s merely speaking as a defense lawyer, and I believe him. So I choose to not take the “for me” too seriously.
Now, speaking as a juror myself:
I imagine sitting on a case in which a CIA officer is accused of torturing a captive in 2005, say. That the defendant waterboarded the captive is not disputed. The defense argument is that the officer believed he was trying to prevent a “ticking time bomb” from going off. Would I vote to acquit?
Not on the defendant’s “belief” alone, I wouldn’t. I’d want to know the facts:
o Was there really a ticking bomb?
o What’s the evidence that the defendant knew there was a ticking bomb?
o If I never heard about it going off, what’s the evidence that waterboarding that particular captive prevented it?
o If it did go off, what’s the evidence that the waterboarding could have prevented it?
If I’m told the relevant evidence is too secret for me to know about, I’d vote to convict with a clear conscience.
McKinney would be well within his rights as a defense lawyer to try to keep me off the jury. McKinney may be correct in believing that most potential jurors would be less skeptical than me. But McKinney is not likely to convince me, on principle, that my skepticism of a “ticking time bomb” defense is inappropriate.
–TP
So, I ask myself ‘why does blackmail work?’ It’s a form of duress far less oppressive than, say, slicing up someone’s face.
The obvious answer here is what you have stated, i.e. blackmail is in fact a form of duress far less oppressive than slicing up someone’s face.
The reason torture is not reliable is less that people won’t say anything, and more that people will in fact say *anything*.
If somebody is slicing your face and the way to get them to stop is to make shit up, you will make shit up. The fact that they might figure that out and hurt you worse later is a bridge you’ll cross then.
If torture didn’t work, organizations like the French Underground wouldn’t use the cell system. The fact is, people can be compromised.
People can be compromised in many ways, torture being one potential one.
The experience of the Gestapo et al in gathering intelligence on the French (and other) resistance is not a tale about the reliability and effectiveness of torture as a means of gathering information. Just for the record.
I think the widely held view is more of a convenient rhetorical device to support the anti-torture argument than it is an objectively established fact.
If you wish to round out your intuition and hypotheses with actual information, it’s available. I encourage you to avail yourself of it, if that is of interest.
don’t think this particular brand of conventional wisdom holds up under close analysis.
You’re entitled to your opinion. It would hold more weight if it aligned with the actual information that is available.
And no, I’m not going to go run around and hunt up links. If you’re interested, you can go do the homework.
I am illustrating the counter argument.
No worries.
I think most folks here will agree that there are situations where torture could be justified. The question – at least, my question, or rather my point – is that the actual torture regime conceived and implemented under Bush was not one of those situations.
The particular problem with torture is that most, if pushed, will concede that there are rare occasions on which it can be justified. Once that concession is made, school is out so to speak.
I’m sorry but that doesn’t hold up.
One can characterize the kinds of situations where torture is justifiable. If a particular scenario doesn’t fit the characterization, one doesn’t get a pass.
I.e., school is not out.
After 9/11, the US collective crapped our pants and gave the Bush administration a free pass to do whatever they wanted to do to “make us safe”. That doesn’t speak well of us. Among other things, it tells me that our belief in basic civil liberties and the rule of law is wafer thin.
It’s not the first time this has been made evident, and will likely not be the last. It’s just one example among many.
All of that said, that does not amount to “school being out” on the question of torture. The folks involved are still subject to prosecution in other venues. Other intelligence services still have questions about whether, and how, and to what degree, they will cooperate with ours. We are still holding people that we can’t figure out what to do with, because we can’t prosecute them without utterly corrupting our criminal justice system, because the evidence against them was obtained through torture.
It was, and is, and will continue to be, a great big festering turd in our national punch bowl. And the claims that it Kept Us All Safe continue to be found to be overstated, if not fraudulent.
It was a stupid, ill-conceived, ill-advised program, and the longer we avoid confronting it and acknowledging it for what it was (and, perhaps, is?) the longer it will corrupt us as a nation, and undermine the values we claim to live by.
You say it doesn’t work. Fine, then the same must hold true for blackmail. Or, armed robbery, or sexual assault under threat of force.
I’m not sure the situations are parallel at all. With torture, you are trying to get information, which your subject may or may not have. With, for example, armed robbery, you are trying to get money that your subject may or may not have. But it is much easier to establish objectively that an armed robbery victim is telling the truth that he has no money on him. Making the same determination of a torture subject who says that he doesn’t have the information you want? Not easy at all.
It’s just like when someone asks “If you knew torturing someone could prevent thousands of deaths, would it be justified?” The assumption is invalid, so the question is meaningless.
“Putting aside studies (because I’m not sure that a valid study could be made)”
Why? I don’t get this. There’s a long history of regimes that used torture to extract information. Historians can look at the evidence. Rejali looked at the evidence and found it didn’t work. Now maybe some future scholar will come along and say he misinterpreted the evidence. But there’s no reason why one couldn’t look at what the Gestapo did and what the French did in Algeria and what other regimes have done and even what was done during witch trials and see whether or not torture extracted useful information.
That is to say, it’s a purely empirical question and none of our armchair speculation on either side of the issue means very much, unless we have been tortured, in which case we have one piece of data to add.
There’s a long history of regimes that used torture to extract information.
Any study of the Gestapo would use cherry-picked information about what the Gestapo did and what they learned. In any torture regime, there might be torturers who really wanted information, and torturers who really were sadistic jerks who just wanted to torture. How could you do a study on the value of torture if you factored in the sadists along with the ticking time bomb people?
The whole thing is too depraved to study.
In any torture regime, there might be torturers who really wanted information, and torturers who really were sadistic jerks who just wanted to torture. How could you do a study on the value of torture if you factored in the sadists along with the ticking time bomb people?
The fact that regimes of torture tend to attract people who like to hurt other people is, I would say, simply part of the reality.
You don’t factor it out, it’s just one of the liabilities. I.e., it’s just another aspect of torture as a policy that makes it less than effective.
You don’t factor it out, it’s just one of the liabilities. I.e., it’s just another aspect of torture as a policy that makes it less than effective.
It’s okay with me to put it that way. The fact remains that you can’t study “torture as an effective means to get at the truth” by looking at various torture regimes, since torture regimes would have a certain number of people (maybe a huge majority, maybe all) who just enjoyed the torture part, forgetting all about the information part.
“In any torture regime, there might be torturers who really wanted information, and torturers who really were sadistic jerks who just wanted to torture. How could you do a study on the value of torture if you factored in the sadists along with the ticking time bomb people?
The whole thing is too depraved to study.”
Obviously wrong, since people have studied it. People torture for info, it doesn’t seem to work very well. Probably, in fact almost invariably the practice also draws in sadists, but as Russell says, that’s just part of the reality. But if you’re imagining high minded patriotic torturers, monk-like in their devotion to duty who took no pleasure in the pain they inflicted, rather like Severian in a famous science fiction/fantasy series, I’m sure they had those too, in the Gestapo and the French Army in Algeria and the Inquisition and the CIA and other places. Or they had them to the extent that such people exist.
What do people think about US air strikes in Iraq? I’m not sure–ISIS is a pretty nasty group. This might be one of the rare cases where I don’t oppose US military action. Limited anyway. I don’t think anyone likes ISIS The irony of course, is that Assad and Hezbollah have been fighting jihadists in Syria all this time, so we’re lined up with Iran, Syria and Hezbollah against the fanatical Sunni threat.
On the other hand, Hamas split with Assad, but they supposedly received missiles from Iran. Sorta hard to keep things straight over there sometimes.
The reason the Middle East is so FUBAR is that people there take their religions seriously. Bombs don’t cure people of religion.
Nonetheless, I’d call the Yazidi situation a “ticking time bomb”, and if I could save them temporarily by blowing up a few of The Faithful, I’d do it.
–TP
Thank heavens Obama has done away with torture (well, not really) and opted to simply kill the bad guys instead (as well as anybody unlucky enough to be in their vicinity).
I have always found it rather strange that people react so strongly to torture, but are quite prepared to condone, excuse or support killing (even of totally innocent people) “because war”.
Or they had them to the extent that such people exist.
You’re arguing over nothing, but go for it.
Nonetheless, I’d call the Yazidi situation a “ticking time bomb”, and if I could save them temporarily by blowing up a few of The Faithful, I’d do it.
Yes.
I have always found it rather strange that people react so strongly to torture, but are quite prepared to condone, excuse or support killing (even of totally innocent people) “because war”.
Because the calculus isn’t usually between peace and killing, it’s usually about stopping worse killing and abuse. Obviously, whether people support military action or not depends on how strongly they’re convinced that the military action will do more good than harm.
FWIW, this, courtesy of the FAS, seems like an interesting discussion of, not just torture, but a broad range of issues around gathering intelligence from folks whose interests may not align with ours.
The fact remains that you can’t study “torture as an effective means to get at the truth” by looking at various torture regimes, since torture regimes would have a certain number of people (maybe a huge majority, maybe all) who just enjoyed the torture part, forgetting all about the information part.
IMO this is a really apt point, and it also brings up an aspect of torture that seems to get lost in the discussion.
Torture, as folks have practiced it over the millennia, has purposes beyond gaining useful intelligence. Among other things, it’s useful for terrorizing populations – if you don’t do what we say, or if you resist us, you will suffer in agonizing ways.
It’s a useful instrument for subjugating people.
It’s also proven useful for getting people to say stuff that you want them to say, completely unrelated to whether that happens to be true or not. A lot of the modern US repertoire of torture techniques comes from practices used against US service people, and which were employed to elicit false confessions and / or false statements that were useful for propaganda purposes.
In the Bush context, please see Al-Libi.
If we want to be people who deal with the world by utterly crushing and destroying anyone who opposes us, and who are willing to crucify people to build propagandistic justifications for doing stuff we want to do, we should by all means consider torture as an instrument, because it’s useful for those applications.
As far as the legalities, there will always be some punk in the OLC who’ll write a helpful opinion. If you don’t have plans to travel overseas, you probably don’t have much to worry about.
Arguing over your strange claim that people can’t do what people actually have done, sapient. It was wrong. I get a little tired of armchair argumentation when there’s actual data.
Novakant–I’m not sure what the right thing to do is with respect to ISIS. It might be potential genocide over there. Or we might make things worse. It’s the first time I can recall thinking the prospective genocide argument has validity here, and of course it could still be wrong or we might make things worse. If you have an actual argument of some sort, I’m listening. Not that it makes the slightest bit of difference what I think, unless hundreds of millions of other Americans agree. I was opposed to intervening in Syria (where we would have been indirectly assisting precisely the sorts of people we are now bombing) because that was almost a textbook case of when the US shouldn’t get involved. Intervening against Assad, whose regime was brutal and corrupt, but secular and allowed for religious differences, vs. a group of people whose strongest forces were likely to kill Christians, Alawites and Shiites and Sunnis insufficiently devout if they won. It made absolutely no sense. In this case there seems to be a side which is recognizably much less bad than the people we are bombing. But by all means make the anti-intervention case. Usually these humanitarian interventions go wrong or aren’t humanitarian.
Over and above the merits of attacking ISIS to try and prevent genocide of the Yazidi, et al., there is this. ISIS is also attacking the Kurds. And of all the folks in the Middle East, the Kurds are the ones who most closely meet the definition of “ally” — even if we haven’t recognize them as a state in themselves. (These days the Turks are, to my mind, second. And that’s only because of the way Erdogan behaves; otherwise they would remain our best ally there.)**
So there is something strongly to be said for acting militarily in support of an ally under military attack. Especially from folks like ISIS.
** And yes, I am including Israel in that. We are doubtless Israel’s best ally. But, from the way the Netanyahu government behaves, there is strong reason to doubt that Israel is our ally. From the way Netanyahu acts, for him we seem to be much more of a client state. A wealthy and useful one, no doubt, but a client, not a peer.
ISIS/ISIL, to a large extent, is using US/Saudi supplied weaponry.
Build a powder keg and then light a fuse with careless destabilization founded on high-minded horseshit wet dreams of democracy, blah, blah, blah and oil and a person of a real politik cast of mind might have concluded that Saddam Hussein was the only piece of murderous vermin who might have prevented the rise of ISIS.
The theme and title of the post comes around again — the world has once again become a meat grinder and the butchers increasingly prefer their meat ground with high bone, cartilage, and viscera content.
A step back might reveal a broadly worldwide move to even more murderous and trans-national forms of crypto-religious, ideological, and highly nationalistic conservatism (the kind that wants to return to and preserve previously ineffective but monolithic forms of Order) and that includes right here in the USA.
Next year, impeachment proceedings will begin against Barack Hussein Obama (a conservative of a sort, but somehow not good enough for this rabid murderous, vile conservatism extant now) in the midst of this world-killing mess and that will focus the various resurgent strains, like Ebola, of murderous conservatism (Putin, Netanyahu, Hamas, ISIS, the Republican Party, the latter a fucking, festering, stinking, ignorant, sadistic — and somehow comical, to boot, to keep the satire industry on its feet — disgrace on this country) around the world in a gleeful paroxysm of renewed war to resurrect and maintain all of the old conservative verities — hating, arming, and killing each other, the Other.
We, the rest of us in this world, are the hamburger, just like the Yazidi on that mountaintop.
“ISIS/ISIL, to a large extent, is using US/Saudi supplied weaponry.”
Yeah. Reminds me of the Iran/Iraq war. Some Americans used to joke about wanting to help both sides kill each other, but I don’t think they were really joking. It’s another data point in why people hate the US or think there’s a vast conspiracy going on (though sometimes I do wonder if there’s a vast conspiracy going on.)
I get a little tired of armchair argumentation when there’s actual data.
The study that you linked to wasn’t very carefully described in the link, but it didn’t seem as though it was very precise in what it was measuring. One can “study” anything, and of course “there are studies” and even “conclusions”. The value of studies and conclusions might be questionable. The study you pointed to shows that among torture regimes, torture didn’t yield information. Of course, whether the victim knew the info, whether the torturer asked the right questions, whether the torturer cared about the info, etc. – these are all variables that weren’t really explored.
Even the link you provided concludes by asserting that the amount of information that can be gained by torture varies according to the personality of the person being tortured. Very informative.
It’s another data point in why people hate the US or think there’s a vast conspiracy going on (though sometimes I do wonder if there’s a vast conspiracy going on.)
we’re too collectively dumb to pull off such a conspiracy.
Rejali wrote a book on torture–it’s around 800 pages long and after spending many years of his scholarly career examining how torture was used in many different places, he came to the conclusion that torture was repeatedly demonstrated to be a poor method for intelligence services to use to extract information –even the intelligence services concluded this in some cases–but a great method for other purposes. I have no idea why you or anyone interested in this subject would see fit to dismiss his conclusions based on your own deep examination of the subject.
Last I’ll say about this, as this is a waste of time for both of us, but if you are interested in torture, the history of the subject and what can be learned from studying it, just forget the fact that I suggested it and read Rejali’s book sometime.
Incidentally, Rejali shot down one of my own lefty myths about torture. There’s a lot of info in that book. Since the issue probably isn’t going to go away and since torture is now a policy choice that we argue over in the US, it has more than historical relevance.
we’re too collectively dumb to pull off such a conspiracy.
I am frequently amazed at how often the same people believe that the government (especially the Federal government) is hopelessly incompetent when it comes to doing almost anything. And yet have no trouble believing that the government is engaging in a variety of massive conspiracies, which it successfully manages to hide from the outside world.
The level of cognative dissonance amongst conspiracy theorists is simply stunning. And stunningly consistent.
The fact remains that you can’t study “torture as an effective means to get at the truth” by looking at various torture regimes, since torture regimes would have a certain number of people (maybe a huge majority, maybe all) who just enjoyed the torture part, forgetting all about the information part.
See, e.g., the United States.
We’re too collectively dumb to pull off a vast conspiracy, but maybe some people pulling one way on a policy and others pulling another way and a third group finding the overall chaos to be a satisfactory result might give the same results. So we help Iraq with intelligence during the Iraq/Iran war and meanwhile the US government also offers them weapons and people sitting back could also say that it’s fine if they just kill each other.
With someone like McCain, who never saw an American bomb he didn’t want to drop, it’s probably just a desire to get as deep in as possible. So we bomb the Sunni fanatics in one country while he wants us to bomb their enemy Assad in Syria and support the “moderate” rebels. The discussion of Syria last year was bizarrely stupid. Politicians in 2013 were saying that “Assad” killed 100,000 of his own people, like Assad’s forces were just sitting around shooting everyone in sight and nobody was shooting back, when l according to the anti-Assad Syrian Observatory of Human Rights about one third of the dead were civilians and 40 percent were pro-Assad combatants. The statistics are a little strange, but the moron contingent in America couldn’t be bothered to even look at them, beyond the total.
“US government also offers them weapons ”
I meant offers Iran weapons.
Charles Pierce on ISIS:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Back_To_Iraq
Notice the same …. filth … in this country who armed EVERYONE, Iran, Saddam, to some extent the Taliban and al Qaeda via previous adventurism in Afghanistan, via our client states, and Israel, and now allegedly ISIS ..
http://benswann.com/did-the-us-train-isis-rebels-to-fight-against-assad-in-syria/
… are now counseling (sidewalk variety, right in our effing faces) yet more of the same to keep the spiral toward chaos ever downward.
You see why American conservatives are so enamoured of the muscled-up, bare-tittied Putin, the other major conservative arms supplier in this world.
It’s malignant metastasizing conservatism the world over armed by malignant, metastasizing conservatism.
Maybe the war is in the wrong countries.
ISIS/ISIL, to a large extent, is using US/Saudi supplied weaponry.
Yeah, this appears to be so. Much of it provided by us to the Iraqi army, to replace all the stuff we blew up in ’03, and which the Iraqi army left behind for ISIS when they ran away.
So, among other odd and interesting ironies, we are spending millions on targeted airstrikes to blow up artillery that we spent billions on just a couple of years ago, to replace other arms (much of which likely also provided by us at some point) that we blew up a decade or so ago.
Maybe we could just take the top 15 or 20% of the gross national product each year out in the desert in the form of big stacks of Ben Franklins, pile them up nice and high, and light them on fire.
Make a national holiday out of it, kind of an all-American Burning Man.
It would be easier, fewer people would get hurt, and the end result might be the same.
How about this: if torturing someone would have prevented the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, would you be for torturing?
The ticking time invasion argument. I’m so sick of that one.
Robert Farley at the Lawyers Guns and Money blog had a short piece at the Washington Post (just before the decision to bomb, I think) about the practical difficulties of what needs to be done–
why its so hard to help the yazidi dying of thirst on the Iraqi mountaintop
We won’t find a book on “Torture and Why it Works” any more than we will find a book called “The Case for Pedophilia”. No prudent scholar is going to argue the efficacy of torture. Further, no one can verify the claim that is doesn’t work, since the claim is based on historical reporting, by conducting real time experiments. Nigel, I’m not implying that its a crying, pitiful shame that we can’t do this.
Regarding the decision to send 2 F-18’s to drop some bombs, what is the plan when that doesn’t work and how long do we think we can feed 40,000 people surrounded on a mountain by armed militants?
Seriously. There isn’t a half measure that is even remotely calculated to work and whole measures are beyond our collective tolerance, at least for the time being. Maybe 40,000 corpses will send us in after the fact, but not now.
via Sullivan … who is dropping the bombs on ISIS:
http://www.businessinsider.com/who-bombed-isis-militants-on-august-7-2014-8#ixzz39oYt3Zsp
Is it too much to now imagine Iranian and Israeli pilots commandeering Russian MiGs as air support for Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine?
All cheered on by American neo-conservative killers as the lot of them hate on Barack Obama.
ISIS certainly has occasioned a rainbow coalition against it.
“Further, no one can verify the claim that is doesn’t work, since the claim is based on historical reporting, by conducting real time experiments.”
You know, actually, people do claim that torture does work and they point to real life cases where they say it worked. Rejali looked at the history of the subject in more depth than anyone ever has and found that, based on the actual evidence of hundreds of years of experience, that torture is a poor method for gathering information since people have tried to use it for that with very limited success.
But now in the ObiWi comment section there’s a whole new standard being proposed–we’ve got to have guys in lab coats with no particular psychological willies to satisfy doing the experiment. Can’t be done for ethical reasons Though in fact there’s no reason to think that all the previous torturers were psychological sadists and that none had good intentions. In fact the CIA guys claim to have had good intentions. The Inquisition had good intentions by their lights. And Nazis sometimes claimed to find what they did distasteful, but necessary. Lots of psychologically normal people with good intentions running around all through history doing all sorts of things. Terrorists who blow people up are generally normal, according to Scott Atran and others who really know the subject. It’s comforting to think that only sick twisted people do bad things, so we can’t know if torture really works because we haven’t had normal people doing the torturing in order to find out information. Except that we probably have, unless everyone involved in the American torture program was a pervert.
I think I’ll just concede the point. There is no way to tell if angelic beings entirely free of mankind’s grosser propensities and with the supernatural power to discern slight changes in facial expression would not be able to use torture to extract information. Furthermore, future developments in computer technology and brain science might enable the super-advanced torturer of the future to poke and prod and electrify his or her way to TRUTH. These are indeed metaphysical and perhaps future scientific possibilities. So to you, Darius Rejali with your decade or more of research into dusty files, I say Hah. What do you know? What do any of us know about what is possible?
I’m a big fan of medicine and suspect there may be a future for the use of truth serums however I believe that is also a war crime
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-truth-serum/
Is there a Doctor in the house?
No prudent scholar is going to argue the efficacy of torture.
Actually, Alan Dershowitz has taken a swing or two at it over the years.
Just as an example.
What I say is: today it’s inducing psychosis through sleep deprivation with a little hypothermia on the side, tomorrow it’s waterboarding.
Next thing you know your crushing the nuts of little boys.
Right, professor Yoo?
Because it’s OK when the President does it. Or whatever transcendent authority floats your boat.
There are lots of things we could do, and don’t do, because they are f***ing wrong.
We don’t decimate civilian populations. We don’t throw people’s kids off of tall buildings while they watch. We don’t dunk people in vats of acid.
I’m sure there’s a plausible scenario in which doing each and every one of those things would yield us some useful benefit. And yet, we don’t do them.
Why? Because they’re wrong. And whatever it costs us to forgo whatever benefit we might get from doing them, we consider it a fair price to pay, to not be people who decimate civilian populations, or throw kids off of buildings, or dip people in acid.
Torture, same/same, as far as I’m concerned.
It’s a corrosive, poisonous practice, because it’s wrong, and any human being who hasn’t surrendered their soul somewhere along the line knows, intuitively and instinctually, that it’s wrong.
It’s wrong, and when you embrace it, it will mess you up. It’s not like there isn’t a downside to doing stuff like this, whatever benefit you think you’re getting from it. It f***’s up the perpetrator as surely as the victim. And that’s as true of nations as it is of individual people.
So, among other odd and interesting ironies, we are spending millions on targeted airstrikes to blow up artillery that we spent billions on just a couple of years ago, to replace other arms (much of which likely also provided by us at some point) that we blew up a decade or so ago.
I am reminded of the movie Holes and the famous quip by JM Keynes about burying bottles of money in mineshafts. But, of course, if one pointed out this apparent anomaly to some wingnut Congresscritter, they’d start yammering about “saving US jobs” (in MY district, no less), “spending that we can’t afford”, and the quintessential “burden on future generations” bullsh*t tripe.
May god have mercy on their souls.
Hi Donald Johnson,
Rest assured in the warm bath of the future liberal Nirvana when the left wing eugenicists have taken over things will be different as we genetically alter all humans to be righteous, just, and good.
But in the meantime, I agree the “truthie technology” we are developing will most likely turn out to be a bust. Indeed, if you could get into the mind of somebody to determine their “true” intent, one would undoubtedly be taken aback by the fact that just about everybody considers themselves to be righteous, just, and good.
Now just how could that possibly be?
Actually, Alan Dershowitz has taken a swing or two at it over the years.
Sorry to tell you this, Russell, but Alan Dershowitz is hardly prudent. Therefore he does not meet McKinney’s criteria.
Nice try, though.
…and how long do we think we can feed 40,000 people surrounded on a mountain by armed militants?
Damn, McKinney. You better lay off whatever it is your drinking. 😉
Call me a cynic, bobbyp, but that was a different time. And the Berlin airlift involved planes landing on location, not dropping supplies from the air. This is potentially more like Arnheim.
It’s wrong, and when you embrace it, it will mess you up. It’s not like there isn’t a downside to doing stuff like this, whatever benefit you think you’re getting from it. It f***’s up the perpetrator as surely as the victim. And that’s as true of nations as it is of individual people.
I agree. I think most of us agree. The only difference is who wants to score points on what and who is holier than thou. Donald wants to champion a study. Okay, great. Someone “studied”. The conclusion is pretty much what is intuitive: torture is bad. It doesn’t work so well, although sometimes it does, depending on whatever.
But whether it works isn’t the issue. Whether it’s right is the issue. And it’s so rarely right that the “ticking time bomb” scenario has to be an affirmative defense, not a way forward.
Hartmut, if memory serves (and I have this vivid image in my head) the planes into Berlin did not land. They came in low over the airfield, the cargo was pulled out with parachutes, and the planes headed back without ever touching down. That may not be feasible here, given the topography. But it might be possible to do something similar.
has to be an affirmative defense, not a way forward.
And, sorry to follow along with my own train of thought, the idea of “affirmative defense” requires the possibility of prosecution. And the possibility of prosecution requires that the American people quit voting for the party that tortures (that would be the Republican Party). Because the country won’t prosecute people who furthered the popular will.
” Someone “studied”. The conclusion is pretty much what is intuitive: torture is bad. It doesn’t work so well, although sometimes it does, depending on whatever.
But whether it works isn’t the issue. Whether it’s right is the issue.”
Guess what–not everyone agrees with you that whether it is right is the issue and they don’t agree with you on what is right. Some people think torture is right because they think it works, and given a tradeoff between torturing a few terror suspects and avoiding a 9/11 that kills 3000 people, they’re going to go with torturing a few suspects. That’s partly why so many of us think that McKT is right about the likely outcome of a torture trial.
But yeah, there is no evidence that torture is a good method for gathering intelligence, people have studied that (studying is wrong when you can just BS) and so we can try to put that misconception to rest. Because if they do think it’s a good method, then you can guarantee that people will want to use it, because a lot of people buy into the ticking time bomb defense. They’re not going to be swayed by the moral degeneration argument if they think that thousands of American lives are at stake–Americans, like a lot of people, weigh our own lives a lot more than they value others and if they think that torturing some terror suspects is a good way to gather info, then a great many people will favor it. Some liberals famously favored it right after 9/11, notably Jonathan Alter. Many liberals defend dropping the A-bomb on civilians. What is morally right to some isn’t so obvious to others.
So fine, just go along with your notion that whether it works isn’t the issue. Concede that to the other side. Toss aside factual studies, because you go with your gut and what your gut tells you is what should convince others, so that enough will vote for the Democrats and America will never torture again. That’s sure reality-based, isn’t it?
One note, Mr Johnson. We are, as you note, talking about terror suspects. Not, necessarily, terrorists. Merely people who someone suspects of being terrorists.
Put another way, what is happening is punishment, severe punishment, without conviction. (Or even a trial.) Indeed, in at least some cases, punishment of those who turn out to be completely innocent. It could, in fact, be any of us — all it takes is for someone to suspect us, not even necessarily with any evidence whatsoever.
Punishment without bothering with a trial, let alone a conviction, has a long and very unfortunate history. But it is something that we should be moving away from as rapidly as possible. Not just repeating the justifications that always surround punishment without trial.
Sorry to tell you this, Russell, but Alan Dershowitz is hardly prudent.
Good point.
Whether it’s right is the issue. And it’s so rarely right that the “ticking time bomb” scenario has to be an affirmative defense, not a way forward.
An even better point.
Ditto your 8:12.
I just came to apologize for yelling at you, sapient. I think you’re mistaken for the reasons I’ve said, but I shouldn’t be yelling at you. I’ve been yelling at too many people online lately, so it’s time to take a break from the internet for a while.
But I’ll respond to wj before bowing out–
“We are, as you note, talking about terror suspects. Not, necessarily, terrorists. Merely people who someone suspects of being terrorists.”
Agreed on all the moral points everyone is making. I usually make those points myself. But I’ve noticed that not everyone agrees with me on morality. Winning an argument in an ObiWi comment thread on morality doesn’t necessarily guarantee success in the wider world. So it’s also a good idea to make the practical argument that torture is a lousy way to gather information. I’m actually surprised I’m having to argue this–as I remember it, it was a pretty standard point back when heated torture arguments were the norm all over the internet. At one blog (not this one) I said myself that “Yes, well, maybe torture does work in extreme cases and we should acknowledge that, but point out that it’s always immoral, a line that should never be crossed, a violation of all that is sacred, etc…” Someone quickly corrected me.
As long as people think torture works, there will be people who argue that it is the lesser of two evils to torture likely terror suspects than to risk the deaths of large numbers of innocent people. This is why the ticking time bomb argument will never die. People “instinctively know” that torture can work, whether true or not. Democracies have practiced it–Israel probably still does link to B’Tselem article on torture used in interrogation though their court put limits on it.
If we get to the point where there is some scientific breakthrough and torture really does aid in gathering information, then we will have to rely on the moral argument alone. But that hasn’t happened.
DJ: I have to agree with McK on one point: if a torturer ever gets prosecuted, it is very likely that the jury will acquit.
Fer cryin’ out loud, cops that break into the wrong house an shoot innocent kids and old people are routinely acquitted, so (horrible as it is) why should prosecutors bother bringing cases they’re going to lose?
When the average US juror gives the same weight to the “just doing my job/following orders” defense as the post-WWII Nurenburg tribunals did, perhaps things will change.
wj, each and every landing strip in Berlin (West) was used plus some of the rivers and lakes (the latter by the large flying boats) in what looked like a conveyor belt. Touch-down, unloading, take-off in an extremly tight schedule. Iirc planes that broke the timetable had to do a full return to the back of the line (i.e. fly back to West Germany).
One aspect not generally known these days but extremly important at the time: It was not an actual threat of starvation. One goal was to lure West Berlinians into getting food and coal** from East Germany, so it could be used for propganda purposes. There was a constant siren song from the Eastern mouthpieces. There is an infamous (and highly hilarious*) speech from an Eastern functionary where he accuses the Western Allies of holding Berlinians hostage by preventing them form buying in East Berlin.
—
I am not old enough to have seen it myself (born 1973) but the power plant flown in piece by piece is within easy walking distance from where I live.
*he misspeaks, tries to correct himself twice and makes it worse each time and all of that at the rhetorical climax.
**far more important than food in that whole affair
I’m with Donald on this one.
More knowledge is better than less, even (especially ?) when the argument is one about morality.
And also about the yelling.
🙂
Hartmut, I’m not old enough to remember it either (born 1947, so I was alive but hardly aware enough).
The image in my mind (from a high school text, I suspect) wan’t exactly this one, because it was directly sideways on. But close.
http://www.warren.af.mil/shared/media/ggallery/webgraphic/AFG-101221-001.jpg
DJ: Thx.
One point (probably known by all here, but apparently overlooked) about whether torture ever “works”: I’ve realized ever since reading a bit about Pearl Harbor and the controversy about whether FDR or anyone “knew” it was coming (and deliberately overlooked it, as conspiracy theorists contended) is that in the modern world the problem is rarely a lack of information. UNLIKE the mysteries and thrillers, books and TV shows and movies, that I enjoy, there is hardly ever a single piece of evidence (clue, file, recording) that is dispositive and suddenly settles matters and resolves the case by the end of the book or movie.
Instead, we have MASSES of information to wade through, some of which turns out to be right and some not and some simply irrelevant, and the whole art of “intelligence” is not finding “information” (whether through torture or intercepts or aerial photography) but in figuring out – correctly – which of this is right, or at least the best guess on which to base action.
Did US intelligence agencies have clues that the Japanese would hit Pearl Harbor early in December 1941? Yes. Is it reasonable to assume that good intelligence practices would have – or did – figure separate these clues from the thousands of bits of “chaff” that surrounded them? Not really.
So if you’re going to torture someone, and he (or she) gives you “information,” besides the question of whether or not s/he is just telling you whatever you want, which is likely, lies the larger question of whether that “information” is dispositive and should outweigh the thousands – by now millions – of other bits of data that we have. Probably not. Some poor guy under duress could actually have given us the names of the 9/11 terrorists and their ID numbers and flight plans and mothers’ maiden names and there’s still a pretty good chance it wouldn’t have prevented 9/11, because that’s how “intelligence” works. As opposed to movies, or McKT’s imagination.
Also, while we’re on the subject: torture is wrong.
Surprise, surprise The US is still torturing:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/25/obama-administration-military-torture-army-field-manual
but as I said, the Obama administration prefers to kill.
Donald, I wasn’t referring to ISIS but making a general point: while I am against torture, I feel that the killing and maiming of people deserves even more moral deliberation than torture, but oceans of ink have been spilled on the latter, while the former barely elicits a shrug from most people.
Also, while we’re on the subject: torture is wrong.
Absolutely. But if you do insist that it was, under certain strained circumstances, in some way justified, you should hold your wrists out and be willing to own up to the to the moral transgression committed.
I feel that the killing and maiming of people deserves even more moral deliberation than torture, but oceans of ink have been spilled on the latter, while the former barely elicits a shrug from most people.
Maybe this is one of those things that seems self-evident to me, but isn’t really, but this seems perfectly explicable. With torture, you have someone who is under your control and you (or a person you are supporting) are choosing to inflict more pain and suffering, where as killing, especially by drone etc, are of people who are not under your control, so the situations are not equivalent, which gives rise to the difference in treatment.
It also seems to be a feature not only of modern miltary ordinance, but also of modernity in general is to work to separate people from the actual consequences of their actions. A mundane example would be the number of people who believe the appearance of beef in the supermarket doesn’t actually entail any kind of slaughtering process. Torture, by the fact that someone is actually having to inflict the pain and do so multiple times, is much more ‘problematic’ than someone pressing a button half a world away to launch a missile. We build up systems to try and control that, but I think there is always going to be an asymmetry.
Sure, lj, I understand the points you make – it’s simply “all too human”.
What I do not understand is how educated, intelligent people discussing ethical matters seem to be largely incapable of recognizing and going beyond these fallacies.
I’m not sure if I get the sense of a ‘fallacy’. I mean, would we accept as a reasonable outcome that we didn’t kill anyone, only captured and then tortured them? I can see how, as a scale, we would list killing as worse than torturing, but that does seem to miss something. Not precisely sure what, though.
One cannot employ a utilitarian calculation to justify killing and maiming, but reject such a calculation when it comes to torture. This inconsistency is the reason why non-pacifist opponents of torture insist that torture never works, but that is doubtful.
It is inconsistent to spend a lot of time deliberating the ethics of torture, while not giving at least the same attention the ethics of killing and maiming people.
People injured and maimed in war can be suffering from physical pain for the rest of their lives, even just witnessing the cruelties of war can scar people psychologically forever. The long term effects can be very similar to those cause by torture …
And yet these people are at least allowed to live on, while those killed have been robbed of their lives, which is a crime that defies all description …
These matters require serious philosophical discussion, not half-baked armchair arguments based on vague intuitions and self-interest – and even then there won’t be a satisfactory outcome. Except maybe that people might hopefully be less willing to glibly justify violence after they have thought through the ethical dimension of violence as a political means.
I know a few people who have experienced war as civilians first hand and most of them are pacifists – it’s not an argument, but makes you think.
LJ, it’s not just something like the slaughtering process where people are unable to see the processes which lead to the ends. And it may be simply part of being human.
I recall when I was growing up, and classes of local suburban kids used to have field trips out to “the farm.” Often there would be some of them who would refuse to drink milk at our house, “because it came from a cow” — a cow that they could actually watch being milked. They drank milk at home. But as far as they were concerned, milk which came from the store was an entirely different, and unrelated, product. It always amazed us, but it wasn’t unusual.
Not something involving anything like violence, or any other unethical behavior. Just a process that they had never encountered first hand. And therefore apparently had trouble connecting to the products taht they routinely consumed.
One cannot employ a utilitarian calculation to justify killing and maiming, but reject such a calculation when it comes to torture.
I guess my sense is that people who are ‘spilling ink’ over this are not thinking of utilitarian calculations, but simply talking about what is foremost on their minds. And I also think that most people are not driven by utilitarian calculations and those that are, they will just continue to up the ante in order to justify it.