When I was ten years old, I read 1984.
It wasn’t typical fare for someone between fourth and fifth grades, but I’d always been ahead of the curve in reading ability, and the straightforward prose of Orwell was not beyond me. Besides, it was 1984, and it seemed to me I ought to read a book named for that year.
And so I did.
But while the prose of the book was not beyond me, the emotion behind it was. I was ten; I didn’t understand how Winston — and Julia — could surrender, could betray one another. I still had a child’s romantic understanding of good and evil, and I could not quite wrap my brain around the ending, even as it seemed, in some way I could not explain, somehow right.
All I knew, as I concluded the book on the old green couch in my parents’ basement, was that I was grateful we did not live in a state that could countenance the horror of Oceana. Unlike the poor souls in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, the American government, even under Reagan, would never spy on our citizens. And they certainly, certainly, certainly would never torture.
That much I knew.
‘You asked me once,’ said O’Brien, ‘what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.’
–George Orwell, 1984
As explained below, any physical pain resulting from these techniques, even in combination, cannot reasonably be expected to meet the level of “severe physical pain” contemplated by the statute. We conclude, therefore, that the authorized use in combination of these techniques by adequately trained investigators, as described in the Background Paper and the April 22 [redacted] Fax, could not reasonably be considered specifically intended to do so.
–Acting Asst. Attorney General Steven Bradbury, 5/10/05
Once, we prided ourselves on being better than our enemies. It was not just idle boasting; the fact that America did not have the gulag system, did not disappear political enemies, did not torture its citizens or its enemies — these were not just signs that we were good people, but they were part of our national belief in our inherent moral superiority. Americans didn’t torture, we said, because we didn’t need to torture. We were simply right about capitalism and democracy, and only a nation afraid of the truth would need do so. While the Russians, we knew, would torture our spies as soon as look at ’em, we knew that the best thing we could do is kill ’em with kindness. And while things didn’t always work out exactly that way, there was more truth than not in the conceit. We didn’t condone torture. It wasn’t just wrong; it was un-American. And if it happened in some out-of-the-way conflict, or in some dark room somewhere, it wasn’t done under color of law.
But in the past eight years, we now know, America abandoned that once-cherished belief. We stopped being a nation that would never stoop to torture, and started looking for ways to rationalize torture so that we could call it something else. We poured water down people’s throats, and called it “waterboarding,” and reacted with shocked surprise when people pointed out that the water cure is a form of torture that goes back hundreds, if not thousands of years. We put people in “stress positions,” and said that this was nothing like hanging a prisoner from the wall by manicle, even if we were shackling people so that they could not sit, could not lie down, could not find a position in which they were not in pain.
And today we found out that we used psychological forms of torment that O’Brien would have been proud of.
The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O’Brien was standing. Winston could not see what the thing was.
‘The worst thing in the world,’ said O’Brien, ‘varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.’
He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats.
‘In your case,’ said O’Brien, ‘the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.’
–George Orwell, 1984
You [the CIA] would like to place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us that he appears to have a fear of insects. In particular, you would like to tell Zubaydah that you intend to place a stinging insect into the box with him. You would, however, place a harmless insect in the box. You have orally informed us that you would in fact place a harmless insect such as a caterpillar in the box with him.
–Jay Bybee, Office of Legal Counsel Memo 8/1/2002
I understand the reluctance of President Obama to prosecute the thugs in the Bush Administration who authorized the use of torture. We are in a severe crisis, and things are likely to get worse before they get better; political energy spent attacking Bush is energy that can’t be used to push for health care. And while the Village was quite happy to see Bill Clinton punished for getting a blow job, there has been no such support among the chattering classes for punishment being meted out for violations of the Geneva Convention.
But while these memos don’t tell us anything new — well, not exactly — they do remind us of just what the previous administration thought of our national soul.
Torture is wrong. It is evil. It is the deepest perversion humanity has created. It is, in its own way, worse than murder — for at least murder does not prolong suffering, does not sustain agony. By affirmatively tying America to torture, George W. Bush placed us squarely among the worst nations that have ever been, or ever will be. That we found useful idiots to claim we were not torturing, technically, because we weren’t calling it torture, and besides, it’s not really torture when we do it — well, there will always be useful idiots around. Good leaders ignore them.
There are worse things that can happen to a nation than being attacked. The destruction that occurred on September 11, 2001 was awful, but it was transient; it was an awful moment in time, but it was just a moment in time. But in our reaction to it, our thoughtless invasion of Iraq, our shredding of civil liberties, and our embrace of torture methods perfected by our erstwhile enemies in the U.S.S.R. — by these actions, we lost a bit of what it was to be America. We lost a bit of our soul.
Sometime in the next dozen years, my daughter will chance upon 1984. She will read it, as I did, and she may understand it better or worse than I did at the time, depending on how old she is. But at the end, when Winston is crying his tears of Victory Gin, loving Big Brother, she will be denied the comfort I knew as a child, twenty-five years ago. For she will know that her nation has tortured, and done so willingly. That it tortured its enemies will be no relief; no country tortures its friends. She will grow up in a nation that is closer to Oceana than the one I grew up in. And I will always despise George W. Bush and his cronies for that; they stained the very soul of this nation. May God have mercy on our souls for not stopping them, and may we find the strength to do what must be done to prevent this from happening again — and if that means prosecuting the bastards, that’s what we have to do.
Amen.
I wonder if conservatives will ever really understand the degree to which people who might otherwise be persuaded by their arguments have come to understand ‘conservatism’ as the philosophy of gay-hate and torture.
It’s not, necessarily. It doesn’t have to be, but they have made it so.
I would like very much if they did not believe, advocate, and defend evil things. It would be better for me and for all Americans, but the part I don’t think they get is how much it would be better for them too.
If you’re a teen or in your early twenties, and you’re just starting to form your political awareness, the choice between liberalism and conservatism is a morally stark one. It’s not based on the philosophy of more or less government, a sturdier safety net or greater individualism, higher taxes or lower taxes, or anything like that. It’s based on “who thinks that torture is acceptable, and who doesn’t,” and, “who believes in equal rights for all Americans and who doesn’t.”
I don’t want there to be two sides to those arguments.
—Myca
(Applause.)
Not to nit-pick or anything, because I do agree with your overall premise, but this:
It was not just idle boasting; the fact that America did not have the gulag system, did not disappear political enemies
I tend to think the Japanese imprisoned during WWII might disagree, not to mention the post-war period of McCarthyism. It wasn’t just the past 8 years.
Sarah,
The Japanese weren’t disappeared, so far as I know; you could send mail to someone in an internment camp, and know whether he was dead or alive. The government didn’t disclaim knowledge of what was happening with the Japanese; on the contrary, it told people that this was all for everyone’s protection (some Republicans today are still saying that it really was to protect the Japanese against Angry Mobs, which I guess is something they’d know about…). Several people who were interned brought lawsuits over it, some of which went “all the way to the Supreme Court.”
Again, so far as I know, McCarthyism also didn’t involve disappearing people. People who lost their jobs because they were accused Communists, for example, could litigate the matter. That’s how the Supreme Court eventually stopped countenancing loyalty oaths and such, because they kept getting cases about it.
McCarthyism and especially the Japanese internment are shameful episodes in American history, but they don’t rise to the horrors of Soviet terror because the underlying institutions were not destroyed. There were executive orders and Congressional legislation that not secret and that anyone could read; the courts were still open and their judgments still had binding effect; the government was not engaged in a pattern of denial or silence about what it was doing.
However, once you remove people’s ability to use the system — once you declare them to be “enemy combatants,” a designation that comes with no established legal status as criminal defendants or POWs, no right to sue under our several laws that prohibit torture — that’s when you’re getting into the gulag system where people became non-persons. For some detainees like Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, the Bush Admin wouldn’t acknowledge holding them or where they were being held. That’s being disappeared.
I’m also not sure what to do about prosecutions, because who can we prosecute except Bush and Cheney themselves? I don’t want government lawyers to go to jail for issuing legal opinions, even if they screwed up and were basically writing advocacy briefs instead of dispassionate memos stating all possible interpretations of the law. That just seems like a First Amendment problem: I’m going to prison for something I wrote? It’s appalling that some of these guys are now federal judges with lifetime appointments, but criminal prosecution doesn’t set right with me.
But going after the folks who relied on these opinions from the Big Lawyer Experts is even worse, because we have a system set up where the executive branch is supposed to be able to rely on the OLC’s and in general DOJ’s legal advice. We’re going to have Justice Department prosecute people for … following the advice of an office in the Justice Department? That’s not fair either, unless it is impossible for someone without legal training to have understood the OLC’s advice as a good faith interpretation of broadly-written statutes and treaties. Obama already has left open the door to prosecuting people who went beyond even what the OLC’s memos would allow, i.e. people who knew they were acting illegally.
Except for those deliberate miscreants, eliminating both the lawyers and the intelligence officers pretty much just leaves the folks at the top who gave the OLC’s advice to the CIA mooks and said, “Have at it.” Bush and Cheney had it within their power to say, “Yeah, even if you can find a way to make this squeeze under the wire of what’s legal, let’s not push the envelope.” But they didn’t.
The problem with this paradox (and I agree, it is troubling) is that we’re left with a situation where the government can do basically anything as long as their lawyers find a legal rationale for it (no matter how tortured), and nobody can be punished.
Not the lawyers, not the people giving the orders, not the peopel carrying them out.
Nobody.
Once we’ve reached that point, torture is only the tip of the iceberg.
—Myca
Beautiful post Jeff — it’s a good reminder that I should crack open 1984 again
I didn’t read 1984 and Animal Farm until a few years ago. Both were on my bookshelf and things that I hadn’t gotten around to, but I’m very glad that I waited as long as I did. The 1984 that I read was not about the threat of communism to a 1949 America. I read with an open mind that not only could this happen to my country, but that it already had. The 1984 that I read was in the context of a ~30 year old mind that had just finished reading about China, Vietnam, North Korea & American Socialism. I knew about the history of the use of US forces abroad, the viewpoint of National Security in 1950, US Interventions in Latin America, the role of the UN and the US vetoes in the UN, and possibly most importantly the recent US view on security and the types of facilities “required to maintain security”. When I read 1984 my main thought was not to question how a society could get to that point but was ‘holy %#@!#$, how can I stop this monstrosity that is around me’. I cried a lot when reading that book.
While I agree that 9/11 changed America and has pushed America further down the 1984 totalitarian regime path, I think it’s just another step on a journey started long ago. Are America’s actions after 9/11 really that surprising coming from the group that brought you the Vietnam war, Japanese Internment in WWII, segregation, the Smith Act trials, or the concept of Manifest Destiny and the oppression that followed in its wake? Frankly, I’m somewhat amazed that nuclear ‘bunker busters’ haven’t been dropped around the world in the last 8 years (or have they?).
As far as the real and immediate decisions for prosecuting people involved in recent US torture, I don’t see a way forward as long as that way is developed by and for the US. The actions that have been committed must stand up to an international law and be treated as the crimes against humanity that they are. Too often when left to its own guidelines for justice the US chooses the path of punishing low ranking officials (Abu Ghraib) while guiding others to punish the leaders in charge (See: Sadaam Hussein, 1980’s S. America)
Despite the UN’s charter we don’t have a true world order. The US is an imperial state in an imperial age with no responsibility to the rest of the world. The uS will continue to do whatever it wants until such time that it is forced to take another course. A trial into torture in the US military and some token prison terms will not change the underlying opressive nature of the regime. I hope that the force of change can come from within through people and democratic change or even better – a good revolution, but I don’t think it will. Ultimately the change will occur when Oceana is overthrown as the leader of the world and a new Oceana(s) rises to take its place and impose its will on weaker nations.
George Orwell wrote:
Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Myca,
I’m OK with prosecuting the people at the top like Bush and Cheney. Basically, they’re the only ones who have the right set of incentives to make these decision.
If lawyers have to fear prosecution for their legal opinions, they’ll feel forced to be super cautious; if the people carrying out policy don’t feel like they can trust the lawyers’ guidelines to protect them from prosecution, they’ll be second-guessing orders and unable to carry out their duties.
In contrast, the president and vice-president were elected both to uphold the Constitution and to keep the nation safe. Their incentives are properly aligned: if they sincerely believe something is necessary to keep a million Americans from dying, then they should be ready to go to jail if what they do is later deemed illegal. (After all, they’re already risking assassination every day just for being pres and VP.)
That set of incentives doesn’t exist for the lawyers and the CIA mooks, because they don’t really have the big picture; they’re cogs in different parts of the machine. If I were working in the OLC and was aware that giving the “wrong” opinion could end up in my going to jail — screw the “24” type scenarios of LA getting nuked. It’s not my job to prevent such things, only to give my legal opinion, one that I’m going to make very very cautiously now that prison is the result of being too incautious. Same goes for the CIA mooks.
People at the top have to take responsibility because they’re the ones who assumed the most responsibility. Again, I’d consider prosecutions for the mooks if they went further than even the OLC authorized, and for the lawyers if their interpretations of law were clearly made without good faith. But from what I’ve seen, their interpretations weren’t totally off-the-wall making shit up, just way too inclined to find ways to let the CIA folks go as far as possible instead of giving a balanced view of the law (contrast with the current OLC’s saying that as much as they would like for DC to have a Congressional rep, it’s probably unconstitutional to do it through statute — an example of evaluating the law seriously instead of just looking for a way for your side to win).
Anyone see this video?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR16iYDIQGs
Kind of funny…I guess it’s the 60th anniversary of 1984?
Righteous post, Jeff.
Let me take this opportunity to suggest everyone see STANDARD OPERATIONAL PROCEDURE, if you can bear it. Really, all Americans need to see it.
Here was my review, from some time ago.
(warning: extremely triggering photos in links; I only reprinted one photo in the post)
The parallels between 1984 and the Bush memos are really inspired. That should get broader circulation.
That said….
Guys, how does the amount of suffering inflicted by the Bush Administration’s torture program – generally on people believed to have some association with a past or pending assault on the nation – compare with the suffering inflicted by two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Recall that the purpose of these bombs was not principally to hurt the people of those cities (they were overwhelmingly civilian); rather, it was to put terror into the hearts of Japan’s leaders who were not believed to be in those cities. We were, quite simply, engaging in terrorism.
Moreover, since shortly thereafter we have been engaged in an explicit strategy of “mutually assured destruction” with the USSR/Russia. That is, we hold each other’s populations – civilian populations – hostage, in violation of any concept of the laws of war.
And then there’s the US’s long history of covert military actions….
Thus, by the year 1984 I question whether any US citizen should have developed much of a sense of pride regarding the US’s restraint in exercising power. Moreover, I encourage everyone to contemplate what you would have done when confronted with the fear that another 9/11 was imminent.
Recall that Bush induced the US to wage war on the premise that doing so would be virtually costless. Let us not reciprocate by suggesting we can wage peace costlessly. Don’t like torture? That’s the easy part. What are you willing to sacrifice to avoid torture? That’s where the rubber meets the road. If we really mean, “We will not torture, thought the heavens may fall!,” then let’s say so explicitly. Acknowledge that restraint is not necessarily costless, that the heavens may in fact fall.
Virtue comes only at a price; name yours.
nobody.really,
There’s a difference between acts of war and acts taken when someone is your prisoner. If the U.S. engaged in torture of POWs in WWII, the analogy would be more apt, but the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (not to mention the non-nuclear bombing of Tokyo, Dresden and many other Axis cities) isn’t very comparable. The laws of war that existed at the time of WWII did not preclude bombing a city of military and industrial significance (as both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were). If the goal had been terroristic, then Kyoto would have made a perfectly good and terrifying target, as it was highly populated and contained many of the cultural treasures of Japan.
If attacks on a country in order to get it to surrender are terrorism, then pretty much all war waged into enemy territory is terrorism and the word has collapsed into meaninglessness. If all concerns about what another country might do in response to one’s own actions mean that one is the victim of terrorism, then again the word collapses into meaninglessness. Pakistan can’t openly support Kashmiri rebels — does that mean it’s being “terrorized” by India? Or is it prudently forbearing from actions that it has no right to perform under international law anyway?
I’m sick of the false binary that one must allow torture for all circumstances or allow it for none. It makes as much sense as saying that one never can kill. One cannot kill in the vast majority of circumstances, even when one’s property or general well-being is threatened, but there’s a narrow set of circumstances in which killing in self-defense is permitted.
Perhaps torture is something we should not do in any circumstances, even in the beloved ticking-time-bomb scenario, but the choices are not between 1) Abu Ghraib (torture for shits and giggles) and an otherwise free rein on letting the CIA and military torture people even when there’s no imminent threat of which we are certain that these people have knowledge; versus 2) no torture ever ever ever. People who posit those false binaries generally are just trying to push polling numbers to get a result that says, “See, Americans support what Bush did!”
Yup, and in fact Kyoto was on the target list. But Secretary of War Henry Stimson had honeymooned there, and couldn’t bring himself to nuke the place. Such are the vagaries of war.
As I understand the laws of war, armed forces are supposed to restrict themselves to attacking the enemy’ armed forces; leading the enemy to live in terror of military defeat is fine. But civilians are supposed to be left out of it to the maximum extent possible. The US targeted Hiroshima and Nagasaki in part because they were of such limited military importance that we hadn’t bombed them much yet, and therefore we’d be better able to evaluate the consequence of the nuclear bomb unsullied by the consequences of other bombs. But, to be sure, each city had some military operations, arguably justifying a claim that the US was bombing a legitimate target.
Well, my concern is the easy morality of condemning without acknowledging cost. Once we acknowledge that foregoing torture may have a cost we may decide that there are circumstances under which we’d continence the practice of torture; that would be one path to forsaking easy morality. But, as you also suggest, we may also conclude that in fact torture is one of those things that we should forsake under all circumstances; that’s fine, too, so long as we’re willing to acknowledge the price we’re paying.
What price would we be paying by forsaking torture under all circumstances?
Jake,
Well, presumably if there are any benefits to torture whatsoever — if there is any circumstance in which torture would yield reliable, lifesaving information for example — we forgo those benefits by having a policy against torture.
(In real life, what it means is that people will go ahead and torture if they believe that it’s worth rotting in jail for the rest of their lives or even getting the death penalty in order to obtain whatever information they think torture will yield. As a practical matter, banning torture bans its being used without consequences to the torturer.)
PG: not even that, since the President can pardon people who he believes were right to break the law. Though I’m not sure if that applies in military prisons.
hf,
Right, but they would be risking that the president wouldn’t pardon them. I don’t know if there’s been any prior instance in which the president has pardoned someone for war crimes. I think the actual benefit reaped from the torture would have to be well-known and significant for the president to expend that political capital.
In a college philosophy class, I read a great article that I can’t remember now, but that was about how a particular military officer in WWII had taken an action that was seen as practically very useful, but morally disgusting. He was no longer welcome in the military and became kind of a shamed person. In other words, military necessity isn’t always a sufficient excuse; people still have a sense of moral disgust at someone who acts wrongfully even if they have to admit they benefited from his doing so.
The word “Orwellian” is generally overused, and it’s never been more so than over the last decade or so.
But damn if the first thing I thought of after reading that except about the insect-box wasn’t Room 101. This isn’t exaggeration; this isn’t poetic fancy. This is like finding out that the Nazis called their torture program the same name that we did, only more so.
I’d like to wallow in some assurances from around 2004 or 2005 that the Americans are the good guys, and we’d never put a government in power that would give the thumbs-up to Room 101. I think I need some of that right now, to get the full effect.
Well, I didn’t have to go back that far. I suppose I’m out of outrage at the actual events; I ran out of outrage a few years ago. But I confess that I’m still disgusted and outraged by the reactions from the other side of the aisle.
In short, what if Winston had had knowledge of a ticking time bomb?
Sometimes, I despair.
I wonder if the folks grendelkhan quotes as saying, “However, the American “torture” was done to save innocent lives,” still believe that after the revelation that Abu Zubaydah gave up all thei nformation he had as soon as the first waterboarding began — yet he was waterboarded 80+ more times by CIA HQ orders. This was against the advice of the agents actually with him, who said that they didn’t think there was any more info to get out of him.
I think Jeremy Waldron’s “cadre of sadists” is in Langley.
Well, frankly, I wonder if they’ve bothered to even read the reports, considering that they’re still willing to beat the tired old ‘ticking time bomb’ drum, despite the revelation that that scenario played in to our decision making about torture not at all.
—Myca
Myca,
Even more than the ticking time bomb scenario, I think these folks that grendelkhan quotes are defending the torture-demanders as good people, and that’s what I’m ready to start calling out on. Humans can well-meaningly do a lot of stupid things and even morally bad things. At the point that the government official is telling the agent who is standing next to the detainee, and the agent is saying, “Sir, we don’t want to do this, I think we have all the info,” and the official thousands of miles away is saying, “No, do it again and again and again…”
At that point, the official is no longer well-meaning but stupid. He’s deliberately disregarding what he’s being told by the people on the ground. He’s starting to sound like a sadist — like a guy who is enjoying this — instead of someone who uses torture sadly and reluctantly but with the good faith belief that it is necessary for something crucial.
In all human organizations, we have to tolerate a certain amount of good faith stupidity. We shouldn’t be tolerating sadism even a tiny bit, because then we’re even worse than the 1984 government that did this stuff for the very practical, self-interested reason of staying in power and suppressing every whisper of rebellion. If we torture to achieve an end that really will be assisted by the means, at least we’re still treating torture as a tool, something we can put down.
At the point that we have government officials demanding more torture, more more more, when it has no reasonably likelihood of usefulness in achieving a goal, then we’re making torture an end in itself, and the alleged goal of obtaining information is a thin cover — the means to the end of getting to torture bad guys because we enjoy it.
Yes. Yes, yes and yes.
I believe that, in most cases, torture is really the goal rather than a tool. The tool excuse is just that, an excuse. We have better methods of getting information and we know we have better methods.
And we know this in part because if they really believed in the imminent threat of
WMDticking bombs, they’d take the risk of no pardon. If they did it for their country, they’d stand up and defend their actions in court if necessary. Heck, if Bush’d told us he lied because he thought taking out Saddam justified it, and thrown himself on the mercy of Congress and the American people, I’d respect him.My own inclination also is to think that torture isn’t even a very effective method for obtaining accurate information (my favorite example is McCain’s pretending, while being tortured in Vietnam, to give up names of other military personnel when he actually was naming the starting lineup of a sports team). However, a frequent argument made is that government officials wouldn’t ask to use torture unless they knew it worked, and they had all the experience and I have none, so nahnahnahnah.
What these disclosures are stomach-turningly demonstrating is that there are some government officials — I guess we don’t know their names yet — who will want to use torture when there’s no reason to believe that it will be useful. There are powerful people in our government who can override the guys on the ground and tell them to keep waterboarding even when it’s useless. There are Americans who have been entrusted with huge responsibility, who hold the suffering of other human beings to be so irrelevant in a calculation of what to do that it basically counts for null.
To think this about people in the Bush Administration, and especially about anyone in the military, has been treated for the last several years as a symptom of Bush Derangement Syndrome or as part of a general leftist paranoia about people in charge of national security. We’ve now had demonstrated that you can be an American in charge of national security (not some low-level bad apple, but someone with wide-ranging power) and be a psychopath. I can’t really think of another word to describe what kind of person would order a prisoner waterboarded 80 more times after he’d already babbled out all the information he had.
nobody.really:
Torture is not effective at providing accurate intelligence. It’s one of the least effective methods, actually. So forgoing torture as a way to get intelligence? Not gonna make the heavens fall.
Torture is good for one thing, though: it’s remarkably effective at terrorizing a population and bringing it to heel under a totalitarian regime. That will make the heavens fall (on us).
So saying you’re against torture is not saying you aren’t “serious” about national defense, any more than being against the Iraq war was an “unserious” position. Saying you’re against torture is saying that the fewer things your leader has in common with O’Brien, the better off you are.
And that may well be accurate. I hear varying accounts. I’ve heard, for example, that any information that can be acquired through torture can also be acquired through sleep deprivation (which, admittedly, some people may regard as torture). Except that sleep deprivation may not prove very useful when confronted with a ticking time bomb. On the other hand, allegedly Cheney is pushing to declassify documents showing instances in which information acquired through torture – er, “enhanced interrogation techniques” – proved to be useful in averting disaster.
Whether or not torture works as a means of securing information is a question of fact. Admittedly, I love the idea that torture is ineffective; it permits me to duck the issue of trade-offs. And precisely because I find that idea so appealing, I maintain my skepticism. I really hated the Bush Administration’s propensity to make factual assumptions to conform to their ideological needs; I’m loath to emulate them.
Lawyers have a technique for testing for conclusions even in the face of unresolved questions of fact: the motion for summary judgment. A lawyer makes this motion to argue that his side of the case should prevail even if you assume all the facts alleged by the other side to be accurate. I think of this discussion in those terms. Because I don’t know about the efficacy of torture, I try to evaluate anti-torture arguments while making the factual assumptions that pro-torture advocates would make, and I try to evaluate pro-torture arguments while making the factual assumptions that pro-torture advocates would make. And if I can’t draw any conclusion under these constraints, that tells me that the ultimate merits of torture depend not on abstract moralizing, but on facts.
Of course, people who have greater knowledge of the facts about torture’s efficacy are not faced by the same constraints that I am, and are therefore free to draw different conclusions than I do.
But that’s being contradicted by the Bush Administration folks. They’re now calling for the release of more information, info that they say will show that torture was necessary to get information that prevented future attacks. Cheney has a newfound desire for disclosure. See, e.g., Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post today:
While some people say that we shouldn’t use torture regardless of its practical benefits (the position held by the Catholic Church, incidentally), those people are going to be a political minority; polls have shown that most Americans (as well as people of other nationalities) will countenance torture so long as it obtains useful results.
That’s why I’m focusing on, and the Bush Admin folks are desperately ignoring, the fact that the CIA ordered torture to continue long past the point that it had exhausted any possible usefulness. Thiessen says that Abu Zubaydah spilled the beans after interrogation in which “enhanced techniques” were used, but doesn’t acknowledge that Zubaydah folded completely as soon as he began to suffer, and that the 80+ subsequent waterboardings were utterly useless in obtaining any information from him.
PG: Oh, yes, absolutely– the fact that we waterboarded people over and over again, sometimes more than 100 times, refutes anything about any kind of ticking time bomb theory or even that they were torturing for information at all beyond a certain point. Asking about that is crucial.
nobody.really: I respect your willingness to question your own assumptions. And so, WRT the torture argument itself, I will defer to Terry Karney, who used to be an army interrogator. He has a whole lot on his blog about torture– its inefficacy, costs, and the way it impacts the nation as a whole. Here is one of his many, many posts on the inefficacy of torture. This one specifically addresses the memos and why the actions described in the memos will get unreliable or worthless information. I recommend going through his LJ at length.
As for the “Ticking Time Bomb” scenario, in specific, there is a whole body of work refuting it. Short version is that the only way torture is justified in that situation is if you already know for certain that: there is a bomb; the person you have in custody has information about that bomb; the other people that person works with will not have reacted to the capture of the person you’re interrogating; the time frame is certain and short, so that no other interrogation techniques are warranted; and, crucially, that you have enough other information about the bomb that you will be able to tell, instantly and reliably, whether the information you extract is true or false (rather than the person, who presumably knows that they only have to hold out for X limited time, running out the ticking clock by feeding you false info that you have to spend time and resources to verify). With all of these conditions, which are unlikely to come into place anyway, then you already have other better ways of finding out the rest of the info.
Another refutation of that idea comes from Jim Henley, here, who puts the problem in a different frame: say you have a person in custody and you know all these things, and you know that they are telling you the truth, and they tell you that torturing *them* is of no use but if you bring your 10-year-old kid into the room and torture your own kid in front of them, then they will tell you how to stop the bomb. Unless you find this a convincing reason to waterboard your kid, “to save NYC” or whatever, then all you are really doing is looking for excuses to treat someone badly. Belle Waring weighs in on that too.
I hope I did the links right. I am such the clueless person about that.
If you want more links, let me know.
If torture doesn’t work, then why torture? The statement that ‘we like it’, although there might be some truth in it, just doesn’t seem to really capture the dynamics, especially between higher and lower ranks, i.e., the ones executing orders, and the ones giving them.
I am reminded, here, of some articles I read some years ago for a humanities course about ‘violence and trauma in the 2ost century.’ Of course, the holocaust was an essential part of this course, and during these sessions some questions were raised, most notably as to the ‘uselessness’ of some of the measures taken in concentration camps – for instance, why did those in the camps need to have bald heads? Ostensibly, this was an hygienic issue – yet other hygienic measures were hardly taken, and: what does hygiene really mattter in a termination camp? The hypothesis was that this measure (and others which I’ve forgotten now) serve to dehumanize the incarcerated; to widen the abyss between detainee and guard; to make sure no guard ever considers the other as completely human with distinct individual characteristics. Sameness dehumanizes.
(I do not want to draw a false parallel between the holocaust and what is happening here. Rather, I feel thinking about torture as the goal, rather than the means, is a useful way to talk about this. The question still remains why torture would be the goal, and what other functions torture would have for the USS government but most importantly for those ‘on the ‘ground’ – much like the example discussed above)
So what I think contributes to the use of torture in these circumstances may be partially the dynamics between guards and prisoners; these people were ‘locked in’ together under horrible and frightening circumstances. Correspondence of ex-guards indicates that the prisoners received nick names; that their individual temperaments were known; that some guards allowed some prisoners to help in chores etc… Torture, to me, seems an ‘excellent’ way to dehumanize those one is supposed to treat with contempt. It is difficult to be sympathetic towards those soiling themselves; in mortal panick because of a harmless bug… Although it is ostensibly for the extraction of vital information, torture as such works also to diminish these indivuals’ dignity as human beings; their individual characters (waterboarding equalizes).. In short, it enhances the ease with which one group’s moral, or rather: human superiority is established over the other’s.
(I am not sure if I am still making sense, here; and even if this is too obvious a point)
I agree with most of you that torture is simply immoral and that it shouldn’t ever be allowed. Not under any circumstances, because it’s a slippery slope. I just want to understand in what other ways torture functions, and perhaps more so in its particular implementation than in its symbolical value, i.e., as an ultimate denigration of what is perceived to be directly opposed to ‘our’ value system.
….Oh CRAP have I been hearing accounts. Today there seems to be a cascade of people talking about it. There’s been a lot of stuff that’s been turning a lot of stomachs, and I guess we can look forward to dozens of photos, too.
But that’s not the stuff that’s knawing on me. No, I’m a crass realpolitiker. So while many people cannot contain their outrage over the immorality and illegality, I find myself once again seething at what once again appears to be the past Administration’s IDEOLOGY-LED INCOMPETENCE BY DESIGN.
I’m still fuming about the unknown damage that resulted because the Bush Administration demanded that anybody who worked on the massive State Dept. guide for occupying Iraq be excluded from working on the occupation. And about a dozen other examples. Now we find that our nation’s preeminent experts on torture — the very SEER guys who designed and implemented the torture regime we ultimately implemented — twice wrote memos in 2002 that torture JUST DOESN’T WORK, and is actually counterproductive. (Apparently they’d been cribbing notes from Ruth Hoffmann — who knew?)
Hey, I don’t have an ideological commitment on this question. And the fact that one guy or another says it doesn’t work, well, maybe that’s just the opinion of one guy or another. But who could possibly know better about the efficacy of a torture program than the guys who designed it and who have been subjecting our own troops to torture for years (as a training exercise)? On what basis could anyone have drawn a contrary conclusion?
Democrats used to be known as the nurturing, bleeding heart, compassionate party, while the Republicans were known as the party of tough-minded competence. Golly, I can’t imagine why the Republicans would be facing a slump right now, can you?
I used to believe that I was tolerant of people with values that differ from mine — in large part because, as a technocrat, I thought I didn’t have values. But once again the Bush’s lack of introspection has provoked my own introspection. I now realize that I have deep ideological commitments to COMPETENCE, and I’m profoundly intolerant of people who don’t share my values.
Tonight I keep hearing people vent their fury that our nation sold its soul. They are enjoying a great group catharsis around this topic. And once again I get to seeth alone in my corner, not that we’ve sold our soul — but that we apparently got nothing in return.
While I hate to destroy someone’s fantasy of what life was like before Bush et al., its wise to remember that ‘America the innocent” never *really* existed. I mean, you simply outsourced torture for two centuries (see: latin America, the Philippines, the Mideast, Southeast Asia, the ‘school of the americas’) in order to retain the fantastical notion that America the Great never did anything evil.
Come on people.