Sure, it’s in the news again, even on the Daily Show, as you can see in this video clip, as John Stewart and Jamie Oliver discuss the matter at hand –
STEWART: How is fake drowning, sleep deprivation, how isn’t that torture?
OLIVER: That is not torture.
STEWART: Why?
OLIVER: Because we don’t torture.
STEWART: Meaning we don’t do those things?
OLIVER: No, no. Meaning if we do do those things, they must not be torture.
The New York Times breaks the story of secret memos authorizing what everyone considers torture, written by Alberto Gonzales as one of the first things he did when he moved over from being White House Counsel (the president’s legal advisor) to become Attorney General – memos written shortly after the White House said torture was “abhorrent” and they were going to get things under control (previously discussed here). The item in the Times hit the wires on Thursday, October 4, and the next day the president was all over the place saying we do NOT torture people – and the memos were classified, anyway. But it was clear he was saying we do that fake drowning (waterboarding), sleep deprivation and all the rest – it’s just that we must to keep us all safe, and that’s not really torture, as the McCain bill he signed into law, the one that forbids cruel and degrading treatment and the rest, clearly says the one person who defines what is and is not torture is the president. Read the bill. The one thing it forbids is acts that “shock the conscience” – and the president’s conscience is clear. So that led to the business on the Daily Show the next Tuesday, the 9th, and, on Wednesday, October 10, former president Carter saying, on CNN and BBC America and elsewhere, that that was a load of crap –
Asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer if, by Carter’s definition of the word, the United States had used torture during the Bush administration, the Nobel Peace Prize winner was adamant:
“I don’t think it, I know it,” he said. “Certainly.”
Pressed by Blitzer on whether that meant that President Bush was lying, Carter was equally clear.
“The president is self-defining what we have done and authorized in the torture of prisoners,” said Carter.”Yes.”
Earlier in the interview, Carter said Bush’s denial this week that the US did not in fact torture detainees was “not an accurate statement if you use the international norms of torture as has always been honored in the last 60 years, since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated.”
“But you can make your own definition of human rights and say we don’t violate them,” he added, “and you can make your own definition of torture and say we don’t violate them.”
Carter must have watched the Daily Show, or not. It seems a plurality of Americans think Bush is lying on torture, forty-two percent. Twenty-eight percent just aren’t sure – and there’s the solid thirty percent that believe him.
Andrew Sullivan asks an obvious question – “If 42 percent of Americans believe Bush practices torture, what percentage of foreigners do?” He contends that the damage to this country’s reputation and “soft power” is “incalculable and indelible.” And he points to Milt Bearden pointing out another consequence of the new “it’s not REALLY torture” policy –
One can expect a torrent of cases to be filed against the men and women of the CIA in the coming months and years. They’ll have to get used to either staying pretty close to home, or taking their ski holidays in North Korea. Stepping off a plane anywhere in Europe will become a little dicey.
Sullivan suggests that applies to Cheney, Addington, Rumsfeld, Tenet and Bush as well – buy why would they ever visit Europe?
But who cares about such things? We all watch “24″ and torture is how Jack Bauer saves the world, each week. And Bush will be gone soon enough.
Of course it should be noted that Hillary Clinton knows how popular that dammed show is. And an item in the Washington Post shows she’s not going to throw away any votes –
Clinton was similarly vague about how she would handle special interrogation methods used by the CIA. She said that while she does not condone torture, so much has been kept secret that she would not know unless elected what other extreme measures interrogators are using, and therefore could not say whether she would change or continue existing policies.
“It is not clear yet exactly what this administration is or isn’t doing. We’re getting all kinds of mixed messages,” Clinton said. “I don’t think we’ll know the truth until we have a new president. I think [until] you can get in there and actually bore into what’s been going on, you’re not going to know.”
Andrew Sullivan is appalled – “Before she’ll promise anything, she wants the power. Then she’ll decide what to do with it. So trust her. Go on: trust her.”
Matt Stoller too –
To me, these two paragraphs get to the heart of the Clinton-era political model. Clinton believes that the top-down political model of her youth, of the early 1960s, can be resurrected. She cannot handle a political system where one party is acting in utter bad faith, and ultimately turns to bad faith herself. That’s why she will not come out against torture by the CIA, since she cannot bring herself to believe that the government could do something so awful, that the Iraq invasion was done for no good reasons whatsoever. And so she ratifies the horrifying behavior, and will continue to do so as President.
I hope Obama can actually challenge her, but it’s not clear to me that he’s any different. There will be leverage under a Clinton Presidency, but 2008 has been so far a tragedy of boomer-dominated cynicism.
Kevin Drum too – “Politics is politics. Spin and ambiguity are part of the game. But if you can’t even take a full-throated, non-weasely position against torture and abuse of prisoners in American custody, what the hell good are you?”
On the other hand, Greg Sargent says there’s more to this, giving the full passage, showing what the Post omitted –
Q: Can I ask you a follow up? You mentioned Blackwater, you’ve said that at the beginning of your administration you’d ask the Pentagon to report. When it comes to special interrogation methods, obviously you’ve said you’re against torture, but the types of methods that are now used that aren’t technically torture but are still permitted, would you do something in your first couple days to address that, suspend some of the special interrogation methods immediately or ask for some kind of review?
HRC: Well I think I’ve been very clear about that too, we should not conduct or condone torture and it is not clear yet exactly what this administration is or isn’t doing, we’re getting all kinds of mixed messages. I don’t think we’ll know the truth until we have a new President. I think once you can get in there and actually bore into what’s been going on, you’re not going to know. I was very touched by the story you guys had on the front page the other day about the WWII interrogators. I mean it’s not the same situation but it was a very clear rejection of what we think we know about what is going on right now but I want to know everything, and so I think we have to draw a bright line and say “No torture, abide by the Geneva conventions, abide by the laws we have passed,” and then try to make sure we implement that.
Mark Kleiman says not good enough –
Nice try, but no cigar. Saying “No torture” is the opposite of a “bright line”; after all, Bush keeps saying “we don’t torture.” To say that “it is not yet clear what this Administration is or isn’t doing” sounds just like Glenn Reynolds.
The CIA just announced that it would no longer do waterboading. That clearly implies that the CIA was doing waterboarding. Waterboarding is torture. If HRC can’t say “No waterboarding,” her “No torture” isn’t worth the spit behind it.
The same goes for the cold cell, for “long time standing,” for “disappearing” people into secret prisons, and to “rendering” people to countries which we know practice torture. It’s legitimate to say “I won’t know just how bad things are until I’m President,” but it’s not legitimate to pretend that we don’t already know that torture is going on in our name, and that if we decide not to hold war crimes trials we at least need a truth and reconciliation commission to expose the facts.
Part of HRC’s problem is that the Bill Clinton regime didn’t have entirely clean hands, specifically on the “rendition” issue. But it now seems clear that if we want the country to make a clean break with current policies on maltreatment of captives, we can’t do so by putting HRC in the White House.
Taylor Mash here says this is right-wing attack reporting aimed at Clinton and Greg Sargent is right to say that the Post should have included the whole quote, but Kleiman is still not convinced –
But let’s not get too meta about this. Clinton’s handlers are certainly aware of this. All the campaign has to do is issue a statement in her name saying “No waterboarding, no long time standing, no cold room, no sensory deprivation, no rendition.” Now that would be a bright line. But I’m not holding my breath.
And Kleiman adds that if Hillary Clinton doesn’t intend to evade the torture question, there are two things she can do about it –
1. Issue a simple statement: “When I’m President, there will be no waterboarding, no cold room, no sensory deprivation, no ‘long time standing,’ and no renditions.”
2. File, and ask for hearings on, a bill for the relief of Khaled al-Masri.
Unless she does one of those things, those of us for whom torture is a deal-breaker will have to conclude that her ambiguity was and is deliberate, either because she thinks it would be bad general-election strategy to be too far out there on behalf of human decency or because she’s not ready to limit her Presidential options with respect to the maltreatment of captives.
Those last too “either” options are troubling. But that’s what politics are about – do what gets you into power, and if you get power, make sure you have lots of it. It’s kind of “Karl Rove” of her.
Of course, Bret Stephens argued in a Wall Street Journal item here that the European Court of Human Rights had ruled that several of the techniques used by the Bush administration in interrogating prisoners do not amount to “torture.” Sullivan discusses that here –
We know that the WSJ believes that the president has the authority to ignore and suspend the rule of law indefinitely. The Brits and all other Western democracies didn’t. The British government moreover immediately banned the suspect techniques after they were used against fourteen prisoners. It is worth noting that none died during the torture, whereas we have at least two dozen cases in the US under Bush in which the government itself concedes that prisoners were tortured to death; and well over a hundred have died during interrogation under suspicious circumstances.
And as for the specific techniques, detailed in the Sullivan item, the European Court eventually ruled that although the techniques were illegal under EU law, and amounted to “inhuman and degrading” treatment, they did not quite meet the standard for the word “torture.” Even so the British government “reiterated its disavowal of all such techniques” –
So Stephens is arguing that the American standard should be far lower than the British standard; and that techniques that the European Court ruled were illegal should be adopted by the US; and, of course, that this narrow semantic ruling would now be used to justify far worse methods used by the Bush-Cheney administration: water-boarding, repeated beatings, chained stress positions, permanent hooding, total isolation for months on end, dietary manipulation, hypothermia, extreme heat, and sleep-deprivation for weeks on end. Stephens, I’m sorry to say, is clutching at straws. The honest argument for those who support torture is to propose legalizing it, to define explicitly what is now allowed, and to get the Congress to revoke the current laws on torture and to leave the Geneva Conventions. If Stephens really believes we need to do this, he and his editorial board should have the decency, if that is an appropriate word, to propose it.
Otherwise one is just playing with words, right? But here Sullivan shows that Stephens point is that “the long-standing decision by democratic societies, and especially by the Anglo-American powers, to eschew the torture or abuse of prisoners to extract intelligence has now been rendered moot.” He suggests an alternative view –
Taken seriously, it says that the civilized world would be better off sustaining a nuclear 9/11 than tarnishing its good name, that righteous victimhood is a finer thing than an innocent life saved through morally compromised methods, and that self-preservation is not the most fundamental requirement of democratic life.
In nearly all conflicts, even existential ones, limits should be observed, and it’s worth thinking through where exactly the limits lie. But when the moral trade-off comes down to KSM waterboarded in order to extract actionable intelligence, or some mother’s child murdered, it’s not a tough call. And no amount of inflated, imprecise and tendentious allegations of torture should change that.
And who can argue with Sullivan here? This is common sense, and common decency –
First: I do not believe that torture does save people’s lives, because I do not believe it gives us reliable intelligence and because the use of it historically leads to it becoming the primary method of intelligence gathering, and so undermines our extreme need to develop better intelligence gathering, especially human intelligence. And I do not believe that the illegal torture of KSM gave us any actionable intelligence that was not destroyed by the huge amount of false intelligence he also coughed up under torture, and that diverted law enforcement in ways that probably did endanger American lives. And I do not trust those in power who tell me otherwise, because there is no check on them whatsoever, no oversight that they have not cheerfully avoided, and any admission of guilt on their part would lead to war crime prosecution. So Tenet would say that his authorization of “enhanced interrogation” saved lives, wouldn’t he? In the protectorate that has now supplanted the republic, we will never reliably know. Our freedoms have already been eviscerated.
But secondly: yes, I do think that in a choice between legalizing torture and the loss of American lives, I would choose the loss of American lives, including my own.
Sullivan says this not “righteous victimhood.” It is righteous self-defense –
There are some things worse than avoiding all casualties in warfare. One of those things is abandoning the core meaning of what a country and a civilization stand for. If America does not stand against the torture of individuals seized without due process by an unchecked executive power, then America stands for nothing. In fact, if this standard had applied two centuries ago, America would not exist at all. The president takes an oath not to prevent any American life from being lost in wartime, but to protect and defend the Constitution which is the sole guarantor of such liberty. Churchill upheld that rule, even as London was reduced to rubble and hundreds of thousands of mother’s children were lost. Washington made it a central hallmark of the meaning of his new republic. To destroy the constitution, the rule of law, and habeas corpus and to legalize torture in the false hope of saving lives is the action of those who do not understand freedom and who do not understand America. It is the action of cowards and slaves.
What part of “Live Free or Die” do these people not understand?
Clear enough?
Oh, and that Washington Post item that Hillary Clinton liked so much? It was an account of a recent attempt to organize reunions of those in the “Greatest Generation” ordered in World War II to interrogate Nazi prisoners of war for vital intelligence. They were told to keep quiet, but it doesn’t matter now – the World War II interrogators kept their word and divulged nothing for decades about what they did or did not do to get information from the bad guys. But now they are ticked at what we’re up to –
“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess.
Blunt criticism of modern enemy interrogations was a common refrain at the ceremonies held beside the Potomac River near Alexandria. Across the river, President Bush defended his administration’s methods of detaining and questioning terrorism suspects during an Oval Office appearance.
Several of the veterans, all men in their 80s and 90s, denounced the controversial techniques. And when the time came for them to accept honors from the Army’s Freedom Team Salute, one veteran refused, citing his opposition to the war in Iraq and procedures that have been used at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
He refused to accept any honors?
Sullivan –
The current Republican Party supports the torture techniques once honed by the Soviets, the Khmer Rouge and the Gestapo’s and Tenet’s “enhanced interrogation.” Yesterday’s heroes were made of different stuff.
Of course they were –
“We did it with a certain amount of respect and justice,” said John Gunther Dean, 81, who became a career Foreign Service officer and ambassador to Denmark.
The interrogators had standards that remain a source of pride and honor.
“During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone,” said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. “We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”
The current administration is wary of any battle of wits. They prefer brute force. All else is quaint, or treason. And these are old men who know nothing about the much greater and far wider threat we face now – if you buy that line.
Times have changed, and it seems we’ve lost this country. Perhaps it’s best to fade away and leave the place to the Young Republicans, and Hillary Clinton and such. General MacArthur, crazy and difficult man that he was, had it right. Fade away.
