Sometimes you miss the old Republicans, the Eisenhower Republicans as they were once called. You remember them, cautious businessmen who hated people rocking the boat, shrugged at social problems until they became unavoidably disruptive, and just wanted things to hum along smoothly and not be bothered. They may have been fond of counting their money and giggling, or so one imagined, but they weren’t mean-spirited. The worst you most often could say was that they were indifferent, not much interested in the civil rights stuff in the sixties, but then, for the most part, not fond of Joseph McCarthy and his “evil commies everywhere” hearings either, a decade earlier. It was a “hands off” thing – keep trouble at a minimum and prosper. You make money, take care of your family, do what you’re supposed to do (you respect tradition) – and hope no one gets all radical and screws the pooch.
Those people are long gone, and the rant of note about their disappearance comes from Gary Kamiya - How Bush Wrecked Conservatism.
This item is about how the American right has embraced this Republican president’s “catastrophic” war in the name of “moral clarity” and now looks not only mean-spirited but kind of stupid. Kamiya puts aside the issues on which liberals and conservatives can be expected to disagree – tax cuts for the rich, expansion of Medicare or this or that position on immigration. He thinks it would be better to focus on issues “that should be above partisan rancor - ones involving the Constitution and all-American values.” There you get into authorizing torture to approving illegal wiretapping to launching “a self-destructive war.” The contention is that Bush has done incalculable damage to conservative principles and “has been supported every step of the way” by current Republicans in Congress, who have “voted in lockstep for his radical policies.” And now none of the major Republican candidates running for office have repudiated any this – they only promise to execute all of it more competently.
Since this seems to be so, Kamiya says this –
The Bush presidency has damaged American civil society in many ways, but one of the most lasting may be its destructive effect on conservatism. Even those who do not call themselves conservatives must acknowledge the power and enduring value of core conservative beliefs: belief in individual agency and responsibility, respect for American institutions and traditions, a resolute commitment to freedom, a willingness to take principled moral stands. It is a movement that draws its inspiration from towering figures: Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke. It stands for caution in foreign adventures, fiscal sobriety and a profound respect for tradition.
Or at least it used to stand for those things. Today’s conservatism is a caricature of that movement: It embraces pointless wars, runs up a vast debt, and trashes the Constitution. Selling out their principles for power, abandoning deeply seated American values and traditions simply because someone on “their side” demanded that they do so, conservatives have made a deal with the devil that has reduced their movement to an empty, ends-obsessed shell. How did the party of Lincoln end up marching under the banner of Tom DeLay and Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and Ann Coulter?
Good question, that. Growing up in the fifties in Pittsburgh, in a Republican family in a suburban tract home, knowing that the avuncular bald man in the White House was, while dull, exceedingly careful, and knowing none of the adults anywhere around had any particular ideological axe to grind, none of what we have now was even imaginable. But it seems in the intervening years those obscure Ayn Rand fans – we never knew they were out there – met the Jesus folks – we’d heard about them but we were all quiet Congregationalists or Episcopalians – and all bets were off –
When the Judeo-Christian injunction to help the less fortunate collides with the “I’ve got mine, Jack” ethos of Ayn Rand individualism, selfishness inevitably triumphs. Crony capitalism, corruption and unchecked greed have been the inevitable result. As a result, conservative morality in practice has been squeezed into an ever smaller, ever more theocentric core. The fact that the Christian right claims to stand at the pinnacle of American virtue is grotesque, but it’s the logical consequence of the shriveling of conservative morality.
Well, Kamiya calls it “conservative morality.” It was more like willful reticence, if not silence. Either way, there’s no more of that –
However much liberal critics (like this writer) might disagree with them, Republican presidents from Ford to Reagan to the elder Bush generally refrained from radically changing American institutions, law and values. They possessed some internal governor that prevented them from going too far, some deeply rooted sense of civic parameters. Like their Democratic counterparts, they kept faith with what the great British conservative Edmund Burke called the “settled tradition.”
Bush’s unprovoked war on Iraq provided a satisfying catharsis for American conservatives, an opportunity to play Winston Churchill and fight the good fight against Evil. But the satisfaction of urging on a Manichaean struggle from one’s armchair should only go so far before reality kicks in. Just as most conservatives during the Cold War realized that attacking the Soviet Union was not in America’s interests, so one would think that today’s conservatives would realize that Bush’s “war on terror” is not only unwinnable, but both unnecessary and counterproductive. By now, it’s obvious to all but myopic ideologues, that attacking the Arab world to teach it a lesson was like kicking a vast wasp’s nest while wearing a Speedo. We want to win the “war on terror,” not strike heroic poses while being stung to death. No one disputes the virtue of moral clarity, but without intelligence, moral clarity is useless. Where is it written that conservatives have to be stupid?
Perhaps the note on that is in the drawer in Karl Rove’s old desk at the White House. And as for this new moral clarity, now claimed by those in power, Kamiya notes that in a Pew poll taken in March only eighteen percent of self-described conservative Republicans believed that torture was never justified. Kamiya quotes Romans 12:17, 21 – “Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all … Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
Yeah, right. You remember the line from the movie –
Jack Sparrow: I thought you were supposed to keep to the code.
Mr. Gibbs: We figured they were more actual guidelines.
So, now what? The suggestion is this –
Party loyalty is based on a willingness to support even a flawed leader and party in the interests of a higher goal. But there can be times when that leader and party are so injurious to one’s deepest moral values and beliefs that it becomes irrelevant what banner they march under. At such moments, those who think for themselves, who are guided by principle and not mere expediency, who are true conservatives - or liberals - and not just partisan hacks, will break with their leaders. They will rebel.
Kamiya says that will never happen. You would need not only people who think for themselves, and who are guided by principle and not mere expediency, but they would have to rock the boat. That’s not in their nature. That’s why they’re called conservatives.
If it is true that traditional conservatives just don’t want trouble, and often seem indifferent, and are into that a “hands off” thing – keep trouble at a minimum and prosper – you could come with another basis for a conservative rebellion. It has nothing to do with anyone getting all radical and publicly troublesome. You find someone to say that torture, for example, is not only wrong in the abstract but, in what is more grave for the phantom Eisenhower Republicans, it just doesn’t work.
And someone acceptable has just made the definitive version of that argument – Stuart Herrington, a retired Army colonel, an expert in interrogation and counterinsurgency operations and the author of Traitors Among Us: Inside the Spy-Catcher’s World (1999). And he made the argument in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Heck, he graduated from Mount Lebanon High (they always beat us in football for some reason) and went to Duquesne, the local university – he seems to be another one of us who grew up in the fifties in Pittsburgh, in a Republican family in a suburban tract home, knowing that the avuncular bald man in the White House was, while dull, exceedingly careful, and knowing none of the adults anywhere around had any particular ideological axe to grind, when none of what we have now was even imaginable.
See Two Problems With Torture from October 21 –
Recently revealed White House memos have raised the ugly question yet again: Is torturing prisoners captured in the Global War on Terrorism an effective and permissible use of our nation’s might?
I served 30 years in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer, which included extensive experience as an interrogator in Vietnam, in Panama and during the 1991 Gulf War. In the course of these sensitive missions, my teams and I collected mountains of excellent, verified information, despite the fact that we never laid a hostile hand on a prisoner. Had one of my interrogators done so, he would have been disciplined and most likely relieved of his duties.
Since my retirement, I have twice answered the Army’s call, journeying to Guantanamo and Iraq to evaluate interrogation procedures. Subsequently, when the terrible tsunami of verified reports of detainee torture by American soldiers overwhelmed the dikes, the Army asked me to assist in training a new battalion of Iraq-bound Army interrogators in non-coercive interrogation techniques.
How odd. This is one of those people Rush Limbaugh would call a “phony soldier” and Bill O’Reilly call a moral coward. (Stop right there – you’re not allowed to think of the psychological phenomenon known as “projection.”)
But Herrington remembers his Duquesne ethics professor, Arthur Schrynemakers, forty years ago telling Herrington’s freshman class that ethical principles were absolute – right was right, wrong was wrong, and it was ethically impermissible to commit an evil act and attempt to justify it because that evil act might lead to some future good. And Herrington actually believed what he once heard in Pittsburgh –
Coming from this background, it has been disappointing to observe the ongoing debate about torture in interrogation, usually carried out by people who have never interrogated a soul. Nor is it easy to accept that the current debate is framed pragmatically by the question, “Does torture work or not?”
In a recent interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, I told her that ten years ago the notion we would even be having such a dialogue was unthinkable. Somehow, perhaps blinded by the horrors of 9-11 and its aftermath, or by that barrage of chilling video footage of hooded executioners snuffing out the lives of journalists, civilians and soldiers, we have lost sight of other equally relevant questions: Is torture right or wrong? Is the brutalizing of helpless prisoners a practice that will advance or harm our nation’s position as it wages a just war against Islamist extremists?
One can almost hear the late Dr. Schrynemakers expound on this question. Wagging his finger, he would note that government sanctioning of mistreatment of prisoners by its intelligence officers is an essentially evil act committed in the name of self-defense, which has propelled our great country down a slippery moral slope and imperiled us further.
Yeah, well, what is the alternative? Herrington offers some utilitarian ideas that would appeal to traditional conservatives, concepts that have to do with what simply works. Forget the morality for a moment. Think like an old-fashioned Republican businessman. Think about the practical.
Here’s one idea – treat the captives as guests. That actually works –
I and other authentic practitioners of the interrogation art respect our adversaries, however wrong we may deem their cause. We know that obtaining information from a captive who is motivated by his beliefs, his country, his honor or perhaps by the very human desire to live a full life with his family, is an elusive task that requires a patient, systematic approach.
One has to “go to school” on each captive. Who is he? Can I communicate with him in his language? What are his core beliefs? His loves? Hates? Fears? Where do his loyalties lie? Does he have a family, an inflated ego, perhaps some other core vulnerability? Does he have a hobby or some passion that might get him talking? What do we know about his activities before he fell into our hands? What about his religion? Sect? Tribe? Culture? Or the history of his movement? What have other captives in our hands said about him? Did he have documents or a computer that were seized with him? What drives this unique individual?
Of course this takes time –
Professional interrogation is thus a developmental process, requiring extensive preparation. It requires in-depth assessment of the prisoner, all complemented by a healthy measure of guile, wits and patience.
Seasoned interrogators know that an important first step is to disarm one’s adversary by resorting to the unexpected. Treat a captured general or colonel with dignity and respect. Better yet, treat a sergeant like he is a colonel or general.
In interrogation centers I ran, we called prisoners “guests” and extended military courtesies, such as saluting captured officers. We strove to undermine a prisoner’s belief system, which we knew instructed him that Americans are unschooled infidels who would bully him and resort to intimidation, threats and brutality. Patience was essential. We rejected the view that interrogators could merely “take off the gloves” and that information would somehow magically flow if we brutalized our “guests.” This notion was uninformed and counterproductive, not to mention illegal, and we made sure our chain of command understood that bowing to such tempting theories would result in bad information.
But we are told there is no time for this. Too many episodes of “24″ have shown us that must be true. But then television dramas might be inadequate guides to the real world –
The very question tells us that intelligence professionals have failed to educate their commanders that detainee interrogation is not like a water spigot. “Give the inquisitors the freedom to push the envelope of brutality and good information will follow” seems to have become the watchword since 9-11.
It also tells us that our young soldiers take away lessons from today’s pop culture. Self-styled “experts” on interrogation frequently cite the “ticking bomb scenario” (featured on shows like “24″) to justify the Jack Bauer-like tormenting of a prisoner. According to this construct, it is necessary and acceptable to torture in the name of saving an American city from “the next 9-11.” This has a magnetic appeal to legions of Americans, among them future soldiers.
But the so-called ticking time bomb scenario is a Hollywood construct that I never encountered in my thirty-year career. Even so, it has become the rallying cry of many well-intentioned but ethically challenged military and civilian personnel. And it has been hawked by a large constituency of senior government officials, from the White House to the Department of Justice to Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, and is most recently evidenced in the surfacing of a January 2005 memo, written almost a year after Abu Ghraib, that characterizes face slapping and waterboarding as acceptable conduct.
But Harrington says it best to keep the gloves on –
When a professional interrogator sits across from a captured Iraqi general who possesses information about the Iraqi nuclear program, or who knows why Saddam did not toss nerve gas at our massed forces, the interrogator knows he is facing a formidable adversary, an educated, trained professional strongly inclined by his Iraqi patriotism and survival instincts to deny his interrogator such information. The interrogator’s challenge in such situations is to assess and manipulate the situation, somehow persuading his captive to make disclosures in spite of the prisoner’s visceral fear of the consequences if he helps the enemy. The role of the interrogator is, in essence, that of a recruiter. The prisoner must be convinced that if he reveals state secrets, his captor will handle his trust with discretion and take care of him.
Generations of professional interrogators have possessed such skills, and used them to obtain information vital to our country. Those who have not mastered these techniques fall back on the ultimate admission of incompetence and resort to brutality
So do you believe him? Or do you believe Rush and Bill, and those producers at Fox Television who gave us “24?” Believe the latter and pay the consequences –
…captives on the receiving end of such treatment respond to their survival instincts. Spurred by cunning and fueled by the hatred stoked by their tormentor’s brutality, they respond as our American aviators responded in the Hanoi Hilton, showing their contempt by lying, invention, stalling - anything to stop the abuse - or by accepting death before dishonor.
You may feel better – all self-righteous – but what you get is useless. Think like a fifties Republican businessman. What’s the point? It doesn’t work.
No, wait. What you get actually is useful, but its usefulness has nothing to do with keeping us safe. Rush and Bill know - but that is a whole other issue, and quite another problem.
But what is going on now, with waterboarding and all, is clearly all wet, or so say Phillip Carter and Dahlia Lithwick, both lawyer and authors – and Carter is also a former Army officer who has done his Iraq tours. They see how what Harrington thinks is clear isn’t clear at all these days –
One of the most amazing manifestations of Michael Mukasey’s odd shape-shifting between the two days of his confirmation hearings for the post of attorney general was the change in his position on torture. On Wednesday of last week, he repudiated the so-called torture memo signed by Jay Bybee in the strongest terms, comparing the “barbarism” of torture to what happened at Nazi concentration camps. By Thursday, he’d changed his tune, if not his entire submolecular structure, refusing to state unequivocally that waterboarding constitutes torture. You could almost hear him channeling Alberto Gonzales as he fudged, “If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional.” (Watch it here.) He was channeling John Yoo when he clarified that even if Congress prohibits waterboarding, the president might be able to act outside those constraints, based on his own authority as president, commander-in-chief, and grand pooh-bah of all things national security.
What is going on here? The whole business is not THAT hard to understand –
It’s an old torture technique from the Spanish Inquisition that consists of immobilizing your target on an inclined board, head down, with cloth covering their face. Pouring water over the face simulates drowning. The practice leaves no physical marks. It’s illegal under the Geneva Conventions and has long been treated as a war crime by the United States. We even use this technique to train our own troops to withstand illegal torture by our enemies. As retired Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, a former top Navy lawyer and now dean of Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H., testified at Mukasey’s hearing last week, “Other than perhaps the rack and thumbscrews, waterboarding is the most iconic example of torture in history. It has been repudiated for centuries. It’s a little bit disconcerting to hear now that we’re not quite sure where waterboarding fits in the scheme of things.”
More than any other interrogation technique employed by the United States, waterboarding has come to represent lawlessness and senseless brutality. In the eyes of the rest of the world, waterboarding has become to interrogation what Guantanamo is to incarceration. So, why won’t the president (and his nominee for attorney general) go on record and disavow it once and for all?
Because it has to do with something else – its usefulness has nothing to do with keeping us safe. It’s about absolute power and absolute secrecy –
It has long been the view of the Bush administration that nothing can be deemed illegal so long as it remains a secret. Never mind that it’s a secret only to people living in igloos without wireless service. That’s why, even while there’s a major movie out about rendition, we call it a secret. Since they have yet to make a movie called Waterboard, Mukasey could take the absurd position that he isn’t sure precisely what it involves. Cute trick. Call it a secret, and there can be no legal debate. As the White House insisted Friday, “Judge Mukasey is not in a position to discuss interrogation techniques which are necessarily classified.” If the soon-to-be-AG cannot hazard an opinion on the legality of waterboarding, even when he can read step-by-step accounts of it on the Internet, who are the rest of us to condemn it?
Of course problem with this argument is that the administration’s use of waterboarding on detainees has been known publicly since at least May 2004 –
Everybody knows what it involves, and even if you live in an igloo without wireless, you can tell it’s illegal. The argument that you can’t call it torture until you’ve been “read into” the torture program is just a lawyer’s trick that justifies keeping bad conduct secret to end-run the laws.
And then there’s absolute authority –
The real reason the Bush administration clings to its power to order waterboarding has little to do with any strategic argument and everything to do with the old standby assertion that to renounce his authority to waterboard would be to give away the president’s power. That is the only issue that has come to matter in laying out the legal contours of the war on terror. As Jack Goldsmith has argued in his book The Terror Presidency, that is the question that guides David Addington’s legal reckoning, and - more so than any practical analysis - that is why the Bush administration balks at legal constraint, even when that constraint is sensible, rational, and necessary.
So we get Mukasey on his second day of testimony arguing nonsense –we are facing a new type of super-enemy, one resistant to regular coercive interrogation but NOT to waterboarding. Well, he did say that – “What the experience is of people in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps has been with captured soldiers, captured military people from enemies we’ve fought in the past, may very well be far different from the experience that we’re having with unlawful combatants who we face now. It’s a very different kind of person.”
Lithwick and Carter don’t buy that –
If we really are dealing with some new, different type of terrorist - someone uniquely resistant to any other forms of questioning - what makes waterboarding so wildly effective? If it’s true that al-Qaida trains to our interrogation manual, doesn’t that suggest doing something other than what they expect, especially when the tactic in question depends upon the illusion that the interrogator plans to let him drown? Perhaps this is why veteran military, intelligence, and law enforcement interrogators insist they prefer to study their captives, know them intimately, and seduce with psychology, not with brute force.
Ah, that’s what Harrington was saying, even if Mukasey seems now to be saying waterboarding works wonders. It’s just too bad about the evidence –
For example, when used against alleged al-Qaida mastermind Abu Zubaydah, waterboarding apparently produced a stream of statements from Zubaydah of such dubious quality - according to journalist Ron Suskind - that intelligence officers now widely believe any evidence gleaned from Zubaydah to be utter garbage.
But there is a final argument – waterboarding can’t be taken off the table because this new enemy has some kind of heightened intelligence value. That is the idea that an al Qaeda detainee like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “might know more than your average Nazi spy or North Vietnamese colonel would have known in previous wars.” So this is more serious. It happens to be illogical –
We rarely (if ever) know enough about a particular detainee to determine whether he knows something worth torturing him for. Even if he talks, we have little ability to verify the confession’s truth and often must caveat it as the product of torture, as has been done with KSM’s post-waterboarding statements. Worse yet, over the six years since 9/11, we have never stopped to systematically weigh the enormous, almost incalculable strategic costs of torture against the speculative benefits (if any) to be gleaned from its use.
So, really, there are no tactical or operational reasons for us to continue waterboarding, and the military is not fond of it –
JAGs and the military oppose the technique in the strongest terms. They oppose it because they recognize it’s not particularly effective, and because they have to worry about our soldiers being subject to such treatment if captured. Most of all, they oppose it because they recognize the value of clarity for maintaining the discipline of America’s military. As one of us has written, “[T]here are few slopes more slippery than that from small war crimes to large ones. Any wartime action, no matter how heinous, can always be justified by some battlefield exigency.”
Our troops need - have always needed - bright-line rules detailing precisely where the legal lines are and when they have been crossed, in order to maintain the high standards of discipline for America’s vaunted all-volunteer military. Officers also oppose waterboarding and coercive techniques as a matter of honor. Such practices debase the troops who must implement them, and cheapen the valor of those who sacrifice life and limb for our country. Sen. John McCain echoed this sentiment when he said, “It’s not about them; it’s about us.”
So there was Mukasey’s testimony Thursday that to comment about specific techniques would be irresponsible “when there are people who are using coercive techniques and who are being authorized to use coercive techniques. … And for me to say something that is going to put their careers or freedom at risk simply because I want to be congenial – I don’t think it would be responsible of me to do that.” It seems the opposite is true.
And this is a kick –
It is the oldest trick in the Bush administration’s psychological playbook to claim that we must be one serious badass nation if we are willing to do sick, unspeakable things to our enemies - even in the face of international condemnation and in violation of our own laws and ethical rules. But when those sick, unspeakable practices endanger our own soldiers, horrify our allies, and embolden our enemies, we don’t look like badasses anymore. We just look like sadists. And when those practices don’t even work, we look like stupid sadists to boot.
There’s an easy fix here, one even the old conservatives might like. Renounce torture – the Unites States doesn’t stand for senseless sadism. That has practical benefits.
But the old conservatives are all gone. It’s not 1953 in Pittsburgh any longer.
