Well, there's this.
What to say that hasn't been said before? Torture is clealry permissible in atom-bomb-in-Manhattan cases beloved by philosophers. That is, permissible in principle under certain very unusual circumstances. Obligatory, in fact.
But we're not facing such cases. We've been told by experts that torture is an inefficient way of obtaining information, we've been given no reason to think that any of these prisoners has atom-bomb-in-Manhattan-level information, and now we're in the same category as North Korea, China, the USSR and Nazi Germany. That is, we're torturers. Not as bad as them, of course, but I don't want to be anywhere close to that group.
Cheney's actions here offer some weak confirmation of my beliefs about him and that wing of the party: they're willing to perform extraordinarily heinous acts to achieve even small benefits for the U.S. And that's not the way a good person or a good country behaves.
Couple of points to note in the article:
"It shows that we have a philosophical difference here," said Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "The vice president believes in certain circumstances the government can't be bound by the language McCain is pushing. I believe that out of bounds of that language, we do harm to the U.S. image. It doesn't mean he's bad or I'm good; it just means we see it differently."
This is the kind of talk that would evoke charges of relativism against a liberal. 'Relativism' is one of the vaguest and most misunderstood terms we have; what Graham says here is not genuinely relativistic, but, again, if a liberal said it that's how it'd be construed.
Also note:
"The debate in the world has become about whether the U.S. complies with its legal obligations. We need to regain the moral high ground," said one senior administration official familiar with internal deliberations on the issue, adding that Rice believes current policy is "hurting the president's agenda and her agenda."
It's a terrible day when we have to resort to the language of self-interest to convince a vice-president that the U.S. should meet its moral and legal obligations. But that's the main failing of Cheney: at heart, he's a foreign policy "realist". Which means, in essence, that he does not believe that our country has any moral obligations to other countries or to their citizens. The only question we are allowed to ask in formulating policy is "what's in it for us?"
This is not the America I grew up believing in.
posted by Winston Smith at
8:18 AM
11 Comments:
A few years ago Mark Bowden wrote a cover story about U.S. torture policy for the Atlantic Monthly. This was before Abu Ghraib. He interviewed American and Israeli security officials and talked about what was probably in store for the then-recently apprehended Khalid Sheik Mohammed. He spent some time talking about the "ticking time bomb" scenario, and how utterly rare it is. His conclusion, which I found made a lot of sense, is that, in extraordinary cases, torture might be necessary to save vast numbers of lives, but that we should NOT change our laws and policies to allow it. Even "necessary" torture should be illegal, so that those who commit it are forced to take responsibility for their actions: the idea being that, if it real WAS necessary, they'd be willing to do so. Creating a legal space for torture guarantees abuse, which we continue to see: torture for torture's sake in American prisons both public and secret, on every continent. DOZENS of people killed during interrogation. A handicapped taxi driver in Afghanistan beaten to death over the course of weeks because his captors liked the sound he made when they hit him with a baseball bat.
But never mind that, the REAL outrage is comparing any of this stuff to the Nazis or the Soviets. THAT is truly unforgivable.
I think Matthew makes excellent points.
Lincoln's attitude about the liberties he took with wartime powers serves as a useful example. Admitting that he was faced with extraordinary circumstances, Lincoln knew at heart that the steps he was taking were probably *illegal*, and certainly unconstitutional. Indeed, Lincoln admitted that he may have had to some day face the personal jeapordy that came with violating the principles of the constitution.
One may debate the moral rightness or wrongness of a particular course of action while neither proscribing nor condoning the subsequent legal or penal consequences visited upon the actor.
The true moral actor weighs the consequences of deciding a certain way, and personal opprobrium or punishment is part of that equation. Winston and Matthew's formula whereby the law is not changed to permit torture forces just such a personal calculation. In cases of extreme circumstances, the judgment of highly *moral* actors should compel them to make the difficult call of behaving illegally but morally, accepting the fact that this may bring hardship upon themselves.
The apotheosis of this calculation seems to me to be Socrates' acceptance of his sentence.
If I understood you correctly, Mr. Carroll, I liked what you wrote very much. There is virtue in following the law, but there may also be virtue in disobeying it. We are not machines, and the law is an imperfect prism through which to view the human experience.
The case of Col. Allen West in Iraq ilustrates what I take to be your point.
(I've failed to find a consensus among scholars as to the motivation of Socrates' drinking the hemlock.
Some say it was the moral principle of obedience to the law taken to its ultimate test, others think he was just too old and tired to run.)
Thank you Tom.
I seem to recall that my professor for my first college course on Plato believed that Socrates' motivation was the survival of the state above all else.
It may take you into detestable depths of circular logic, but if I understood his point correctly, it was that the 'obediance to the law' that you allude to is necessary for the perpetuation of society, albeit it even an imperfect one with some unjust laws. I've gone down that road of considering whether indeed "an unjust law is no law at all" and it inevitably comes up in ungrounded circular logic.
Sometimes you go with LAW and sometimes you go with MORALITY/VIRTUE. You pays your money and you takes your chances.
This brings up the more general point about the relationship between law and morality - namely that there may at times be overlap, but that there isn't necessarily a relationship between the two (where 'not necessarily' = not always true + could be otherwise).
To my mind, morality is a code of personal behavior. Where the maintenance of a stable society (and the establishment of justice, promotion of general welfare, securing the blessings of liberty etc.) requires behavior that is moral, consequent *moral* behavior is due to legal coercion rather than internal moral or ethical compulsion.
As Madison said, "If men were angels, we would need no laws".
I forgot to add that your link was to a very good example.
I find it hard to fault the guy for what he did, and if I were on the court-martial jury I'm not sure I could vote for conviction.
However, it could be argued that justice would be better served if he were convicted, assuming his behavior was counter to the Army Field Manual and/or UCMJ.
That would actually make it more akin to the moral/legal conundrum we're discussing. In fact, if he's like most of my military friends, he'd probably take a bullet for his comrades, so he'd certainly be willing to face the music of a court-martial for doing what he felt he had to.
Not an easy case.
O, damn. If I say anything as nice to you again, folks are gonna tell us to get a room.
As our host WS has written not in so many words, agreement on at least some of the largest things sustains true dialogue. I think you've hit on the central issues of what might be called political philosophy.
If we could touch on the issues of the day while still keeping them at arm's length, we might just get somewhere.
And to your point, we might ask what the standard of law should be--the reasonably achievable or the highest aspiration.
A philosophical dilemma. Each argument has merit.
I as a right/Hobbesian/authoritarian have been sympathetic to the administration's desire to hold the door open to torture for the ticking bomb. But perhaps I've been wrong: one should have to break the law in order to save the world.
LC and tvd, sittin' in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g...
Seriously, I think this is a really interesting point. Normally I think that our legal obligations must track our moral obligations as perfectly as possible, but what you guys are talking about is the possibility that some morally permissible/obligatory things should be made illegal in order to make it clear how rare are the cases in which they really ARE permissible/obligatory...and/or to make the moral profundity of the action clear.
I'm still inclined to disagree, but it's a damn interesting idea.
Not to turn this quasi-partisan, but I've always thought that a president who really believed that what he did was right, though illegal, should suck it up and resign to make the point. So, if Reagan really thought that it was important to make the Iran-Contra deals, he should have said "yes, I did it; yes, it was illegal; but it had to be done. Now I must resign." It's analogous to Thoreau(? King?)'s point about civil disobedience: you have to be willing to accept the consequences of your illegal action...but why? I can't remember. As a sign of your sincerity? To display your contempt for both the illegal law and its consequences? Damn. Haven't read that stuff since undergrad...
Anyway, now you two have forced me to engage in the painful process apparently called "thinking."
I think it's a great discussion.
My sentiments are summed up by one salient thought from you Winston:
"...some morally permissible/obligatory things should be made illegal in order to make it clear how rare are the cases in which they really ARE permissible/obligatory...and/or to make the moral profundity of the action clear."
However, Winston, I think it's important to distinguish between the MLK/Ghandi type of civil disobedience and the legal trespassing of the 'ticking time bomb' foiler.
In the former case, the actor's civil disobedience brings into sharp contrast the conflict between real justice and the underlying injustice of a particular law or policy. That is, their conscious violation of the law in question lays bare the injustice of the law itself.
In the case of the ticking time bomb scenario, or Tom's link re: the interrogator, the violation of the law in no way leads me to the conclusion that the law itself is unjust. It's really a matter of justification. Sometimes, the most extreme circumstances may justify breaking the law; to me, that in no way makes the law unjust.
Embedded deeply somewhere in here is the conflict between consequentialist and deontological ethical paradigms. I'll leave it to someone smarter than I to ferret out that conflict as it applies here - someone for whom the process called "thinking" is less painful than it is for me.
Re: torture - posted on Juan Cole's site:
Guest comment by Michael Pollack
I am posting this on behalf of Michael - Juan.
Michael Pollack writes:
"There is a lot to be said for the idea that fighting evil can make us evil.
But when it comes to torture, recent events suggest a more direct mechanism:
torture is the indispensable basis of fake intelligence. It is how you
create irrefutable evidence for what your ideology says should exist, which
allows you to override all contrary evidence.
Recently you discussed crucially false intelligence given to us by the
al-Qaeda leader
http://www.juancole.com/2005/
11/al-libi-tagged-as-liar-
by-us.html
It now turns out that there seems to be a very simple explanation for why
Libi told the interrogators what they wanted to hear: he was tortured.
Now, since Libi ranked high in al-Qaeda, the fact that we tortured him isn't
a surprise in itself. But what makes it an interesting subject for
reflection is that he seems to have been the subject of a battle. His was
the first case where torture won out. And the surprise is that this was all
prominent news more than 3 years ago in
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id
/5197853/site/newsweek/
in the wake of Abu Ghraib.
This might well be part of why the DIA suspected he was lying. Although
"lying" doesn't seem to exactly capture the speech act of "telling torturers
what they want to hear.
http://atrios.blogspot.com/
2005_10_30_atrios_archive.
html#11312508568
3083680 Atrios seems to have been the first to make this suggestion.
This seems like another fine exhibit of how torture can be counted on to
produce the worst kind of intelligence -- the kind that makes us positive
that our fantasies are reality by "confirming" them.
And it's by no means the first. I would argue that it is often the essence
of a countrywide torture operation such as we used to run in Latin America.
You capture people, torture them, and they tell you want you want to hear as
well as the names of people. You torture the people they named, and these
"confirm" the original confessions for the same reason: they are also
telling you what you want to hear in order to get the torture to stop. The
end result is to create a cascade of confirming "facts" -- and with them an
ultimate truth that seems to stand on them irrefutably: that these people
you are torturing are evil and deserve it. And this is of paramount
importance: torture, by creating evidence, justifies torture: it becomes
literally the only means to obtain the crucially confirming information --
because that crucial information is made up. And by this means it hid under
the cloak of a search for truth the real means by which systemic torture
"worked" in fighting guerrilla war in Latin America and other countries: it
made clear to everyone in the population that any opposition could get you
tortured by getting you caught up in these concentric circles of being
named. The "truths" created by torture rationalized a system of rule by
terrorization. It was exactly the mechanism by which Saddam ruled Iraq. But
the crucial difference was we believed the truth that our system created.
And that made it seem like something other than the incarnation of evil.
Without that belief, there would be nothing to cover that reality.
So for such a system, the "truths" that torture creates are indispensable.
But even when torture is not being used as a means of countrywide oppression
it still always produces the truths we want to hear. Or so it seems based
on the little evidence that escapes its secrecy (which is the second reason
its truths are irrefutable: its evidence is by nature unexaminable except by
those who believe).
The great example in Iraq is the infamous journal posted on the internet by
the contract interrogator Joe Ryan. (Remember the great contract
interrogator scandal? It seems so long ago.) There we learned that his
interrogatees confirmed every ignorant thing he thought about Iraq -- and
above all the dominant line that the Iraqi insurgency had been gotten up and
run by foreigners:
http://www.juancole.com/2004
/05/interrogator-diary-
bilmon-has-via.html
http://www.juancole.com/2004
/05/reader-comment-on-
torture.html
So there is a kind of perfect fit when we now learn that the ultimate force
pushing for torture by the US -- the one party willing to defend it even in
the light of day, even against the opposition of 90% of the Senate -- is the
office of Richard Cheney, who the Washington Post, in an October 26
editorial, recently and famously called
http://www.washingtonpost.com
/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/
10/25/AR200
5102501388.html
It's no accident that Cheney's office is also the ground zero for the faked
intelligence that led to the war (which has recently been churned up by the
Fitzgerald investigation and the indictment of the other Libby). People like
Richard Cheney need torture because they need distorted intelligence. They
need irrefutable objective proof that their distorted ideas are true. And
they need to torture reality to do it. Their ideas and their policy can't
survive without it.
The lies of torture contributed to the last war. And if unchecked, it will
lead to the next."
Fantastic comment whichever Anonymous you are. I need to link to this in a post.
This info is like a missing piece of the whole delusional puzzle about Iraq-related intelligence.
Still doesn't mean that there aren't conditions under which torture is morally permissible, of course. It merely (" ") means that it not only doesn't work but is counter-productive in the majority of the actual cases in the actual real realio-trulio reality-based world.
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