by Katherine
(Note: In response to commenters' requests (thanks, guys) I'm promoting this response to Patterico's hypothetical about torture, which I posted last night. I've edited for grammar, & in one case--the bit about Abu Ghraib & its relationship to the CIA torture program--for factual precision.)
No, the waterboarding session was not worth it.
The CIA officers charged with waterboarding KSM, lacking the knowledge that everything would turn out so swimmingly, would demand assurances from their boss that they could not go to jail for this. Their boss, & his boss, would ask the Justice Department to assure them that they would not go to jail. In order to tell them that they wouldn't go to jail, the Justice Department would have to write a memo falsely concluding that: (1) terrorism suspects were not protected by any portion of the Geneva Conventions, & the war crimes act did not apply; (2) waterboarding (& such other "enhanced interrogation technqiues" as the CIA would deem necessary) was not torture.
As a result of those memos, CIA agents would torture many other prisoners, and kill several of them, including some who were not high level members of Al Qaeda & whose torture & death did not save a single life. In order to justify what they had done & avoid liability, they would cover up the evidence of this. They would also make false and exaggerated claims about how the program was necessary, how many lives had been saved by torture.
The techniques--not waterboarding, so much, but many of the others--would spread to the military. In some cases, it would be because the Secretary of Defense thought it would be convenient not to have the Geneva Conventions apply to terror suspects in military custody, & to have authorization to use "enhanced interrogation technqiues" to abuse prisoners. After all, were America's brave soldiers lives less valuable than civilians? In other cases it would be because members of the military stationed with the CIA saw what CIA agents could do to prisoners: a guard at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, say, might come into work one night & notice that a CIA agent had tortured a prisoner to death & left his body paced in ice in the shower while higher ups fought about what to do with the evidence. The guard might unzip the body bag, take some pictures with corpse. It might not be the first time the guard had seen a CIA interrogator torture a prisoner. It might assure him that if the CIA could get away with killing a guy, surely he & his friends on the night shift could continue to have some fun with the prisoners, & continue to take some pictures.
Soldiers would torture many, many, many prisoners--in Afghanistan, in Guantananmo, in Iraq. Some of them would be tortured to death. Some of those tortured would be innocent.
The people tortured would make false confessions, which whether they were guilty or not would lead to them being detained for years without charge or trial. Their false confessions would lead to other arrests, and more torture, and more false confessions. Intelligence would be led down God knows how many blind alleys, resulting in the torture of God knows how many, the imprisonment of God knows how many more.
The results would be downright bizarre sometimes. We'd not only imprison & torture innocents--we'd imprison & torture guys we captured in a Taliban prison bearing scars from torture by high level al Qaeda members; one of whom Osama Bin Laden had personally accused of trying to assassinate him in 1998. We'd keep one of them in prison in Guantanamo for the better part of 5 years; another for 6 and counting despite the fact that he kept trying to kill himself.
The administration wouldn't be able to admit that this happened; it would have to classify as much as the evidence as it could, for as long as it could. It would have to keep the courts from examining the legality of these techniques, & push laws through Congress immunizing itself from prosecution, & ensure that the Justice Department remained in the hands of lawyers who would continue to falsely claim that everything had been legal; who would never investigate; who would never prosecute. Members of the President's party would have to support "enhanced interrogation" & pretend it wasn't torture; otherwise they would be admitting that a President in their party had participated in a conspiracy to commit war crimes.
But they wouldn't be able to keep it all secret; the world would find out. It would destroy our reputation, & make it impossible for us to credibly pressure other countries not to torture people or detain them indefinitely based on a bare allegation that they were terrorists or national security threats. It would help drive recruiting for Al Qaeda. It would help seal the failure of our invasion of Iraq.
I suppose you could add a bunch of other stipulations to your hypothetical to prevent these things from happening: these techniques would be practiced only against the highest level suspects, in a few prisons. They would be restricted to trained, professional, carefully selected CIA agents. It would only be used to prevent attacks when there was no other possible way to stop them. We would never torture innocents. We would never torture anyone to death. You could stipulate that, but it just makes the hypothetical even more of an irrelevant fantasy. In real life, this happened. In real life, it always happens when a country experiments with torture: it always spreads, it always leads to innocents being tortured, it never saves more lives than it destroys. In real life, a government who promises that this time it will be different is either lying, or kidding itself.
You should trust a government claiming it needs to torture exactly as much as you should trust a terrorist leader explaining why it needs kill just a few civilians (or a few dozen, or a few hundred), in order to save hundreds of thousands of Muslim children from death and slavery. I could make up a hypothetical where a suicide bombing prevented more evil than it inflicted & saved more people than it killed; would that show that opponents of terrorism just don't understand the moral complexity of it all?
A few other things:
(1) I think this is obvious but just in case: I am not responding to an unrealistic hypothetical with another unrealistic hypothetical. The scenario I lay out here is, as they say in the movies, "based on a true story"-- very closely based on a whole bunch of true stories. I realize that a lot of people aren't going to take my word for it & I need to support that with cites. I don't have time to do that now--I may later, either by revising this post or posting follow-ups.
Before I do, though: if I'm correct about these consequences, was it still worth it?
What if there were no credible, reliable evidence that your hypothetical scenario had ever occurred, but that the facts I discuss above HAD occurred, as a result of the Bush administration's decision to grant the CIA authority to use "scientific" "advanced interrogation techniques" against high level Al Qaeda suspects?
(3) If people insist on basing debates about the ethics of torture on fictional scenarios rather than real ones, though, please discuss the following three hypotheticals (some of these are also taken from comments):
(a) Stipulate that in 2002, Dick Cheney's cardiologist was deeply opposed to the coming invasion of Iraq. Say that based on his conversations with his patient, he was convinced that (1) Cheney was trying to drag the country into war based on lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons program; (2) invading Iraq would lead to the violent deaths of thousands of American soldiers & hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians; (3) these deaths would make the United States less safe from terrorist attack, not more so; (4) if Cheney were out of the picture, Colin Powell would be able to talk the President out of this disastrous course, & the intelligence agencies would be able to present accurate information, & the invasion would not occur; (5) he can prevent all this by deliberately sabotaging a heart procedure on Cheney & making it look like an accident; (6) murdering Cheney in this fashion is the ONLY way to prevent the war.
Say the cardiologist is 100% right about all of this. Is he justified in murdering Cheney?
If yes, does this scenario call into doubt whether there's a moral basis for a blanket ban on: (1) murder in general; (2) political assassination in particular; (3) doctors deliberately harming their patients? Is criticism of advocates of murder, assassination & violations of the Hippocratic oath sanctimonious, self righteous hypocrisy against people who just refuse to toe an ideological line?
(b) Stipulate that there is a ring forged in the fires of Mount Doom in the land of Mordor that makes it bearer more powerful than anyone else in your world, which is called Middle Earth. A dark lord named Sauron is trying to take over Middle Earth. Your fair city, Gondor, is his first target. Sauron is preparing to unleash his armies against you. Your people and your city are doomed to horrible, gruesome painful deaths, and the only hope of stopping it is bringing the One Ring to Gondor. However, for reasons passing understanding, a council of elves & wizards has decided that instead of using the ring to send two hobbits on an utterly hopeless quest to destroy it. (Easy for them to say--they're immortal & they can always sail off to wherever). Stealing the ring from the wee hobbitses, and bringing it to your father to protect Gondor, is the only way to the White City, your people, & your world from certain doom. DOOM! What do you do?
(c) The year is 1984. You live in a place that used to be called England & is now called Oceania, a country ruled by a brutal, evil, totalitarian, one-Party government, which has eradicated its citizens' liberty far more thoroughly than Josef Stalin's USSR.You meet a man named O'Brien, a leader of a clandestine liberation movement called The Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is the only organized resistance to The Party in existence. O'Brien asks whether you are willing to do the following to support The Brotherhood:
--"give your lives?'"
--"to commit murder?"
--"To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?"
--"To betray your country to foreign powers?"
--"'to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming
drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases--to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?'
--"If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child's face -- are you prepared to do that?'"
You believe that joining this organization is the only possible hope of opposing the party, & that you can only join if you answer "yes" the whole list. How should you respond to O'Brien's questions?
(Dear Secret Service: this post is very much NOT a threat or endorsement of violence against Dick Cheney--not even in hypotheticals or in parallel universes involving time travel and/or Dick Cheney having a psychic, unethical, murderous, yet well-meaning cardiologist.)
Posted by: Katherine | November 15, 2007 at 01:15 PM
HYPOTHETICAL: that the right-wing supporters and enablers of GWB would engage in honest discussion with those who oppose GWB's actions and policies.
Nah, not worth even thinking about. Never happen.
Posted by: Snarkilicious | November 15, 2007 at 01:21 PM
Awesome job Katherine.
Posted by: OCSteve | November 15, 2007 at 01:44 PM
another great post.
y'all are really rocking this torture issue.
Posted by: cleek | November 15, 2007 at 01:48 PM
What do you mean (b) is a hypothetical?
More seriously, great work, Katherine.
Posted by: JakeB | November 15, 2007 at 02:05 PM
devil's advocate:
The urgency of the original hypothetical, as well as the immediacy with which anyone who lived through 9/11 can relate to the fervent, panicky desire to prevent another one, are not matched here in the opposition to the suggestion that torture may be morally justified in certain circumstance.
It's human nature to deflect moral nuance when something as threatening as the horror of mass murder is accessed in their consciousness. What Patterico keeps coming back to (and we're not effectively countering, IMHO) is a visceral rejection of the clinical rationales of those who argue torture is always wrong. There's a separate, illogical, but still powerful reasoning process in play there.
What my side (the side opposed to torture) isn't that good at, but perhaps needs in order to help the Patterico's get it, viscerally, is an equally compelling consequence narrative.
I think K's done a good job of presenting the real world consequences of latitude where torture is concerned, but it's still too easy to weigh the two (mass murder in an instant vs. systemic graying of moral boundaries that can/might work themselves out over time) and side with those who feel the means justify the ends.
I suspect nothing short of the kind of epiphany Camus' father had while witnessing an actual execution by guillotine will drive home for most of Patterico's ilk why they're wrong.
The problem is, they already have strong images from 9/11 and elsewhere to counter any inherent empathy they might otherwise have for someone being tortured, and Patterico can tap into those.
What am I getting at? That perhaps Americans should be forced to watch waterboarding being conducted? No. That's obscene. Besides, we have films and such delving into that of late, and it's still not a parallel to the hours of footage we've consumed of the towers collapsing and such. But perhaps a simple meme that asks anyone who'll publicly support waterboarding to agree to undergo it first before they bother the rest of us with why they feel it's justifiable.
Indeed, hearing folks defend it is approaching being nearly as painful as knowing the US is doing it.
Posted by: Edward_ | November 15, 2007 at 02:30 PM
Eddie: It's impossible for us to make the case against equally compelling because they don't consider the victims--even the innocent ones--as human as Americans. They don't think their lives are worth what our lives are worth. So the mere possibility that torture is necessary to prevent an attack & save American lives (however unlikely, however unsupported by reliable evidence that this has actually happened), outweighs the real & proven suffering of actual real life torture victims (even when the victims were tortured to death, were innoccent, where torture only produced false confessions, etc. etc. etc.).
They can imagine themselves & people like them being killed in a terrorist attack; they can't imagine our government disappearing & torturing people like them. It doesn't seem real, or matter very much, when it's only done to foreigners.
So how do we make it real? We can write posts & reports & articles discuss actual cases of torture in exhausting detail--reading the details about it is what did it for me--but most defenders of torture's existence aren't willing to read those or acknowledge their existence. How many right wing blogs have claimed that "no one died at Abu Ghraib" in spite of the many photographs of the corpse of a prisoner who died from "Palestinian Hanging"? They won't deal with the facts, they just deny it without even reading the report & then pretend it never existed.
We can make movies about it, but those movies will be as fictional as 24, and they don't have to watch such "liberal propaganda".
It seems more real if you actually see a recording of a victim describing his experiences. But again, they don't have to watch such things. It would seem more real if you had to watch a video of an actual torture session--but those aren't exactly publicly available, & if they were, I wouldn't count on everyone reacting like Camus's father did. It's much more real if you actually speak to a victim in person (look at Congress's inability to look Arar in the eye & tell him that his rendition was justified--and that was just testimony via video link), but why would they choose to do that?
Some people can be convinced by such things, and I don't know of a better approach--I'm convinced a very large majority can be convinced, eventually. But some people really don't care very much if it's something that happens to accused terrorists and foreigners, and there's just nothing to be done about it except to try to outnumber them. I mean, look: even opponents of these policies are not reacting against them as strongly as they would if it were happening to "people like us." Myself included.
Posted by: Katherine | November 15, 2007 at 03:01 PM
It doesn't seem real, or matter very much, when it's only done to foreigners.
I think it's easy (it is for me) to dismiss such folks as unreachable. Racist and unreachable. I'm reminded, however, of the simple "trick" pulled by the lawyer in "A Time to Kill." He knew the racist jury wouldn't empathize with the torture of the young black girl, so he described her torture within the context of how they'd see it, with their defense mechanisms up and them safely behind the wall of their own "otherness." Once he got them to do that, safely, and only when he had carefully led them to a place where they themselves could let their better human nature peer over that wall, did he then drop the wall and let them discover for themselves how they'd feel if the victim was them.
Where am I going with this? I'm not sure. I guess I have to believe that Patterico is only refusing to peer over that wall. Not that he's inhuman.
"A Time to Kill" is probably a bad example, now that I think about it, though. It's essentially the story of a lawyer who gets a jury to agree a murder was justified, and it's probably just as easy for Patterico to use it to justify his support of torture as it is for anyone to use it to help folks identify with the victims of torture. Besides, the victim in that story was entirely innocent. What Patterico relies on in his hypothetical is the notion his victim isn't.
In the end, though, Patterico's not making an argument for making a distinction between innocent and non-innocent torture subjects. He's making an argument for torture. If he would look over that wall, see himself on the receiving end, however, perhaps he'd get it.
Posted by: Edward_ | November 15, 2007 at 03:24 PM
Sure, lots of people can be reached & it's worth the effort; I think a majority. Him in particular? Maybe; I think it's very unlikely, given the fake, sanitized description of waterboarding he uses.
Posted by: Katherine | November 15, 2007 at 03:27 PM
Wonderful work, Katherine. Thank you.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov | November 15, 2007 at 03:33 PM
i dunno... it's gonna take a hell of a lot of convincing to 'reach' most of the pro-torture folks.
go browse any wingnut comment section and count the number of people who are apparently seriously convinced that we're one Democratic president away from sharia and burkas, and that gun-totin, GOP-votin patriots like themselves are our only defense against the establishment of a worldwide Caliphate.
Posted by: cleek | November 15, 2007 at 04:16 PM
What my side (the side opposed to torture) ... perhaps needs in order to help the Patterico's get it, viscerally, is an equally compelling consequence narrative.
Ibn al-Libi.
"Iraq is training Al Qaeda in the use of poisons and chemical weapons".
Thanks -
Posted by: russell | November 15, 2007 at 05:25 PM
Boy, Katherine’s hypothetical sounds a lot like defensive measures in Spain (1500s), Yugoslavia, Iraq, Morocco, Algeria, Iran, Chechnya, Turkey, Romania (1400s), Afghanistan, Nigeria, Sudan, and, increasingly the Philippines and Thailand.
The ethical option is containment.
http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/
Posted by: Bill | November 15, 2007 at 06:00 PM
Cleek: i dunno... it's gonna take a hell of a lot of convincing to 'reach' most of the pro-torture folks.
Not sure that’s true. It didn’t take that much to convince me. Unfortunately, Katherine and Hilzoy are not nationally syndicated…
Posted by: OCSteve | November 15, 2007 at 06:04 PM
I could make up a hypothetical where a suicide bombing prevented more evil than it inflicted & saved more people than it killed; would that show that opponents of terrorism just don't understand the moral complexity of it all?
Well, this is just heresy plain and simple.
Posted by: r4d20 | November 15, 2007 at 06:04 PM
At some point does it need to be pointed out that Patterico's entire post and follow ups was no different than the troll comments we see here from time to time?
And should probably deserve the same non response?
The fact that he is in a position of power is more of a problem for the people of California.
Actually, I had an easier time reading him when I thought he was hanging out in his Grandma's basement. These days, it's just more of the same scary.
Posted by: Davebo | November 15, 2007 at 07:15 PM
I think it's worth writing about these subjects, & in my experience people are a lot more likely to respond if it's a response to some provocation from a right wing blogger than if it's just "yet ANOTHER depressing torture & detention post from katherine".
Posted by: Katherine | November 15, 2007 at 07:20 PM
not watching the 'debate', but did Hillary really just say (quoting Kevin Drum's paraphrase):
National security is "absolutely" more important than human rights. [No hesitation]
???
out of the frying pan into ... the other frying pan ?
Posted by: cleek | November 15, 2007 at 09:30 PM
I thought this quite interesting:
I wasn't aware of this declaration of clarity, but it certainly would be nice if it were true.Posted by: Gary Farber | November 15, 2007 at 09:55 PM
One of the best things I've read on torture is the 1999 decision of the Israeli Supreme Court rejecting rules which would have broadly justified practices that amount to torture. The Israeli Court expressly rejected the "ticking bomb" scenario as a justification of general rules authorizing torture, reasoning that it was exceedingly rare and would open the door to torture under less extreme circumstances (exactly what has happened with our policy, witness Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib).
The conclusion the court came to was that torture was illegal, that rules excusing it in advance were illegal and that those who engage in it should be prosecuted subject to legitimate defenses such as necessity and self-defense. Not a total ban, but it bars torture except when the "24" scenario is for real. Those considering torture know they better be right that they are preventing such cataclysmic disaster, because if not they may be in jail for a long time. The ticking bomb scenario is an isolated individual defense and not an excuse for a blanket rule redefining and permitting torture. The court addressed and described several abusive practices in graphic detail, making clear its disapproval of government efforts to paper over the abusive nature of the practices with antiseptic semantics.
The justices on the Court began by observing that they citizens in a society under terrorist assault, and ended by contesting argument that their decision meant fighting terrorists "with one arm behind our backs", instead reasoning that rendering torture illegal gave Israeli society "the upper hand."
This seems to me to be a sensible approach, but I don't see it discussed much in our debate. I'd welcome input from those familiar with the decision as to 1) whether it's right and 2) whether it provides us with guidance about what to do. Feel free to let me know if you think I've described it incorrectly.
Posted by: Charlie Martel | November 15, 2007 at 10:33 PM
i think the ring of power analogy works almost perfectly in this context. tolkien definitely tapped into something there.
Posted by: publius | November 16, 2007 at 12:33 AM
my only criticism is that you could have deployed a lot more snark. set it up with "well, since krauthammer and pals all like hypotheticals, here's one for 'em." and then close with something appropriately snarky - "oh wait, this wasn't a hypothetical."
snark isn't necessarily indifference. dig deep and there's usually some fairly strong idealism lurking at the core.
Posted by: publius | November 16, 2007 at 12:36 AM
"my only criticism is that you could have deployed a lot more snark."
There are times that snark works well, but in this case I think it would only distract. Less is more.
Needless to say, this isn't something where one of us is provably correct.
Posted by: Gary Farber | November 16, 2007 at 12:47 AM
Concerning the suicide bomb hypothetical.
There were attempts on the life of Adolf Hitler by that method but they failed because Hitler obviously had something like a sixth sense and changed his schedule on short notice. There is still a debate on whether assassinating Hitler would have been legally/morally/historically justified.
Posted by: Hartmut | November 16, 2007 at 05:51 AM
This treatment of the idea that torture is possible in extreme circumstances seems extremely unfair to me. It sounds as if you think the people saying this are mere act-utilitarians of the most unsophisticated sort, and that's simply not true. The idea isn't that something is ok merely because the consequences will turn out to be a net positive as a result. Your counterexamples are pretty standard ones against that kind of utilitarianism, and I agree that such a view is morally intolerable.
But the view you need to be targeting is actually a version of deontology. The idea is that Kant's absolutism is wrong. There are cases where the moral importance of a certain consequence can be so extreme that a prima facie duty can be removed, i.e. something that is almost always a moral constraint against a certain normally very bad action can in very extreme cases become morally ok or perhaps even morally required. So infecting someone innocent who volunteers with a disease in order to work on an antidote that will save the entire human race might be ok, even though you may well cause an innocent person's death. Torturing someone you have very strong evidence is guilty of great evil in order to prevent a very serious disaster would be worth it. But there's no suggestion here that mere consequences are the only factor. That's just a complete straw man.
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce | November 16, 2007 at 07:23 AM
Hartmut: Minor quibble - the July 20 plot failed mostly because it was not a suicide bombing.
Stauffenberg left the briefcase and there is a lot of speculation on exactly how Hitler survived (possibly someone moved it etc.). In any case the war was winding down at that point and even if it had been successful it was far far too late.
Earlier attempts that may have done some good (bomb on his plane in 43) also failed because no one was willing to suicide to be sure it went off.
Posted by: OCSteve | November 16, 2007 at 07:36 AM
cleek: yes, she did - Thatcher anyone?
Posted by: novakant | November 16, 2007 at 08:19 AM
Posts like this are the reason I read blogs.
Posted by: Clarence Wilmot | November 16, 2007 at 08:24 AM
In any case the war was winding down at that point and even if it had been successful it was far far too late.
I agree that it was late, but even at that stage a successful assassination attempt would very probably have saved everybody a lot of grief, since "winding down" is not really the correct assessment. Just imagine: no Battle of the Bulge, no Battle of Budapest, no Battle of Berlin, no firebombing of Dresden and other cities (bomber command's peak was in March 1945), a lot more concentration camp inmates saved.
Posted by: novakant | November 16, 2007 at 08:45 AM
novakant: Fair enough. You’re right of course.
My larger point is that I don’t believe that the attempts on H are valid in considering the suicide bomb hypothetical. They were unsuccessful because no one was actually willing to suicide. That suggests to me that the plotters were also interested in being around to be part of the new power structure. They were willing to risk death as they obviously knew what would (and did) happen to them if they got caught but they weren’t willing to suicide. Stauffenberg could have just as easily concealed a pistol in that briefcase and put a bullet in Hitler’s head, or stayed and insured that the bomb remained in an optimal location. Even though being fully aware of all the horrors at that point he wasn’t willing to suicide to stop them.
Posted by: OCSteve | November 16, 2007 at 10:01 AM
Jeremy Pierce--I don't get your argument. All the consequences I'm describing are quite extreme & two (the deaths of thousands of Americans & hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians in an unjust war; and the doom of Middle Earth) are pretty clearly MORE extreme in consequentialist terms than not stopping a plot to crash planes into buildings.
Posted by: Katherine | November 16, 2007 at 10:32 AM
My feeling is that ok, so you have the "ticking-time-bomb" scenario.
Are you willing to sacrifice yourself to save a whole bunch of other people or not? If you would be willing to throw yourself on the bomb in order to save people, why are you so unwilling to a) torture someone, and then b) take the punishment that society mets out to those who torture? (this is assuming that "torture works", which no one has proven to me either.)
What these people want to do is torture and get away scott-free with it. They don't want to pay the price, so they're trying to put together some legal justification to cover their asses.
If you believe that torture is "necessary", at least you should have the guts to take the punishment for having done it.
Posted by: tzs | November 16, 2007 at 10:40 AM
This is a brilliant idea. With a little more narrative impact (not snark, but more emotional, story-like writing, and especially the "surprise" ending that it's all real stuff), this would be an e-mail that people would forward around. And when doubters checked snopes, they'd find that it was well supported.
I agree with you, Katherine, that it's impossible to make the narrative as compelling as an emergency scenario. But I don't think it needs to be, because I don't think anybody reachable really likes the idea of torture -- which means that you only have to slip past their outer mental defenses to deliver the message effectively. The whole "you're going to die" narrative that's been pushed on us since 2001 is going to have to be countered in a broader way (probably with a "here's why they want you thinking about death" counter-narrative, a la Drew Westen).
Great stuff, Katherine.
Posted by: dkilmer | November 16, 2007 at 10:48 AM
I think TZS has made a critical point, and one that often gets overlooked in the discussions. There's something fundamentally immoral (and not "serious) in taking the position that inflicting torture on a suspect is somehow "necessary" and justified because of the alleged need to save hundreds, if not thousands, of lives, but that you (the torturer) personally are not willing to run the risk that you might be punished for your actions. Surely if the lives of those hundreds or thousands of supposed victims make it "necessary" for the suspect to be tortured, they also make it equally necessary, if not more so, for the torturer to expose himself to the risk of punishment?
And if you (the torturer) are not willing to run that risk, then I don't want to hear about your supposed moral imperative.
Posted by: retr2327 | November 16, 2007 at 11:10 AM
I just found (via Sullivan) what appears to be the next step in the evolution of this issue for those unable to check their own cowardice long enough to understand why they reduce themselves to the moral equivalent of the terrorists by supporting torture (sorry if this has been discussed here already). An editorial like this was truly inconceivable in my youth:
Hoorah for waterboarding
It makes one wonder how long it will take someone like Murdoch to realize that the moral imperative to spread our way of life to other parts of the world that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq now includes the asserition that torturing people is something to cheer about. If that's the case, though, what does that do to the case against Hussein. It wasn't his WMD that Bush cited as justification for his execution. It was his "tyrannical rule" and "brutal regime."
Oh, I'm sure I know what Murdoch would argue in response: We only torture the bad guys. Hussein was torturing innocents. Our torture isn't a sign of tyrannical rule and a brutal regime. Our torture is a sign of the superiority of the American way of life. And we have a moral obligation to spread that way of life. Those who abide by the Geneva Convention and abhor torture need to be forced to change their unAmerican ways.
Posted by: Edward_ | November 16, 2007 at 11:15 AM
Why in the world would any moonbat consider murder of any human being wrong? They and their supporters have been responsible for over 45 MILLION abortions in this country alone in the past 30 years, so why would advocating murder be wrong to them. They are killers in myriad ways of this country and what was the grand experiment on the planet earth. That its own people caused the failure of the great democracy is irony itself.
When you cannot see anything but one view, no matter where you are standing it makes you blind. So, what else is new for you guys since the l960's?
Posted by: Sue | November 16, 2007 at 11:20 AM
I know that that last comment violates the posting rules (& there will be probably more where that came from) but it also completely proves my point. So while I completely defer to the hive mind whether to delete "I don't know, but I do know you're a baby killer!!!" & similar posts, I'd appreciate people not responding to it otherwise.
Posted by: Katherine | November 16, 2007 at 11:24 AM
How does it prove your point, though? I'm a bit lost there.
Posted by: Edward_ | November 16, 2007 at 11:34 AM
Edward_: I think SueTroll makes the point that a single, vivid, repeatable image ("baby killers!") has a more powerful grip on people than a rational argument.
Posted by: Doctor Science | November 16, 2007 at 12:36 PM
TZS, I posted this in the comment thread of Sebastian's original post, and I think you're getting at what I was saying in a much more verbose way:
I posted something like this in the comments to Malcolm Nance's essay:
"Please consider the possibility that the President was weighing national security against the legal and moral implications and that - just maybe - he did not begin from all of the same assumptions that you begin with."
If that was the case, then not only did he disregard the oath he took upon assuming office:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
but he also failed in his constitutional duty to see that the laws be faithfully executed (such as the Convention against Torture).
Also, what many are losing sight of is the difference between personal moral agency and the function of employees of the government - namely to uphold and defend the principles upon which our nation was founded. Those employees all take a similar oath to that of the president, which is an oath to uphold the consititution. They owe no similar moral duty to my family that I do.
So while the question of what I would do if confronted with some kind of one-in-a-million situation that for example Mr. Evans refers to, where I could save my family by committing torture, I can't honestly say what I would do in that situation. Perhaps, not being of right mind, I would commit what is undeniably a wrong in the hopes of saving my family. But if I did it would be because I believed that I owed such a moral obligation to my family.
But even in that case, I would also have no reason to expect legal immunity or even leniency. Seeking legal protection strips the entire exercise of any moral profundity the hypothetical is designed to proclaim. Either you think your moral justification trumps the law or you don't. Having official and legal approval doesn't make your action a morally trenchant decision, it makes it following orders.
There is no evidence of a similar moral duty owed to citizens by employees of our government. They may believe it is so; but that does not make it so. They are acting in their capacity as our employees. If we wish to empower them with that ability, we should undo all of the laws on the books forbidding such behavior and withdraw from all treaties that do so as well. I would submit that that would represent a rejection of what it has to this day meant to be an American.
People may attempt to graft that moral obligation to MY family onto our servants in government, but that merely represents an attempt to win by visceral reaction, rather than logic. Yes, I may HOPE that some random interrogator would save my family by torturing a suspect, yet I have no legitimate reason for expecting it. In this respect the analogy to WW II Germany is apt: a German interrogator may have been able to morally justify torturing a captive in an effort to save his family (say by gaining information about a planned bombing raid in Dresden), but he should not expect to escape legal liability at Nuremberg.
As far as the practical results of torture, I would say that the use of torture could result in increase peril to our troops in battle because opposing combatants who thought they might be tortured would be more apt to fight to the death rather than surrender. There was a good reason why the understood rule among German soldiers in WW II was to run west not east if they found themselves behind enemy lines or separated from their unit.
Finally, also from a practical point of view, I would ask that people examine the case of Ahmed Ressam, the captured millenium bombing plotter:
http://corrente.blogspot.com/2005/08/terrorizing-judges.html
A sample:
"Ressam confided to his lawyers that he had found the trial surprisingly fair. The judge had treated him respectfully. THE EXPERIENCE WAS NOT AT ALL WHAT HE EXPECTED OF THE COUNTRY HE HAD BEEN TAUGHT TO HATE.
Ressam also told Oliver he was unsure of the morality of his plan to massacre innocent holiday travelers. He said he needed to study the Quran to see if he had misunderstood passages.
So when Justice Department lawyers offered a deal to reduce his sentence, Ressam was ready to listen. (my emphasis) The terms were simple: His minimum sentence would be cut in half, to 27 years. In return, he had to testify against an associate, Mokhtar Haouari, and others. He had to reveal all he knew about al-Qaida — plots, training, tactics.
Ahmed Ressam became a terrorist turncoat.
On May 10, 2001, FBI Agent Fred Humphries questioned Ressam, the first of dozens of interviews. The information was invaluable — and terrifying. He explained how he was recruited in Montreal and funneled into the bin Laden camps. He talked in detail about training with Taliban-supplied weapons. He informed on Abu Zubaydah, Abu Doha and other top al-Qaida operatives. He provided the names of jihad fighters he had met in the camps. He revealed that he had contemplated blowing up an FBI office and the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C....
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Ressam's solitude has been broken by a stream of visitors, often FBI agents such as Fred Humphries, but also investigators from Germany, Italy and elsewhere.
With federal public defender Jo Ann Oliver at his side, he is told names and shown photographs of suspected terrorists and asked if he knows them.
On several occasions, Ressam has been flown to New York City for similar questioning. There, he is held in a detention center just blocks from Ground Zero.
Ressam did not recognize any of the 19 suicide hijackers from Sept. 11. But he was able to identify student pilot Zacarias Moussaoui of Minneapolis, now in U.S. custody, as a trainee from Osama bin Laden's Khalden camp.
Ressam informed on Abu Doha, a London-based Algerian who was the brains and money behind Ressam's Los Angeles airport plot. He identified Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who ran the Khalden camp, and Abu Sulieman, who taught bomb-making at the Darunta camp.
Most importantly, Ressam named the previously little-known Abu Zubaydah as a top aide to bin Laden. That helped smash the notion that Zubaydah, also now in U.S. custody, was little more than a travel agent for terrorist wannabes making their way to the al-Qaida camps.
Ressam is expected to testify at the trials of these and other suspected terrorists.
So it is that Ahmed Ressam — the boy who loved to fish in the Mediterranean, the teenager who loved to dance at discothèques, the young man who tried and failed to get into college, who connected with fanatical Muslims in Montreal, who learned to kill in bin Laden's camps, who plotted to massacre American citizens — has become one of the U.S. government's most valuable weapons in the war against terror...
Ressam's information was given to anti-terrorism field agents around the world _ in one case, helping to prevent the mishandling and potential detonation of the shoe bomb that Richard Reid attempted to blow up aboard an American Airlines flight in 2001"
Posted by: Maimonedes | November 16, 2007 at 12:46 PM
So while I completely defer to the hive mind whether to delete "I don't know, but I do know you're a baby killer!!!" & similar posts, I'd appreciate people not responding to it otherwise.
Baby killer is a shortcut epithet, much in the same way as is "pro-torture". Not pleasant when you are on the receiving end, but you have to remember that it is a superficial label.
Posted by: DaveC | November 16, 2007 at 12:51 PM
"I posted something like this in the comments to Malcolm Nance's essay"
Whoa, whoa, buddy: cutting and pasting long long coments that were just posted yesterday is, ah, not kind to animals and small children and regular readers. That's what links were invented for.
Like your previous comment so much that you figure everyone needs to read it twice? Link to it.
Posted by: Gary Farber | November 16, 2007 at 01:08 PM
I propose a compromise to the ticking-time-bomb scenario, though it is a bit tongue-in-cheek:
Create the legal framework and protocol wherein only the President and the highest ranking member of the opposite political party can authorize "enhanced interrogation" in the event of a ticking bomb scenario.
Upon doing so and assuming a successful outcome both the President and the aforementioned official must serve no less than 6 months in federal prison. The legal framework must not allow any possibility of a pardon whatsoever.
If the interrogation did not lead to a successful result, the President and the corresponding official must serve 2 years in prison and the torture victim is to receive some significant monetary compensation and an official public apology from the United States government.
If any attempts are made to cover-up the Presidential order or if any person(s) in the government or military has been found to engage in enhanced interrogation techniques without Presidential approval then all such persons involved shall serve no less than 20 years in prison. Period. No Pardons allowed regardless of outcome or how many lives were saved.
Surely, any President would gladly serve his time in prison in order to save thousands of lives, right? But the decision to call for the order in the first place would be very soberly weighed.
Posted by: alan | November 16, 2007 at 01:11 PM
My hive vote would be to let it stand, because it is beautiful.
"Why in the world would any moonbat consider murder of any human being wrong?"
Implicit admission that the poster can't make sense of (i.e., cannot see) the other side of the argument.
"When you cannot see anything but one view, no matter where you are standing it makes you blind."
Therefore, the poster is blind
QED
Posted by: dkilmer | November 16, 2007 at 01:14 PM
Sorry, didn't know how to link directly to a comment.
Posted by: Maimonedes | November 16, 2007 at 01:34 PM
"Sorry, didn't know how to link directly to a comment."
The permalink is under the date/time.
Here is a handy guide to HTML tags.
You can use "find" to go to "link something."
Here's how you link (you can copy this and paste it as necessary, if you can't remember):
Put words as necessary between > <
Put the actual URL to link to where it says "URL."
You're done. It doesn't matter if you capitalize or not.
Posted by: Gary Farber | November 16, 2007 at 01:49 PM
Whoops, a line fell out:
Here is a handy guide to HTML tags.
You can use "find" to go to "link something."
Here's how you link (you can copy this and paste it as necessary, if you can't remember):
Put words as necessary between > <
Put the actual URL to link to where it says "URL."
You're done. It doesn't matter if you capitalize or not.
Posted by: Gary Farber | November 16, 2007 at 01:53 PM
WTF?
It was there in preview.
Posted by: Gary Farber | November 16, 2007 at 01:54 PM
[your text here]
(sorry, had to try it)
Posted by: dkilmer | November 16, 2007 at 02:00 PM
Posted by: Gary Farber | November 16, 2007 at 02:01 PM
Fricking Typepad.
Posted by: Gary Farber | November 16, 2007 at 02:02 PM
#$%#@$!
It keeps showing one thing in preview, and disappearing it all when posting.
Test: <
>
Posted by: Gary Farber | November 16, 2007 at 02:04 PM
It seems to translate < and > to the actual characters when you post.
Hit preview twice and you'll see it.
Posted by: dkilmer | November 16, 2007 at 02:10 PM
Posted by: Gary Farber | November 16, 2007 at 02:10 PM
"It seems to translate < and > to the actual characters when you post."
What? That's what it's supposed to do, when the proper HTML code for those characters is there. See "special characters" here.
The problem is that it's disappearing most of the code now, for some reason; it's never done this before, including as of yesterday.
I'm not having trouble reproducing < and > alone.
Posted by: Gary Farber | November 16, 2007 at 02:14 PM
Okay, sorry. One more try:
[I promise to stop littering on the blog]
Posted by: dkilmer | November 16, 2007 at 02:14 PM
Thx Gary, I suck at that. Although apparently it IS pretty tricky. ;)
Posted by: Maimonedes | November 16, 2007 at 02:15 PM
Gary - You saw the greater than and less than characters. What I typed was ampersand lt semicolon, etc. (actually I typed ampersand amp semicolon lt semicolon, thinking it would only translate once - I was apparently wrong about that). One could probably get it to work (multiple literal tags?), but I'm already feeling guilty about littering, so I'll leave off.
Posted by: dkilmer | November 16, 2007 at 02:18 PM
Maimonedes, linking is not tricky. What's tricky apparently is getting the HTML to display without being interpreted when explaining how to link. So as long as you're not explaining you shouldn't have a problem.
Posted by: KCinDC | November 16, 2007 at 02:29 PM
>
Posted by: Gary Farber | November 16, 2007 at 02:30 PM
"What's tricky apparently is getting the HTML to display without being interpreted when explaining how to link."
No, that's not tricky in the slightest. It's simply a matter of writing HTML.
Until an hour ago. At the moment, Typepad is doing something weird. But otherwise writing simple HTML characters is as simple as writing simple HTML characters.
For the time being, just use the form here under "Link Something."
Posted by: Gary Farber | November 16, 2007 at 02:35 PM
"Although apparently it IS pretty tricky. ;)"
No, linking isn't "tricky" in the faintest, slightest, way. No one has had a problem linking here, ever.
Posted by: Gary Farber | November 16, 2007 at 02:38 PM
<
A HREF="URL"
>
<
/A
>
< A HREF = "URL" > < /A >
Posted by: Gary Farber | November 16, 2007 at 02:41 PM
Ha!
For some reason, today, Typepad isn't allowing special characters to be put together. It'll reproduce them only when separated by a space, today.
That's inexplicable to me, but there's the problem, which didn't exist yesterday.
Fail:
Succeed: < A HREF="URL" > < /A >
Posted by: Gary Farber | November 16, 2007 at 02:45 PM
I happen to think that my take on the original hypothetical is better. That's because it hits the wingnuts where they live, in fantasy land. It ups the ante of the original hypothetical and lays bare what is really going on, torture. I can tell it goads them because I get accused of "pretzel logic". That's always a good sign.
In the original hypothetical let’s assume that we waterboard and it doesn’t work. We know without a doubt that he has the information and we know getting it from him will save thousands of American lives. Since waterboarding is not working you must try something else. Would you pull finger nails? Use cattle prods? There are microwave devices that cause extreme pain and give the sensation that your skin is on fire. It isn’t really and they cause no real permanent damage. Would you use these methods? If not why not?
Frankly, I am skeptical of this entire conversation. It seems to me to be a waste of time and is merely annoying the pigs.
Posted by: noen | November 16, 2007 at 03:24 PM
Patterico's 'response' is here.
To me it suggests that while addressing pro-torture ideas is unfortunately necessary, engaging Patterico would seem to be fairly useless.
Reading the comment threads over there on this topic is quite informative, though, and generally, I think, supports Edward_'s (Nov. 15 @ 2:30) point.
Posted by: Dan S. | November 16, 2007 at 05:59 PM
Hmm, Patterico's answers 2 and 5 seem to be close to the correct one, but for some reason he views them as invalid.
Posted by: KCinDC | November 16, 2007 at 06:41 PM
maybe I could add:
given that it could save hundreds of thousands from death, if there is a 1% chance that Cheney's cardiologist is right, does he have a responsibility to treat that as a certainty?
Posted by: Katherine | November 16, 2007 at 06:58 PM
Only if there's at least a 99% chance of him being right about having a 1% chance of being right.
Posted by: dkilmer | November 16, 2007 at 07:35 PM
My problem with his hypothetical is that if two or three minutes of waterboarding succeed in getting KSM to sing, that would seem to imply one of two things. Either 1) he wasn't holding on to the information very tightly, in which case it's likely information that could have been acquired through less abusive methods (or even misinformation); or 2) two to three minutes of waterboarding is a deeply horrifying experience of the sort once quaintly called torture, and any arguments which apply to waterboarding would apply as well to wiring up KSM's testicles to an extension cord. Patterico wants to argue that a little torure isn't so bad without actually admitting that waterboarding is torture. But how could it be effective in such a short time if it isn't?
Posted by: Larv | November 16, 2007 at 08:00 PM
Your mistake Katherine (and one I've made many times) is that you think it is actually possible to have a discussion at all. Patterico is a well known and particularly ugly troll on feminist blogs. It's unrealistic to expect anything like a civil conversation with him.
In fact, this whole thing has been one giant "Let's see if we can get some liberal heads to explode". He even says so in earlier posts though not in the same words.
For wingnut trolls you have to remember that everything revolves around us. That is just troll psychology 101. The whole point is simply to goad others into a flame war. There is no other point and any argument, no matter how bizarre is acceptable if it does that. Or to put it crudely, the whole point is to shit in the punch bowl of the hated "elites". There is nothing beyond that that matters to them.
Posted by: noen | November 16, 2007 at 08:39 PM
c) Yes
As described and stipulated, since you offer no possible alternative routes to freedom or possibilities such as Eastern Europe had under Communism, I do not condemn my entire world to permanent slavery for the sake of my personal qualms & preferences.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | November 16, 2007 at 08:44 PM
Orwell on Gandhi
Posted by: bob mcmanus | November 16, 2007 at 08:53 PM
"The [brain] scans showed that both sexes experienced increased brain activity in the fronto-singular and anterior cingulate cortices – areas that the associated with the direct experience of pain – when watching other players receive a jolt of electricity. Researchers have previously shown that so-called mirror neurons will sometimes fire in empathy with another person's experience.
Both men and women also experienced slightly less activity in these areas when cheaters were given a shock, which suggests the feeling of empathy was dependent on social behaviour.
But tellingly, activity dropped much more in men when watching cheaters being buzzed. In addition, several other regions of male participants' brains "lit up" instead – areas linked to the experience of reward known as the ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens and orbito-frontal cortex.
The results suggest that men not only feel less empathy for cheaters but experience pleasure when they are punished."
Posted by: Dan S. | November 16, 2007 at 11:21 PM
"The [brain] scans showed that"
Um, this article didn't actually link to itself. The concept is very Ouroboros, but you're quoting a link that isn't there and that couldn't be there, while making obscure where the source of the article should be found. Since none of that is in the least necessary, it's probably a bad idea.
Posted by: Gary Farber | November 17, 2007 at 12:22 AM
It does raise the question though doesn't it? "What do we do about the sociopaths among us?" What do we do about those, like Patterico and his ilk, who feel no empathy for other human beings? Because unless we do something they will lead us all into the abattoir.
Posted by: noen | November 17, 2007 at 01:39 AM
Noen, this has been worrying me a lot in recent years. Having something like a quarter of the voting public proving themselves unwilling or unable to make the most basic moral and practical distinctions is scary. Cleansing the legacy of movement conservatism and restoring competent sanity to society and government will be a [i]massive[/i] task, on the scale of de-Nazification or the post-Soviet restructuring of Warsaw Pact nations. I understand why this isn't a popular topic among those who are busily collaborating now, but the diffuse nature of public resistance to it all makes it hard to see any good outcomes. We could be heading toward being the world's richest ex-Yugoslavia rather than West Germany or Czech Republic. But no matter how difficult the task may be, it has to begin with acknowledging truths including that a lot of our neighbors have deliberately turned themselves into amoral drones or been seduced into it and refused opportunities to escape.
Posted by: Jaden "Otter" Holt | November 17, 2007 at 03:08 AM
A big part of the problem is language, just as our predecessors in attempting to recover civil life from tyranny have often noted. If you didn't know the facts of the matter, much of what must be truly said of the Bush/Cheney administration and the movement that brought it to power would sound as crazy as anti-liberal and anti-Democratic language back to Nixon and HUAC actually was. Um, I mean to say, in simpler sentences...Republicans have been saying insane things about Democrats, liberals, and the left since the 1940s. Crazy in charging conspiracies to overthrow law and order, multi-generational plots to undo constructive developments in society, mad schemes to make all of government the hapless tools of pet schemes, on and on. It turns out that all of this actually is true of movement conservatism, but distinguishing crazy from sane requires looking at something outside the exchange of rhetoric. Also, some of us would really like to have better language to talk about it all with so that we don't seem to just be swiping or reversing our enemies' style. Still, a good starting place seems to be going ahead and saying that it is actually both evil and irresponsible to the point of derangement to support the combination of sadism, anger, fear, paranoia, and outright incompetence that is the conservative movement. Its leaders are bad men and women. Its followers are at best fools. What we can do about their power, I don't yet know, unless the revolution's coming sooner than I think.
Posted by: Jaden | November 17, 2007 at 03:21 AM
Propagating democratic values -- of which "don't torture" is very much one -- is always an ongoing project.
Posted by: Gary Farber | November 17, 2007 at 03:22 AM
Katarico,
First,some of my best friends are Liberal Arts majors.There are my bona fides.
I'm going to rebut it on several quick points.
Primum non nocere.
(I'm a bit of an anchronism in that I took Latin in hs.But I think you can figure it out.
Secundum.Roger Zelazny (Amber Chronicles et al)wrote a story,"Spell my name with an 'S'"The gist was a Polish American physicist consults a numerologist who advises changing his last name's spelling.This eaarns him an academic position and averts nuclear war ,as a side effect.The tiny changes being leverages into gigantic results is OK in spec fic,but doesn't work in life.Too many variables.I don't whether VP Cheney being dead would have averted the Iraq invasion."I am but the slave of the Ring,not the Lamp."To use an analogy.
I'm really don't give a rusty fuck about waterboarding.I'm trying to understand if there is a disagreement on all toruring underany circumstances by American government agents.I don't get a sense of clarity above .
Is Edward(above at 8:24 )being serious?
Posted by: corwin | November 17, 2007 at 10:24 AM
To OCSteve:
Stauffenberg could not use a gun because he had lost one hand and some fingers on the other. Also it was planned to blow up not just Hitler but also several other important characters. The hit was postponed several times because e.g. Goering or Goebbels were not present (in the end they dared not to wait any longer).
I was not referring to that case anyway. There was at least one (earlier) case where an officer wearing a suicide vest planned to embrace Hitler while he visited a show of uniforms and blow himself and Hitler up. But Hitler changed schedule (as on several other occasions) and the would-be assassin had to hurry to get his vest defused without anybody noticing.
I read that the plane job failed because the fuses froze in the Russian cold but I don't know whether that is conjecture.
Posted by: Hartmut | November 17, 2007 at 10:50 AM
Corwin, "Spell My Name with an S" is by Asimov (who, after all, was always having to say that). But perhaps you're commenting from a parallel universe in which Zelazny wrote such a story and Edward commented at 8:24.
Posted by: KCinDC | November 17, 2007 at 10:51 AM
Well, perhaps time and the gods have marched on at this point, but I am reading a biography of Khrushchev and this morning I ran across the following passage. It is from mid-June 1953, after Stalin had died and Beria was briefly ruling. Beria instituted numerous reforms just because he was so drenched in blood, as Taubman puts it, and needed to make it look as much as possible that the horrible things he'd done were at Stalin's command. Beria, of course, as head of Stalin's secret police, knew a thing or two about interrogation. Here Beria is lambasting the Hungarian Communist Mátyás Rákosi: "A person who's beaten will make the kind of confession that interrogating agents want, will admit that he is an English or American spy or whatever we want. But we will never learn the truth this way. This way innocent people may be sentenced."
Posted by: JakeB | November 17, 2007 at 02:15 PM
Baby killer is a shortcut epithet, much in the same way as is "pro-torture". Not pleasant when you are on the receiving end, but you have to remember that it is a superficial label.
Not really, no. "Pro-torture" may not be their desired epithet, but the pro-torture crowd will be among the first to tell you that they are, in fact, in favor of methods that were until just recently considered torture -- and which, if they were practiced upon Americans, would be denounced as such.
Posted by: Anarch | November 17, 2007 at 11:12 PM
Yes, "pro-torture" has the merit of being precise and true. The position rests on the basic idea that some things are too important to subject to the system of restraints, oversights and punishment developed over time. Some advocates seem to be genuine sadists and dominants for whom useful information really doesn't matter at all as long as they get to make others scream and fear. More seem to have gotten swallowed up in ill-founded fears and can't find their way out of the labyrinth back into daylight. Can't or at least won't, not if it would require them to do something base like admit error. That running note of hating to admit ever being wrong seems a very strong one to me. But it all comes back in practice to justifying torture.
Posted by: Jaden "Otter" Holt | November 18, 2007 at 02:14 AM
Nitpick on the third hypothetical (and I can't believe Gary Farber missed this one):
England = Airstrip One
Oceania = British Empire + USA
Posted by: Johnny Pez | November 18, 2007 at 10:30 PM