Torture

So, people got tortured by America. This has been known for some time but recently we got the details in printed form, so in their own feckless way the media are engaging the story. Every time I see this on television, usually on MSNBC because that's what I watch, I get angry and I yell at the screen. This doesn't get much done even to the extent that it's cathartic, because as soon as I express my anger something else is said to make me mad again.

So here are a few specific items about the torture story, or rather about the story of the story, that bother me and elicit my anger at the television screen.

(A) The ticking time-bomb scenario. I would like it if, every time somebody tried to float this one on the news programs, the anchor/moderator/whoever would just stop them and say, "no, you automatically lose because you brought that up, please leave the set and collect your dunce cap."

First, the entire idea, that there could be a situation wherein we capture a terrorist, and we know that there is a deadly attack coming in the near future, but not know where, when, or how, is fiction. It has never happened and it will never happen. To put this in simple terms, if we know absolutely no details of the terrorist plot, how do we know it is going to happen so quickly that there is only enough time to torture this one guy? If we have no details, how do we know that the suspect knows anything about it at all? It isn't plausible.

Second, even if we accept the ticking-time-bomb scenario in a general sense, as a "well this could happen, and in such a case it would be okay to waterboard a guy," it still fails as a justification for any of the tortures that occurred under the Bush administration. After you get past the large plausibility problem with this argument, you run smack into the fact that it applies to precisely none of the detainees who were tortured! Let's relate this to another crime. Most recognize that if someone attacks another with clear intent to commit murder, the victim of this attack would be justified in using all necessary means to defend himself, up to and including lethal force if all other options were exhausted. Now, does this then justify all murders, including those where self-defense is not even claimed? Obviously not.

Third, even if we allow the first two to slide, there is still the issue that torture produces flawed information anyway, so it's doubtful whether it would yield sufficient data fast enough to thwart a ticking-time-bomb attack, especially since the suspect himself knows that he need only stall the interrogators for a short length of time until the attack comes off and his work is accomplished.

(B) Reporting the controversy and the Golden Mean. When there is an argument or a public debate the newspeople love to sit on the fence between the two sides and simply report on the ins and outs of the argument itself, without ever quite figuring out who was right and who was wrong--often, it seems, they're both wrong and the correct answer is somewhere in the middle, right near the Golden Mean. Hence the reportage about whether or not the torture described in the released memoranda is actually torture. It is! It is! It is! Ask the SERE trainers from whom the ideas were cribbed. Ask Amnesty International. Ask professional torturers who worked for Saddam or Pinochet! Ask any expert, but don't ask Pat Buchanan or Newt Gingrich, because they're talking out their asses!

MSNBC does something particularly egregious with respect to reporting the controversy, which is their habit of replacing one expert with two political operatives, one from right and one from left. Like this morning they had somebody representing the liberal blogosphere and somebody representing the conservative blogosphere, and asked them questions about what the lefties and the righties were saying on the internet about the torture memos. Here is what this lefty is saying: get an expert on your show instead of these amateurs! For example, have an expert in international law tell you whether or not we should prosecute the people responsible for Bush administration torturing. Answer: Yes, the US has legally binding treaty obligations to prosecute wrongdoing of this kind.

(C) Please let's talk about what Dick Cheney is saying about torture, without discussing the fact that he was almost certainly deeply involved in the decision to torture and his statements are probably attempts to avoid being prosecuted himself. I mean, the extraneous memos that he is trying to release to demonstrate that torture worked come from his own personal files. Gee, I wonder why he kept those close to hand.

This is a big story with a lot of details, but this is what bubbles up in my mind right now.

Evan