In light of President Obama’s speech Thursday on torture and Guantanamo Bay, I wanted to share an “interblog” dialogue that’s going on between me, Winston Smith, and his crew at Philosoraptor on the morality of torture. Join in the debate over there if you feel so inclined! It’s a tough one, but very important.
Winston Smith has some more insightful stuff at Philosoraptor about the latest revelations concerning the torture memos. His reply to Charles Krauthammer’s recent editorial is especially interesting. Krauthammer is arguing again today that Speaker Pelosi’s knowledge of waterboarding shortly after 9/11 reveals that our intuitions at that time were that torture was “reasonable,” in his words. He links to a very disturbing piece by the liberal journalist Jonathan Alter, written just weeks after 9/11. If you have time, read Alter’s piece. It is a reminder that the mindset of many Americans just after 9/11 was very, very different than it is today. Alter’s account of the passage of the Patriot Act is just one example of the confusion that reigned shortly after the terrorist attacks. In the end, Alter seems to endorse sending terrorist suspects to the CIA’s black sites to be tortured by foreign governments, something that we ended up doing. It would by “hypocritical”, Alter writes, but “nobody said this was going to be pretty.” I wonder if he would agree with this article today.
What Krauthammer concludes from Alter’s piece, and Nancy Pelosi’s awkward position about waterboarding, is that all the outrage over the torture memos today is really “false”. Our correct intuitions about torture were the ones we had immediately after 9/11, when many people, including liberals like Alter, were considering the use of torture to extract information from terrorist suspects.
But the problem with this argument is the following, and it’s not hard to see. Just because many people, including possibly Nancy Pelosi, were not as disturbed about torture shortly after 9/11 as they are today does not mean that these intuitions were correct back then. I concede that if there were a very significant terrorist attack tomorrow, the percentage of Americans who would support torture as a method to gain intelligence would increase dramatically. Perhaps Pelosi would go back to not speaking out against torture. But that does not prove that these “aftermath” intuitions would be correct. It is often the case that our intuitions about right and wrong are distorted when we are angry or have recently been harmed. One reason why we have laws, I believe, is to check the darker emotions of individuals that may lead them to act in uncivilized ways.
If anything, Krauthammer’s piece challenges those of us who oppose torture to take account of the way that intuitions about right and wrong do seem to have shifted somewhat. Winston Smith is also correct that liberals need to be more open to the possibility that torture may sometimes “work”, in the sense that it may sometimes have been effective at getting at the truth. As he goes on to say, however, torture still seems to be an unreliable method of interrogation, even if it sometimes “works.” (By the way, I have no idea how effective torture is. I have listened to many intelligence officials and professional interrogators say it doesn’t work, but that is consistent with saying it is unreliable but gets at the truth in some cases.)
In any case, even if torture did work, that would not by itself answer the ethical question. In my view, the immorality of torture still stands in all cases except, perhaps, very rare “ticking time bomb” cases. The problem with people like Krauthammer who advocate torture in cases beyond “ticking time bomb” scenarios is that there is no clear end to the lengths we should be willing to go to extract information if his position is correct. Krauthammer says he’s okay with slapping, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and the other techniques that have been used. But if those techniques are okay by him, then what if other terrorists are resistant to these methods? Would Krauthammer be okay with methods that do cause permanent mental or physical suffering? I don’t see how his position prevents him from going down this road.
Krauthammer’s road is a very slippery slope, and barbarism is the destination. Law is the only solution to this problem. We need a truth commission to investigate what happened. We are fortunate to live by a constitution that puts a very high value on the rule of law so that we have a check on the things we might do out of anger and fear. It’s true that the constitution is not a suicide pact, but danger is not a permit to become monsters.
Ari Melber from The Nation wrote a very interesting post over at Personal Democracy Forum about Condoleezza Rice’s recent confrontation with several students at Stanford. If you haven’t seen Rice’s defensive scolding of these students yet, here it is, video courtesy of Stanford student Reyna Garcia:
I won’t go too far into analyzing Rice’s remarks. Whether or not this was a “Frost/Nixon moment,” it was very revealing. For a good account of how disturbing Rice’s comments are, see this piece by Scott Horton, which Melber links to in his post. What I want to focus on is just how effective these students were at provoking Rice to get off message. There’s a powerful lesson here for journalists–professional and citizen alike.
Ari Melber is a journalist and blogger who understands the changing dynamics of his business and the power of the internet. I’ve interacted with him several times on Twitter, and I’ve been impressed at how he engages with the progressive social media community. Like Ana Marie Cox, he uses the internet as a feedback loop between the world of professional journalists and the world of bloggers, twitterers, and citizen journalists.
In any case, Melber’s post at PDF gets at something very important in the Rice moment at Stanford:
The seven-minute clip quickly drew 150,000 views, shot up to the top of Rice videos on YouTube, and jumpstarted traditional media coverage. Blogs pounced. Law professor Jack Balkin, who runs an influential legal blog, banged out a quick analysis of the claim that an act isn’t torture if “Bush ordered it.” The Washington Post ran an item about how the “riled” former secretary of state was “caught on tape” giving a “finger-wagging” torture defense to students. Online radio host Cenk Uyger picked up the clip with a YouTube commentary, “Condi Rice Pulls a Nixon,” that drew over 100,000 views. The next day, Keith Olbermann devoted a segment to broadcasting and discussing Garcia’s video on MSNBC.
Melber accurately draws a direct line from George Allen’s “macaca” scandal a few years ago to the latest furor over Rice’s comments. (Incidentally, I’m proud to say that S.R. Sidarth was a student of mine when I was a TA at the University of Virginia–the course was “Democracy”.) I’m convinced that this kind of journalism will and should increase rapidly in the near future. S.R. Sidarth’s videotaping of George Allen calling him “macaca” was the “aha” moment when we realized the power of citizen journalism to get at the truth behind the layers of facade that politicians frequently hide behind. Reyna Garcia’s video of Condoleezza Rice has taken citizen journalism a step further by possibly catching a former high level administration official revealing complicity in a crime.
Why is citizen journalism like this so powerful? I think one answer is that citizen journalists don’t have to worry about their future careers as journalists nearly as much as the professional journalists do. In other words, professional journalists frequently have to worry about access. They don’t want to anger public officials and powerful people too much by being too aggressive, because they know that if they cross certain lines these people will stop talking to them. For instance, I saw Andrea Mitchell on “Hardball” the other night, and she was making a very implausible argument that Rice’s statement was not a “Frost/Nixon” moment. It seemed pretty clear to me that Mitchell was trying to stay on Rice’s good side. But citizen journalists don’t have this problem because we’re not worried about future access. We have the opportunity to be as aggressive as we want. After all, there probably isn’t going to be any possibility of future access anyway.
I say “we” tentatively because I’ve dabbled in citizen journalism (see my take on the tea party protest and this hearing with Eric Holder). I haven’t yet had the chance to interview powerful people. Yet, I think the model that Melber has presented of the feedback between bloggers, citizen journalists, and the major media outlets is instructive. The lesson I’ve learned from Reyna Garcia’s video and Melber’s post is that if I ever have the opportunity to interview political elites for this blog, I’m going to try to ask questions that the mainstream media is freqently too deferential to ask. And I’m going to bring a video camera.
“I will not permit the criminalization of policy differences, but it is my duty to uphold the law” said Attorney General Eric Holder Thursday at the House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing, which I was fortunate to attend. It was a fascinating hearing. Along with Obama, Holder is now the major player in what is unfolding as one of the most significant political scandals in recent history. This hearing presented Holder’s first public comments since Tuesday, when President Obama stated that prosecutions of those who authorized torture “is going to be more of a decision for the attorney general within the parameters of various laws and I don’t want to prejudge that.” Obama has stated clearly that he does not believe that CIA officers who participated in “enhanced interrogation methods” should be subject to prosecution. But Obama has left the door open to prosecutions of the Justice Department lawyers from the Bush administration who devised the interrogation methods.
Holder was consistently asked whether he would seek the prosecution of Office of Legal Council (OLC) attorneys, and he consistently evaded answering. The statement above was the closest thing to an answer he gave, and it reveals the dilemma facing Holder and the President. The Attorney General is not ruling out prosecutions, but he also seems to recognize the fine line between upholding the law and prosecuting lawyers who do their best to interpret the law but err.
During the hearing, Rep. Wolf (R-VA) pressed Holder as to whether or not the DOJ would release more memos relating to the alleged effectiveness of “enhanced interrogation.” Dick Cheney, who has been appearing increasingly nervous and defensive about the torture memos, has claimed that there are other memos that show that these interrogation methods resulted in valuable information. Holder answered, “There are other OLC memos that have not been released, and it is my hope that they will be released in the future.” When Rep. Wolf asked specifically whether memos existed which showed the results of the interrogation methods, Holder said, “I am not familiar with those memos. I cannot say that they exist.”
The hearing Thursday was high drama. The stakes are huge. We are still facing a potential economic meltdown. At the same time, we are trying to clean up a moral meltdown during the Bush administration. President Obama faced a very stark choice in whether to release the torture memos. By doing so, he recognized that he may be setting the stage for an ugly showdown with Bush-era loyalists. But whether or not America tortures is a very serious moral issue that we are now finally facing head-on. Today the Washington Post reported on President Obama’s dramatic and tense meetings over whether to release the torture memos. The piece reveals how difficult the issue was for Obama and how he made his decision:
Seated in Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s West Wing office with about a dozen of his political, legal and security appointees, Obama requested a mini-debate in which one official was chosen to argue for releasing the memos and another was assigned to argue against doing so. When it ended, Obama dictated on the spot a draft of his announcement that the documents would be released, while most of the officials watched, according to an official who was present. The disclosure happened the next day.
Whatever one thinks of Obama’s decision to release the memos, this is a significant demonstration of leadership. He decided on the spot after hearing a debate among his senior staff that the public had a right to know about the torture memos. With this decision, Obama may be gambling his agenda.
I have been reading Philosoraptor longer than almost any other blog. I think I started reading it in the summer of 2003, just a few months after it got started. Before I even knew about the Daily Kos or Andrew Sullivan’s blog, Philosoraptor was my daily go-to for sharp political analysis from a philosophical perspective. But mainly, the great thing about this blog is Winston Smith’s use of logic and humor to shred bad arguments and ridicule people who make a living spreading BS.
Anyway, as if to prove my point, Winston has been writing some very perceptive posts at his blog about the torture memos. Sullivan doesn’t have anything on this. Why? Just check out the post, “Bybee Memo: The SERE is OK, Therefore Torture Is Ok Argument”. Winston shows in a very brief post why Bybee is full of it when he argued that the SERE program proved that the interrogation methods used after 9/11 were not torture. When we’re arguing about torture, the person you really want to talk with is a philosopher who understands logic and takes it seriously.