Credit where it’s due
It should be clear that I am no fan of Obama. But I’m with Radley and, generally, approve this list of things he’s done in the first bit. Except the suspending Gitmo trials thing. After all, the issue with Gitmo is that they’re being held there without a, you know, trial.
January 22nd, 2009 at 12:28 pm
You’re letting your own wordplay confuse you. There are many problems with Gitmo. That there are no trials happening there is not true, nor would it be the biggest problem at the site even if it were.
The trials that are underway are shameful proceedings, under unfair conditions, most notoriously the use of testimony extracted through torture.
There’s a lot that needs to be done to untangle the mess, but a sensible first step is to immediately halt the sham trials now underway.
As they say, “First, do no harm.”
If halting the trials is the only move Obama makes in Gitmo, then of course it’s a step backwards. But no serious observer can possibly think that this will be the case.
January 22nd, 2009 at 12:35 pm
My fear is this. If we move battlefield captures to the criminal court system, convictions will be impossible. Soldiers are not policemen. They are not trained in maintaining a “clean” environment: Did that bullet casing really fall right there or did someone kick it in the firefight. Oops, maybe it wasn’t the Dad that was shooting at you, it was the son: Can you say reasonable doubt?
Since convictions will be impossible due to technicalities and given the high recidivism rate already seen in people released at Gitmo already will the military just decide that since they don’t wear uniforms, aren’t part of an official command structure etcetera, etcetera, etcetera that they’ll just utilize the out the Geneva Convention grants them and summarily execute them.
What exactly will be the incentive for them to surrender, then?
Fight = Die
Surrender = Die
The enemy will just figure that if they’re going to die anyway they might as well take U.S. soldiers with them.
So we have the military conducting executions and increased US fatalities. *That* will be so much better. /sarcasm
January 22nd, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Yu-Ain, the issue I have is that their choice as of now is
Fight = Die
Surrender = Get tortured and imprisoned without any chance of getting a fair hearing. Death is better.
And, the military isn’t going to just start executing people on the spot. Sometimes that’s the best option, but it goes against what we fight for. We can be our own worst enemy.
I’d prefer it if the enemy knew he’d get a fair shake with us. Food, clothing, shelter, etc. It goes a long way with taking the fight out of them.
January 22nd, 2009 at 12:57 pm
What exactly is the motive for them to surrender now, with indefinite detention in Gitmo, possible torture, the prospect of a military trial where you can’t face your accusers or see the evidence against you, and where you’ll be kept for years even after they figure out that you’re innocent?
The number of suicides and attempted suicides of detainees—innocent and guilty alike—makes it apparent that dying is preferable to wasting away in Cuba anyway. So once again, where’s the motivation to surrender?
And how are we to know how much of those are combatants returning to their old ways, or wrongly-detained people who understandably grow to revile the country that locked them up for years and tortured them? It’s probably not all “recidivism.”
January 22nd, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Robb beat me to it.
January 22nd, 2009 at 1:04 pm
I wonder how Daniel Pearl’s family feels about the treatment they receive? Was he read his right did he face his accuser’s.
Give me a break……….
January 22nd, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Wow, you’re really setting the bar high, “Dad.”
We don’t retain the moral high ground or our character as a nation by letting the savages dictate how we act.
How Daniel Pearl’s family feels about how detainees in Gitmo are treated—quite a few of whom are completely innocent—is absolutely and totally irrelevant.
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:16 pm
As noted by others, the problem with the Gitmo trials is that there are legitimate questions as to whether they are fair or just trials.
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:25 pm
How do you know that they are completely innocent? Do you have some information that you would like to pass on? How about letting those innocent one’s move into your neighborhood,The point I was trying to make was, why should we be so concerned about these people when they have only one goal in mind and that is to kill as many American’s as possible at any cost. They are called terrorist for a reason. When a person straps on a bomb and walks into a crowd of innocent people and kills women and children for no other reason than to kill them and we have people sitting here at home and watching their big screen and sucking on a beer wanting to give them the same right’s that our citizens have. That gets my dander up. I did not spend 20 years in the Army to give a damn terrorist any rights.
The closing of GITMO is only a political move, it will solve nothing except to appease the left. Where will they be sent? Where do we keep the new one that we will get? Better yet I think a lawyer should be assigned to ever unit so that they can be given their rights as soon as they are caught.
The point I was making about Daniel Pearl was they don’t care about others rights why should we bend over and grab our ankles?
Don’t give me that ” We cant stoop to their level or we are no better than they are crap” That is all they understand, anything else is seen as weakness in their eyes.
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:33 pm
“I’d prefer it if the enemy knew he’d get a fair shake with us. Food, clothing, shelter, etc. It goes a long way with taking the fight out of them.”
Why the hell should we feed, cloth, and shelter our enemies? Is that going to make them love us? Ha! Since capuring them aint going to result in anything useful just kill them. If they know that fighting WILL get them killed they’ll stop.
Fight = die
Go home to your camel ranch = live.
BTW, since Abdul and company dont show our troops any mercy then why the hell should we show Abdul and company any?
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Well, primarily because that is what makes us better than them.
In the Marines, I was taught to offer the enemy shelter, food, and care. The goal of war is not to kill your enemy, but rather destroy his will to resist yours. You do that in the least destructive way possible. Sometimes, as it is with many of these terrorists out there, death is the only way to get through to them. So be it.
However, you and Dad are making the assumption that every last person at Gitmo is a terrorist and has already been proven guilty beyond a doubt so a trial is only a formality. The anti-gunners use the same argument against us – We’re all blood thirsty murderers anyway, why bother with due process.
We believe that due process is a right. Not an AMERICAN right, but a human right. I have no problem with capturing individuals on a battlefield and trying them. However I prefer that the trials be open and fair. If they truly are guilty, then you have nothing to worry about – a fair system will convict them.
Now, we’re also arguing that our enemies are rational actors which I don’t believe is the case. Unfortunately, we don’t just capture our enemies. Sometimes we capture those who, at the point of a gun, are forced into fighting us or occasionally we grab a totally innocent bystander. They deserve a chance to explain themselves.
However, if you have keen insight as to the provable guilt of every last prisoner in Gitmo, then by all means fire off a letter to Obama and I’m sure he’ll be all ears.
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Don’t make fun of his ears.
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Robb,
Since when did POW types get trials? They have always been held until the end of hostilities without trials. That’s kind of the nature of war. I’ve never heard of someone released because “Well, the war is still on, but he’s served his time” or “Well, yeah, he was wearing the other side’s uniform, his fingerprints we all over the rifle and it matched the ballistics of the bullet that killed the Major, but you lost the paperwork for the chain of custody said items so I’m going to have to let him go”.
War != Crime
And, the military isn’t going to just start executing people on the spot. Sometimes that’s the best option, but it goes against what we fight for. We can be our own worst enemy.
I agree it’s a horrible thing to do, but when the alternative boils down to essentially letting them shoot you*…
*Because the guy that shot your buddy ran around the corner and dropped the weapon thus preventing you from shooting him. You arrest him, the court lets him off on technicalities (again, you’re not trained as a police detective) and 6 weeks later, he’s back shooting at you again and the cycle repeats. You’re telling me that that’s *better* than holding someone without trial?
As for rampant torture at Gitmo, our soldiers handle the Koran with frikkin white gloves. I have a hard time believing that in such an environment torture is widespread and pervasive. Come on, we won’t dare rip a page from a book but we’ll rip your fingernails off in a heartbeat? Sorry, just don’t believe it.
For those who believe we do… Well, let’s face it, we *didn’t* flush a Koran down the toilet and they *still* killed people for it. I doubt saying “We don’t torture people” is going to be believed whether it’s true or not.
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Don’t know how long you’re going to stay with Balko on Obama, because he’s pretty much a Hopenchange groupie.
Obama could order the forcible confiscation of every gun in America and the lead story on Balko’s blog would be about some long-gone policy of the Bush Administration.
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Hey, Rob et al,
Those poor sweet wonderful folks in Club Gitmo have already had their lawyers protest the idea of sending them back from whence they came.
SO what do you propose too do with them? And lets not even get into how many of those innocent victims of American agression have been turned loose and gone right back to the battlefield.
Kill’em all; let Allah sort ’em out.
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:46 pm
There’s got to be some kind of a middle ground. Obviously if we picked up “Abdul Mohammed Hassan al-Tikriti” and we should have picked up “Hassan Mohamed Abdul al-Tikriti” then “Abdul” should be released (unless we discover that he, too, is a terrorist); I don’t know that anyone disputes that part.
A problem is that we’re not in a declared formal war with the rules attendant to it. Congress didn’t declare war on anybody. It’s not clear that, even if we had, that these prisoners are properly designated as POWs. Our legislature and executive have wandered into new (or at least unfamiliar) territory, and may or may not have been right to do so, and the judiciary is, understandably, having a hard time keeping up. Saying that POWs are kept without trial and then released at the end of the war doesn’t directly resolve the situation of those at Guantanamo.
I’ll definitely give Pres. Obama credit for the order restricting interrogation to that within the Army manual. As for the others, I’m not sure whether I agree or not, but they’re not unreasonable.
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Dad:
I don’t have any information that isn’t freely available to anyone. For example: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/detainees/story/38773.html . Also:
We offered bounties of $5,000 in a country where the average annual income in 2001 was $145. Wonder how that could possibly go wrong …
Uhm, that’s fine. I’m sure that there are already plenty of innocent people in my neighborhood. I think I even have some Muslims in my neighborhood. And I haven’t been beheaded yet!
But the point of contention is whether or not these people ARE terrorists. Some are, and some are not. The plain fact is that after 9/11 we swept up thousands of people. Most of them were not terrorists. And about the half the people we brought back from Pakistan and Afghanistan weren’t terrorists either. I don’t particularly care what happens to actual terrorists—I care what happens to people who are not, in fact, terrorists.
You don’t need to explain terrorists or terrorism to me, I was in New York on 9/11. I understand quite clearly what we’re facing.
Well, you kind of did. In serving to defend this country and it’s Constitution, you were defending our way of life and the things that make us great—one of which is the fact that we weren’t supposed to have a gestapo or secret prisons and gulags—It’s one of this things that made us better than the fascists and communists, wasn’t it?
I don’t understand why so many otherwise patriotic Americans want to race to the bottom and meet the lowest standards possible, set by barbarians. Yes, we are better than them. But that’s dictated only by our actions, not by any accident of birth or geography. We’re better because we don’t saw people’s heads off without a fair trial.
But Daniel Pearl has nothing to do with this at all—you were invoking his name to make an emotional plea. Extend your logic to other aspects of our daily life. Why not drive drunk since there are people who don’t care about the law? Why wait in line politely when there are line cutters? Why not rape women when there are so many men that do? Why not steal? Why bother acting like a civilized person at all?
I will, because it’s true.
On the contrary, I can think of no historical precedent to support the theory that Muslims respond particularly well to or are cowed by overwhelming violence. If you haven’t noticed, terrorists are not afraid of dying and they’re not terribly shocked or awed by us.
January 22nd, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Muslims aren’t. Not anymore than anyone else, anyway.
But terrorist who claim to be Muslim didn’t exactly respond better to Jimmy Carter’s appeasement.
The simple fact is: Innocents will be harmed in War. Sure, we should try to keep it as small as is prudent. But you are going to have a hard time convincing me that a whopping 245 people across two wars is excessive.
January 22nd, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Umm… No offense, especially as former military myself, but rights are self evident and do not require being given, created, or granted.
For me, it’s like the death penalty. I have no problem with killing another human being who’s continued existence puts others’ rights and safety in danger. Rapists, murderers, etc. do not warrant sympathy nor do they warrant my money to keep them alive.
What I have a problem with is a judicial system that cannot adequately mete punishment. We’ve got guys on death row for 20 years who are cleared of all crimes through DNA while people who gang rape nuns walk on technicalities. I’m not saying it has to be perfect, but it needs to be a hell of a lot better than it is right now to make me comfortable with the Government handing down the ultimate punishment.
Same concept goes for terrorists and Gitmo. If they’re truly terrorists (a word that does not mean ‘enemy combatant’), then if someone goes all Jack Bauer on them you won’t see me cry. But someone who defends his home against a foreign invader (and that is what we are) doesn’t deserve torture and the label of terrorist.
Sometimes it’s hard to discern between the two, I know. But just rounding up any ‘towelhead’ with a gun isn’t going to save our fellow soldiers’ lives.
If we’re really at the point where we don’t feel that at least trying to determine guilt or not, then why not just carpet bomb the whole place? Why worry about civilian casualties if we’d just round them up anyway? The answer is because we’d prefer it if we could change their minds, bend their will to ours, in other ways.
Finally, I’m not saying close Gitmo. I’m saying fix it. I want those who’d do our guys harm in jail or spread across several square yards. If we’re releasing the ones that should be tortured and torturing the ones we should release, that’s simply not a system that’s working well.
January 22nd, 2009 at 6:32 pm
What Robb said … again.
January 22nd, 2009 at 7:40 pm
Robb Allen
Very minor quibble: I’d say natural rights are are self evident and do not require being given, created, or granted. We can contract for other rights if we like, whether in a sales agreement or something like the Geneva Convention(s). Of course, this raises the problem of whether the contracted rights are self-evident and are merely recognized by the contract or are specially created by/for the agreement…
January 22nd, 2009 at 7:49 pm
But someone who defends his home against a foreign invader (and that is what we are)
Off topic, but if you were to see your neighbor threatening to kill his wife with a knife and you broke down his door to protect her, would you call yourself an intruder from whom the husband would be defending himself?
Me, I fully expect him to attack you, but I wouldn’t exactly say “He’s just defending himself from an intruder”.
January 22nd, 2009 at 8:30 pm
Iworked in counter terrorism for 13 years not in the military but in my second career when I was a Federal Agent. I guess you are correct I can’t tell you anything. I was not aware that being in New York gave you such a profound knowledge. Just think of all the security briefings I could have missed if only I had been there.
Yes, I was defending OUR Constitution, not theirs.
You say Daniel Pearl has nothing to do with it, I was only pointing out the type of people we are dealing with.
But the point of contention is whether or not these people ARE terrorists.
I guess you are willing to take that chance, what if you are wrong? A whole lot of people that may have not been in New York on 9-11 have made that determination that they are.
I don’t have any information that isn’t freely available to anyone.
There is a difference between information and facts, which you do not have.
I understand your concern for the innocent but I say leave that to the ones that have the real information.
January 22nd, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Back on topic.
If you put these people on trial in our open and public criminal courts, what do you when the evidence against them is all classified or derived from classified sources?
You have two choices:
A) Protect your intel and sources and have the prisoner go free regardless of guilt or innocence.
B) Expose your intel and sources, maybe get a conviction if you don’t get caught on a technicality, but lose all hopes of getting further intel from anyone in the future either way. (Those exposed that aren’t killed sure as hell ain’t talking anymore and everyone else certainly won’t come forward given the risks of being exposed).
Wonderful, we’re screwed either way.
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:13 am
Unfortunately, Balko started hitting the Kool-Aid pretty hard a few months ago. Lots of “I’m voting for Bob Barr, BUT…” stuff. He simply doesn’t apply the level of skepticism and cynicism to Obama that he (rightly) applies to every other politician, and is far too willing to take the One at his word.
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:21 am
How many of these guys would actually have evidence that’s from classified sources? I thought the problem with these guys was that they were unlawful combatants seized on foreign battlefields by our troops…not spies snagged by other spies.
You hear that objection bandied about…that we have to hold these people indefinitely and we can’t risk saying why we’re holding them…which is a pretty shitty excuse for holding someone who might well be innocent.
Sorry, you don’t save democracy by destroying it. What you save Gitmo types fail to realize is that abandoning our freedom loving principles and becoming fascists WE’RE GIVING OSAMA EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTS.
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:33 am
It’s amazing that we’ve allowed torture to be defined down to include discomfort. None of the interogation techniques in regular use cause any permanent physical harm; no testicles in a vice, drills through hands, no sodomy with broomhandles. You stand a greater chance of actually being tortured, real torture, for being the wrong shade of tan and mouthing off to a member of the LA or NY PD. So the choice these combatants have is, pop off a few rounds at US troops, and if you can’t extricate yourself to fight another day, you will get food/housing/shelter/medical care with full sensitivities to your religious preferences, in an environment so horrible most detainees gain weight, and maybe, maybe have to endure some discomfort, if you choose not to cooperate with your captors, who had the legal right to summarily execute you. Oh the humanity! So let’s remove the discomfort. Also, let’s load the guns with marshmallows, and outlaw the soldier’s use of harsh words, or for that matter, angry tones of voice. Lets define torture to include confinement itself, and introduce “combat timeouts” so that the un-uniformed, using civilians as camouflage “insurgents” can give their solemn word of honor that they’re leaving the battlefield to open bonsai shops and be sent along their way… with a complimentary bus ticket of course. Wouldn’t want them to get blisters on our watch.
This isn’t a criminal matter, where guilt or innocence is a factor. It’s war. It’s a question of threat/non-threat. These are not US citizens, they’re external entities, and the one bedrock responsibility of the government is to protect it’s citizens against outside threats. How many US citizens are the non-existent due process rights of a foreign threat worth? If they want redress, they’re welcome to petition their government to negotiate their release with the US; tellingly, most aren’t wanted back by their home countries.
January 23rd, 2009 at 2:28 am
I got to agree with Guav, Robb and Sebastian. Gitmo had to close. IMHO the WoT is not much different than the WoSD. I understand terrorists are a bad thing but we cannot lose what defines us as a nation in combating it. When we act in a way that has more in common with totalitarian regimes than the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights we lose what makes us a great nation. If we continue with rendition, Gitmo, military tribunals and torture how long before we start using it on our citizens who disagree with the government? How long before government starts rounding up constitutionalists and gun nuts or flowery hippies?
January 23rd, 2009 at 6:00 am
Folks, BATFE’s conviction rate is a lot higher than that of the courts martial in Guantanamo.
If they were simply ‘show trials’, where the defense is muzzled by the judge, the facts are whatever the prosecutor says they are, and so forth, you’d expect the conviction rate to be 100 percent, or at least as high as those obtained by BATF, wouldn’t you?
January 23rd, 2009 at 6:17 am
…. continued, sorry….
A fair number of the detainees are still there because the prosecution failed the fairly strict standards of evidence required, but their home countries, presented with the facts of their detainment, will not allow their return.
What would you have us do, issue them student visas and a scholarship to the flight school of their choice?
January 23rd, 2009 at 9:24 am
Junyo,
We tortured people. Get over it. That’s simply a fact. Your brand of denialism smacks of partisanship. There are clearly defined definitions of torture that are generally accepted (which include water boarding, which is definitely more than simply discomfort) that include things we did.
January 23rd, 2009 at 9:26 am
And Mark, please, don’t be so facile: just because it’s time that Gitmo closes doesn’t mean the only other choice is saying “hey goes, go blow shit up.”
January 23rd, 2009 at 10:20 am
PGP,
Many of the people we capture weren’t seized in the middle of a firefight. They were seized at night, from their homes. They may have been on a watch list due to a firefight, but they’re homes were likely found through informants. I.E. the guy’s neighbors. You really want to expose them to recriminations?
Like I said, forget getting help ever again.
January 23rd, 2009 at 11:20 am
Sebastion, what really bothers me the most is how quick some folks are to assume that our military would use waterboarding to obtain information to be used in a trial. My understanding is that waterboarding, sleep deprivation, etc. were used to obtain information regarding ongoing terrorist ops.
If we were torturing people for confessions, we’d have gotten a lot more confessions, no?
So, tell me – what are the options with the detainees? Federal prison system? Without a trial? A civilian trial? A bullet in the neck? How about we put them in, say, Leavenworth, with military prisoners?
January 23rd, 2009 at 11:28 am
Sebastian,
Nothing to get over. I’m not squeamish at all over the use of torture against foreign nationals. It should be national policy; if you treat our captured servicepeople well, we’ll handle yours with kid gloves. If you mistreat ours and we’ll do unspeakably worse to yours. The reason why, by and large civilized nations built rules of war had nothing to do with ideals or humanity; war is, after all, dispute resolution via organized violence. They built those rules out of naked self interest. Now, muddy headed thinkers had elevated the rule above the intent, and mandate that we most follow a rule despite the fact that it has actively bad real world consequence. Enemies have a number of very simple expedients for avoiding coercive questioning; a) don’t make war on the US, b) if you choose to, don’t get captured doing it, c) fight like civilized people, up to and including corresponding safeguards for captured US personnel that compensates for the data we can’t now extract, thus making it worthwhile for the US to reciprocate.
And do you think making a rule that interrogators can’t torture changes anything? People invariably work towards their immediate interests, and rules against those interest get ignored or worked around. In war the incentives are extremely high to gather data from the enemy. Now instead of doing it in a controlled,relatively safe environment, instead of it being known policy so that it has an additional preemptive deterrent effect, and where the ultimate consequences can be controlled and modulated, we’ll still do it, just crude, quick, and dirty on the battlefield, where plausible deniablity as to a combatant’s status can be maintained. After all, bullet through the thigh + in custody = torture, but bullet through the thigh + in combat = moral, right? We can make the rational decision to kill lots of nameless people to get what we want (which is what war is, at it’s core) and it’s fine and moral as long as most of us agree, but making the rational decision to make one particular guy’s life hell in pursuit of information that may help us get what we want quicker/more efficiently (and potentially saving some of the faceless people) is so very terrible. Nonsense. We have the police using pain compliance devices on Americans as a matter of daily course, but God forbid we light up a hostile foreign national in an effort to save lives.
Being squeamish about things we’ve done, are doing, and will undoubtedly do in the future isn’t some brave moral stand, it’s infantile denial of how the world works, and a guarantee of needless deaths, on both sides.
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:47 pm
YAG–that’s not evidence, who ratted out where you were hiding.
I’m talking about how we know these people are bad guys in the first place. The problem is that sort of “we’re going to hold you and not tell anyone why” rationale doesn’t leave much room for an innocent person to state their case.
As for Mark’s point…if he has one, my understanding is that even the Israelis have figured out that torture results in people saying what they think their torturers want to hear so the torture will end, not useful operational info. I’m sure we got all kinds of confessions about everything from the 1947 Roswell incident to who peed in Dick Cheney’s coffee mug. If we can’t reasonably demonstrate that someone’s a criminal or an ongoing threat, deport them. Let their home countries worry about it. But the fact that I don’t have a pat answer that’s perfect for unscrewing Dubya’s fuckup doesn’t mean it wasn’t a fuckup in the first place. The very problem with Gitmo was that by its very nature it means we can’t have a decent civil or criminal proceeding.
Junyo’s post can be summed up in one sentence–he doesn’t care if we’re no better than the bad guys. That’s fine if you want to think that, but please spare us the mock horra, horra, HORRA!!! when you learn that’s not a popular viewpoint.
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:48 pm
My point, Sebastion, was that we aren’t torturing people for confessions in Gitmo. Confessions and operational info are not the same thing.
If we were doing so, we’d have more convictions; as I said earlier, BATF has a higher conviction rate than the courts-martial in Gitmo. As far as I know, BATF doesn’t waterboard people (although I won’t speak to their rules of evidence, investigatory ethics, or truthfulness on the stand).
Finally, to claim we torture people for confessions requires you to believe that our (intelligent and ethical) military is fine with beating out what they know are false confessions in order to get a courts-martial conviction (rather than to interrupt ongoing enemy operations).
Thank you for your support.
January 23rd, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Dad:
It doesn’t give me any profound knowledge at all. My point was just that I am already intimately aware of “the type of people we are dealing with,” I’ve seen what they can do firsthand—and what I saw was way worse than the gruesome murder of one person. I’m not harboring any illusions about the evil nature of actual terrorists.
The daily spectre of a suicide bomber on my morning train isn’t just an abstract TV scenario to me, it’s something that I think will literally happen sooner or later—I’m actually surprised that it hasn’t yet. But the fact remains that the chances are if I am ever killed by an Arab or a Muslim, it’s probably going to be getting accidentally hit by a taxi driver.
I’m more likely to be a victim of street crime than of a terrorist attack. Murder—at the hands of Al Qaeda or anyone else—is a very real threat. But it’s not a supreme threat, and preventing it does not require the wholesale reorganization of the American way of life. The prevention of murder doesn’t require the suspension of habeas corpus, nor does it require national identity cards, or the torture of 15 year-old goat farmers who took up arms against an invading foreign military.
Junyo:
I’m not against torture in theory either. If I knew that someone had kidnapped my wife, I’d torture the shit out of them—breaking the law in the process—to find out where she was. In fact, I can think of many scenarios where I’d personally torture someone. But torture should not be a sanctioned state policy.
Jack Bauer’s “ticking time bomb” scenario doesn’t actually happen in real life. Furthermore, in the real world, governments don’t just torture ticking time bombs: They torture under circumstances that routinely stray from the isolated, extreme “ticking time bomb” scenario. Even the most scrupulous regime is bound to do so, for the simple reason that nobody can know for certain whether a suspect is a ticking bomb. You can’t know whether a person knows where the bomb is, or even if they’re telling the truth. Because of this, you end up going down a slippery slope and sanctioning torture in general.
The problem is that torture is a shortcut, and everybody loves a shortcut. Why stop with the bomber? Why not torture the person who could introduce you to the cousin who knows someone who planted the bomb? Why not torture the wife and children? Friends? All of this becomes justified and once torture becomes common practice, it severely undermines a society’s democratic norms. We can’t defend what we stand for by subverting our own values in the process.
January 23rd, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Sebastian-PGP Says:
“Junyo’s post can be summed up in one sentence–he doesn’t care if we’re no better than the bad guys.”
If the only thing that seperates us from the bad guys is tactics then we’re truly fucked. ‘Sorry honey, you’ll need to put on this burkha after they mutilate your genitalia, because using the tactics that would’ve preserved your rights as an individual would’ve made us the bad guys. Sure we lost the fight, and now you can’t be in the room with a non-relative male without risking a beating, but we lost it on our own terms.’
What separates from the bad guys isn’t what we do, it’s why we do it. Which is why deliberate killing for fun is a crime and deliberate killing in defense of life isn’t. Kill people in the name of protecting the fundamental rights of your citizens against those that would harm them or forcibly subjugate them makes you a good guy. Feed puppies and paint rainbows in the name of repressive theocracy and you’re still a bad guy.
Guav:
“The problem is that torture is a shortcut, and everybody loves a shortcut. Why stop with the bomber? Why not torture the person who could introduce you to the cousin who knows someone who planted the bomb? Why not torture the wife and children? Friends? All of this becomes justified and once torture becomes common practice, it severely undermines a society’s democratic norms.”
I agree that that’s a deliberate concern, and one reason why I created a clear brightline at citizens. But since we know that it will happen, I also believe that’s precisely why interrogation techniques need to be employed with full transparency, and need to have a defined and consistent cost to those people authorized to employ it. There should be consequences if you got the wrong guy or go too far. When it occurs illicitly, the decision as to whether it’s worth it has two components; is the information that I’m likely to obtain worth the risk of getting caught. There’s no review of whether the judgment about the former is sound, and the latter consideration can be manipulated by acting without witnesses or ultimately killing the captive. Both factors make it more likely that abuses will occur. If on the other hand, the interrogator knows that, while lawful, his decision and methods will be reviewed, this will encourage basic human risk aversion in all but the gravest of circumstances, or the surest that info is available; if the interrogator believes that the value of the information that suspect captive X has is low (or if there’s any doubt that they have information), that the methods needed to extract it severe, and the use of those severe methods for meager rewards carries personal sanction, basic human CYA will make most err of the side of caution.