I think Ace’s analysis here is spot on. And before you say, ”but wait, Jeff. Didn’t those same draconian tactics Ace advocates fail Bruce Willis in The Siege, bringing him scorn from a less reactionary, more liberal Denzel Washington, who—instead of taking the easy way out and pinning his hopes on torture and internment—relied on good ol’ fashioned investigative police work to reach a heroic (and moral) conclusion?”—let me just remind you, dear reader, that The Siege was a fucking movie.
This ain’t playtime, folks. Bring out the bamboo shoots. And the big bottle of Ex-lax.
****
More, from Malkin.
Tony Shalhoub always has pain in his eyes. Ever seen Big Night? The man does suffering like nobody’s business.
Thanks for the link, JeffG.
With you on my side, I think that Paula Zahn appearance is a lead-pipe cinch.
That upside down pasta cake with the sliced egg at the end of Big Night? I still dream abou that thing.
Mmmmmmmm.
Ace —
Zahn loves it when you wear high top Chuck Taylors with no socks.
Don’t question. Just do.
The pasta thing with the egg made me erect. No, wait—actually, it just made me hungry. It was Isabella Rosselini who gave me the erection. Never mind.
I’m sorry, but the more I think about this, the more I don’t buy it.
An example of the problem with Ace’s argument is the “known terrorists” caveat. Who gets to decide who is a “known terrorist”? Even if you don’t make the subjective assessment that torturing people diminishes us (which is a pretty big leap, I think), doesn’t the problem of the potential innocence of the “known terrorist” create enough of a problem not to advocate this?
I don’t know how the tragic casualties suffered by our soldiers serves as a justification. Deaths and injuries suffered by them in past wars didn’t serve as a justification to torture POWs in our custody.
I think there’s a middle ground between the “patty cake” method skewered by Malkin and IMAO and actual torture. For example, some old-school Homicide: Life on the Street interrogation mind-fucking would be fine.
By the way, Jeff, did you know that “we have all but lost this war”? I heard about it today on Andrew Sullivan’s blog and, man, was I disappointed.
Me being the kind of guy who nips problems in the bud:
This has nothing to do with my politics, but it’s a shame that it’s all desert out there, because some really high-grade defoliant would serve us well. I mean, we could totally say it was just some fire that started at some burning oil field and just got out of control. Would anyone really miss that region if we woke up tomorrow and everyone was just gone a la ‘Langoliers’?
Who is this Sullivan fellow everyone keeps talking about?
Hubris —
Were I running things, the first phase of this war would have had no POWs other than the big named guys in the al Qaeda hierarchy. Everyone else either escapes the gun battle or is killed.
Allah, I’m thinking you really need to get back to that blog.
Mmmmm, timpáno…
And I’m a big fan of ‘The Big Night’. Sullivan, not so much…
Yes to the bamboo shoots! Yes to the big bottle of Ex-lax! But only if both are administered simultaneously as an enema.
(Jeff, my spam-buster word for this comment is “europe.” Ewwwwww! Torture for the terrorists, yes, for your commenters, not so much.)
I don’t see why everyone’s so worried about torture laws, when the real culprits here soldiers and SEAL’s too stupid to leave their digital cameras at home.
f
The Siege is pretty weird to watch these days, with the WTC looming over the troops rounding up the Muslims.
Denzel looks something of a fool. Running in and charging General Willis with “violating international law.”
Speaking of “pop culture and,” Instapundit linked to a guy who saw Kiefer Sutherland interviewed talking about Jack Bauer. I’ve thought that myself – Jack Bauer is loose shit personified, and he’s the good guy.
I’m not sure, Hubris, that the “known terrorist” question is such a difficult one. Or at least not in many instances.
To wit: Say, while we were scrubbing a Fallujah mosque, our troops captured a guy who had been shooting at them 30 seconds earlier. He is un-uniformed and certainly not part of any state army, so GC provisions do not apply. He can be labeled a NUC or a terrorist, whichever label fits your fancy. If it is determined that he may possess relevant information that will aid our side in the conflict, and is unwilling to impart that info, torture should unequivocally be an option for gaining said data.
Should it be the first option? No. Well, maybe. No, no, (yes?) no. I think. But it should be an option. Of that I am certain.
There is little sense in abiding by a set of strictures that were designed to guide war between defined nations when we are now fighting an amorphous blob o’ evil that strikes from the shadows and is not in the least bit interested in following anyone’s rules but their own.
As far as the “torture diminishes us” argument, I don’t buy that either. War is a nasty, nasty business, and things happen in war that just don’t occur in the normal arena of life. Is torturing the meat department manager at Teal’s Super Valu to find out if he is really giving you the best price on those New Your Strip steaks acceptable? Not normally. Is it acceptable to torture him because he is a radical islamofascist who has knowledge of a plot to bomb the Governor’s motorcade as it passes through town? You bet your turban it is. Torture, used judiciously, does not diminish us. Losing soldiers, civil servants, and civilians unnecessarily DOES diminish us. Especially if those losses could have been prevented using torture-gained intel.
And please don’t anyone try the tired-ass “slippery slope” argument. Just because we yank a few teeth or break a few knuckles of some al-qaeda dead-enders doesn’t mean Bush’s next appointment will be a Grand Inquisitor who will show up on your doorstep tomorrow morning. We are the world’s beacon of freedom, and shall remain so – even if we must be a beacon who removes Mahmoud’s fingernails with pliers on occasion.
/end overlong comment
kyle,
I don’t think a slippery slope argument is necessary.
What you’re arguing is that the ends justify the means; I think that we should have underlying moral principles to which we conform, even if upholding them creates (yes, very human and real) costs.
There is little sense in abiding by a set of strictures that were designed to guide war between defined nations when we are now fighting an amorphous blob o’ evil that strikes from the shadows and is not in the least bit interested in following anyone’s rules but their own.
I don’t think that the GC should be our sole arbiter of right and wrong, any more than I would look to the U.N. for moral guidance.
Hubris:
the often-used phrase: ‘the ends justify the means..’ makes no sense .. it is a rhetorical dodge.
ask these questions: ‘which ends?’ , ‘which means?’
theoretically, ‘some’ ends justify ‘all’ means.
to illustate via a hypothetical: if you knew a person you held at gunpoint custody was 100% sure to nuke Chicago if you didn’t kill him, you’d pull the trigger. The ‘end’ ( saving Chicago) justified by the ‘means’ of shooting him.
Alternatively, if all he was gonna do was spit on the sidewalk, shooting him would not be justified—THAT ‘end’ (a spittle-fee sidewalk) would not be justified by THAT ‘means’
so, any discussion of ‘ends/means’ must be SPECIFIC.
I think that one of the mistakes we make here is telegraphing our mentality onto these prisoners.
They don’t think like us; they don’t have our expectations. You’ll note that the difference here is that the terrorists don’t hesitate to film the sawing-off of heads, while shouting “God is Great!”, whereas we react with revulsion and horror to the administration of humiliation and a bif of pain.
As long as we’re not responding to each beheading with a bit of ultraviolence, we’re sending the message that we’re weaker then them. That’s how they see it.
They hate us and want us dead. They’re willing to die for their twisted ideals, and I’m willing to help them along.
Torture? …theoretically, ‘some’ ends justify ‘all’ means.
You said it!
And the “some ends” are the safety of my six grandchildren. In order to save these innocents, it would be okay with me if every Muslim in perpetuity were reduced to atoms floating in the wind for the greater glory of Allah. Allah akbar.
Arabs don’t want to be tortured. Stay home, take care of your families and live in peace with the rest of us. Send your sons and daughters to our homes and hurt our families and face the consequences.
Bleeding heart liberals, peace loving folk? They are so full of it. I worked at an ivy league college and those lefties would fight to the death for a better parking space.
I didn’t think Siege was a very good movie when it came out, but it really stinks in hindsight. Frankly, if I owed the film, I’d quietly burn all the prints.
Ed. Ed Sullivan.
Remarkably laconic. Even for a dead guy.
Let’s all get together and buy Tony Shaloub a lifetime supply of Visine, while everyone is feeling extra charitable.
This is foolishness. It’s a WAR. Intelligence will keep our soldiers and civilians from being killed. What’s the hold up??
“Good people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
Check this out, if you didn’t see it when it first came out and need a good laugh.
“I want a War Sim…
1. …where I spend two hours pushing across a map to destroy a “nuclear missile silo,” only to find out after the fact that it was just a missile-themed orphanage. I want little celebrities to show up on the scene and do interviews over video of charred teddy bears, decrying my unilateral attack. I want congressional hearings demanding answers to these atrocities.
2. On the very next level I want to lose half of my units because another “orphanage” turned out to be a NOD ambush site. I want another round of hearings asking why I didn’t level that orphanage as soon as I saw it, including tearful testimony from a slain soldier’s daughter who is now, ironically, an orphan….”
There’s a section on torture which is pretty topical.
And the “some ends†are the safety of my six grandchildren.
Or my wife. Or my brother and his wife and her two daughters and grandson. Or my dad. Or my next-door neighbors. Or…
For an anti-social guy, there’s a lot of people on my personal “Don’t @#$! with Them or Else” list.
the often-used phrase: ‘the ends justify the means..’ makes no sense .. it is a rhetorical dodge. <
Actually, the oft-cited specific examples are the rhetorical dodge.
We can all think of examples where rules should be broken. That doesn’t mean you throw away the rules.
If you rely on these examples to set your rules, you’re left with a twisted shadow of utilitarianism to guide you in your actions, and that’s a pretty fucking weak foundation upon which to build your principles.
An example to show the folly of examples:
You’re walking down the street, see a bad guy snatch a kid and throw them into a car, and take off. You’re on foot, but you see a car beside you with the windows down and keys in the ignition.
You jump in the car. You break the rules, you steal the car, in order to give chase.
Now, that is absolutely the right thing to do. But does that mean that it shouldn’t be against the rules to steal cars?
When the extreme circumstances call for it, you break the rules. But that doesn’t mean you change the standard rules and society’s practices in order to allow for the extreme situations.
Real world torture is when you go to your fiances parent’s house for coctails and someone plugs in the three disc retrospective of Tony Orlando and Dawn.
Let’s definitely use the same hands-tied-behind-our-backs approach with terrorists, now that’s it’s been so successful turning our public schools into jokes
Coercion, yes. Torture, no.
There’s a whole bunch of effective coercive tactics that fall between pattycake and mutilation. The Lefties don’t get that and think all discomfort inflicted on a bad guy is automatically “torture.” It’s not.
Similarly, the Right should not okay any means of torture available because that would cause us to lose what moral standing we have over the monsters we’re fighting. Among other things, it sort of what makes us the good guys in the fight.
Later,
bbeck
So are you saying that if you had a terrorist in custody who absolutely knew the location of a nuclear bomb set to take out a major American city in one hour, you wouldn’t use every tool available from the local Lowe’s to extract that information? You don’t comprehend your decision not to act effectively in that situation as making you personally liable for the deaths of millions and the radiological diseases of thousands more?
…and another thing: I don’t think differences in methods are what separate us from the terrorists. It had better not be, or we will either have to be massively more creative than them or we will certainly lose to them with our hands tied behind our backs.
I think our goals are what separate us. They want to subjugate the world to Islam. We want–nominally–to make everyone free to choose their own governments, Gods and economic transactions. I believe what moral standing derives from this. Left alone, we will leave alone. Left alone, they will not.
So are you saying that if you had a terrorist in custody who absolutely knew the location of a nuclear bomb set to take out a major American city in one hour, you wouldn’t use every tool available from the local Lowe’s to extract that information?
I’m not saying that. I’m saying that you don’t shape your standard rules around what you would do under extraordinary circumstances.
Let me rephrase your hypothetical: In that situation, would anyone give a shit what the rules were? Would they worry about breaking the rules? I don’t think they would.
But why should that guide what rules you apply on all the other days when you don’t have the nuclear bomb ticking away?
And I certainly was not saying that. What I was saying is that your standard rules (regardless of exactly which set of principles they are based upon) must have the flexibility to allow for adjustment during those extraordinary circumstances.
I am positing that this war is just such an extraordinary circumstance. We have never before faced an enemy quite like this, so we need to recalibrate our settings a bit. I am certainly not advocating an ends/means worldview. If I were, then I would write to our leaders begging them to nuke Mecca, use 100% racial profiling re: immigration, airline flights etc. etc. etc. – whatEVER could be done to conceivably make us safer. I’m only saying that torture should be an option for extreme circumstances, not that it should be the norm.
As a post-script: Does anyone here believe that we haven’t already used torture to some extent in EVERY war since the inception of our nation?
kyle,
Sorry if I misrepresented your position.
<i>As a post-script: Does anyone here believe that we haven’t already used torture to some extent in EVERY war since the inception of our nation? </i>
Not to be cute, but let’s turn the question around: Has there ever been a war during which we seriously discussed codifying the practice?
I’m not saying that. I’m saying that you don’t shape your standard rules around what you would do under extraordinary circumstances.
I think you should, actually. We are a society of laws arrived at democratically, and we should ideally all be able to do the right thing while obeying them. Doing the right thing should never require breaking the law, though it may require taking advantage of an exception that’s written into a law–unless the situation a person finds him or herself in has never been contemplated and considered. We are not in such a situation. We have an opportunity to set forth laws regarding torture within which our personnel can be expected to operate without suffering sanctimonious grilling from Congressional Democrats. And Democrats need to be forced to take credit or blame for the actions of the duly appointed agents of the government whom they oversee. Repubicans, too, for that matter.
It’s strange to me that you’re basing the argument in favor of torture practices on idealism (i.e., one should never have to break the law), when the only reason to favor these practices is to actually elevate pragmatism over ideals.
I don’t think you can split up goals and methods as you did in your earlier comment; one of our goals is to be the kind of country that uses the right methods. You can’t divorce the two.
I am not advocating the codification of torture practices. I am only saying that those methods should not be reflexively rejected because they offend someone’s sensibilities regarding the way we ought to conduct war.
Again, we do lots of things in war that we don’t do in the ordinary course of life. I’m not sure why torture is thought of so much more poorly than bombing, spying, shooting etc. It is a tool of warfare that can, when wielded properly, be beneficial to the effort.
We already practice sensitivity in our prosecution of the rest of the war (i.e. we don’t bomb indiscriminately, we don’t purposely go mow down civilians with our SAWs); why can’t torture fit into that picture? Not as a first step in interrogation, but certainly as a tool against the more reluctant crazies we capture.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a gung-ho, uber-pro-torture kinda guy, but I do believe it should be an option for our boys and girls who are out there with their asses on the line for us.
I think you’re setting up a bit of a straw man with the bit about “offend someone’s sensibilities.”
I don’t think you’r a crazy gung-ho pro-torture person; in return, I would hope that you think that objections to the use of torture could be predicated on something firmer than effete squeamishness. I’m not demanding that captives be provided with a rec room and ping-pong table.
I daresay that I have as much concern as you for the folks putting their asses on the line for us; that concern, however, does not allow me to change my compass for right and wrong in order to keep them safe. Of course, wiping out the cities in Iraq through bombardment would lessen our casualties, but it’s not an option because it isn’t the right thing to do.
I won’t deny that there’s some craziness in the premise that some sorts of violence are considered proper means of warfare and some aren’t, but I think most of us have an intuitive reaction that purposely inflicting pain on a human being who is wholly under our control isn’t cool.
I think most of us have an intuitive reaction that purposely inflicting pain on a human being who is wholly under our control isn’t cool.
Is it not cooler than Washington turning into a radioactive slag heap? Because that’s the choice we’re in part discussing. Not the choice between “cool” and “not cool” so much as the choice between “not cool” and “way, way, way not cool.” No one’s advocating recreational torture.
Man, if we’re counting on torturing captives to prevent that radioactive slag heap, we’re fucked.
Hubris, I think this the second site I’ve seen you post on this subject and I completely agree with you. Nicely done.
As for this movie-inspired scenario of saving New York from a nuclear blast, look at it another way; if torture is “justified” in such a situation, then just how far would you go? Cut off his genitals? Filet his entrails? Burn out his eyes? And what if all that physical pain didn’t work on him and you had to try something else? How about kill his children? Attack his wife? The clock is ticking, and if you torture the man any more then you could kill him and never get the info. Come on, if the ends justify the means in this situation, then any means would be okay, right? You’re talking about saving thousands, possibly millions of lives. What wouldn’t you do to achieve the goal?
(And for anyone thinking this is far-fetched, um, the scenario itself is.)
The point is, there must be limits to how far we would go, even if there are lives at stake. I’ve seen folks say that in this situation torture’s okay…but they never say what kind of torture would be acceptable.
Later,
bbeck
Obviously, I was being a little flip with the “sensibilities” comment, but I think you got my drift. When you said,
you came closest to where I was headed.
The point I’ve tried to make is that much that is acceptable in war is acceptable nowhere else. I think that can include torture. In general, I find the entire business of war awfully nasty and would rather do without, but I recognize that it is a necessary evil. If we are going to successfully prosecute the GWOT, I believe torture should be an option because of the formless nature and loony-tunes mentality of our opponent. When you’ve no idea where your enemy is located, you need to find new ways to extract that intel. And when your enemy WELCOMES death, you have to find other leverage to hold against them since death is not a deterrent (virgins await, after all).
I understand and respect your argument, hubris, and I think we can safely disagree on this without either being in the wrong. Feel free to email me if you would like to discuss this further so we don’t chew up too much more space here.
Hubris – One point I will give you is that if we rely on torture for information to remain secure, then we will surely lose. It can not and must not be a primary source. But I still think it should be there in the bag o’ tricks should the situation dictate.
Oh oh oh – plus I saw an example on Fox News last night where torture worked. Fox had somehow got some footage of a terrorist interrogation – probably from Gitmo from the look of the facility – and our guys were grilling this terrorist severely, but he wouldn’t budge. Wouldn’t give us ANYthing. All of a sudden, this “bad cop” agent breaks in, puts a bullet through the guy’s knee, and the pain prompts him to blab his primary objective.
Man, was that some gripping video footage. And you can’t argue with real-world results!
kyle,
I’m a 24 fan too. That was kickass.
Agree to disagree. Fair enough.