My struggle is that I find each of these commentaries more or less equally compelling.
Mark Danner makes a great case for how both sides and all levels of government betrayed the American ideal in perpetrating and condoning torture for political gains.
Michael Scheuer knows what he's talking about when it comes to the ultimate end-game of our enemies' intentions.
I don't want to be a nation that tortures, but I fear the price for being a nation which is too introspective about "why they hate us" instead of "how can we get them to stop killing us".
Mark Danner makes a great case for how both sides and all levels of government betrayed the American ideal in perpetrating and condoning torture for political gains.
Michael Scheuer knows what he's talking about when it comes to the ultimate end-game of our enemies' intentions.
I don't want to be a nation that tortures, but I fear the price for being a nation which is too introspective about "why they hate us" instead of "how can we get them to stop killing us".
2 comments:
That's quite a loaded post title. let's hope Google doesn't index it. (Too late.)
I have not yet read the links, but I see "why do they hate us?" and "how can we get them to stop killing us?" as linked questions. If we can answer #1, perhaps it will also be the answer to #2.
Perhaps.
Scheuer to me was not very compelling in his argument for torture. he rests his case on the contention that Mukasey and Hayden "know" that torture worked, but this does not seem entirely consistent with the facts on the record -- there's a lot of countervailing arguments out there. I don't pretend to know the answer, but his certainty seems well beyond what I would consider the current consensus. I was more struck by the passion of his argument, and how driven it was by fear -- fear of the potential worst-case scenario, fear of the Obama investigations (which I honestly doubt are coming), fear of the unknown. Also, he seems willfully blind to other ways of interrogation, other ways of gaining intelligence, and completely indifferent to any moral cost to torture.
Danner plays a false equivalency game in blaming all sides. Yes it's true that "Profiles in Courage" has had its last edition printed and they are not adding names to the list. Yes, many (not all) democratic leaders failed to stand up to prevent these abuses. But there is a distinction between those who perpetrated torture, who advocate for it, and those who simply failed to stop it (especially given the fact that the democrats didn't actually have the power to stop it).
having said that, I agree that his point is that publicizing what was done is perhaps the best deterrent to future abuses. Tyler Cowen wrote "I believe that a full investigation would lead the U.S. public to, ultimately, side with torture, side with the torturers, and side against the prosecutors." If prosecution fails, and it might, then the paradoxic effect may be to make torture a permissible option for future authoritarian administrations.
My personal opinion is that there is no point in prosecuting any low- mid- or senior-level officials if you are not going to prosecute Bush. He bears the ultimate authority. It's true that "I was just following orders" is not a legitimate defense, but it is perverse to prosecute those who executed the orders while not prosecuting those who issued the orders. That goes up and up the chain of command to the top. So let's be real -- Bush will never be prosecuted. Knowing that, I would prefer to focus on the political side of the machinery to ensure that those abuses are well-known and shunned so they can never happen again. This bothers me as being corrosive to the rule of law. It sucks that the law will not be enforced because it's inconvenient. That torture was committed in our name and there will be no accountability.
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