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Sun. Nov 04, 2007

Becoming The Thing We Hate

Here we are about five years down the line since the subject came up, and we’re still trying to decide if waterboarding and other “intense interrogation techniques” qualify as torture. I suppose I should take solace in the fact people are still talking about it, instead of being waterboarded for their dissent. But I swear, day by day, I have more and more of those “What Country Is This?” moments. The latest is inspired by something The Wife pointed out to me in Saturday’s AJC about a recent speech by General Russel Honore, the plain spoken and straight forward general who you might remember from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

I haven’t “Fisked” anything in ages, but I think it’s time to dust off those skillz…

The introduction to the article, with the first quote:

Army General Russel Honore said the general public shouldn’t be so quick to condemn the use of waterboarding as an interrogation technique.

“I don’t know much about it, but I know we’re dealing with terrorists who do some very awful things to people,” he said after Friday morning’s speech to about 900 students at Flat Rock Middle School in Tyrone. “I know enough about [waterboarding] that the intent is not to kill anybody. We know that terrorists that we deal with, they have no law that they abide by. They have no code, they kill indiscriminately, like they did on 9/11.”

General says waterboarding could save U.S. lives

Of course, the general has a right to his opinion, and I’m not one of those who thinks those in uniform should have to completely surrender their right to free speech. But that’s the thing about free speech; it invites reciprocation. At times like this, it almost demands it.

For example, those opening words: “I don’t know much about it…”

Well then stop. Or, as the kids say, STFU.

Of course, if we all followed that advice, there would be exactly seven weblogs in existence. But my point is that it’s one thing for me to be one of a zillion bloggers ranting about a topic where we admittedly have no experience, and quite another thing for a man in a uniform with stars on it to speak about a topic where he admittedly has no experience. The impact is not quite the same, and as the article notes, he made these comments after speaking to “about 900 students at Flat Rock Middle School in Tyrone.”

More: “...but I know we’re dealing with terrorists who do some very awful things to people…”

Yes. Just as we dealt with some Serbs who did some very awful things to people (including the euphemistic “ethnic cleansing”). Just as we dealt with some Communists who did some very awful things to people (from Stalin’s purge of millions, to the gulags, to Vietnamese and Korean POW camps, to Tiananmen Square, etc.). And we dealt with some evil Nazis, and some suicidally Imperialist Japanese … simultaneously.

This is often met with the argument of “yeah, but this is different, these guys chop off heads and film it. We’ve never faced that before.” Which often morphs into some form of … “when you are faced with this kind of evil, you may have to do things you haven’t before, but at least we don’t behead our captives.”

Our behavior once stood on its own. It did not require the heinous acts of others for justification. It stood on its own in the face of them. We strove to provide a contrast to such evil behavior … “Americans don’t do that, only evil [insert historical enemy] do that kind of thing.”

But I covered a lot of this ground two years ago:

A corollary argument is that we face an enemy unlike any we’ve faced before, and that is due cause for extraordinary measures. We do face an enemy unlike any we’ve faced before. This was also true in December, 1941, as we faced two widespread and powerful empires … both of which we crushed in less time than has passed since September 11, 2001. That was a nation at war.

It was also true during the Cold War, as we faced the Soviet Union, another enemy unlike any we’ve faced before, one with an expansionist policy and a nuclear arsenal that could wipe us out in less than an hour. And it is also true that in both those cases, there were excesses, from holding Japanese-Americans at places like Manzanar, to the well-investigated actions of the CIA in the 1970’s … which, ironically brought about some of the very laws some are saying Bush is now violating.

We’ve faced difficult and unprecedented foes before. And one of our strengths has always been that we didn’t let those enemies change the core of our nature as a country. We reigned in those excesses we caught, often with new laws. Because it was important.

There are some things that we knew on September 12, 2001 (or should have known), that are just as true today. We knew that one of the biggest and trickiest dangers we faced was ourselves. The danger that we might trade a measurable amount of our liberty for an unknown quantity of additional security.

We knew the next step in that progression was that if you aren’t careful, you can become the very thing you hate. Where you begin to justify your actions with rationalizations like “well, at least we’re not beheading those we take prisoner, like those animals.”

In my opinion, we’ve been walked right up to the edge of that cliff.

The Daily Whim: The War on Extraordinary Executive Orders

In the nearly two years since I wrote that, I think we were sleepwalked right over that cliff. But back to General Honore:

“I know enough about [waterboarding] that the intent is not to kill anybody.”

What has the intent of the actor got to do with it? The definition of torture is whether or not the victim thinks their life is at imminent risk, or they are experiencing pain equivalent to loss of an organ, or some such legal hoo-hah they’ve used to define what torture is or isn’t.

To pick the first example that popped into my head, Jeffrey Dahmer had no intent to kill. His intention was to create a sexual automaton, and he attempted to do so via methods like drilling their skull and pouring in acid. And some people died. And he ate portions of them.

But that was not his intention. It was just the end result of his actions.

I can hear the howling already, that is not the same at all, these are not insane people drilling skulls, we’re talking about techniques that we use on our own military for training. And that’s an argument I’ve been wanting to take apart for a while.

Yes, Special Forces members and Air Force pilots do receive what is sometimes called “resistance training” as a part of their SERES (search evasion resistance escape) training. Though it started after WWII, the training took on increased importance during the wars in Korea and Vietnam. That is when techniques like “Long Time Standing” and waterboarding sometimes entered the training.

Why?

Because we had learned from released POW’s that our evil enemies engaged in forms of torture to which no American had been exposed. Things that the average American could not even imagine. That’s one of the reasons it was sometimes effective. So the course needed to expose trainees to some of the terrible evil things they might encounter if they were captured, since there simply was no equivalent in the American experience.

Until after 9/11. Then we felt the need to do things we had not when we previously faced fascist imperialism intent on world domination and/or nuclear Armageddon. Now the very techniques we once decried and trained our people to resist are a part of our toolkit, too. By intention.

General Honore: “We know that terrorists that we deal with, they have no law that they abide by. They have no code, they kill indiscriminately, like they did on 9/11.”

Correct, they have no code, no laws they abide. But we do. It defines who we are, and has from Day One.

When we stray away from our code and laws in the direction of the gutter, using the excuse “but they do worse“ ... they win. They have caused us to redefine who we are, purely based on their pitiful existence, and in direct contradiction of more than two centuries of “who we are.”

To put a finer point on it, 19 guys with box cutters led by a cult leader living in the hills with a beard dyed black managed to accomplish what the Germany-Japan Axis and the Communist Bloc failed to do: change our very nature, by our own choosing. That is most distressing to me.

Then there’s the small fact revealed by that writer’s construct, the “he said” portion of a quote. In this case, referring to General Honore … “he said after Friday morning’s speech to about 900 students at Flat Rock Middle School in Tyrone.”

One can only parse that to mean these quotes were in direct response to a reporter’s questions, and assume the general is not telling 8th graders what they should think about this very adult topic. I hope.

Because it is an adult topic, one that’s been a prime point of contention in the debate over the Mukasey nomination. Gregory Djerejian writes “...torture speaks directly to the civilizational values of this country in most fundamental fashion. There can be no compromise on this point, even on behalf of a very talented lawyer from your home state. Torture belongs to the pre-Enlightenment era, hundreds of years past. The notion that the U.S. Congress would approve as Attorney General — the chief law enforcement officer of the United States — a man who can not declare an ancient, disgraced torture technique such as water-boarding illegal is simply unacceptable.”

To me, it is that fundamental to who we are. To others, it’s just politics.

In the process of shouting DO NOT TRUST CONTENT FROM ANDREW SULLIVAN (which is I think where we all hoped weblogs would take us, to a place where we could shout at people by name and engage in ugly feuds from the comfort of our easy chair), Glenn Reynolds says: “This seems pretty consistent with my view of torture, which is that I’m against it, but that it’s not quite the issue Andrew wants it — perhaps I should say needs it — to be. Rather, especially for the Democrats, the torture debate has been a political tool, applied in an ‘any weapon to hand’ fashion when politics dictate, but abandoned when they feel the need to talk tough on terrorism.”

Whatever. I’m sick of people who are stuck on what’s best for their party, or worst for The Other Guys. They are not The Enemy. This is not a Red issue, this is not a Blue issue, this is a Red, White, and Blue issue.

The question that runs through my mind from time to time is not “is the American Society so important we must use a tool like torture to protect it?” The question is “is a society that is willing to use a tool like torture worthy of protection?”

And I hate that I’ve been brought to that place, even momentarily.

Back to General Honore:

“If we picked up a prisoner that could tell us where the next 9/11 plot was, we could sit there and treat him nice, and that may not work,” he said. “We could sit there and give him water and we could be politically correct.

“But if we have to use sources and methods that get information that not only save American lives, but save other people’s lives or could prevent a major catastrophe from happening, I think the American people can decide [whether to allow waterboarding].”

Two issues here; first of all, the American people aren’t deciding squat about waterboarding or any other form of interrogation. The Decider is.

John McCain backed a law that Congress passed specifically forbidding these acts. Bush added a “signing statement” that basically said he would continue to use the tools and methods he felt necessary, as he believed it was his prerogative as President. When the Justice Department issued an opinion or a court ruled on the matter, the White House would find a way to skirt the opinion/ruling by somehow redefining their acts as “not torture.”

Secondly, General Honore speaks as if there is no gray ground between serving up a white cup of tea in a politically correct manner, and putting on the black mask used for waterboarding. This is not a binary choice of “politically correct niceties” and “intense interrogation techniques,” what some of us call “torture.” That implication is dishonest, as is the idea that torture generates valid intelligence.

All you have to do is project yourself into that situation. You know nothing about any planned terrorist acts, right? But if you were being waterboarded, certain you were going to be drowned, certain the only way it would stop is if you tell them something, anything (because the truth, “I don’t know anything” had been repeatedly ignored, and got you “on the board”) ... you’d soon be spouting about your plans, and your past crimes.

Ah, you say, but that’s because you’re innocent. If you were truly Al Qaeda, you’d probably give up some valuable info under such treatment. OK…

Once upon a time, people would take suspected women, tie rocks to them, and throw them in the lake. Lots of women drowned. Ah, you say, that’s because they were innocent. But if they had truly been a witch, they would have floated. And then we could have burned them.

As Greg said, “Torture belongs to the pre-Enlightenment era, hundreds of years past.”

Back to General Honore: “As long as we’re responsible for hunting those SOBs down, finding them and preventing them from killing our sons and daughters,” Honore said, “I think we’ve got an obligation to do what the hell we’ve got to do to make sure we get the mission done.”

Because the end justifies the means.

Al Qaeda, in a larger philosophical sense, wanted to act against what it saw as injustice to Muslims committed around the world by the US, as well as what they considered our unwelcome presence in Muslim nations. That was the “end,” to make a statement about those issues. The “means”? Violent death for hundreds in Africa at the embassy bombings, sailors killed on the USS Cole, and thousands dead in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington on 9/11.

Because the end justifies the means. This is not a fine line we are about to cross. This was a big bold red line of departure that we stomped past a long time ago.

They used to say a conservative is a liberal who has gotten mugged. Today, there are an awful lot of liberals who used to be conservatives, until their core values got raped. From the fiscal responsibility of a limited government, to the moral high ground America has always held when it comes to human rights and treatment of POW’s, to immigration reform, to government intrusion in citizen’s lives via domestic surveillance (not to mention barefoot security checks by the Air Gestapo, who seem to answer to no one).

It’s been one big gang bang, done publicly and proudly, sold as “for our safety.”

We have faced much worse, and we have done much better. We still can. But not by continuing down this path. We’re almost lost. It’s time to snap out of it and turn around.