Ball of Confusion v. Won't get Fooled Agian

[Peter_Puget]

Under insistent questioning from a Senate panel, Mr. Panetta said that in extreme cases, if interrogators were unable to extract critical information from a terrorism suspect, he would seek White House approval for the C.I.A. to use methods that would go beyond those permitted under the new rules.

 

linky

 

 

 

 

[STP]

Definitely the Love and Rockets version.

 

[video:youtube]-ALRLZQf42s

 

And speaking of Love and Rockets, have you heard the story of Jack Parsons?

The Magical Father of American Rocketry

 

 

[JayB]

"Beginning in 2002, Nancy Pelosi and other key Democrats (as well as Republicans) on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees were thoroughly, and repeatedly, briefed on the CIA's covert antiterror interrogation programs. They did nothing to stop such activities, when they weren't fully sanctioning them. If they now decide the tactics they heard about then amount to abuse, then by their own logic they themselves are complicit. Let's review the history the political class would prefer to forget.

 

According to our sources and media reports we've corroborated, the classified briefings began in the spring of 2002 and dealt with the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a high-value al Qaeda operative captured in Pakistan. In succeeding months and years, more than 30 Congressional sessions were specifically devoted to the interrogation program and its methods, including waterboarding and other aggressive techniques designed to squeeze intelligence out of hardened detainees like Zubaydah."

 

Etc.

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123120464870255997.html

[prole]

Yes, it's true. In the post-9/11 period the congressional Democrats have leaned too far to the right on this issue.

[Skeezix]

This guy'll get 'em talking...

[j_b]

Yep, these were the times of "if you're not with us, you're against us", when the meatheads were looking for 'traitors' and 'raghead lovers' under every rock. The democrats who bent over should pay for it too.

[Off_White]

Prosecute everyone who was in charge and approved of torture.

[j_b]

hear, hear!

[STP]

...these were the times of...

 

[video:youtube]9ncw729HBYc

[JayB]

Prosecute everyone who was in charge and approved of torture.

 

Serious question:

 

What about people who approved air-strikes or other military actions in which civilians were killed alongside the intended targets, and knew that this would be unavoidable? Is execution by JDAM or guided missile with no trial or legal safeguards whatsoever, much less of innocent bystanders, not a much graver ethical transgression than water-boarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammad et al?

 

Just trying to figure out where and how you draw the line.

[j_b]

It's fine to ask others where they draw the line, but where do YOU draw the line?

[JayB]

I think that there's no question that torturing terrorists in order to secure information that may help spare innocent lives is orders of magnitude more moral than airstrikes that kill both the terrorists and anyone around them.

 

However, it's clear that airstrikes are more palatable to the average persons sensibilities on a number of levels, and it's much better politics to disavow torture loudly while maintaining special exceptions that will come into play in practice when the stakes are high enough, and discretely (as possible) kill as many terrorists as you can with whatever means you have at your disposal in the meantime, while striving to minimize civilian deaths but not letting it paralyze your offense. As conducted under Bush, the political/strategic damage stemming from their approach to these matters ("enhanced interrogations", Guantanamo, etc) probably resulted in more strategic damage than the tactical gains that any info derived from torture/exceptional interrogation, etc generated. Obama is smart change the PR facade while retaining the capacity to engage in much the same practices if necessity forces him to.

 

Ultimately neither airstrikes or torture can ever be considered "moral" in any abstract sense, but we don't live in an ideal world, and morality - in practice - often comes down to choosing the least immoral alternative. Even in cases - as with carpet bombing German cities, or firebombing Japan, which are at least at reprehensible as anything that they could have thrown at us - physical equivalence doesn't render all actors morally equivalent to one another. Neither action made us as bad as the folks that we were fighting who wanted to turn the parts of the world that they controlled into ethnically cleansed totalitarian slave-kingdoms, and if Obama ever exercises the exceptions necessary to engage in "extraordinary interrogations" in order to prevent the likes of Al Queda or one of their franshisees from fulfilling one of their jihad fantasies via the death of as many people as they can kill at once - that certainly won't render us their moral equivalents either.

[Fairweather]

Well said, JayB. In the case of airstrikes on the homes of islamic killers I think the blame for any ensuing carnage lies squarely on the shoulders of those who sought refuge behind women and children. A case in point was the Hezbollah missile attacks on Israel launched from the roofs of apartment buildings in Lebanon. The doctrine of 'total war' is another story and I'm less comfortable with it. Tecumseh Sherman was probably the first American to embrace the practice when he deliberately took the war to southern civilians, but FDR's firebombing of civilian targets in Japan with no military value to speak of was immoral in the extreme--even more so that the atomic bombings later that year, that at least had the sole purpose of forcing a surrender. But the question you propose is one of statistical morality. Who is a darker soul? The pilot of the B29 killing innocents by the thousands as they huddle in their basements, or the junior officer who places a pistol against the head of a man and pulls the trigger? And if refusing to stoop to our enemies level--even just a little--means the demise of our culture and macro-ideals in the long run, then what, exactly, was the difference?

 

Who is worse? The pilot? I believe the man in the second photo is--but I understand why others would disagree.

[j_b]

Lots of things in there but 2 comments which are in my opinion essential to this kind of discussion.

 

First, there is historical context because none of these issues arise in a vaccum. I note that you mention carpet bombing during WW2 when there is little doubt of who was the agressor but you unsurprisingly didn't choose to discuss carpet bombing Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia, or bombing Iraq for years between the 2 gulf wars, arming and training the contras who terrorized the Nicaraguan country side by butchering teachers and peasants, help Pinochet achieve his reign of terror through torturing his opponents out of existence, among numerous similar examples. Your reducing the issue to "we had to choose the least bad of means to achieve good" and to tactical considerations applies to perhaps a small fraction of instances when there was, perhaps, little choice but to choose the least bad means to achieve a noble end. In other word, your unsaid premise of "we good, them bad" doesn't really hold in many instances and certainly doesn't justify appealing to "we had little choice" because the end wasn't a noble one.

 

Second, and I have already said this, which you ignored: there is a huge difference between legalizing terror (torture for example) and doing it under the table, even when it isn't to achieve a noble end. I assume I don't need to elaborate on what it means to democracy to have terror enabled by the rule of law, its effect on the culture of security agencies and on political opposition. So no, Obama's decision is way more than a PR move to present a different facade beacuse it has large implications for the future of democracy in america.

 

[bradleym]

I think that there's no question that torturing terrorists in order to secure information that may help spare innocent lives is orders of magnitude more moral than airstrikes that kill both the terrorists and anyone around them.

 

However, it's clear that airstrikes are more palatable to the average persons sensibilities on a number of levels, and it's much better politics to disavow torture loudly while maintaining special exceptions that will come into play in practice when the stakes are high enough, and discretely (as possible) kill as many terrorists as you can with whatever means you have at your disposal in the meantime, while striving to minimize civilian deaths but not letting it paralyze your offense. As conducted under Bush, the political/strategic damage stemming from their approach to these matters ("enhanced interrogations", Guantanamo, etc) probably resulted in more strategic damage than the tactical gains that any info derived from torture/exceptional interrogation, etc generated. Obama is smart change the PR facade while retaining the capacity to engage in much the same practices if necessity forces him to.

 

Ultimately neither airstrikes or torture can ever be considered "moral" in any abstract sense, but we don't live in an ideal world, and morality - in practice - often comes down to choosing the least immoral alternative. Even in cases - as with carpet bombing German cities, or firebombing Japan, which are at least at reprehensible as anything that they could have thrown at us - physical equivalence doesn't render all actors morally equivalent to one another. Neither action made us as bad as the folks that we were fighting who wanted to turn the parts of the world that they controlled into ethnically cleansed totalitarian slave-kingdoms, and if Obama ever exercises the exceptions necessary to engage in "extraordinary interrogations" in order to prevent the likes of Al Queda or one of their franshisees from fulfilling one of their jihad fantasies via the death of as many people as they can kill at once - that certainly won't render us their moral equivalents either.

 

what if we had taken a different approach post-911? what if, instead of 'declaring war on terrorism' we had regarded what happened as a criminal matter, for the police to pursue?

 

such a policy might still have led to the invasion of Afghanistan, since it would likely have been beyond the power of the police to bring down the Taliban. it may seem a subtle point, and namby-pamby to all the red-blooded amurricans out there, but it would have allowed us to focus on who actually did this (a very small number of people) and avoided the 'clash of civilizations' confrontation where the stakes necessarily become much greater and the prospect of dead innocents much more likely.

 

such a path would have allowed us to marginalize the 'terrorists', rather than delivering the bully pulpit to them when the inevitable ocurred, and innocents were killed.

 

PR is important, as it happens, and the fight has now become much larger and pervasive than it needed to be because of the path we took. We wind up debating false extremes in the end--torture v. carpet-bombing--and miss the real issues that motivated that small group of people in the first place, and gave their message power.

 

instead of referring to 'the terrorists' we might recognize that it is actually a bunch of humans out there, some of whom 'may' be terrorists but most of whom probably are not. in an open society such as ours, we have always paid lip-service to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, though we have on many occasions violated that principle, as now. adhering to such a principle is risky, and 'may' allow 'the terrorists' more freedom to act, but in a way that is what our society is supposed to be about, and we have to recognize the risks we take.

 

that is how, i think, we could actually defeat 'them', but it would require a more subtle approach, it would entail greater risk (though that is debatable) and it would require the nerve to stick to the high ground.

[j_b]

Is the post-911 approach dissociable from the pre-911 approach? Is the rise of islamic extremism also blowblack from decades of meddling (to put it mildly) by the west in middle east politics? Wasn't it decided in the 80's that we'd prop up the warlords and islamists instead of the moderates so that Afghanistan would become the soviet's Vietnam? Post-911 policies are what they are because objectives are much different than just punishing the culprits and preventing another 911.