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a little light reading about torture
This article is a couple of weeks old, but if, like me, you're a couple of weeks behind on your current events, you might want to take a look. The jist of it is not too revolutionary -- that whatever your moral feelings about torture, it yields notoriously unreliable information -- but there was some interesting stuff I hadn't heard, such as how the FBI, who had a strong success rate with incentive-based questioning methods, bid for and lost jurisdiction over the al-Quaeda 14, in favor of the more vicious and less knowledgeable CIA.
This, however, was the part I found most interesting:
Five years after 9/11, Americans are understandably eager to finally get an unfiltered--read nonpoliticized--look at our "high value" captives, the transnational actors, so-called, at the center of global drama. An authentic legal process would give them that--which is why the Administration is dead set against it. The problem is not really with classified information. Most of what these captives told us is already common knowledge or dated; the U.S. hasn't caught any truly significant players in two years. However, discovery in such a case would show that the President and Vice President were involved in overseeing their interrogations, according to senior intelligence officials. Subpoenas on how evidence was obtained and who authorized what practices would go right into the West Wing.
And as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bradhicks pointed out in his last entry, war crimes aren't just high crimes & misdemeanors -- a.k.a. impeachable offenses -- they're death penalty offenses.
Wait. Let that sink in a second.
If an interational court decides that prisoners in U.S. custody were, under the personal supervision of the President, tortured in defiance of the Geneva Convention, then the President of the United States could (although probably not til January of 2009) face trial and execution for crimes against humanity.
Have you wrapped your head around it yet? Yeah, me either.
First, torture is bad intelligence policy. Get over it. There's no pragmatic reason to do it, and many pragmatic reasons to avoid it. So, with that disposed of, on to the emotional reasons to torture prisoners: i.e. it makes you feel better because you think they deserved it; it helps you to believe in a just world, where inflicting suffering inevitably means you receive suffering in return.
Here's my thing about that, and why I really, really hate using the word "justice," ever. Justice doesn't happen in events, in moments -- nor does it happen for events and moments. People's lives are whole, complicated, weird lives, and people live in a vast and multilayered world of connections and reactions. To wake up one day and decide, "I want justice for last Thursday, but only for Thursday and just *last* Thursday" makes no fucking sense. Last Thursday is embedded in everything else; it's a part of everything else. What does it mean to take a perpetrator and say, this is the event, this is the action that will receive perfect justice? In the case of terrorists, what justice do they receive from anyone, human or divine, for the other ten thousand days of their lives -- for poverty, mental illness, constant violence, for the dice games that empires play that end in murder after murder and worse than murder, for the indoctrination they receive from radical cults who prey on their powerlessness and paranoia? Justice only makes sense in a world of justice, a world where universal justice is the law, is manifest reality. Then you can say, justice for last Thursday, just like Wednesday before it and for Friday as well.
Whenever I say things like this, people get all up in arms about "personal responsibility" and how I must mean that it's Society's Fault. I don't mean that, although I do harbor a potentially subversive and irrational belief that most decisions that most people make are they ones they genuinely believed were best at the time, and that should probably count for something. But whatever. I'm not anti-free will or anti-personal freaking responsibility or whatever. I just think that to say an injustice must be redressed implies that injustice is a violation of the natural order, a break in the pattern of things, something to be repaired -- and if you believe that, more power to you, but I don't. I think most people's lives are marred by injustice most of the time, in any of a trillion different ways. For all practical purposes, it *is* the natural order.
So we establish laws and we enforce them (usually), and we try to keep mere anarchy and the blood-dimmed tide under some kind of control, and I'm in favor of this. We have a legal system that's as reliable as anything in this unreliable world (usually, though I'd sleep better at night if we could all get together and agree that maybe *knowing someone didn't do it* would be sufficient legal justification for letting them out of prison), and I'm pro-police and pro-jury duty and pro-Fourth Amendment and pro-all of that stuff. At our best, we achieve a fair and impartial hearing of the facts of any given case. But I never call it justice, because justice isn't in the facts of any given case -- you can't have justice for Thursday but take weekends off. You either have a world made right and righteous and just, or you have what you get and you make do -- "the cards you're dealt," as the saying goes. I want the al-Quaeda 14 to be tried in a manner both legal and fair; it won't create justice, but it will be *legal and fair.* Trying to pile on as much misery as you think they've caused however many other people won't create justice, either, but it will be illegal, dangerous, and pander to the most sadistic and selfish parts of our psyche, the parts that don't give a fuck about justice but do enjoy seeing someone we hate suffer.
That, to me, is the real "crime against humanity" -- against the *torturers'* humanity, and it's why right-wing bullshit about "at least they probably feel comforted that their fates would have been worse if they were being tortured by Saddam Hussein" falls apart totally. Yeah, there's always some motherfucker out there who's more sadistic than you are -- more motivated, or just more naturally creative about it with fewer internal limits. What do you want, a medal? I think -- and this is one of those unquantifiable things that you either believe or you don't, I guess -- but I think taking comfort or pleasure in someone else's pain diminishes you in some fundamental way. It besmirches your humanity, your gloriously animal knowledge that what happens to your family happens to you, too, and your totally unique human ability to decide for yourself who "your family" is. It may sometimes be necessary to cause harm, even grievous harm -- I wouldn't argue that. But when the "necessity" isn't what they want you to believe (did I mention, it's *crap* for intelligence-gathering?), you have to know what the necessity is, and in this case it's to convince panicked Americans that the protective and benevolent and just patriarchy is still fully in place and that we can "feel safe" knowing that the warlords in charge are the ones who won't be bombing us personally. It's to make us believe that no one can ever hurt us without being so punished for it that they'll be sorry afterwards. If that's what buys you off, if that's all it takes to make you feel like inflicting pain on a trapped and unarmed human being is a good idea, then that's on you. That's your soul in the balance, no one else's.
By the way, it's also a lie. They can't make you safe, and plenty of people have and will hurt you and aren't sorry in the slightest. If we're going to give up the best in us, couldn't it at least be for some goal we'll actually achieve?
This, however, was the part I found most interesting:
Five years after 9/11, Americans are understandably eager to finally get an unfiltered--read nonpoliticized--look at our "high value" captives, the transnational actors, so-called, at the center of global drama. An authentic legal process would give them that--which is why the Administration is dead set against it. The problem is not really with classified information. Most of what these captives told us is already common knowledge or dated; the U.S. hasn't caught any truly significant players in two years. However, discovery in such a case would show that the President and Vice President were involved in overseeing their interrogations, according to senior intelligence officials. Subpoenas on how evidence was obtained and who authorized what practices would go right into the West Wing.
And as
bradhicks pointed out in his last entry, war crimes aren't just high crimes & misdemeanors -- a.k.a. impeachable offenses -- they're death penalty offenses.Wait. Let that sink in a second.
If an interational court decides that prisoners in U.S. custody were, under the personal supervision of the President, tortured in defiance of the Geneva Convention, then the President of the United States could (although probably not til January of 2009) face trial and execution for crimes against humanity.
Have you wrapped your head around it yet? Yeah, me either.
First, torture is bad intelligence policy. Get over it. There's no pragmatic reason to do it, and many pragmatic reasons to avoid it. So, with that disposed of, on to the emotional reasons to torture prisoners: i.e. it makes you feel better because you think they deserved it; it helps you to believe in a just world, where inflicting suffering inevitably means you receive suffering in return.
Here's my thing about that, and why I really, really hate using the word "justice," ever. Justice doesn't happen in events, in moments -- nor does it happen for events and moments. People's lives are whole, complicated, weird lives, and people live in a vast and multilayered world of connections and reactions. To wake up one day and decide, "I want justice for last Thursday, but only for Thursday and just *last* Thursday" makes no fucking sense. Last Thursday is embedded in everything else; it's a part of everything else. What does it mean to take a perpetrator and say, this is the event, this is the action that will receive perfect justice? In the case of terrorists, what justice do they receive from anyone, human or divine, for the other ten thousand days of their lives -- for poverty, mental illness, constant violence, for the dice games that empires play that end in murder after murder and worse than murder, for the indoctrination they receive from radical cults who prey on their powerlessness and paranoia? Justice only makes sense in a world of justice, a world where universal justice is the law, is manifest reality. Then you can say, justice for last Thursday, just like Wednesday before it and for Friday as well.
Whenever I say things like this, people get all up in arms about "personal responsibility" and how I must mean that it's Society's Fault. I don't mean that, although I do harbor a potentially subversive and irrational belief that most decisions that most people make are they ones they genuinely believed were best at the time, and that should probably count for something. But whatever. I'm not anti-free will or anti-personal freaking responsibility or whatever. I just think that to say an injustice must be redressed implies that injustice is a violation of the natural order, a break in the pattern of things, something to be repaired -- and if you believe that, more power to you, but I don't. I think most people's lives are marred by injustice most of the time, in any of a trillion different ways. For all practical purposes, it *is* the natural order.
So we establish laws and we enforce them (usually), and we try to keep mere anarchy and the blood-dimmed tide under some kind of control, and I'm in favor of this. We have a legal system that's as reliable as anything in this unreliable world (usually, though I'd sleep better at night if we could all get together and agree that maybe *knowing someone didn't do it* would be sufficient legal justification for letting them out of prison), and I'm pro-police and pro-jury duty and pro-Fourth Amendment and pro-all of that stuff. At our best, we achieve a fair and impartial hearing of the facts of any given case. But I never call it justice, because justice isn't in the facts of any given case -- you can't have justice for Thursday but take weekends off. You either have a world made right and righteous and just, or you have what you get and you make do -- "the cards you're dealt," as the saying goes. I want the al-Quaeda 14 to be tried in a manner both legal and fair; it won't create justice, but it will be *legal and fair.* Trying to pile on as much misery as you think they've caused however many other people won't create justice, either, but it will be illegal, dangerous, and pander to the most sadistic and selfish parts of our psyche, the parts that don't give a fuck about justice but do enjoy seeing someone we hate suffer.
That, to me, is the real "crime against humanity" -- against the *torturers'* humanity, and it's why right-wing bullshit about "at least they probably feel comforted that their fates would have been worse if they were being tortured by Saddam Hussein" falls apart totally. Yeah, there's always some motherfucker out there who's more sadistic than you are -- more motivated, or just more naturally creative about it with fewer internal limits. What do you want, a medal? I think -- and this is one of those unquantifiable things that you either believe or you don't, I guess -- but I think taking comfort or pleasure in someone else's pain diminishes you in some fundamental way. It besmirches your humanity, your gloriously animal knowledge that what happens to your family happens to you, too, and your totally unique human ability to decide for yourself who "your family" is. It may sometimes be necessary to cause harm, even grievous harm -- I wouldn't argue that. But when the "necessity" isn't what they want you to believe (did I mention, it's *crap* for intelligence-gathering?), you have to know what the necessity is, and in this case it's to convince panicked Americans that the protective and benevolent and just patriarchy is still fully in place and that we can "feel safe" knowing that the warlords in charge are the ones who won't be bombing us personally. It's to make us believe that no one can ever hurt us without being so punished for it that they'll be sorry afterwards. If that's what buys you off, if that's all it takes to make you feel like inflicting pain on a trapped and unarmed human being is a good idea, then that's on you. That's your soul in the balance, no one else's.
By the way, it's also a lie. They can't make you safe, and plenty of people have and will hurt you and aren't sorry in the slightest. If we're going to give up the best in us, couldn't it at least be for some goal we'll actually achieve?
no subject
Hold on, let me check a few things.
no subject
We've never made it to conviction of a president yet and despite my own political leanings, I would be highly disturbed to see a president go up for the death penalty.
no subject
Besides being erroneous - jails have their own code of conduct based on strength and ties that have very little to do with societies moral standards - it's the belief that people will have their own sins used against them - so the rapist or pedophile will be raped and tortured - that such things *comfort* people is a great worry to me. How can we be at peace when we believe ourselves to be allowing the very thing we punish others for? I'm not a forgiving type, I'd rather these types were in jail than out - just as I'd want terrorists kept away from society for life: a society that allows freedom to those capable of such horrors as 9/11 or rape or pedophilia is a stupid society and deserves what it gets.
But, there has to be some sort of line drawn that we don't cross - where as a society at least - we don't turn too much into what it is we despise.
no subject
There are so many reasons for why torture is wrong, but people seem to be unwilling to frame the argument in any terms except "the ends justify the means" and "we have to do hard things in an emergency." The fact that by doing so we abdicate any pretended moral authority as one of the leading world democracies is outweighed only by the fact that torture doesn't actually work to achieve our goals and prevents us from getting the "justice" (I share your discomfort with that word) that so many people seem to want.
I'm also disturbed that there is legitimate reason to talk about prosecuting the President of the United States for a capital offense.
no subject
That's an extraordinarily clear way of putting it. I'm going to remember this, because what you've said makes a lot of sense.
no subject
This whole administration has been allowed to make the US a renegade nation, one that doesn't think it needs to follow international laws or civilized behavior. That needs to end, the sooner the better.
If that takes impeachment, then go for it. I don't think it'll happen anytime soon though.
no subject
whoa. that is...wow, that really is hard to get your mind around.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2006-10-04 10:10 am (UTC)(link)no subject