Pussyfooting around torture

Last night, Twitter flared up in response to the latest Trump provocation. Taking up a cry of passion from an audience member, Trump had called Ted Cruz a pussy. He'd crossed another red line, one tweet proclaimed.  He could be the first New Hampshire primary winner to use the epithet, said another.

Taking a very back seat was what the taunt purported. Trump was mocking Cruz for hedging his support of waterboarding -- the war crime for which the U.S. had executed enemies, the simulated death experience that the Bush administration had sanctioned as official U.S. policy. Trump has promised to do "a hell of a lot worse" -- that is, put the U.S. in permanent, proudly proclaimed violation of the Geneva Conventions, the international Convention Against Torture signed by Ronald Reagan, and the U.S. Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Cruz, for his part, asserts that waterboarding isn't torture, taking as his authority the discredited and withdrawn "Bybee memo" from the Bush administration Justice Department that limited the definition of torture to punishment that induces pain equal to organ failure or death. He's also called for carpet bombing regions in which ISIS holds a civilian population hostage and relaxing efforts to minimize civilian casualties. He's evinced since his early manhood an unsavory passion for the death penalty. But he's not sadistic enough to meet Trump's standard of leadership.

It's not meaningless that Trump seized on a feminizing epithet to denigrate his rival, and one that associates femininity with vulnerability to being dominated. But the epithet was hardly the point. Lost in the grade-school reaction was the appalling fact that a presidential frontrunner was whipping up a crowd's enthusiasm for torture, and taunting a rival for expressing some ambivalence about it. And in fact, re-instituting torture as official U.S. policy is a near-consensus position among Republican candidates (Cruz says he opposes torture, but then defines a practice universally considered torture outside the GOP as not-torture).  Oppose it, and you're a pussy in the Foxosophere.

We are watching democracy degrade before our eyes. It's not done yet; the Democratic debates are an alternate universe, in which policy and political philosophy are debated civilly and with reference to facts. But one major party, primed for years by a sensationalist media that amplifies its worst impulses, is trafficking in dreams of mass deportation, mass murder (via carpet bombing), and institutionalized torture.

We are hanging by a thread.  And the dominant reaction, when the promise of Nazi policies is on most naked display, is "He said pussy!!"

Update: The Intercept's Dan Froomkin is one of the few to look past the name-calling itself and focus on the real story: GOP Candidates Compete Over Who Will Commit Most War Crimes if Elected

Scalia researched torture's efficacy by watching "24"

Antonin Scalia reacted* to the Senate torture report with a defense of torture, as reported by the AP*:

"Listen, I think it's very facile for people to say, 'Oh, torture is terrible.' You posit the situation where a person that you know for sure knows the location of a nuclear bomb that has been planted in Los Angeles and will kill millions of people. You think it's an easy question? You think it's clear that you cannot use extreme measures to get that information out of that person?" Scalia said.

That jogged a memory. What planted this scenario in Scalia's mind? Hark back to June 2007, via the Wall Street Journal Law Blog:

The Globe and Mail reported that Scalia came to the defense of Jack Bauer and his torture tactics during an Ottawa conference of international jurists and national security officials last week. During a panel discussion about terrorism, torture and the law, a Canadian judge remarked, “Thankfully, security agencies in all our countries do not subscribe to the mantra ‘What would Jack Bauer do?’ ”

Justice Scalia responded with a defense of Agent Bauer, arguing that law enforcement officials deserve latitude in times of great crisis. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles . . . . He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Judge Scalia reportedly said. “Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?” He then posed a series of questions to his fellow judges: “Say that criminal law is against him? ‘You have the right to a jury trial?’ Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer?”

Peace at Antietam, Carnage in Copley Square

On this just-past beautiful spring Sunday, my wife and I took our first visit to Duke Farms, the 2600 acre Jersey estate of the tobacco heiress, philanthropist and passionate horticulturalist Doris Duke. The foundation has just launched a free bike share program, and we spent three happy hours tooling around the meadows, wooded ridges, and huge network of man-made, landscaped lakes, all in perfect 60-degree sunshine.

At the heart of the estate is a house that was never built - preserved foundations at the top of a low bluff, with grand marble stairs leading down to a large circular meadow.  At about 5:30 I took a short solo walk down the giant stairs, which felt like something out of Narnia, into the meadow, where you're flanked with grasses maybe two or three feet high.  There, in the late afternoon sun, I flashed back to the battlefield at Antietam, which includes a cornfield you can traverse, and which we also visited on a still, sunny afternoon.

At Antietam you are at pains to imagine unspeakable carnage, and what struck me late in the afternoon sun there, and came back to me this past Sunday, was the sense of deep domestic peace in the ensuing 150 years, and what  a rare blessing that is.  I know that peace is marred by a further hundred years of peonage for African Americans in the south, and almost equally brutal discrimination in the north, and to this day by urban war zones, and a brutal criminal justice system, and a thousand other social ills and injustices. But human social well-being is relative, and the peace for most of us is real, and an accomplishment and a blessing.

I gather that a similar sense of felicity and festivity was in the air in Boston yesterday, until 2:50 p.m.:

GOP leaders: GOP is unfit to govern

Let's step back and let the obvious sink in. Think about this internecine GOP spat for a moment:

BRIAN KILMEADE: Now, Sen. McCain, I want you to hear a sound bite from one of the Sunday shows. Dick Cheney sits down, talks about your selection of vice presidential candidate Governor Palin. Listen.

DICK CHENEY: I like Governor Palin. I’ve met her. I know her. She – attractive candidate. But based on her background, she’d only been governor for, what, two years? I don’t think she passed that test…of being ready to take over. And I think that was a mistake.

BRIAN KILMEADE: You agree? Disagree?

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Well, I’m always glad to get comments four years later. Look, I respect the vice president. He and I had strong disagreements as to whether we should torture people or not. I don’t think we should have. But the fact is I’m proud of Sarah Palin. I’m proud of the job she did. I’m proud of the job she continues to do. Everybody has their own views and I respect those views. But I’m proud of what we did.

Better Angels yield new angles

I am very much looking forward to reading Steven Pinker's  The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, after reading a precis by Pinker and a review by Peter Singer. As a collector of evidence that human life and human beings are getting better, I am receptive to the copious evidence that Pinker has gathered to demonstrate that violence has diminished dramatically over the course of human history -- in the family, in the state, between states, and, perhaps now finally, within states.

Pinker's demonstration that human beings have gradually taught themselves to be more in control of their violent instincts, more amenable to reason, and more empathic seems to me to sync up nicely with Robert Wright's theory that God has evolved with human society--that as society grows more humane, so do concepts of God (this too I'm familiar with through the writer's shorter representations of his recent book, The Evolution of God).

Personally, though, I would prefer not to drag the God of Ages along on our pilgrim's progress.  Notwithstanding frequent relapses such as the two world wars of the twentieth century, it looks to me as though Pinker shows moral advances in human history to be as verifiable as technological advance. For that reason, I am impatient with the concept of scripture, the investiture of any inherited text or law with authority that can't be superseded , after due process, by a text or law embodying the best wisdom of those living now. Less legalistically: if a thinker is groping toward new moral or ethical insight, why shackle that insight to an interpretation of God's law as embodied in ancient texts? Can we not acknowledge by now that gods are silent, except perhaps through our own intuition, and that that intuition is continually improving?

Too big to jail? Can the U.S. prosecute an ex-President?

Should democratically elected leaders be tried for war crimes if there's reasonable cause to believe they may have committed them?

Michael Walzer of Princeton surveys 350 years of killing kings (and hanging Nazis) and concludes: almost certainly not. Reviewing the conditions under which past regimes have put their predecessors or war opponents on trial and executed them, he notes that all constitute radical rejection of the deposed or defeated enemy -- i.e., that trials occur after regime change (obviously enough -- in a way, Walzer seems to see his mission as laying bare what should be obvious). Democracies,Walzer argues, are different -- and the consequences of treating the policy decisions of predecessors as criminal are dangerous.

Walzer issues a warning that should be brooded on seriously. But he draws conclusions that even he is uncomfortable with, and that in my view should be repudiated.

Here is the warning:

we should think very carefully before we do anything that raises the stakes of democratic politics—and putting your opponents on trial after they lose an election would certainly raise the stakes. There is a narrowly prudential argument against doing that (in addition to the broader prudential argument that I have been making): if we raise the stakes for them, they can raise the stakes for us. Paraphrasing Saint-Just, we might say that nobody can rule innocently: there will always be reasons for a trial. There will always be political maneuvers or policy decisions that violate the law or that can be made to look as if they violate the law. And once the game gets serious in that way, anyone holding office would have a very strong incentive to do whatever was necessary to win the next election. Winning some and losing some would then look like a fool’s politics. It would be very dangerous, I think, to start down this path.

If you think that Obama's open dialogue with House Republicans was remarkable,

check out the dialogue between Leah Farrall, a former a former intelligence analyst for the Australian federal police and current Ph.D. student and blogger on intelligence matters, and Abu Walid al Masri, a legendary jihadist with close ties to the Taliban and at least past intimacy with the top leadership of al Qaeda. 

al Masri's responses to Farrall's questions can be found in the right margin of her blog. Perhaps the most important takeaway is his claim that the Taliban today, to the extent that it regains power, will keep al Qaeda at arm's length (see this post).  Most recently, however, Farrall has posted her responses to al Masri's questions. And this exchange is remarkable too. How often does a westerner engaged in counterterrorism get a chance to respond publicly to the grievances and world view of a skilled mouthpiece of Jihad? (al Masri wrote for Taliban publications when they were in power and writes for their magazine now.) 

al Masri's question-set is a broad indictment of U.S. and western interaction with al Qaeda, the Taliban, Afghanistan, Iraq, and by his constant implication with the Muslim world generally. He asks for Farrall's "personal opinion" regarding a litany of Bush-initiated imprisonment and interrogation practices, some of which have been continued by the Obama Administration -- along with broader charges  that the U.S. and its allies are waging colonial war in Afghanistan and civilizational war against Muslims generally.

Farrall concurs with al Masri's implicit condemnation of torture, rendition to countries that torture, military commissions and other extra-judicial means of treating terrorist suspects-- concessions that highlight the strength of these abuses as jihadist recruiting tools.  But she counters with admirable moral clarity al Masri's whitewash of Taliban crimes and assertions that the U.S. and allies have acted against Muslims generally.

A couple of representative excerpts (with al Masri's questions in italics) below. But read the whole thing.

Ali Soufan goes nuclear on Cheney

Four months ago Ali Soufan, the FBI interrogator who extracted reams of actionable intelligence from Abu Zubaydah using rapport-based techniques before the CIA took over and commenced torturing him, broke a seven-year silence to assert that the CIA's torture regimen interrupted and undercut effective noncoercive interrogation and never yielded any actionable intelligence that could not have been gleaned without coercion.

Today, in a second Times op-ed, Soufan goes further, suggesting that the U.S. failed to capture top al Qaeda leadership because it turned to ineffective torture:

It is surprising, as the eighth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, that none of Al Qaeda’s top leadership is in our custody. One damaging consequence of the harsh interrogation program was that the expert interrogators [e.g., Soufan] whose skills were deemed unnecessary to the new methods were forced out.

Mr. Mohammed knew the location of most, if not all, of the members of Al Qaeda’s leadership council, and possibly of every covert cell around the world. One can only imagine who else we could have captured, or what attacks we might have disrupted, if Mr. Mohammed had been questioned by the experts who knew the most about him.

There's a fearful symmetry here: Cheney claims that torture prevented further terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Soufan suggests that torture prevented the capture of top Al Qaeda leadership.

This inflammatory claim follows a point-by-point demolition of the various claims made for torture-based interrogation: that it led to foiling a plot to fly a plane into the tallest building on the West Coast; that it led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; that torture induced KSM to give up new information about Al Qaeda's organizational structure. According to Soufan's parsing of the CIA inspector general's report of 2004 and the two CIA memos on intelligence gained from detainees, virtually all actionable intelligence cited by torture's defenders came from "pocket litter" and from captives' assumption that they were giving up information their questioners already had.

Soufan is plainly tormented by the conviction that he personally had what it took to get the highest-value information out of the top-level detainees, and that he and other informed and skilled interrogators were prevented from doing so by the thugs at the top who imposed the torture regime. Of course he can never prove what he might have accomplished -- just as torture's defenders can't prove that any info gained once the"program" commenced could not have been gained by other means. But Soufan does know a) what was gained in the interrogations he did conduct; what is false in most of the explicit claims about knowledge gained under torture; and c) a good deal about the psychology of the top detainees and the knowledge in their possession at the time of capture.

Philip Zelikow, who interviewed Soufan for the 9/11 Commission, says that he "seemed to us to be one of the more impressive intelligence agents -- from any agency -- that we encountered in our work." Soufan is a far more credible witness than Cheney and his henchmen.

The ninth circle of hell is reserved for theocrats

The Times lede blog relays allegations of unfathomable theocratic depravity from an essay by Iranian feminist lawyer and journalist Shadi Sadr:

Published reports are available about these types of torture committed against women political prisoners after the 1979 Revolution. The most systematic type of reported rape has been the rape of virgin girls who were sentenced to death by execution because of political reasons. They were raped on the night before execution. These reports have been substantiated by frequent statements from the relatives of women political prisoners. On the day after the execution, authorities returned their daughter’s dead body to them along with a sum considered to be the alimony. Reports state that in order to lose their virginity, girls were forced to enter into a temporary marriage with men who were in charge of their prison. Otherwise it was feared that the executed prisoner would go to heaven because she was a virgin!

Beyond the sexually charged sadism, I would have thought the world's major religions united in agreement that acting with intent to deprive any human soul of heaven would by definition damn the perpetrator. But that's misspoken -- there's nothing 'beyond' such sadism...the sexual aggression in this act is so intense that it makes a mockery of any alleged theological intent.

Condi Rice to 4th Grader: Terror Works

Asked by a fourth grader what she thought about the Obama administration's comments about Bush-era interrogation techniques, Condoleezza Rice first insisted that Bush was determined to do nothing illegal, then added this special pleading:

"I hope you understand that it was a very difficult time. We were all so terrified of another attack on the country. September 11 was the worst day of my life in government, watching 3,000 Americans die. . . . Even under those most difficult circumstances, the president was not prepared to do something illegal, and I hope people understand that we were trying to protect the country."

Out of the mouth, to babes: the former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State confesses that the U.S. government was terrified by the September 11 attacks. That's as good an explanation as any I've read as to why they shredded core Constitutional protections, abrogated U.S. treaty obligations and broke U.S. law in a rush to implement torture tactics learned from Communist adversaries and considered ineffectual by top authorities at the F.B.I., in the military and even by many within the CIA.

I don't object to Rice telling children that she was "terrified" by 9/11. In fact, it's rather moving. What I object to is that the Bush team let terror control their response to the attacks.

From the Ministry of Love

Andrew Sullivan, on how Bush's inner circle came to embrace torture:

It is as if neoconservatism came to believe that American exceptionalism also means that America, by virtue of its unique virtue, is uniquely empowered to commit evil and somehow thereby render it good.

Cf. Rudolph Giuliani, upon being told that his friend Michael B. Mukasey, Bush's nominee for Attorney General, said he wasn't sure whether waterboarding is torture (Oct. 25, 2007):

Well, I’m not sure it is either. I’m not sure it is either. It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it .

And George Bush: "we do not torture."

And finally, the the Table of Contents of the "ICRC Report On the Treatment of Fourteen 'High Value Detainees' in CIA Custody":

Introduction
1. Main Elements of the CIA Detention Program
1.1 Arrest and Transfer
1.2 Continuous Solitary Confinement and Incommunicado Detention
1.3 Other Methods of Ill-treatment
1.3.1 Suffocation by water
1.3.2 Prolonged Stress Standing
1.3.3 Beatings by use of a collar
1.3.4 Beating and kicking
1.3.5 Confinement in a box
1.3.6 Prolonged nudity
1.3.7 Sleep deprivation and use of loud music
1.3.8 Exposure to cold temperature/cold water
1.3.9 Prolonged use of handcuffs and shackles
1.3.10 Threats
1.3.11 Forced shaving
1.3.12 Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food
1.4 Further elements of the detention regime [cont.]

"We do not torture." As in, "when we do it, it's not torture."

Training in torture

Atul Gawande's long look at solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, Hellhole, asks, "is solitary confinement torture?" and provides overwhelming empirical evidence that the answer is yes. Solitary confinement brings on psychosis and hallucination; it makes the mind effectively disintegrate; it causes lasting psychological damage.

In addition to documenting this torture's effects, Gawande also chronicles its explosion in the U.S. prison system since the early eighties, the same period in which the prison population as a whole has exploded:

The number of prisoners in these facilities has since risen to extraordinary levels. America now holds at least twenty-five thousand inmates in isolation in supermax prisons. An additional fifty to eighty thousand are kept in restrictive segregation units, many of them in isolation, too, although the government does not release these figures. By 1999, the practice had grown to the point that Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Virginia kept between five and eight per cent of their prison population in isolation, and, by 2003, New York had joined them as well. Mississippi alone held eighteen hundred prisoners in supermax—twelve per cent of its prisoners over all.

Reading this made me think that like most disasters, the Bush Administration's embrace of more physically abusive forms of torture in its treatment of hundreds if not thousands of detainees from Bagram to Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib had no single simple cause -- say, a rogue Vice President and Secretary of State -- but came at the end of a chain of systemic failures. In some sense that needs to be explored further, we have trained ourselves to accept brutal treatment of those we deem to have forfeited their rights. A politics and society that embraces ever more punitive measures against prisoners and illegal immigrants is part and parcel with one that removes regulatory restraint from elites, from Wall Street to the executive branch, that gleefuly redistributes wealth upwards, and that plots to privatize and eviscerate our common measures for sharing risk.

We have changed course. How successful, lasting and thoroughgoing will Obama's counterrevolution be? For better and worse, we're living in interesting times..

Promises to keep: The ACLU puts the heat on Obama

Kudos to the ACLU for working from Day 1 to hold Obama to his always rather briefly expressed promises to end torture, close Guantanamo, and revisit FISA. Since November 5, when they took out full-page ads quoting those promises (the first two, anyway), they've been in congratulations-we're-waiting-for-action mode. Yesterday they sent an email to supporters linking to a segment of Obama's recent 60 Minutes interview in which he reiterates those promises (again, without elaboration), again filling the details void in their own terms:

During a 60 Minutes interview last week, President-elect Obama affirmed his intentions to reject torture and close the Guantánamo prison camp and the military commission system.

"It is incredibly gratifying that President-elect Obama plans to put an end to the Guantánamo prison camp and its sham military commission system which have been a stain on America's name at home and abroad,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. “We strongly urge him to take such action on Day One with the stroke of a pen, by executive order. The Bush military commissions that violate core constitutional principles and rely on hearsay, secret evidence and evidence obtained through torture have no place in our democracy. Federal civilian or military courts are perfectly capable of handling terrorism prosecutions and accommodating sensitive national security concerns, as has been demonstrated time and time again."

Needless to say, Obama did not say that he would close Guantanamo on Day 1 or that he would "end" the "military commission system." But this is the kind of "lobbying" that strengthens democracy. Obama has a large constituency that will "put their hands to the arc of history and bend" him to do more, sooner, to roll back the Bush assault on civil liberties than he might otherwise be inclined to do.

As a card carrying member, I feel an enormous debt of gratitude to the ACLU. Against the Bush Administration's "unitary executive" virus of absolute executive power, the group has proved one of this country's strongest antibodies, successfully challenging the whole extralegal military commissions apparatus in court, mobilizing members to pressure Democrats to resist the Military Commissions Act and the 2008 FISA bill, documenting and publicizing abuses in the secret prison system. Thanks largely to their efforts, the Supreme Court repudiated the Administration's worst excesses, preserving core principles of habeas and rules of evidence. (They did so mainly by bare 5-4 margins -- and now we've been spared the specter of a Court tipped with one or more new appointees inclined to grant the President any right of action he claims.)

The ACLU is primed to keep up a necessary pressure on Obama, fully aware that no president will be eager either to yield up powers claimed and exercised by his predecessor or to prohibit actions --i.e., forms of torture -- that powerful forces within the country's security apparatus will claim are essential to security.

Audacity of The New Yorker: Comparing Obama and Lincoln

The editors of the New Yorker, in the best retrospective of this endless campaign and the Bush Administration that I've read anywhere, have expressed in a couple of sentences what I've been trying to get across about Obama for the better part of a year (e..g., here and here):

Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.

As Obama himself put it in the January 5 ABC debate:

And, you know, so the truth is actually words do inspire. Words do help people get involved. Words do help members of Congress get into power so that they can be part of a coalition to deliver health care reform, to deliver a bold energy policy. Don't discount that power, because when the American people are determined that something is going to happen, then it happens. And if they are disaffected and cynical and fearful and told that it can't be done, then it doesn't. I'm running for president because I want to tell them, yes, we can. And that's why I think they're responding in such large numbers.

Do we still have that democratic capacity to sell-correct? Arguably, people always do.In his inaugural address to the (then) Czechoslovakian nation on Jan. 1, 1990, Vaclav Havel told his people that after 40-plus years of Communism

we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves.

Later in the same speech, though, he acknowledged the miracle of the velvet revolution:

Where did the young people who never knew another system get their desire for truth, their love of free thought, their political ideas, their civic courage and civic prudence? How did it happen that their parents -- the very generation that had been considered lost -- joined them?

The U.S. moral environment has been tainted by an eight-year binge of preemptive war, relentless lying on the part of leaders, the shredding of civil liberties, the institutionalization of torture, not say by a binge of deregulation, tax cutting and credit run wild. Just 53% of Americans now think that torture is never justified -- the lowest percentage among developed nations, lower than that of the Chinese, who live under an authoritarian regime. A people can be corrupted from above, by their leaders and by media controlled by their leaders, e.g. Fox and its beloved torture-glorifying "24."

But democracy in America ain't dead yet. It may seem ridiculously starry-eyed to hope that Obama, like Lincoln before him, can win over the electorate by sheer force of ideas, by articulation of American ideals and of policies designed to give them new life -- and to hope further that he can execute those policies with some success if elected. Maybe those of us who buy in are Charlie Brown running for another kick of the football. But that's -- oh, the fear of looking foolish by quoting a politician's keynote! -- the audacity of hope.

1994: When a caning seemed like torture

A chance association turned my thought today to Michael Fay, the American teen who in 1994 was sentenced to be caned in Singapore after allegedly vandalizing cars. Fay pleaded guilty on the understanding that he would not be caned and later claimed that he had never vandalized any cars, only stolen a couple of street signs. Judicial caning in Singapore is extraordinarily painful and can leave scars for years. Barely budging in response to U.S. pressure, the Singaporean government reduced the sentence from six cane strokes to four - and carried it out.

My thought was that if the incident happened today, the U.S. government would never have the face to plead and pressure Singapore for clemency, as President Clinton and much of the U.S. Senate did in 1994. According to Wikipedia:

The official position of the United States government was that while it recognized Singapore's right to try and punish Fay with due process of law, it deemed the punishment of caning to be excessive for a teenager committing a non-violent crime. The United States embassy in Singapore pointed out that the graffiti damage that Fay made on the cars was not permanent, but caning would leave Fay with physical as well as long-term emotional scars.

U.S. President Bill Clinton called the punishment prescribed by Singapore as extreme and mistaken, continuing to pressure the Singaporean government to grant Fay clemency from caning. Two dozen U.S. senators signed a letter to the Singaporean government also appealing for clemency. After Fay's punishment was carried out, the United States Trade Representative said that he would try to prevent the World Trade Organization's first ministerial meeting from taking place in Singapore.

Following Fay's sentence, the case received wide coverage by the U.S. media and dozens of reporters were sent to Singapore to cover the case.^[1] The New York Times had several editorials and op-eds that condemned the punishment and called the American public to flood the Singaporean embassy in the United States with protests. Newsday wrote about a person who claimed to have witnessed a graphic public caning event in Singapore, despite the fact that Singapore does not practice public canings. Some commentaries treated the Michael Fay affair as a clash of civilizations between Asian values and the differing view of human rights common in liberal western cultures.

In 1994 as today, there was no shortage of brutality in U.S. prisons equal to and exceeding officially administered caning. Still, the high assumed moral ground from which this plea was made stings now -- after six years in which the U.S. has tortured to death dozens of people in its custody and subjected hundreds of terror suspects to isolation, sleep deprivation, sustained standing, stress positions, beatings, extremes of heat and cold, sexual humiliation and in some cases waterboarding.

Today we've reached the point where a U.S. citizen, detained and tortured by the Chinese for protesting repression in Tibet, goes out of his way to note that his treatment was less harsh than that meted out out to U.S. detainees in Guantanamo. Here's graffiti activist James Powderly, held in detention in China for six days, describing his treatment to Jen Carlson of Gothamist:

Would you say the interrogations were torture? Well, I think probably, a lot of people might disagree, even some of my other detainees might feel like what they received wasn't torture. And relative to what someone might receive on a daily basis at a place like Gitmo it certainly is not particularly harsh. It's kind of like being a little bit pregnant, we were a little bit tortured. We were strapped into chairs in uncomfortable positions, we were put into cages with blood on the floor and told we would never live, we were sleep deprived the entire time. There was an interrogation every night and they kept us up all day. They never turned the lights off in the cells. We were fed food that was inedible, we were not given potable water. Any time you threaten and take the numbers of family members and take down home addresses, there's an element of mental torture there. There's physical torture in the form of us having to sit in uncomfortable positions all day long and spending the night strapped to a metal chair inside of a cage. We all have cuts and bruises from that, and some of my peers were beaten up a little bit.

People worry about American decline. Well, here it is. If we don't roll back and repudiate the torture regime put in place by the Bush Administration, we'll have destroyed our most precious inheritance, the foundation of our prosperity and creativity and ultimately, our power.

"We Tortured" -- and have not yet renounced

As part of an Atlantic retrospective of the biggest ideas of the year, Andrew Sullivan's contribution, "We Tortured," presents an ultimately heartening review of our dawning awareness of what our government has wrought, concluding:

But something else happened as well. The chief defenders of these methods among the presidential candidates—Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani—failed to gain traction in the primaries, and the one Republican who has consistently opposed these techniques (and who had had some of them used against him in Vietnam) won the nomination. The two leading Democratic candidates have vowed to end abusive interrogation upon coming to office. And the pseudo-legal arguments of former Bush officials such as John Yoo were both repudiated by the administration itself and subjected to withering critiques in the legal community.

We learned, in other words, that America had crossed the Geneva boundaries in the years after 9/11. We also learned that America has the resources to correct itself in the end.

Yes, "we have the resources," and our system has shown some encouraging antibodies -- disclosure, judicial repudiation, at least a partial change in policy. But the outcome remains in doubt. A few caveats:

1) McCain has effectively repudiated his repudiation of torture, voting against a law that would have subjected the CIA to military regulations banning torture.

2) McCain will likely pick a running mate who supports torture. And he's 71 years old.

3) The Supreme Court has thrice struck down a practice enabling torture and the government's absolute power over individuals: denial of habeas. But it's done so on a 5-4 vote. We're one Supreme Court appointment away from a Court that accedes to the Bush Administration's insanely expansive view of the powers of a "unitary executive" -- that is, an executive ultimately subject to no law as long as it deems the nation to be in a state of war.

4) McCain has held up as models for future Supreme Court appointments two justices, Roberts and Alito, who have so far shown no sign that they would ever impose any check on powers asserted by a sitting President.

5) Many of those high officials who systematically and deliberately designed and implemented a regime of torture remain in office, and there's no sign that any of them will ever be prosecuted for abrogating U.S. and international law.

It looks like U.S. voters will repudiate the party of torture. But not because of torture. And election outcomes are always uncertain. We're frighteningly close to voting our Bill of Rights out of existence.

The New Yorker laughs off torture

In February 2007, Jane Mayer, writing in The New Yorker, did us all a service by documenting the extent to which Fox's 24 had inured Americans to torture -- making it seem necessary and thrilling and heroic. How sad, then, that the same publication this week should publish an obscene little attempt at humor by Geroge Saunders that replays the old RosannaDanna op-ed in favor of "violins on TV" by coming out in favor of "washboarding" terrorists. That is, playing a washboard as a percussion instrument. Catch the hilarity:

I honestly don’t understand the mind-set here. Are these people terrorists or not? Or, I should say, is it possible that these people might be terrorists? Or, rather, has someone (possibly us, possibly someone other than us, such as, for example, someone they knew back in their home country, with whom they have possibly been having, say, a blood feud) alleged that they were possible terrorists? Keep in mind that we’ve never washboarded anyone who has not been, by someone or other, accused, more or less, of being a suspected, pending, or eventual possible terrorist. So why do we want to coddle these people? I say washboard the bastards 24/7, then supplement the washboarding with a circle of Peruvian wood flautists, then reinforce the flautists with a circle of acne-faced, oblivious fifteen-year-old boys with Fender guitars and distortion boxes, and let the war on terror begin.

Gilda Radner waxing enthusiastic about "violins on TV" was funny. Pretending to enthusiasm about "washboarding" terrorists is disgusting. What's the difference? First of all, RosannaDanna had no inkling what violence on TV was. Second, the evils of violence on TV, such as they are, are a matter of degree, part of the furniture of everyday life, fair game for humor. On the other hand, to mix the rhetoric of enthusiasm for torturing terrorists with depictions of ridiculous un-pleasantries is to trivialize the intense evil that we have collectively consented to. An extended joke about waterboarding in The New Yorker is perhaps stronger evidence of the coarsening of our culture than the popularity of 24.

Supergurus against Torture?

After invoking Gandalf in his case against torture (Torture as the Ring?), Andrew Sullivan has now drafted Yoda as well. Both supergurus warn against the seductive powers of the dark side.

I am tired of people trotting out Gandalf's two or three humane homilies to lend profundity to their arguments. Tolkein was as morally simplistic as Bush. The Lord of the Rings is built on the pernicious fantasy that agents of evil are purely and unambiguously evil, that wars are fought against inherently and irremediably evil enemies, that kings are fighting a constant rearguard action against the weakness of their people, and that history is a long tale of degeneration.

There are few evils more clear-cut than torture, which is why the campaign against it suits Sullivan's earnest nature, and why he has been so effective on this vitally important front. But fantasy-world invocations should be left to the neocon fabulists.

Debriefing Kiriakou: What if Torture Works?

The Brian Ross interview with former CIA interrogator John Kiriakou, who interrogated Abu Zubaydah, is disturbing in the extreme in that Kiriakou declares reperatedly, matter-of-factly, and with apparent certainty that Zubaydah yielded large amounts of actionable intelligence as a result of torture, including waterboarding and sleep deprivation. These claims completely contradict Ron Suskind's account, in which sources say that Zubaydah was a psychotic with limited knowledge of Al Qaeda operations who, upon being tortured,

began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

According to Kiriakou, waterboarding was "like flipping a switch" that made Zubaydah decide it was Allah's will (revealed in a dream) that he should talk -- and "the threat information that he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks." Kiriakou claims that Zubyadah subsequently served as a reliable reality check for other intelligence that came in. Kiriakou also portrays him as rational, knowledgeable, far from insane in any conventional sense, and a high-level al Qaeda operative-- a logistics chief, a financier, and a close associate of Bin Ladin.

Kiriaku also counters the claim that other interrogation techniques are more effective than torture. He claims that the key differentiator was speed; that building trust or willingness (which he dismisses as impossible with the religious fanatics of al Qaeda) or engaging in psychological warfare are time-consuming, whereas waterboarding was, again, 'like throwing a switch."

Is Kiriakou to be believed? Over time, will enough Kiriakous speak out to create a general acknowledgment that torture can produce actionable intelligence? If so, we opponents of torture lose a major comfort and must rely on a braver and more nuanced cost-benefit assessment. Such as: the harm that torture does to the society that authorizes it outweighs the harm -- the deaths and destruction -- that it may in some instances prevent. We have already seen that torture cannot be contained with the circumspection that Kiriakou portrays - where every step, every slap, is deliberated and authorized. Instead, we have dozens of people killed in custody, thousands detained (in Iraq) under brutal conditions, and all kinds of random and sadistic abuses, the knowledge of which has generated so much further hatred against us throughout the Muslim world. Nor can its target be limited to "known" terrorists - witness the mistaken renditions and the abuse leveled on Iraqis rounded up virtually at random. American citizenship is no shield -- ask Jose Padilla. In concert with the denial of due process and the President's assumed power to deem anyone an enemy combatant, there is nothing to prevent its being inflicted on an ever-widening circle of alleged 'enemies of the state.' That is the real danger.

Andrew Sullivan points out that "The Zubaydah torture does not fit the category laid out by Charles Krauthammer as the criterion for legalized torture. It was done not because we knew something and needed to nail it down. It was done because we knew nothing and needed to find out more. The attacks it allegedly foiled were not catastrophic and not on the mainland of the United States." Does this kind of cost-benefit analysis make sense - that is, is the 'ticking time bomb' argument relevant? Is it wrong to torture someone if you think that doing so might thwart unknown attacks saving hundreds or thousands of lives, but right to torture in an attempt to thwart an attack known to be pending that might take hundreds of thousands or millions of lives? I think the answer is that the '24' scenario is a false choice, highly unlikely to occur in its pure form. Sullivan is right that it's fatal for a society to greenlight torture in anticipation of that choice. That's Cheney's 1% solution -- a permanent state of emergency authorizing absolute executive power because of an eternal risk of catastrophe.

In fact, that risk has been there throughout the nuclear age, and the remote possibility of a terrible choice has always been part of the burden of the terrible responsibility of those charged with the security of millions of people. I imagine that every president has left a corner of his mind open to the possibility of an emergency that will force him to act outside the law. But to pre-authorize a crime in a vanishingly unlikely scenario is not a solution.

Huckabee Caesar

Re Huckabee's defense of his support of the death penalty as Governor in last night's debate: Andrew Sullivan has posted the Asp comment below as half of the Dissent of the Day at The Daily Dish:

While I despise the "what would Jesus do?" mindset ("original intent" to the nth) and regard Christianism as a major threat to our democracy, I thought Huckabee's "Jesus was too smart to run for public office" response to the death penalty question was kind of brilliant. You found it a "cheapening of Jesus' radical injunction to forswear worldly power and wealth" -- I thought it was a dead-on voiceover of "render under Caesar what is Caesar's."

The thing is, Huckabee has been Caesar, i.e. has had to make the life-and-death decisions, which he spoke of rather movingly (not glibly, though I can't gauge his sincerity). What he said, in effect, was that Jesus offered no direct guidance to worldly rulers about what to do when the apparent demands of public welfare (or security) clash w/ the dictates of the Sermon on the Mount. In a way he was also saying he would have been 'smarter' to stay a minister rather than enter politics - there's that humility reflex, real or faked, which is part of his appeal. More to the point,, "Jesus couldn't (wouldn't) tell me outright what to do as governor." There's an unBushlike shunning of certainty there that's also part of his appeal.

The second half of the dissent, by another reader, highlighted the decency in Huckabee's discussion of immigration and defense of his refusal as governor to exclude the children of illegal aliens from a state merit scholarship program. In their different ways, Huckabee, McCain and Paul shed a few rays of decency on the dung heap of immigrant bashing, bloodlust for torture and contempt for civil liberties fertilizing the Republican frontrunners' campaigns.
If Huckabee or McCain win the nomination, I will not fear for the future of American democracy as intensely as I will if Double Guantanamo Romney or Depends-on-Who-Does-it Rudy win.