Amnesty: Unsubscribe-me from waterboarding
Amnesty International has a new film, illustrating waterboarding, as part of their unsubscribe-me campaign. Go unsubscribe now.
Add comment April 27th, 2008
Archive for April 27th, 2008
Soldz WBIX Radio Interview: Does Torture Work?
My March 22, 2008 interview on the WBIX show Talking Things Through with Bob Stolzberg & Bill Pike is now online for listening: Does Torture Work?
Add comment April 27th, 2008
Yet another Justice Department rationale for torture
The Sunday New York Times brings new revelations of the Bush administration’s ever-evolving legal rationale for torture. Like the hydra, lopping off one legal argument only leads to another. The only thing that remains constant is that the administration can do whatever it wants to those in CIA custody.
Today’s revelation is of a set of letters between Senator Wyden and the Department of “Justice” on the legal basis for the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation,” aka torture, program. The letters seek to clarify the reasoning and impact of President Bush’s executive order last summer that reauthorized CIA torture.
Sandy Levinson at Balkinization explains why the reasoning in the letters will justify virtually any torturous action. Levinson starts by quoting from the Times article:
In one letter written Sept. 27, 2007, Mr. Benczkowski [a deputy assistant Attorney General] argued that “to rise to the level of an outrage” and thus be prohibited under the Geneva Conventions, conduct “must be so deplorable that the reasonable observer would recognize it as something that should be universally condemned.”
There is, of course, a certain logical paradox here: The very fact that the some US interrogator would suggest that some particular conduct is “reasonable” in some situation would, by definition, mean that there is not “universal” condemnnation of the practice. This is especially true if one accepts the DOJ argument that “The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act.” Once one allows what might be termed “purity of utilitarian motive” to dominate the analysis, the game is over, for there will always be those who will argue that it is worth doing practically anything to forestall any “terrorist attack.”
A reading of the letters shows that they admit that “torture” is always banned, but that they seek to redefine the constraints of th Geneva Conventions Common Article 3, so that the banned “outrages upon personal dignity” depend upon a “shocks the conscience” definition of prohibited conduct. This criterion is combined with the question of whether activities are “for the purpose of humiliation and abuse” [emphasis added]. Thus, the sentence reads:
Similarly, the fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation and abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act.
As David Luban explained here, the “shocks the concsience” is extremely problematic and can be bent to justify almost anything behavior. See also Luban’s Were You Really Surprised? where he explains how:
the Justice Department already told us that no interrogation tactic can possibly be cruel, inhuman, and degrading. In some sense, the only surprise is that Congress now acts surprised. Why the outrage now? DoJ told them its position more than two years ago, in a letter to three Democratic Senators.
This situational argument does not apply to the definition of “torture,” the letter states. Hence the importance of restricting the definition of “torture”, such as the intensive efforts to avoid admitting that waterboarding is “torture.” We should therefore push to define activities as “torture” wherever reasonable and not allow administration defenders to restrict it as they have. In this light, see the Physicians for Human Rights/Human Rights Watch Leave No Marks.
The Times kindly provides copies of the letters: Wyden’s August 2007 Letter; DoJ Reply; Wyden’s December 2007 Letter; DoJ Reply.
1 comment April 27th, 2008
Boston Globe takes on Hillary Clinton, Obliterator-in-Chief
One of the most ridiculous and yet terrifying statements yet during this campaign came this week from Hillary Clinton, who has given up her race for the President and has announced a campaign for Obliterator-in-Chief. She told ABC News that, in response to being asked her response if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons.
“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran…. In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”
[See complete editorial below.]
Thus, Clinton has announced her willingness, if elected, to incinerate 60 million innocents. Such a staetment makes her defeat a necessity for anyone concerned with human decency.
The Boston Globe has responded appropriately in an editorial to that campaign. To cut to the chase, the Globe states, echoing my horrified reaction:
A presidential candidate who lightly commits to obliterating Iran - and, presumably, all the children, parents, and grandparents in Iran - should not be answering the White House phone at any time of day or night.
Remember that during the rest of the campaign.
Sandy Levinson at Balkinization also has two excellent posts on Clinton’s disgusting comments: As we prepare to elect our next constitutional dictator and Torture and “obliteration”.
In the first, Levinson points out:
This is the statement of someone running for constitutional dictatorship, not for a “republican form of government” presidency who might have said, for example, “as President, I will certainly urge the Congress to declare war on Iran should Iran attack Israel”–though one might wonder exactly why, since the brutal truth is that an attack on Israel, however egregious, would not constitute a serious security threat to the United States (which is why Israel very wisely has constructed its own nuclear deterrent instead of relying on the US and the vagaries of American domestic politics)–”though I recognize that that decision is ultimately for Congress to make.”
In the second post Levinson relates our insistence that candidates renounce torture with our ability to accept their willingness to support obliterating millions:
There is a widespread consensus, shared, at least rhetorically, by the Bush Administration itself, that “torture” is forbidden and indefensible. That is precisely why so much of the debate concerns what, precisely, counts as torture. (For the record, let me state that I regard waterboarding, as well as extended sleep deprivation and much else, as torture.) But, of course, there is also the additional debate, sparked by the Yoo memorandum, as to whether the President, under extreme conditions, has the authority to order torture.
But why isn’t there more debate, not only among academics but among the general public, about a) the morality of any military strategy that depends on “obliterating” millions of innocent people simply because they have the bad luck to be living in a country run by terrible leaders and b) the propriety of a view of presidential power that makes it possible for an ostensibly serious candidate for our nation’s highest office so casually to threaten such obliteration should another country engage in behavior that, though no immediate threat to American security, we deem sufficiently awful? As awful as torture is, it really isn’t the most awful thing that regularly occurs in the world, starting with “collateral damage” to innocent civilians as the result of “justified” military attacks, and going onward to the “destruction” that is at the basis of nuclear deterrence strategy (under the rubric “Mutually Assured Destruction”).
Here is the complete Globe editorial:
Hillary Strangelove
AMERICANS have learned to take with a grain of salt much of the rhetoric in a campaign like the current Democratic donnybrook between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Still, there are some red lines that should never be crossed. Clinton did so Tuesday morning, the day of the Pennsylvania primary, when she told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that, if she were president, she would “totally obliterate” Iran if Iran attacked Israel.
This foolish and dangerous threat was muted in domestic media coverage. But it reverberated in headlines around the world.
Responding with understatement to a question in the British House of Lords, the foreign minister responsible for Asia, Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, said of Clinton’s implication of a mushroom cloud over Iran: “While it is reasonable to warn Iran of the consequences of it continuing to develop nuclear weapons and what those real consequences bring to its security, it is probably not prudent in today’s world to threaten to obliterate any other country and in many cases civilians resident in such a country.”
A less restrained reaction came from an editorial in the Saudi-based paper Arab News. Being neighbors of Iran, the Saudis and the other Gulf Arabs have the most to fear from Iran’s nuclear program and its drive to become the dominant power in the Gulf.
But precisely because they are most at risk from Iran’s regional ambitions, the Saudis want a carefully considered American approach to Iran, one that balances firmness and diplomatic engagement.
The Saudi paper called Clinton’s nuclear threat “the foreign politics of the madhouse,” saying, “it demonstrates the same doltish ignorance that has distinguished Bush’s foreign relations.”
The Saudis are not always sound advisers on American foreign policy. But they understand that Rambo rhetoric like Clinton’s only plays into the hands of Iranian hard-liners who want to plow ahead with efforts to attain a nuclear weapons capability. They argue that Iran must have that capability in order to deter the United States from doing what Clinton threatened to do.
While Clinton has hammered Obama for supporting military strikes in Pakistan, her comments on Iran are much more far-reaching. She seems not to realize that she undermined Iranian reformists and pragmatists. The Iranian people have been more favorable to America than any other in the Gulf region or the Middle East.
A presidential candidate who lightly commits to obliterating Iran - and, presumably, all the children, parents, and grandparents in Iran - should not be answering the White House phone at any time of day or night.
Add comment April 27th, 2008