- Caligula (Gaius Caesar)
AS is noting "the Pentagon's strange and sudden decision to release graphic drawings of al Qaeda torture techniques" in taking up some of his critics with this:
What al Qaeda and Saddam did was an extreme form of sadistic torture, the kind that psychopaths enjoy and inflict. But that does not make, say, freezing someone to near-death, reviving him, re-freezing him again any less torture. Yes, we did that, carefully monitored by Rumsfeld. -AS
THE HAPPY TORTURISTS AMONG US
The truth is that there are and will be American citizens among us who want to fight torture with torture, whose impulse it is to fight terror with terror.
It's even worse, because they will call themselves 'true patriots' and decry others as unaware of the true nature of our enemies, a nature that they intuit as requiring us to torture, as if our nature should be dictated (or corrupted?) by the nature of our enemies ... [btw, this is the stepping off point, I believe, for why 'terrorism' or, more generally, 'political violence' is fundamentally a moral challenge, not a military one].
Sometimes, when I think it cannot be any worse than that, I feel as though some of the pro-torture lobby are actually trying to spin the torture legacy of Bush-Cheney, rather than own up to it as unlawful and unwise and almost abjectly unproductive - and, as we now know, most certainly murderous.
These feelings and their largely right-wing Sherpas are strong enough that they form part of a political movement, arguably. Just as the GOP set out to trash the U.N. when public opinion in favor of multilateralism was too high for what George Tenant euphemistically calls Administration 'policy', some are ready now to soften the beaches against the overwhelming public opinion against torture. When I am at my most cynical, as I say, I worry that it is done in order to save 'dear Leaders' Bush-Cheney from fates up to and including impeachment.
WELL PAST TIME FOR NEW LEADERSHIP
New Leadership in the Wings: John Edwards spoke out this week against the hapless phrase 'War on Terror'The political problem is that we need to get past "war on terror" and "everything possible to protect the American people" and onto smart counterterrorism. RAND has recently pointed the way with its report on 'cognitive COIN', which casts the struggle with militant radicalism as global counter-insurgency. (If nothing else, perhaps this report can go a long way to settling the disagreement to the extent it exists within the military).
Democratic primary votes should go to the candidate who has the wits to ditch "war on terror" and ditch "what I'm going to do in the 'war on terror'" and starts to educate the public about smart counterterrorism and global counterinsurgency. Let's hope to find those phrases in the Democratic tag-clouds, I say, before the GOP have time to pervert the doctrines of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, too!
THE TORTURE OF SADDAM AND AL-QAEDA
I'm not sure I'd focus on the act of torture as a psychopathy or sadism, but would rather highlight its gravely deliterious effects on the torturer, notwithstanding. Another, better focus is on the political ends of torture.
Saddam and al-qaeda used torture as a means to achieve their political ends. Baathism in general has a violently suppressive streak in it, and it took a student of Stalin to take it to the next level. Al-qaeda groups (and others), when they aren't competing against each other to see who can be the most 'shocking', use their violence also to intimidate, to sow fear among those who do not subscribe to their vision of 'justice', to their politics.
Now, I think we can concede that we also use violence (or the threat of it) in our societies as an ordering principle (and, oh, how the jihadis know the list of how we do and have, especially when it was done poorly according to Islamic law because it fits with their narrative of the 'corrupt' West). What I think that the 'enlightened' world can categorically reject is the notion that we need torture to be part of that ordering whatsoever.
In other words, we can easily reject a priori the notion that, "We are the good guys, so using torture to our own ends is okay and needed to protect 'our good' from 'their evil'." No, we are the 'good guys' because we don't need torture to order our societies. Also, we can go further and say, our rule of law, the Spirit of the Laws of Our People, do not require or permit us lawfully to torture the innocent, in pursuit of information that might 'protect Our Good', for what profit is it to lose one's soul to gain the world?
This principled realization is backed up by the observations that torture, as a general proposition, seldom produces anything actionable, is counterproductive if we wish to shield our own from torture done by others, confounds the battlefield wish that 'the enemy' surrender (who would surrender if you know you are going to be tortured), and is solidly and definitively no way to run a counterinsurgency that aims to get and keep the support of the general populace against a minority disruption, even a spectacularly powerful and heinous one.
