Goodwill Hunting Authorizing torture with the very best of intentions

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.slate.com/id/2193892/


By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Thursday, June 19, 2008, at 6:03 PM ET

Attorney General Michael Mukasey
It isn't easy to justify torture. It does, after all, violate centuries' worth of human rights norms and international and domestic law. It has famously been used by the Nazis and Stalin, Saddam Hussein and Kim Il-Sung—not really the kinds of folk we usually strive to emulate. And as professor Darius Rejali explains in his superb Torture and Democracy, it also doesn't work, at least not as a means of extracting useful information. It doesn't work because, among other things, torture leads to false confessions, because interrogators are not skilled at detecting false confessions, and because tortured prisoners are inclined to misremember and misstate what information they do know. You would think that having decided to permit torture, in the face of all these legal, moral, and practical objections, those members of the Bush administration who did so could assemble a coherent defense: We tortured because it works; we tortured because nothing else worked better. We tortured because after careful consideration, it was worth the moral price we paid. But as Congress begins the painful process of tracing the origins of the government's abusive interrogation program, its members are now confronted by the last refuge of torturers everywhere: We tortured with the very best of intentions.

Before the Senate armed services committee this week, some Bush administration officials offered up the hazy recollections, circuitous chains of command, and the passing of the buck that are the hallmarks of any such investigation. The lowlight came Tuesday with the Senate testimony of William J. Haynes II, former general counsel of the Department of Defense. If suspending the Geneva Conventions, then reverse-engineering torture-resisting techniques taught at the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape School for use against prisoners had worked so well in the summer of 2002, you might think a Jack Nicholson moment would have been nigh this week. You might imagine someone brave would leap to his feet before the Senate committee and holler, "Yes, I walked on the dark side, and it saved you all!" But nobody seemed willing to explain or justify the momentous decision to violate the legal ban on torture. What we heard instead was that desperate times called for desperate measures, and thus any old desperate measure would do.

"What I remember about the summer of 2002," Haynes testified, "was a government-wide concern about the possibility of another terrorist attack as the anniversary of Sept. 11" approached. "There was a limited amount of time and a high degree of urgency," he later explained. The implication is that he'd have tried anything in that climate and that anything he'd tried would somehow have been justified. The editors at the Wall Street Journal took the same tack this week, excoriating congressional Democrats for persecuting noble men who authorized the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and "other murderers" for the good of us all. Those men acted in good faith, we are lectured. "When the threat seemed imminent after 9/11, Democrats were only too happy to keep quiet and let the Bush administration and CIA do whatever it took to prevent another attack." Desperate times. Desperate measures. Case closed.

[MannyGoldstein]

1. Torture... How Simply *AWFUL*

Now please pass the Grey Poupon, lovey.

[The Magistrate]

2. An Excellent Article, Ma'am

Its closing point, that legal questions do not become 'hard' merely because someone can be found to argue the other side against a well-established consensus, needs repeating to the point of wearied boredom at the sound of it. Nor does the fact that a lawyer someone hired said some act would not break the law mean the person acting on that bought advice commits no crime: things like this are common in frauds and racketeerings of various sorts, and both client and counsel may end up in jail by the end of it.

One other item worth noting is that 'seeking information' is a mere alibi for the real object of a policy of torture, which is to strike fear into those who would oppose a power, in the hope of making them less likely to do so. This is why all the well known objections to torture as a tool for gathering information are consistently disregarded when the course of torture is resolved on. It is simply claimed the object of torture is 'gaining information' because this is a line of argument that can convince a number of people the act is a grim necessity, and enable them to overcome their natural abhorrence of torture. Few people are sufficiently cold-blooded to accept the actual reason, and flatly own to agreeing that if people know they will be tortured when taken alive by the country's armed forces and police, they might be less likely stand in opposition to them.

[Prefer]

3. People in Philadelphia like that approach

they want gestpo to go around and bust the heads of "troublemakers", that's the idea I get from the readers responses to the recent story there. that's an extension of the torture philosophy. The Sopranos was an idolization of that type of power

[arcadian]

4. I KNEW somebody should have been keeping an eye on Matt Damon.

n't

[JDPriestly]

5. "other murderers" A person really is innocent until proven guilty.

It should not have been difficult to prove some of these people guilty. Where are the convictions? Where is the proof for the world to see? They have to have it. Don't they know how important it is to the public, to the world, to see that evidence?

Not only is their torture illegal and inhuman, but it is self-defeating. It places their statements that the prisoners were murderers or were guilty of anything at all in doubt.

If the people were guilty, why didn't they try and convict them?

[Solly Mack]

6. K&R (more, please)