Hullabaloo

Monday, April 20, 2009

 
Safe

by digby

As I read these accounts from former Bush officials who are vociferously and angrily accusing the Obama administration of making the country vulnerable to its enemies by releasing the torture memos (and also see the entirely predictable bandwagon effect in the media) it becomes clear what the fundamental difference of opinion about this really is. Michael Hayden, once hailed as an eminently reasonable, decent man but now revealed to be a staunch torture apologist, is probably the best example of the kind of thinking that is represented by those who think torture is a positive good:

"Most of the people who oppose these techniques want to be able to say: 'I don't want my nation doing this' -- which is a pure honorable position -- and 'they didn't work anyway'," Hayden said.

"The facts of the case are that the use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer, it really did," he said.

[...]

Hayden also said Obama's own CIA director, Leon Panetta, as well as three other former CIA chiefs had warned the White House against releasing the memos outlining US interrogation techniques.

"The definition of top secret is information which, if revealed, would cause grave harm to US security," he said, adding that the release of the documents, by definition of their classification, was "a grave threat to national security."

The gravest effect, Hayden said, was that agency officers may be held back in the future from acting in the best interests of the country.

Again, if agency officers "hold back" from using legal, sanctioned means to protect the country then they are unpatriotic scum who must be fired. If they "hold back" from using torture, which is illegal and immoral, they will be following the law and doing their duty. That one isn't difficult.

What is a little bit more difficult is this idea that torture "keeps the country safe." Setting aside the disagreement as to whether Abu Zubaydah ended up providing some useful information under torture, the underlying issue seems to be whether or not it keeps the country safe if the world believes that the US tortures its prisoners. Many of the torture apologists claim that regardless of whether or not torture works, or whether we are actually doing it, we don't want the enemy to know that we don't torture. (Apparently, now that we've revealed that we won't be putting insects in coffins with prisoners, nobody will ever give up any information again). But the subtext of all that is that the world will think we are weak if they don't believe that we will torture.

True, they accept this little wink and nod by Presidents Bush and Obama that "America doesn't torture" but the whole point of that odd, and clearly incorrect, locution is to signal that we really do. The very fact that the phrase is used so rigidly and so awkwardly makes it clear that it's a term of art rather than a simple declaration of fact. I don't know that Obama and Bush use it that way for the same purpose --- I suspect Obama has been told by lawyers that if he implies in any way that America has tortured that he could become a witness in a war crimes trial. Bush, I would guess, has convinced himself that he didn't actually order torture --- and even if he did, it was perfectly justified. Either way, the term of art serves the opposite purpose of its stated intention. It makes people believe that we do torture not that we don't. And that's the whole point.

The apologists indignation that the release of the memos means we will not be able to use those methods again pretty clearly says they thought it was useful for the world to believe that we would continue to torture despite the fact that Obama ordered the government to limit itself to the use of the Army Field Manual. Regardless of whether we actually torture or not, they think it is vitally important that the world believes the United States has no limits. And that is as big of a problem as the torture itself.

Aside from the moral dimension, which should be the most relevant, the premise that the world must believe the United States will stop at nothing is very, very dangerous. It confirms the world's darkest suspicions about us and validates many of the arguments made by our enemies. I honestly can't conceive of anything that makes the US less safe than that.

Torture is immoral. Any country that practices it (or even pretends to practice it) much less contrives an entire bureaucratic legal underpinning for it, is then, by definition, immoral. That's the kind of "exceptionalism" that turns countries into feared pariah states, veritably begging for mistrust among allies and the creation of new enemies. Unless we are prepared to do a lot more torturing, invading and occupying -- basically becoming a malevolent superpower holding on primarily by brutal force --- we have to repudiate this concept. The more powerful a country is, the more it needs to be seen as operating from a moral, ethical and responsible standpoint --- and the less chance it will be seen by others as a threat. Making the world recoil in disgust at their brutality is about the stupidest thing the leaders of an empire could do unless they plan to spend all their time fighting wars and fending off enemies.

A world power of our magnitude and unequaled military might naturally engenders mistrust around the globe, which our government must already go to great lengths to assuage. To add to that already delicate, difficult situation by illegally invading countries and endorsing something as barbaric, crude and indefensible as torture is criminally irresponsible. The United States is made much less safe by these actions and we will all be paying the price for that schoolyard mentality for the rest of our lives.

Far greater empires than ours have been brought low by exactly the kind of juvenile thinking that leads to the belief that unless the world is petrified of a nation's power to commit violence it will be unsafe. It's a self-fulilling prophesy.
digby 4/20/2009 02:00:00 PM |