Recently in Torture Category

So says Caleb Stegall, who is no fan of Cheney, but who points out that Eric Voegelin told an uncomfortable truth about statesmanship . You should read the entire Voegelin passage in Caleb's post, but basically, the great political theorist taught that even the most beneficent political order exists on the basis of cruelty; the trick is to keep people from recognizing it. If you force them to confront their own guilt, you will suffer. Notes Caleb:

Cheney's chief sin is admitting these hard truths to public consciousness. If he had read his Voegelin, he would have known the fate awaiting him.

This is an extremely difficult position to be in, don't you think? I've always felt that Jack Nicholson's character in "A Few Good Men" had far more ugly truth on his side than I was comfortable admitting:

Do we all need Dick Cheney on that wall, like Col. Jessep? Though we can't stand to admit it, are we secretly happy that there was for a while men at the pinnacle of power who would stop at nothing -- and who felt unbound by any law -- to protect this country? Voegelin would say that it's not Dick Cheney's existence that really bothers us, but the fact that he (Cheney) forces us to acknowledge it. Because if we stare clearly at the principle Cheney stood for -- that is, the idea that no law, either statutory or moral, is higher than protecting the United States from attack -- then, if we are honest with ourselves, we are forced to reflect on how so much of what is good and honorable about our daily lives depends on the willingness to accept, however implicitly, injustice and immorality.

I think what Voegelin is saying is not that the ends justify the means as a principle of morality, but as a description of the way men and societies actually behave. To stand behind Cheney is to sanction the view that power elites have the right to break the law for the sake of defending the political and social order. Do we really want to admit to that? Most of us do not -- and if we do, imagine then your political opponents in charge of the government, and making the decisions about which laws need ("need") to be broken to protect our civilization. So of course we don't want to admit it. But if we don't believe that Cheney and Jessep need to be on that wall (so to speak), why aren't we moving forward to prosecute him and people like him?

Frankly, I would like to see some kind of prosecutions, because I don't want to live in the kind of country in which the leadership arrogates to itself the power to violate all laws in service of some higher ideal, chosen by itself. You let Cheney et alia get away with this, what kind of precedent have you set for future administrations? At what point does defending the order justify rounding up domestic political opponents, and invalidating the constitution? You know? We can't go down this road, or at least if we're going to be dragged down it, we have to fight every inch of the way.

Yet it must be admitted that many of us have a profound ambivalence about all this -- an ambivalence identified by Voegelin. My sense is -- and I accuse myself here too -- that for most of us, we really do want our leaders to protect us by any means necessary, but we simply don't want to have to know about what was done. I don't think this is anything unique to Americans. I think it's merely human.

From yesterday's Fox News Channel interview with Dick Cheney:

WALLACE: Do you think what they did, now that you've heard about it, do you think what they did was wrong?

CHENEY: Chris, my sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks against the United States, and giving us the intelligence we needed to go find Al Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed. Those interrogations were involved in the arrest of nearly all the Al Qaeda members that we were able to bring to justice. I think they were directly responsible for the fact that for eight years, we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United States.

It was good policy. It was properly carried out. It worked very, very well.

WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you're OK with it?

CHENEY: I am.

Think about that. The man who was vice president of the United States is saying that he is untroubled by lawbreaking -- even beyond the permissive rules on harsh interrogation his own administration laid down -- because the lawbreaking was, in his judgment, effective.

The ends, in other words, justify the means. Where do you suppose it would stop with Cheney? What if instead of threatening to rape a detainee's mother, our agents had actually done so in front of him. Would that have been okay with Cheney? Would that have been okay with Bush?

If the United States is governed by men with contempt for the rule of law, and who do not feel bound by the rule of law, we are well on the road to tyranny, and in an important sense are already there. We know about Cheney's view of the powerful executive. It would be interesting to know what he would be prepared to support in terms of the president violating the law with respect to anti-terror operations on US soil.

On a First Things blog, J. Bottum writes that torture is immoral, but that Eric Holder's pondering whether or not to prosecute Bush officials for torture endangers the republic. Excerpt:

Say you have a system of government in which policy differences are criminalized--a political situation in which a change of administration allows the people who've lost power to be prosecuted. We have a name for what happens next: We call it a coup.

John Schwenkler is gobsmacked, pointing out that AG Holder is reportedly considering prosecution of CIA interrogators who violated the Bush administration's own policies on interrogation. This isn't "criminalizing policy differences;" this is criminalizing criminality.

It is true that not everything that is illegal ought to be prosecuted, which is to say, prudence should decide such matters. I don't know whether or not the CIA interrogators in question should face prosecution by the US government under the new administration. But I don't think it should be out of the question. The Republic has far more to fear from leaders who think they are free to break the law in the name of a higher good, and from an ethic that says lawbreaking tied to an executive policy is immune from prosecution because to object would be an act of dangerous partisanship.

Then again, Jody's got a pecular sense of what constitutes a threat to the Republic, having once appealed to the judge in Scooter Libby's case not to send the convicted executive-branch liar to jail because doing so would cause "deep philosophical injury" to the nation, and would harm "our shared lives in this country."

Former Bush administration lawyer Jack Goldsmith writes that Dick Cheney has it all wrong: Obama is not gutting Bush's anti-terror strategy, but rather hanging on to most of it. The real change, says Goldsmith, is in the packaging. Excerpt:

Many people think Cheney is scare-mongering and owes President Obama his support or at least his silence. But there is a different problem with Cheney's criticisms: his premise that the Obama administration has reversed Bush-era policies is largely wrong. The truth is closer to the opposite: The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit. Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric. This does not mean that the Obama changes are unimportant. Packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric, it turns out, are vitally important to the legitimacy of terrorism policies.

So Obama, far from being counterrevolutionary, is only solidifying the gains made by the Bush revolutionaries -- and co-opting the would-be Democratic opposition. Brilliant guy, that Obama.

From the left, Glenn Greenwald agrees, saying that the left has got to come to grips with the fact that on torture, Obama has sold them out. Excerpt:

What is, in my view, most noteworthy about all of this is how it gives the lie to the collective national claim that we learned our lesson and are now regretful about the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism. Republicans are right about the fact that while it was Bush officials who led the way in implementing these radical and lawless policies, most of the country's institutions -- particularly the Democratic Party leadership and the media -- acquiesced to it, endorsed it, and enabled it And they still do.

Meet the new boss...

I think Nancy Pelosi is lying about whether or not she knew about CIA waterboarding earlier in this decade. I think she did, and is now embarrassed by that fact. Says Marty Peretz:

Every top Democrat is trying to cover her or his ass. Now that they are making such a fuss about the Bush administration having held everything in secret the news that it hadn't is mortifying to the Democrats now in power.

E.D. Kain notes something particularly interesting about Congressional Democrats:

To me, Pelosi's denial (and accusation against the CIA) lays bare a deeper truth about the Democrats. Without Obama they'd be nearly as big a mess as the Republicans. Most of them are complicit in the Bush torture program and the wars. The party is almost headless without Obama - led by the fickle and hardly inspiring Reid/Pelosi duo. After Obama, if conservatives learn anything over the next eight years - yes, I'm predicting it will be eight - unless the Democrats get some sort of order and discipline and more importantly, some grander vision, then I think the GOP should have no trouble at all coming in and cleaning up.

Spengler writes: That was torture, all right: they did it for revenge, and to make a horrible example of a Nazi collaborator. There is a case to made for the use of atrocities to discourage collaboration with radical evil. Did...

Remember the recent story about the slaves of Dubai? Well, here's another story showing the contempt the ruling class of the United Arab Emirates has for human rights and common decency. ABC News plays a tape that one of the...

Biola University's John Mark Reynolds lays down the law for Christians. Excerpt: Torture of any human being is incompatible with the Christian faith. This should have been obvious, but like many hard and inconvenient moral lessons it was not. Christianity...

My pal David Rieff writes: I haven't read the comments on your post about the 'religious v. secular people's attitudes toward torture' poll, but selfishly I would hope it would provoke a debate on what I believe at least to...

Here's a shocker: a new Pew poll finds that Christians support torture more than non-believers do. What's more, Evangelicals are more pro-torture than white mainline Protestants and white non-Hispanic Catholics -- but that Catholics and Evangelicals are more pro-torture than...

Great stuff from Ken Adelman. Excerpt: I'm having trouble figuring out why staunch conservatives aren't as outraged by the torture memos and practices as the American public. Maybe it's because they've become so estranged from the public. Republican leaders have...

Cunning Realist says that if he had had a family member tortured by the US, nothing would stop him from seeking revenge. Excerpt: As the means of mass destruction get ever-smaller and more accessible to individuals via vials and backpacks,...

Garrison Keillor says that criminal prosecution of torturers would not be worth the trouble. Excerpt: The widespread waterboarding and other acts of torture carried out in secret CIA prisons are no small matter. The free play of sadism on the...