Dirty Work
In the debate over torture, I am continually reminded of A Few Good Men, and I often get the sense that many of the most vocal torture advocates are, essentially, playing the terrifying but also tragic role of Jack Nicholson’s Col. Nathan Jessep.
The key line: “I did my job. I’d do it again.” He’s proud of his work. He considers it right and honorable and noble. In the end, Jessep never understands that his orders, his beliefs, his faith in the sanctity of military authority — his authority — are antithetical to a just and decent civilization. And while his beliefs are partially rooted in personal arrogance, they also stem from a genuine commitment to the notion that his actions and orders were vital to the preservation of a safe, free, and great society. For Jessep, Code Reds — essentially sanctioned torture of American troops by their fellow soldiers — are necessary and therefore right. What’s more, even if they aren’t, the core of the issue is not the cultivation of society’s moral character, but the preservation of respect for authority. Whether the practice is cruel, inhumane, or uncivilized hardly matters. He believes that worries over such notions are for civilians and weaklings; they have no place on the front lines of national defense. That’s the distilled essence of how the most vociferous defenders of torture perceive the practice, and I suspect that they, like Jessep, will never accept or truly grasp that what they’ve done and what they support is wrong.
Well put. I think that, to a certain extent, is why I enjoy stories with darker settings, BSG, Stephen Erikson’s Malazan series, Children of Men, World War:Z. It’s a way of working on my truth handling abilities at least when it comes to fiction.
Obviously confronting the Jesseps requires confronting them with facts, but I think art helps us process the facts.
— Greg Sanders · Apr 23, 09:16 PM · #
Funnily enough, about a month ago I was writing a paper on Alan Dershowitz’s theories regarding torturing the “ticking time bomb” terrorist and inserted a quotation from there as a section header. Felt like I was treading fine line between cliche and pop-culture ninjitsu at the time, but I feel mildly vindicated now. :p
— Anthony · Apr 23, 09:26 PM · #
Names, dates, and quotations please for the “more vocal” and “vociferous” defenders of THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION COERCIVE INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES who also defend the sort of military “discipline” techniques symbolized by the Code Reds of this Hollywood Movie.
And, the debate is about those techniques. It is not a “debate about torture.” Unless, of course, it is not a debate that you seek to conduct, but…something else.
— Carl Scott · Apr 23, 10:05 PM · #
A Few Good Men is the second most overrated movie of all time, after The Shawshank Redemption. And Jack Nicholson’s character and performance are at least as big a factor in the movie’s essential awfulness as the more obviously dreadful acting by Tom Cruise and Demi Moore.
— Noah Millman · Apr 23, 10:08 PM · #
Well, I’m not sure if the earlier comment I submitted posted—your system here isn’t always reliable. So excuse the double-post if that happens.
Names, dates, and quotations please for the “more vocal” and “vociferous” defenders of THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION COERCIVE INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES who also defend the sort of military “discipline” techniques symbolized by the Code Reds of this Hollywood Movie.
And, the debate is about those techniques. It is not a “debate about torture.” Unless, of course, it is not a debate that you seek to conduct, but…something else.
Or, should a social-con like myself start referring to the abortion debate as “the debate over pre-natal murder?”
— Carl Scott · Apr 23, 10:14 PM · #
‘Or, should a social-con like myself start referring to the abortion debate as “the debate over pre-natal murder?”’
If you want to lose the debate in an even speedier and more comprehensive fashion than is currently the case, by all means go for it.
— Anthony · Apr 23, 10:19 PM · #
I think Peter’s talking about a habit of the mind of some people, where they assume that one most do awful things in order to secure liberty for all, and those awful things must be done in secret. I’m not sure Cheney would have to literally support Code Reds in order for the point to hold.
If the walls have to be defended by men with guns, some people believe we have the right to know what the men on the walls do with the guns. Jessup thinks this is unnecessary, and a waste of time because the people the walls protect are, in his view, sybaritic and soft and would spill their liberal bleeding hearts all over the awful things that Jessup does in order to defend the wall. What’s missing from the current situation is someone like Cheney or Rumsfeld going on TV and essentially telling the American people that they can’t handle the truth! The torture defenders in public have generally argued that secrecy was dictated by the desire to prevent terrorists from training to our “methods.”
Read Manzi about “Torture 1” and “Torture 2.” The English language is getting waterboarded this week, but as always it doesn’t know anything, and will tend to agree with the torturer’s presupposition.
— j · Apr 23, 10:32 PM · #
Carl is right that the “debate about torture” formulation obscures more than it edifies. The debate is not over whether torture is permissible, but whether certain extreme interrogation procedures constitute torture.
Part of my frustration over calling the controversial procedures “Torture 2” is that the moral conclusion to the argument is built into the terminology, even as Jim tries to avoid drawing any such conclusion.
— Blar · Apr 23, 11:34 PM · #
j.—yeah, I read Manzi. Even if his terminology loads the dice a little bit, it does the immense service of recognizing that what the Bushies authorized is not at the same level as the practices usually called to mind by the word torture. So few in this “debate” are willing to concede that; still fewer are willing to frame the debate in a way that recognizes that from the outset.
But for folks like Anthony, apparently, a debate ain’t about what’s what. It’s about what wordplay wins the most votes, and civility be damned. Who cares that someone like me, who truly thinks that prenatal murder is what abortion is, but who typically does not refer to it as such in political discussion let alone make that term THE TITLE of the discussion, feels that the terminology y’all are so cavalierly using is, civility-wise, grossly unfair?
— Carl Scott · Apr 23, 11:47 PM · #
The Bushies authorized waterboarding. The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (Khmer Rouge Museum in common parlance) in Phnom Penh has a waterboard used by them. It used to be known as Spanish Water Torture.
Until 2001-2002, it was more or less universally, and in common parlance!, recognized as torture. It qualifies as Torture 1, at least among the sane.
— jackal · Apr 24, 02:31 AM · #
Waterboarding was too brutal for Inquistor General Tomas de Torquemada, and he forbade its use by the Spanish Inquisition. If it’s morally repugnant to the dude who made the auto-da-fe a family outing and thought nothing of yanking out fingernails with flaming hot pincers, I think we can safely say that waterboarding is torture. I’m really not sure there’s room for linguistic nuances and, even if there is a relative scale of torture, it’s hard to put waterboarding on the middle of the slope without some pretty callous mental gymnastics.
— James F. Elliott · Apr 24, 06:11 AM · #
James, I’m really going to have to see your evidence, but even if it’s true, your argument is the most interestingly twisted example of “argument from authority” I have ever crossed. Why, no less an expert in torture than Torquemada thought waterboarding was too cruel! Which first of all, has nothing to do with whether or not waterboarding actually is too cruel, and secondly, is from a rather dubious source, considering that he did go ahead with the hot-pincer thing.
— Blar · Apr 24, 03:34 PM · #
I don’t understand how palestinian hanging and beating a man’s legs until they break and he dies from it could possibly be construed as anything but torture.
I don’t see how we can possibly take your participation in the debate seriously until you’re sufficiently educated on the issue that you’ve learned that waterboarding was the beginning, not the end, of how we treated detainees under our custody.
But even beginning with waterboarding: Americans prosecuted people who waterboarded. We sentenced waterboarders to death. Were we wrong to do so? Or is waterboarding only not torture when Americans do it?
— Chet · Apr 24, 05:23 PM · #
I think “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!” could have served as Dick Cheney’s motto.
I’d love to hear how torture apologists can explain how techniques can, through the infliction of misery, coerce even the most hardened opponents to speak, and yet somehow we are supposed to believe these techniques fall short of being torture. What else is torture besides forcing someone to talk by inflicting sufficient misery? Are you telling us that these al Qaeda prisoners were wimps, and gave in without extreme coercion? The story makes no sense and it is tedious to argue each and every technique when clearly the whole logic of enhanced interrogation was a logic of torture.
Spare us the sophistries and embrace torture as a policy if you think it is a good idea.
— Steve N · Apr 24, 06:22 PM · #
Mr. Suderman provides no names, dates, and quotations, let it be noted.
If y’all want to put a movie character on trial, that’s great, but while we’re considering prosecuting real live persons who worked for the CIA, WhiteHouse, etc., you might want to momentarily flush that Hollywood intelligence out of your heads, and actually comment on what real people said about what they were doing—people who had responsibility for real decisions, not for snappy blog posts.
Steve N. has a point here, although it is for the adoption of the Manzi terminology. Unless, that is, Steve thinks there is no fundamental vocab-worthy difference b/t what our guys did and what the French did in Algeria, or to take it a hideous giant step further, what the KGB and Baathists did on a regular basis. (Indeed, this last category continues on a regular basis in North Korea, and elsewhere.) If that’s the case, he’s as vocab-challenged as anyone here. If that’s the case, the word “torture” functions for him like a mental black hole that extinguishes all possible thought or distinctions regarding the subject. I hope it’s not the case.
And if it’s not the case, then here’s the deal, Steve N. I’ll agree to say that waterboarding is a sort of “torture-light” (I can’t remember—did Manzi say that’s torture 1 or 2?), while continuing to hold that it is good U.S. policy to have protocols on the books for select agents using it in a predefined and very rare set of extraordinary situations, IF you’ll agree to say that your position demands no level of our government to ever pressure anyone, physically or psychologically, in an interrogation or elsewhere to relinquish information. No prosecutorial tactics in which we allow our interrogators to lie to suspects about their having evidence that will win them the death sentence, no infliction of any deceptive psychological distress whatsoever, no manipulation of comfort levels, sleep times, no cultivation of uncertainty, no nada. Oh, maybe the mattress can be lumpy and the food can be crummy. And what this amounts to, of course, is saying no “interrogation” beyond what a high school counselor is permitted to conduct.
This is demanded of Steve N., because what waterboarding fundamentally does is inflict pyschological distress. It is THAT distress that “forces” and “immiserates” the non-wimps of al Qaeda. So if this distress is so fundamentally horrible that it must NEVER be allowed or even considered, then all such things that induce similar (if I fear a death sentence, I fear for my life) distress in interrogation-like situations must NEVER be allowed. Not even approached. By no means do I deny that such distress can be used in a horrible and genuinely torturous manner—see the movie Brazil or the posts of James Paulos (scroll way down on the up-again Postmodern Conservative blog). But to ban it entirely? Categorically? So that we basically give up 50% or more of what interrogation is? If that’s what you want Steve N., own up to it, and I’ll adopt Manzi’s classification.
— Carl Scott · Apr 24, 08:14 PM · #
Carl: I’m not actually participating in “the torture debate,” or whatever we’re calling it. I think more or less reasonable people can disagree on the utility and perhaps even the morality of waterboarding and other rough tactics in certain circumstances, but I’m pretty firmly in the camp that agrees that tactics now known to have been used by the U.S. with approval at the highest levels constitutes torture. A lesser form of torture, to be sure, than what many of the country’s foes have employed, but torture all the same. If you think using the word torture is mistakenly applied, fine, but I’m not actually all that interested in spending a lot of time participating in the debate. There are plenty of others better qualified than I to argue both sides, and they seem to be doing fine without me.
Instead, I was simply trying to characterize, through a pop culture reference, the nature of advocates and defenders of torture/EIT/harsh interrogation. That’s all!
— Peter Suderman · Apr 24, 08:23 PM · #
Lesser in what way, specifically? Please recall that over a hundred individuals are known to have died during these “enhanced interrogations” (a phrase itself originally coined by Nazi Germans.)
— Chet · Apr 24, 09:02 PM · #
Guys, c’mon, America does not torture. How many times do we have to tell you that?
This technique, you see, is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering. And of course there’s no pain. Certainly not pain <i>and</i> suffering. Which is why it’s so great for making hardened terrorists bend to our will . . . the total absence of pain and suffering.
— southpaw · Apr 25, 05:31 AM · #
Fair enough, Peter. And, frankly, I have no desire to participate in the debate or become expert on it, and do not think it is a topic we ought to be spending SO much time on, but the public opinion climate on this issue has really become nauseatingly demagogic, with so many, unlike yourself in this comment, simply tying all their arguments to the power of repeating that one word, that I’ve felt driven to mix it up a bit. On a policy-level, I suspect that were I among the deciders of the policy, I would probably err more on the side of caution and allow less than the Bushies did. But what so angers me, I guess, is the refusal of people to recognize that it is properly a morally difficult POLICY issue, not a momentous MORAL LITMUS TEST, that affects a fairly small number of people with its evils (and I definitely include the interrogators in that camp) and potentially protecting the lives of a very large number of people, that is morally difficult, but which HAS to be left to our designated officials to decide. We should not play this ugly game of “Your Job is to Protect Us by Secret Effective Methods!” later switched with “Your Job is (also) to Not Betray our Morally Pure Standards!” Either you find a sane way to delegate democratic responsibility for secret and morally dicey activities, or the mutual trust (and willingness to forgive) necessary for just and effective democratic government collapses.
I do share the spirit of the Few Good Men Hollywood character in trying to remind people that government is ultimately grounded upon the sword, and no matter how comparatively peaceful our society becomes compared to past ones, we will never find a way to legislate the infliction of suffering by our various sword-bearers out of existence. Again, longterm-imprisonment, some practices of espinoge, and er…shooting to kill, are very, very, nasty things. They do deep violence to the human spirit, and pose a grave danger of spiritual corruption for those tasked with implementing them. And we cannot not do these things and still have government.
But I (and the Bush interrogation policy, I think) part ways with the Few Good Men character by insisting that procedures be in place that will allow us to deal with the Extraordinary with above-board procedures, and not with “Code Red”-like ones adopted by a military/police/intelligence caste that becomes contemptuous of democratic civilian opinion, or worse, feels it must regularly deceive that opinion. There is a danger more and more of the latter could develop if we allow demagogic politics to indulge in moralistic clean-sweeps of all rougher procedures against combatants/suspects. I am aware the danger of regularizing the Extraordinary with procedures also exists (good article on tnr.com this week on this w/ respect to the Israeli exp.). But no particular moral danger is a slam-dunk. I accept that policies will have to be adopted, and designated offices with more flexible authority will have to be established and staffed, that in some cases will let our enemies get away with stuff (perhaps even killing U.S. citizens) they shouldn’t, and in some other cases will allow some of our agents to push things to the limit, find ways to regularize the Extraordinary, and otherwise do things they shouldn’t. Both are moral dangers, and there is no perfect procedural formula by which to utterly exclude them or even to perfectly balance them. We must continually try to get as close as we may to such a formula, and continually try to appoint leaders who will prudentially enact its principles in inescapably particular situations, but we are simply in denial about the realities of war and politics if we refuse to accept the difficulties that exist here. One doesn’t get to live one’s life inside an Obama speech where one always finds a way to get beyond false choices or difficult trade-offs.
— Carl Scott · Apr 25, 02:58 PM · #
If government torture is ever in the public interest – and I’m hardly all-knowing, I can’t say that it would never be – then I want the people who are contemplating it to have to weigh it against dire personal consequences, as well. I want a chilling effect on torture. I want the people who are thinking about doing it to weigh it not only against nebulous civil ethics, but against the personal prospect of spending the rest of their lives in jail. If they still think it’s worth it? At that point, torture will happen regardless of what we could do to stop it.
And they should still go to jail, even if they saved a city. If saving a city is such a moral good that it justifies torturing a human being, then it justifies imprisoning another one, too. And creating a chilling environment against torture of prisoners is worth the sacrifice.
Carl – answer the question I’ve posed three times, please. Were we wrong to execute Japanese soldiers who waterboarded Americans? If not, why not, if it would be wrong to prosecute Americans who waterboarded, too?
— Chet · Apr 25, 04:40 PM · #
Sorry, Chet, only until I’m provided with unambiguous evidence that soliders we executed, we did so ONLY for waterboarding (and one basically like the one we’ve used), will I struggle with your rhetorical question.
And hey, all you “its obivous it’s torture” types, take a look at your buddy Chet’s position: Save a city and go to jail! We’ll I guess when we’re talking about actual, tear-out-the fingernails-torture, I might have to endorse some version of that position, so long as it respects the places where the exercise of executive power can only be judged politically—i.e., via losing elections or being impeached, with of course more being possible once out of office. But save a city with waterboarding, and go to jail!
Speaking of movies, did y’all ever really see the hurt CONTEMPT in Gary Cooper’s eyes at the end of High Noon and understand for whom it was for?
— Carl Scott · Apr 26, 03:07 PM · #
1. Most of us don’t think anything done at Guantanamo constitutes torture, which is a big distinction with this movie; 2) We did it a limitied number of times to terrorists (if this was sanctioned policy against uniformed Iraqi soldiers I would be livid as well; 3) We actually have waterboarded more Americans in training than enemy terrorists in practice.
I also like the line, “Its not torture if Christopher Hitchens agrees to be subjected to it for a Vanity Fair piece.
In all of these ways we enhanced interrogation people are different from Colonel Jessup. We do feel our opponents are worthless and weak however.
— jjv · Apr 26, 07:42 PM · #
jjv – so why not allow policemen to waterboard murderers and drug dealers, if it isn’t torture or overly coercive? Surely a murderer is a murderer; should we treat one with kid gloves simply because they’re an American, too?
Why not simply have waterboarded Hans Reiser until he gave up the body, for instance?
— Chet · Apr 27, 02:13 AM · #
Peter
I agree with your point, though I think you hit on the wrong quote from Nicholson’s speech to illustrate it. Here’s my argument:
http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/post/2009/04/Torture-Can-we-‘handle-the-truth’.aspx
— Sam Roggeveen · Apr 27, 08:31 AM · #