on the making of tiny distinctions
A couple of days ago, a reader of the Corner wrote to Ramesh Ponnuru to make the following point: “Regarding the differences in SERE and actual interrogation, [some people mistakenly] insist that key difference is that interrogation is an involuntary exercise while SERE is voluntary. On the contrary, all the suspect has to do is cooperate with his interrogators and the ordeal will be over. . . . [T]he target can opt out at any point he wants by providing the information” and is therefore virtually indistinguishable from the SERE participant. The only difference that the writer can think of is that “the target of interrogation does not want to be there and there is coercion involved.”
Oh, that. Yes, I suppose one must acknowledge that teeny little factor — that the SERE participant chooses to participate in the program while “the target” has been captured and imprisoned. But do we really want to go so far? After all, once we acknowledge so insignificant a detail the gates could well be open to noting others, no doubt even less meaningful, but still. . . . There’s the fact that the writer is simply assuming that the target, in every case, has precisely the information his interrogators want from him. And the fact that even if the target has that information and gives it he has no idea whether his interrogators will be satisfied, or what further interrogation methods will be used, or when or if he will ever be released; whereas the SERE participant can not only leave the program but even leave military service, pretty much at his own discretion. That kind of thing. Not anything major, you understand, but you know what they say, sometimes it’s the little foxes that spoil the grapes.
Here’s how Ponnuru responds: “I agree with most of this, but I still think that the trainee's greater confidence he will survive the exercise makes a big difference.” A big difference, you say? And yet you agree with “most of this.” Interesting. In a later post Ponnuru mentions that readers have made some of the points I have noted but he doesn't appear to be moved by them: “As I said before, my own view is that the trainee's greater confidence that he will survive the experience is the important distinction.” So the SERE participant is thinking “My fellow soldiers probably won't kill me”? And the target is thinking . . . ? I’m losing the thread here.
During the election campaign, what most bothered me was the continual ratcheting up of rhetorical aggression, by both sides (but especially as it was directed against the late and I must say not-at-all-lamented Sarah Palin). That bothered me — but when I read stuff like this I feel like I’m in a freakin’ madhouse. Or that I’m Winston Smith. Maybe after six more months of reading The Corner you’ll find me down at my local weeping my pints because I can't find words to express how much I love Big Brother.
I get weepy over everything these days.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 25, 12:32 AM · #
I think this raises an interesting point regarding the parameters of a torture session. It’s a fairly common assumption – naturally enough, I think – that in order for the torture to stop, what needs to happen is simply for the person being tortured to tell the torturers what he knows. In reality, it’s generally the case that what needs to happen is for the torturee to convince the torturers that he has told them everything he knows. Which is actually a pretty different proposition. Not least when the torturers either believe he knows something that he actually doesn’t, or have the conviction that he probably knows Important Stuff, but no real idea what the specifics of that knowledge might relate to.
— Anthony · Apr 25, 01:25 AM · #
This is, of course, another way of saying, “The tortured must tell the torturer what the torturer expects to hear,” and if the tortured lies to you, the solution is clearly more torture. You could pick up pretty much any human being off of any street on Earth, and provided sufficient torture, they will tell you where they believe Osama bin Laden is. And the more you torture, the more specific they’ll get. Might not be accurate, but at least you know you tried your utmost to extract the truth…
— j · Apr 25, 03:19 AM · #
This is my reaction. I don’t know how even moderate conservatives can stand to have these debates about effectiveness. The MSM can’t even use the word torture, as in “the CIA tortured prisoners”. Very though-the-looking-glass.
And to this day – today! – we have even center-left commentators effectively taking the Noonan approach to the LAW. I wonder if someone can articulately explain why everyone thinks it’s ok to absolutely, incontrovertibly break some of the most important laws on the books, but because of __________________ (< ??? what goes here?) we ought to “move on”, or have a truth and reconciliation commission or whatever.
If this was about selling state secrets or selling crack nobody would have any trouble throwing these criminals in jail.
— Steve C · Apr 25, 04:49 AM · #
Steven: Your frustration is warranted. But I think you can fill in your blank with “the fact that the perpetrators were acting to defend the U.S. from a terrorist threat” or “the fact that the people against whom the crimes were committed were almost certainly fairly unsavory characters (at best).” National defense justifies an awful lot to most people. Some estimates put the civilian body count in Iraq at more than 70,000. Even if the number is half that, or a quarter of that, or 10 percent — if most of the U.S. population isn’t all that concerned with the killing of thousands of civilians in a useless war in the name of national defense, doesn’t it make sense that we could also justify, or at least ignore, the mistreatment of a handful of prisoners? When security and safety are on the line (or seem to be), people will accept behavior that they’d normally find appalling.
— Peter Suderman · Apr 25, 07:18 AM · #
“all the suspect has to do is cooperate with his interrogators and the ordeal will be over”
In any case it is obviously not true. It is directly contradicted by the accounts of torture in the ICRC report. And it is clearly incompatible with the nature of torture as was used. The prisoner has no idea what the torturer wants. The torturer wants to break the prisoners will so that he cannot lie. At no point is cooperation relevant. The reasoning is insane, useless, without merit of any kind.
Moreover, what is this wholesale intellectual failure we are witnessing? (The best thing you could say about Ponnuru is that he is totally deluded and a liar. Worse comes quickly to mind).
WAKE UP, AMERICA
— vimothy · Apr 25, 10:53 AM · #
Sorry, Anthony’s comment is spot on — precisely correct.
And I, too, am struggling to understand how others are discussing the issue as if it wasn’t insane and criminal.
— vimothy · Apr 25, 11:03 AM · #
I agree that it’s fatuous to compare SERE training to being waterboarded by infidels from another country. What I don’t understand, if we’re in the drawing distinction mode, is why it’s okay to incinerate hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese women and children, or to work to death hundreds of thousands of German draftees in slave labor camps after the war is over, but self-evidently monstrous to waterboard KSM. To me, that seems backward.
— y81 · Apr 25, 02:32 PM · #
When your shamans have gone mad your tribe is doomed.
— matoko_chan · Apr 25, 02:48 PM · #
Simple: It’s not.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 25, 02:56 PM · #
This also raises a question about the taking of prisoners in a conflict with Muslim terrorists. What is the point of taking prisoners? In state conflicts we take prisoners to take them out of the fight until the war is declared over. Since we no longer can extract information from captured terrorists, what sense does it make to keep them imprisoned for the rest of their lives (sense Islam can never declare the fight to be over)? And what sense will that make 50 years from now when we will face overwhelming numbers compared to today? I would anticipate fewer prisoners being taken in the fighting ahead, and substantially more killing.
— Doug · Apr 25, 10:39 PM · #
Alan, are you contending that Ramesh Ponnuru and anyone at the Corner who disagrees with you is crazy, or are you saying that Ramesh and others are just so inarguably wrong from a moral standpoint (and since he’s Catholic—from a Christian standpoint) that it makes you feel crazy? Is it so that even in the example of the ticking nuke with a million Americans facing death, that the President’s course of action (inaction really) is patently obvious and clear?
— Doug · Apr 25, 10:57 PM · #
Doug, don’t be silly. Not everyone who disagrees with me is crazy. Some of them are evil. Severe mental deficiency is also a possibility, though in my experience not nearly as common as insanity and wickedness.
(Seriously, you should re-read my post. You seem to think it’s about something it’s not about.)
— Alan Jacobs · Apr 26, 02:50 AM · #
I think this may be age-related. After 20-odd years, and perhaps only feeling slightly out of step on a day by day basis, one can wake up at 45 and realize that you’re marching to the beat of a very different drummer
Or perhaps like student quality, it’s cyclical, and after a time people will grow wearing of not giving an inch; of blowing up even the slightest difference of opinion into a life-and-death struggle.
Or perhaps it’s this internet thingo; perhaps the nature of the medium itself promotes a certain sort of interaction between people, while making it difficult to have other sorts of interactions with people that might be equally valuable. One thing I’ve notice doing myself is picking up the phone and calling people at the earliest opportunity. I think part of what I’m trying to do is put a voice with their words to help me towards a gentler inflection when I read.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 26, 11:27 AM · #
“Some of them are evil.”
All of them are either evil or deluded. Remember after 9/11, how stupid the left was? How disgusting their defence of terror was? Remember how they claimed that AQ did it for a reason? This is the same moment for the right. It behoves everyone who considers themselves a conservative to stand up and call this for the undoubted BS that it is.
The intellectual circle-jerk we are witnessing over at the NRO is embarrassing and infuriating in turns. Yes, if you assume “arguendo” that torture works as a policy response, and that that justifies torture, then the torture of thousands of people was justified. But that’s obviously totally idiotic.
We have witnessed a moral failure, a strategic failure, a tactical failure, a legal failure — but this particular right here failure is the failure of intellectuals, the failure of thought. This one is on us.
— vimothy · Apr 26, 03:15 PM · #
Sorry. I only wanted to say that once.
— vimothy · Apr 26, 03:24 PM · #
Alan, I’ve read it a few times (along with three of your books, so I’m fan). It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve the point of everything, but in my misreading I understood you to mean that Ramesh and the other fellow had so minimized the pivotal moral issue that you felt their discussion not worthy of engaging beyond sarcasm and a reference to madness. But what am I missing?
(Would you discuss this with Ramesh in the same way face-to-face? If not, why not? And if not, why does a publicly posted comment warrant what seems like a more personal attack, than would a private discussion?)
— Doug · Apr 26, 06:31 PM · #
Final point: Does not vimothy misread this post the same way that I have?
(Oops: I meant to write in my previous comment “It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve missed the point of everything…”)
— Doug · Apr 26, 06:38 PM · #
Blog posts and even columns can only be so long(although this one’s gonna be my longest ever! Yikes!). So why should Mr. Jacobs assume that Mr. Ponurru is not aware of the problem of having a guy in custody who knows nothing, just because Mr. Ponurru does not allude to it in everything he writes on the subject? And why should this problem decide the issue?
And why should Mr. Jacobs mock Doug’s point that, while apparently lamenting the “ratcheting up of rhetorical aggression,” Mr. Jacobs blames specific people, a specific source, a specific side of the “debate” to make his “when I read this stuff” connection to MADHOUSES and BIG BROTHER? Why should he try to cover his confused(or disingenious) point by mocking Doug?
Honestly, Mr. Jacobs, were you meaning to say that the arguments of BOTH sides remind you of a madhouse? I honestly don’t have a good measure of your character, given your recourse to mockery, and so I honestly don’t know if you simply got carried away and forgot that you meant to lament both sides of the debate. In the above, it’s basically one side that’s to blame—my side, the side that dares to defend what the Bush administration did.
Now, as it happens, I DO think the tone of this “debate” is largely “madhouse” also. And while I acknowledge that there are plenty of populist conservatives whom indulge in crude and baiting justifications, a la, “It’s 9-11, stupid,” or “You can’t handle the truth”(see below), but by no means do I think that their voices began or presently define this “debate” that “we’re” having. I DO think the rhetorical demagoguery began with and largely remains with the anti-Bush side of the debate.
Read the comments on these posts, here and elsewhere in the non-conservative blogosphere. Scores and scores of short, simple, “how can we even be debating this?” comments, and virtually each and every one seem to assume that defenders of the Bushies like me are moral cretins. That’s the overall tone, a shout-down tone.
So where are we now? We’re calling for the criminal trial of those who did the legal leg-work for considering the various options and ramifications of these policies, perhaps also for those who did the ordered deeds, and obviously for those who authorized the policies. We are getting ready, to force real persons, with real bank accounts, to hire lawyers and prepare for the long legal and very public fight. Guys and gals with friends and relatives who will begin to wonder if maybe the prosecutors have a point or two, real parents with real children they will have to try to explain the whole thing to. Real persons who were justly angered and worried by 9-11, who were acting under orders, usually in a time period when more imminent attacks seemed likely, in a time period in which virtually NO Democrats stood up in public and said, “You CIA-type guys, you’d better not be even thinking about doing p, q, and x.” Indeed, Pelosi and others signed off on many of the procedures.
Where will our trials stop? Will we demand that Speaker Pelosi lawyer up too? By what rationale will we target only certain persons for criminal prosecution?
HOW will doing this help the Obama administration, help the cause of liberalism? Or, for you anti-torture conservatives and moderates, HOW will this help the nation?
The trials probably won’t happen, BTW,for the reasons given above. Or one or two will.
And at that point, those of you who have compounded your error by further insisting that the most authoritive standard of criminality and morality is binding-on-every-government International Law, will really be up shit-creek in terms of consistency. Because at that point, with no trials, or only a pathetic two or three probably with maybe one guilty verdict at best, our President Obama will be, by YOUR VERY LOGIC, guilty of obstructing international justice. It is insane, but that’s where the logic takes us if we actually take the words of many of you seriously.
So how did we get to this ugly point? This point of simplistic, distinctions-erasing, mob-think?
Some torture denouncers are best explained by BDS, you know, “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” which is a cute way of labelling a much deeper leftist malady that we can’t go into here.
Others, are best explained by calculation of political advantage. Certain amoral Democratic partisans saw that this was a debate they could not lose so long as they kept it at a simple level. The word “torture” was, rhetorically speaking, like a super-weapon. The enemy had chosen indefensible ground in any demagogic word-war.
But the most important explanation is that we got here because many of us really were trying to take the moral high road and not get seduced by the dangers of the 9-11 moment into accepting the morally unacceptable. Indeed, although you’d hardly know it from Mr. Jacobs’ characterization, folks like Ponurru from the beginning said, “there are some things we can NEVER do, in ANY circumstances.” It’s just that most of us did not see, as a man like Ponurru did, that there might be a way to honor a natural-law-like absolute prohibition and still honor the also natural demand for political prudence. Do the likes of Ponurru succeed in this morally dicey search for the morally safest position between absolute prohibitions and prudential allowances for extraordinary situations? Well, read their work and decide for yourself.
But precisely because for many, the whole debate was reduced to the quick calculus of A) “what belongs in the class of things called torture,” and B) “we all know that torture is always in all situations unacceptable,” the more thoughtful thinking which the likes of Ponurru were conducting tended to be ignored or shouted down. The inquiry around A) was conducted very broadly, precisely because the administration was seeking to do things that lay at the borderline of our understanding of what torture was. And so the borderline now has shifted, for the opponents of the policy, to include virtually any form of interrogation in which “the aim is to break the spirit of the person” (A. Sullivan says something like this) or which makes the person fear death or other grave consequences. That is, their logic has now extended itself well into any interrogation that involves deception or distress.
Worse, not only has the class of A) Torture expanded quite questionably, but there seems to be refusal to acknowledge the grades existing within the class. Again, read about what the French let themselves slide into doing in Algeria. But no-one who has read about what Soviets, Nazis, and Baathists did can refuse to acknowledge that it was a lesser evil by far. I think we can say it was a lesser grade of torture, both in terms of the procedures, and in terms of the aim of the torture. I do not say this to excuse the French failure here, but to say that I think it would be DISGUSTING to equate what they did with what the Soviets and co. did. But if all “torture” is equally abominable to us, then we ARE equating these troubled Frenchmen with the beasts of the Cheka. Read the Gulag Archipelago, and Horne’s A Savage War of Peace.
And, if we do have our trials, the evidence will show that we never even approached what the French were typically doing. Horne doesn’t see this.
The basic story here is that the “trying to take the moral high road folks” have let themselves become way too influenced by the BDS-ers and those promoting the demogogic potentials of the word “torture.”
Amittedly, the history of our usage of the word “torture” is partly the problem here. We all had a pretty clear idea of what it was, and in the eras of basically rule-honoring uniformed combatants, there was little need to even consider where its boundary on the “light” side lay, and thus little awareness that that boundary could be difficult to draw. And so, once the consensus grew that what we typically thought torture to be was unnacceptable, we gradually came to hear the word as denoting evil simply. Now futher back, once upon a time, Westerners heard the word “torture” and for them it was like the word “abortion” is today—the description of a procedure, yes, categorically rejected by some, but one that politically aware persons could talk about with a convention neutrality or objectivity. I.e., “The King is going to torure the plotters” was not a slam-dunk statement convicting the King in everyone’s ears of unnacceptable immorality.
Perhaps, “abortion” once denoted for almost all what I really think it is, “prenatal murder.” As I noted here before, with respect to abortion, I do not insist upon labelling the debate as being about “prenatal murder.” I do not speak about “defenders of prenatal murder” or the “controversy over prenatal murder,” whereas Bush’s opponents have succeeded in framing this debate as a “debate about torture,” not about “coercive interrogation,” and many act as if by asking them to use the latter I’m asking them to engage in some horridly absurd Orwellian exercise. I do not do the same with respect to my use of the term “abortion.” And in that debate, I’m often earnestly schooled about how, with such a “controversial” issue about such a “hard moral decision” that I must try to calm things down, and that I must adopt the moderate pro-choice position of letting the evil happen so as to avoid the (supposedly) greater evil of government policing of it. But on this interrogation debate, notice that when folks like me try to talk up the complexity of the thing, what I typically get is DISBELIEF THAT ANYONE CAN ASK US TO CONSIDER THESE DIFFICULTIES, or a quick dismissal of them. Now I know the two cases are made vastly different by one being a private action and the other being executive branch action, but you can see why I feel unjustly treated by the rhetorical handling of them.
And consider for a moment one more way the word “abortion” compares to the word “torture.” There is no debate about when an abortion has occurred: it occurs when an unborn human being or thing is killed. We do ask ourselves, “Has toruture occurred here?” but we never ask ourselves “Has an abortion occured here?” No such thing as a “Soviet-grade” or “French-in-Algeria-grade” abortion, whereas these distinctions really must be made with respect to torture, and other distinctions particularly must be made the borderline we are trying to define(See my comments in the “Few Good Men” thread below).
I do commend those American trying to, as they understand it, not compromise with evil, and not take a relativistic stance to morality. I just think too few of them have properly considered the complexities of this issue, and the motives of their allies in the debate. And now, they are going to have to decide if they really understand all this enough to put real people on real trial according to a consistent criterion.
Mr. Jacobs, American Scenesters, do you think of yourselves as moderates? Are you for civility? Really for it? Then oppose the lynch-mob mentality that has developed on this issue, and do so with vigor.
— Carl Scott · Apr 26, 06:40 PM · #
Doug, I thought you had misread my post because you commented about the President’s decisions, and my post didn’t mention the president or any presidential decisions. I didn’t even discuss the merits or demerits of torturing enemy combatants, though I have made my views on the subject clear. I wrote a post about one thing: how it’s possible to get yourself to the point (as Ponnuru has) where it seems reasonable to say that there’s no significant difference, in the experience of torture, between being a prisoner held without charge and being a soldier undergoing training. Or to say that there’s simply no difference at all in the matter of freedom. That seems self-evidently nonsensical to me, so either Ponnuru and his reader are out there where the buses don’t run or I am.
And Doug — and everyone else — let’s try not to be too literal-minded in these matters, okay? If I make a reference to being in a madhouse, I’m not literally talking about insanity, you know? I am not claiming that I am on the verge of being institutionalized, or that I think Ramesh Ponnuru should be. It’s a way of saying that I can’t follow the logic of Ponnuru’s comments at all. Our language would be a pathetic thing indeed f we purged it of metaphors and figures of speech.
— Alan Jacobs · Apr 26, 08:57 PM · #
You remember how in grade school, we all learned how, despite having the components in- and flammable, inflammable doesn’t mean ‘not flammable’. Similarly, thoughtful doesn’t mean ‘full of thoughts’. In a similar reversal, it actually refers to the process of winnowing down from all possible thoughts on a subject to only those which are actually illuminating, in the process rejecting those that are irrational, irrelevant and nonsensical. In that spirit, I would like to thank Prof. Jacobs for a thoughtful post. Thanks also for your comment, Mr. Scott; it was full of thoughts.
— Bo · Apr 26, 09:54 PM · #
Thanks Alan. I did not realize that you weren’t literally ready to check yourself into a mental institution. And here I was plotting a rescue plan to bust you out! Well that’s a relief. As for every nearly every commentator’s discussion of the merits or demerits of torture (and God knows where everyone got that idea), let’s just chalk it up to total audience failure.
— Doug · Apr 27, 01:46 AM · #
Thank you for entering into the spirit, Doug! — and of course this is all about torture. But sometimes it’s worthwhile to break a situation down into its component parts. You can make a case for torture, or “enhanced interrogation,” without making the kinds of absurd claims Ponnuru and his reader make. Sometimes it’s worth trying to clear away the accumulated refuse in order to see the situation more clearly. Or so I think, being in this matter a party of one, I guess.
— Alan Jacobs · Apr 27, 12:50 PM · #
Don’t call it “lynch-mob mentality”, call it “enhanced debate.”
— Chet · Apr 27, 02:53 PM · #
You can make a case for torture, or “enhanced interrogation,” without making the kinds of absurd claims Ponnuru and his reader make.
Correction/clarification: neither Ponnuru nor his reader explicitly make a case for torture in the posts I quote, and Ponnuru has made it clear that he opposes torture. My apologies.
— Alan Jacobs · Apr 27, 09:36 PM · #
Dear Prof. Jacobs,
I can’t believe that nobody has complimented you for the apt 1984 references. I’m flattered to be the first. Perhaps the only.
I write because I’m somewhat appalled at the zeal with which those who have made comments are eager to engage in frivolous argument. If C.S. Lewis were around, I’m sure he would ask, “Don’t they teach logic anymore in the schools these days?” Or words to that effect.
I think you’re aware that there is a lot more for you to offer on this matter, regardless of the reaction of people who would rather engage others with “enhanced debating techniques.”
Nat Stone, Wheaton ’00
— Nat Stone · May 1, 04:53 PM · #