Okay, more torture

This is almost funny:

Why is it that if this person...says the words “I surrender” that it suddenly becomes wrong to punch him in the face hard enough to make him bleed? Not prudentially foolish, but morally wrong?

G.K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, spoke about how it is easy to argue for something if you partially believe it, but almost impossible if you fully believe it. His example was that, since he fully believed in Christianity, when someone asked him why it was right he said something like, "the rocks and the trees and the sky", because all these things--because everything--was evidence to him of the reality of God.

I'm feeling similarly these days. I just don't even know how to respond to this. I don't understand what first principles Manzi is operating from. I just don't know how to engage this sort of argument. Everything in my being knows that this sort of statement is dead wrong. I'm just dumbfounded. I think that Larison makes a pretty good argument here--that when surrendering the soldier becomes a noncombatant, and that just killing noncombatants isn't something that civilized countries do. Manzi says that this doesn't matter because the soldier can escape, which is irrelevant as the soldier isn't a risk until they do that, at which point they become combatants again.

I also agree with John Cole's assessment: "[T]hey are mobilizing and going balls to the wall in defense of sadism. It is really quite amazing, and a testament to just how sick and detestable and rotten to the core the Republican party has become." And it's not going to pay dividends. The Obama Administration is going to release pictures of the torture detainees. There's going to be art on this shit. There's no way they're going to be able to huff and puff against pictures of bloody faces that our government made. Right now it's an abstraction, but it won't be. It didn't have to be like this: the Republicans could have said that the Bush era is done, that investigations were proper--in essence, they could have cut Dubya loose. They didn't, though, cause the libruls hated him, and you can't let the libruls win. Just my opinion, but I don't see anyone else with a better one.

But, really, if you think that hurting or killing somebody who poses no threat to you isn't obviously wrong--even if they could potentially be a threat to you (or not) at some point in the distant future--then our moral principles are so far apart that I don't even know how to engage you.

Against a Truth and Reconciliation Commission

I'm afraid I don't really see how this makes sense. It did make sense in South Africa in the 1990s for a few reasons: for one thing, Apartheid upholders weren't breaking any law at the time. Morally awful as they were, they were following the laws of South Africa at the time, and putting them on trial would necessarily have meant trying them under ex post facto laws, something which is dicey and is, by the way, forbidden under the United States Constitution. But in a broader sense the Apartheiders committed moral infractions on such a grand scale that it's almost impossible to come up with a law to fit their crimes. It's similar to upholders of slavery in the United States: what were you going to do, throw every White Southerner into jail? Clearly that could never have been a plausible course of action, and going down such a path would invariably lead to lots of witch hunts. So criminal action didn't make sense for South Africa after Apartheid.

These conditions do not apply to Bush-era lawbreakers. There were laws on the books against torture that were wantonly broken, so there is no worry about an ex post facto situation. And instead of the sort of massive injustice we were dealing with when we talk about slavery, in which an entire ethnic group was brutally subjugated and mistreated as a matter of government policy. Here it was still a small group of people who were definitely mistreated, to some extent because of ethnicity, but the scale is vastly different, and between Abu Gharaib and a reading of Jane Mayer's The Dark Side you can sort of get a handle on what the Bush Administration did. So I think that, aside from political messiness, prosecuting Bush Administration officials has to remain the preferred alternative. This doesn't mean that every CIA interrogator who dabbled in a bit of the dark side ought to be dragged in front of a jury--as far as they knew, they were following orders they believed to be legal. The architects of these policies--specifically David Addington, John Yoo, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales and George W. Bush--ought to have to explain themselves to the people. I doubt this would happen unless subpoenaed and forced to testify under oath.

Of course, it will never happen, and a TRC isn't the worst of all possible worlds--it's not a bad consolation prize, and getting all of Bush's dirt into the public record forever ought to rightly preclude any posthumous resurrection of Bush's reputation. What confuses me about the Bush team's conduct on this is that they insist they got good legal commentary from John Yoo's shop, but they seem to be terrified of a full public airing of all of this dirty laundry. Why would they be, if they were acting according to the law? They're indirectly admitting that they knew Yoo's bullshit was just that: a thin veneer to break the law to "protect America" which, curiously, had not needed their particular brand of protection before they showed up.

One other thing that annoys me about the interrogation discussion is that the discussion always focuses on which methods to use (i.e. is waterboarding torture) rather than on whether interrogations are simply done effectively, like the FBI has been doing (and doing pretty well, by all accounts). What do you know, staffing federal agencies with competent folks who are serious about their jobs (as in the Clinton years) often makes a difference in keeping people safe. Or you can appoint Don Rumsfeld, George Tenet (yes, he was a Clinton appointee, but still), Feith, Yoo, etc., and get the results Bush got. It often seems like debates on interrogation policy revolve around finding some sort of magic bullet to get enormous scads of intelligence, but good old-fashioned intelligence and law enforcement seem to do just as well as any of the alternatives, and often better. And they don't require ceding our souls.