Where We Agree with Obama and the Anti-Torture Mavens

posted at 1:56 pm on April 21, 2009 by CK MacLeod
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I wrote much of this post a couple of days ago, but felt reluctant to plunge back into this topic.  Unfortunately, the anti-torture campaigners clearly aren’t done:  They seem to get a kick out of psychologically torturing the supposed torturers and torture-supporters, and they’re back for another fix.  With Obama’s and his AG’s latest comments regarding possible prosecution of Bush Administration personnel, the addiction and the agony may be intensifying.

At the linked post, Ed Morrissey sheds light on the legal thicket that Obama may be ready to rush into, and many commenters and counter-commenters seem, as ever, ready to set the thicket on fire.  Yet, for all that, and even if the seemingly uncontrollable compulsiveness of torture-obsessives makes conservatives dubious about their motives, about their political judgment, about their national security instincts, about their moral depth, and sometimes about their sanity, at the same time it does partly reinforce their theme – and so do the borderline and over-the-line reactions to today’s thoughtful and earnest Green Room post by Legal Insurrection, in which he asked a rhetorical question meant to appall – Which City Would You Sacrifice? – and received a bit-torrent of decreasingly funny answers.

Torture – including rough, violent interrogation methods that many decline to refer to as “torture” – always threatens to unleash forces that are difficult to control and take account of, in all those connected to it.   We have every good reason to treat it like the psychologically and politically radioactive substance that it is without indulging in fantasies about eliminating it and anything like it, or the moral issues it raises, from our lives.

Here, I believe, is the one place where Obama and the anti-torture mavens are right, and where we can and must agree with them:  It should be difficult to torture, or to get anywhere near torture.  Testing our traditional limits on interrogation should be one of the most difficult decisions our public servants ever take upon themselves.  No one should feel justified in doubting that, even when being put on the defensive by trolls and mega-trolls and now the Commander-in-Chief, the vast majority of conservatives, like the vast majority of our fellow citizens, remain strongly protective of the individual – even a foreign individual, suspected of the worst – and committed to limiting  the state’s freedom to work evil, even supposed lesser evil, in our name.

There are spots on one of those famous slippery slopes between what the Bush Administration really was and the “terror state” of Sullivan-Greenwald fever dreams where we can draw back, where we have drawn back, from the abyss, but there are probably as many or more where we could trip and fall beyond return, and I say this as someone who’s come down I hope strongly on the side of our interrogators.  Anyone who insists, as some of us may be moved to do from time to time, that there’s anything easy or simple about the issue, does the Bush people an injustice – underrates the care they took to stay within the American tradition, and underestimates the risks they were taking for our benefit.

In an earlier post on the torture issue, I tried to make it clear that I consider the actions of the Office of Legal Counsel as detailed in the so-called “torture memos” to be eminently defensible.  Even if you don’t read the entire post, it’s still worth noting the comments from fellow Green Roomer coldwarrior on the authors and how seriously they took their responsibilities.  In short, though many of us find ourselves distinctly un-appalled by the methods and events detailed in the memos, fairly easily balancing the lesser evil of rough interrogation against the greater evil of new terrorist acts, it wasn’t a balancing that the lawyers and CIA operatives, and those above them, took lightly.

We give medals and other special honors to veterans to help restore them to full membership in society after having asked them to “do things” that are incompatible with normal civil life and common morality.   The men who waterboarded Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed, likely saving thousands of lives, are now denied rewards and recognition.  Instead, they’re nowadays frequently vilified, treated – quoting President Obama – as enemies of our “core values,” as authors of a “dark and painful chapter in our history.”  Calls for witch hunts and prosecutions, or for the impeachment of memo-author Jay Bybee, now a Federal Judge, further underscore the real personal and professional risks that OLC lawyers and CIA personnel took in order to perform their duty as they saw it.  (Even people who merely speak out on their behalf, or who criticize the critics, are attacked in the harshest terms, their arguments distorted and the worst light shone on them.)

Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, the nutroots, the churlish trolls presuming on their welcome at open registration sites – they’re the extremists, and, along with the Obama Administration, they seem intent on testing the sturdiness of their moral postures at the expense of other people’s reputations, our citizens’ lives, and our country’s future.   At the same time, however, they put themselves and their dear leader in a minority position that the public will someday reject in the strongest possible terms.

We can condemn their arguments and their approach, but we shouldn’t let them force us off the solid ground that Bush’s people left themselves and us to stand on, into some other, equally unsupportable, equally self-destructive extreme.

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