the fact, for example, that non-violence is a basic tenet in all major religions suggests that we’re also genetically coded to be compassionate.

sesquipedalian on April 23, 2009 at 2:02 PM

lol….the nonviolence is only extended to ones’ memetic or genetic tribe.
There is cooperation in nature….the jury is still out on altruism.

strangelet on April 23, 2009 at 1:24 PM

the fact, for example, that non-violence is a basic tenet in all major religions suggests that we’re also genetically coded to be compassionate.

i still find the argument that historical precedent justifies torturing people vacuous. i despise reflexive hitler analogies,

No, it is a strong argument…….but not directly the argument of history, but the argument of biology.
Homo sapiens sapiens is both warlike and tribal.
History is the field lab of evo bio.

i still find the argument that historical precedent justifies torturing people vacuous. i despise reflexive hitler analogies, but he also had plenty of historical precedent for expanding the german lebensraum and exterminating other peoples in the process. that obviously doesn’t make it acceptable.

stay tuned, sesqui, strangelet, and symparanekromenoi, I’ve got some errands to run and some captives to torment this afternoon, but I expect to have plenty of evil and spleen still in the tank later on.

CK MacLeod on April 23, 2009 at 12:55 PM

Lol
You continue to delight.
Since you are The Mathematikos of this blog, Sesqui and I must needs be aukosmatikoi.
We await revelation.

i can’t see how rejecting systematic torture wrapped in fake legality and acknowledging the necessity of collateral casualties in a conflict is contradictory.

I think I scored a touch.

Touche!

en garde!

sesquipedalian on April 23, 2009 at 12:26 PM

Egagee! Parry huit!
My sempai, Dr. Manzi, articulates the Highlander’s SUBSTANTIVE point quite well.

First, I think it is important to segregate the cases of “legal, but secret” from extralegal. I skipped all three years of law school, but I’ll use a layman’s working definition of legal in this context as something like “authorized and funded by Congress and undertaken by the Executive in accordance with the powers granted under the Constitution”. By illustrative example, “the OSS boys” being “funded and overseen by Congress with a defined chain of command running up through the Executive branch to the President, and having a defined set of procedures and bureaucratic oversight for Torture 2 vetted by lawyers, for which equipment and facilities are provided by the relevant authority” would be something that I mean by legal. On the other hand, “a small team of OSS agents that has just parachuted into occupied France holds a gun to the head of a German soldier and demands to know where the fuel depot is, and then fails to report what they did once they get back to base” is what I mean by extralegal. I assume that lots of extralegal Torture 2 has happened throughout modern American history. The statement that there might have been some secret, systematic and legal Torture 2 infrastructure in the modern United States is, by the definition of “secret”, a statement that can never be falsified – you can’t prove a negative – but I’m pretty skeptical about the capacity of the U.S. government to keep secrets like that over a long period of time. As both you and I have said, however, I would welcome more information on whether such a secret, legal infrastructure was deployed by our government in modern history.

en garde!

your arguments are vacuous because they essentially represent a “let’s look the other way” stance. you exhibit a level of tolerance for human suffering that makes it difficult not to be scornful.

sesqui, the Highlander’s arguments are NOT vacuous.
They may be wrong, but they are substantive.
Retract that or draw your sword.

i’m glad to see the vacuity of your arguments challenged by others as well. torturers shouldn’t be safe from scorn anywhere.

sesquipedalian on April 23, 2009 at 12:12 PM

And I’m sorry to see you draw back from the respectful form or our exchange on the other thread, and isntead reverting to your reflexively derisive and pre-judging modus operandi. If you find my arguments vacuous, you may leave, and never return. If your objective reduces to heaping scorn on me or anyone, merely for the thought-crime of disagreeing with you on this subject, then you and your posts are not welcome.

CK MacLeod on April 23, 2009 at 10:05 AM

i’m glad to see the vacuity of your arguments challenged by others as well. torturers shouldn’t be safe from scorn anywhere.

Bybee will judged by a jury of his peers…the Bar Association.
That is the American Way.

It was classified so WE wouldn’t know what they were doing.

It was classified because how many sheets of paper your secretary’s secretary is using is classified during wartime.

The American people were, overall, fine with the knowledge that bad things were being done to bad people in their name. If on 9/12 GW Bush had sadly informed the country that protecting our cities required nuking Tora Bora, he would have gotten nods and more than a few cheers from Manhattan to Hollywood.

I already conceded Highlander.
There is no torture/ everybody tortures.
Make up your mind.

strangelet on April 23, 2009 at 11:49 AM

Not my burden. I’m not the one trying to sell Jay Bybee down the river, wash my hands and plead “not my fault” if worse comes to worst, and call everyone who disagrees Torquemada, Jr.

It was classified so WE wouldn’t know what they were doing.
So the American People wouldn’t know America was torturing.

You are responsible, Alyoshalet, whether you dirty your hands or not

Liar.
That was compartment codeword classified.
When the first stories of torture leaked, I couldn’t believe it.
I said, not my country, never.
My country doesn’t torture.

And that’s one of the problems with the “shocks the conscience” (aka, “closest available high horse”) standard: What shocks the conscience on 9/10 or on 4/22/09 is a lot different from what shocks the conscience on 9/12, or what may or may not shock the conscience on 4/22/10. At the beginning of World War II, “area bombing” shocked the conscience. By the end of World War II, we were burning up whole cities.

It would shock my conscience to accept the risk to thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians – both in the unstaunched terror campaign and the war that would have inevitably followed it (and made Afghanistan and Iraq look like Tea Party protests) – because of squeamishness over plunging KSM’s face in water several times an hour on a series of afternoons. Call it torture or call it getting rough: No one cares what you think of my relationship to the words, and they’d care even less about anyone’s feelings about their feelings in the rubble of whatever un-averted aftermath.

I could not do it.

I YOU ABSOLUTELY don’t. And neither so does Shep.

See how easy that was. In fact, you and Shep and sesquipedalian and Andrew Sullivan and Green Glennwald not only support torture, but are avid fans of torture, happy torturers, every one of you.

I support a minimum sufficient and timely application of physical force based on well-grounded contingency, subject to consultation and review torture.

I don’t. And neither does Shep.

KSM wasn’t an innocent child, but where do you draw the line? Would you torture an innocent child to get his suspected terrorist father to talk?

As I said to our comrade sesqui, strangelet, this isn’t a sequel to SAW. I support a minimum sufficient and timely application of physical force based on well-grounded contingency, subject to consultation and review, not sophomoric would-you-pimp-your-wife-to-Robert-Redford for $1 MM, or cut-off-your-finger-to-save-your-dog’s life games.

I believe definitions of torture will always be contingent,

I hear you…..THERE IS NO TORTURE.
Then why change the definition in secret?
Why bother to classify the memos redefining torture as not-torture?

You say there is no line that we cannot and willnot cross to protect ourselves.
I say that is an old question, and one you secretly know the answer to, Highlander.
Like Ivan’s question to Alyosha–

“Imagine you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature . . . to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?”

So you would torture to protect our country?
Just admit it, and quit trying to weasel word it.
KSM wasn’t an innocent child, but where do you draw the line? Would you torture an innocent child to get his suspected terrorist father to talk?
More Dostoyevsky….

“Neither man or nation can exist without a sublime idea.”

Millions o’ wimmen bring forth in pain
Millions o’ bairns that are no’ worth ha’en

Hugh MacDiarmid

I also think you’re over-interpreting – in a kind of Lucy with the football way – my Charlie Brown willingness to play your game theory game.

It’s the anti-torturists who are convinced, like your friend Schwenkler, that they know what torture is exactly, and what implications incontrovertibly follow – by sufficient necessity to condemn a set of public servants who were coping with what they, and as or more important the public, considered an emergency situation. We know the public considered it an emergency situation, because the public overwhelmingly supported war and all that war entails, and the public wouldn’t support war just for the fun of it, would it? We know that the public was still feeling urgent enough about it to support a second war by levels measured in the 70% range at its commencement and throughout the first major episode. The vast majority of the citizens of this nation, including several ardent anti-torturists, were worried enough to tell Generation Kill to go for it, and to marvel in advance at shock and awe and then to make up justifications for that little dismembered bomb victim’s agonies – and to take an chance on things going badly, worse even than they did, even during the whole ruckus that followed and that eventually led more than half conveniently to flee responsibility when the movie’s sequels ceased to please.

I believe definitions of torture will always be contingent, as will attitudes toward torture and every other gradation of violence between a caress and… use your own imagination, and I support a policy flexible enough to deal with that fact, without pretense to moral certainty, especially retrospective moral certainties. I support a policy that looks at the full range of known reactions to threats and violence by human polities, and so is in a position to conduct itself with reason and perspective the next time the torture of a nation breaks that nation’s will to suffer quietly and helplessly – as it will.

Throngs of knights and barons bold
In weeds of peace high triumphs hold
With store of ladies fair whose eyes
Rain influence and judge the prize
Of wit or arms, while both contend
To win her grace……..whom all commend.

good thing you specced dual weild.