Enhanced Interrogation Works -- But Don't Tell Anybody

Allahpundit observes:

Watch the goalposts move. First the left insisted that America doesn't torture as a matter of simple morality, whether or not that means another round of crashing airplanes forcing office-dwellers to swan-dive off of skyscrapers. That one didn't fly, so they shifted to the cagier argument that enhanced interrogation never, ever, ever, ever, evah works — ever — except that Cheney and Obama's own DNI claim that it does, and now a majority of the public believes them. In fact, according to Gallup, Pelosi's slo-mo meltdown over what she knew about waterboarding has left her credibility so thoroughly shot that she's almost exactly as popular as Darth Cheney himself.

Cornered, the Democrats make the only move left that they can make: After eight years of leaks aimed at kneecapping every aspect of Bush's counterterror program, they've suddenly decided that … leaks are bad.

....Republicans on the panel said that not only did the use of interrogation techniques come up Thursday, but that the data shared about those techniques proved they had led to valuable information that in some instances prevented terrorist attacks…

"The hearing did address the enhanced interrogation techniques that have been much in the news lately," [GOP Rep. Jon] Kline said, noting that he was intentionally choosing his words carefully in observance of the committee rules and the nature of the information presented.

"Based on what I heard and the documents I have seen, I came away with a very clear impression that we did gather information that did disrupt terrorist plots," Kline said.

Note that no Democrat interviewed for the Hill's piece disagrees with Kline's conclusion, just that they're pissed that he chose to say anything. Like Tom Maguire says, given that The One already published the details of our interrogation techniques by releasing the torture memos, what damage is done to national security by the GOP insisting that EIT works? There's plenty of political damage done to the left, but surely angry Democrats' only concern with leaks is how it complicates protecting America, no? Exit question: How exactly did the GOP congressmen who talked to the Hill reveal any more or less than Carl Levin did last week when he denied that those two memos Cheney wants declassified confirm that EIT is effective? Neither he nor the Republicans revealed any information beyond asserting whether it works or whether it doesn't. Double standard, anyone?

Inside Catholic on Tiller

An article at Inside Catholic (HT: The Anchoress):

Things are looking pretty good for Dr. George Tiller, and he goes to his local house of worship to thank his particular god for the triumph of moral sanity in this country. Then someone bursts in with a gun and shoots him down right in front of his family and the entire congregation, someone who turns out to be a longtime schizophrenic with flimsy ties to the uttermost fringe of the pro-life movement, whose obsession is waging an anarchist war against the "tyrannical" U.S. government.

The group with which the apparent assassin, Scott Roeder, 51, had kept some connection was, according to LifeSiteNews, "the so-called Army of God, a group that advocates domestic terror, violence, and murder against abortion facilities and those who work there." To find an equivalently outlaw and irrelevant pro-choice organization, you'd have to turn to the Church of Euthanasia – a group led by the flamboyant transvestite Chris Korda, which celebrates abortion along with pandemics, natural disasters, and the deaths on 9/11, since they cull the "dangerously high" human population. (Check out its home page for an image of Korda licking the World Trade Center tower as one of the high-jacked planes plows into the side. Is this the face of pro-choice America? Maybe it's time we started insisting it really is.)
....
But there is a serious point that nestles here behind all the bull-hockey and fulminations: If we as pro-lifers really believe that a million or so American children are being murdered every year, why don't we do something about it directly? We rightly use metaphors recalling the Holocaust, U.S. chattel slavery, and other atrocious assaults on human dignity – and if we think those through, we will remember that they were ended not by pacifist prayer chains but armies in battle. People who say that "violence never solves anything" should come to Germany, where I'm staying this week. The flags here are different than they were in 1945, and my father who served under Patton that year said that the transition wasn't seamless.

Like 99.9 percent of pro-lifers, I do not advocate the use of armed force to end abortion today. But I want to be clear about why.It's not because the use of force is wrong; it isn't. When Gandhi told Jews to employ non-violent resistance against the Germans, he proved himself an ass. Non-violence worked against the British because that empire was possessed of two things that didn't exist in Germany: a strong moral conscience and an open-minded press.
....
The reason it's wrong to kill abortionists is that it is an act of war, and one that does not meet the conditions for a Just War.

When the State allows an activity, and you use force to prevent it, you are declaring war on the State -- as surely as early Christians would have been doing if they used force to free their co-religionists from the Coliseum, or free Roman slaves from the mines or prostitution. None of which, students of history will know, early Christians actually did. This wasn't because they were pacifists; many Christians served in the Roman armies, such as that patron of soldiers St. Sebastian. Some early version of the Just War theory finally formulated (not invented) by St. Augustine was surely at work. That Just War theory found in Augustine's writings still binds us today – albeit with certain adjustments and clarifications to cover cases of legitimate revolt against a tyranny, and speculations by the likes of Robert Bellarmine on the rightness or wrongness of killing tyrants.

If, by engaging in organized violence to save lives left unprotected by the State, one is indeed declaring war upon that State, the conditions of Just War teaching must be met – or else you are nothing more than a terrorist, an irresponsible person (like poor, deluded Guy Fawkes) whose actions will do nothing more than encourage a persecution of the Church.

What are the conditions for a war (in this case, a revolution) to be just? You can read them in detail here, but central to them are: A just cause, defending the innocent from attack. (Check.)

A situation that long experience has shown cannot be resolved by peaceful means. (Not yet, not by any means; impatience with rejiggering the Supreme Court doesn't equal the presence of the Gestapo.)

An evil proportionate to the evils that will come from war. (Not clear at all; see the horrors of the civil strife in Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Palestine -- are we ready to inflict all that upon our neighbors?)

A reasonable chance of success. (Would a civil war launched by orthodox Christians against America's secular regime end in a just peace that preserved innocent lives? Or millions of dead, and a de-Christianized America? Would "winning" even be worth it – given what happened to the Church in Spain shortly after the "friendly" regime installed by Franco passed from the stage – when Catholics were tarred, rightly or wrongly, with all the crimes of the victors?)

Yes, words mean things. If you refer to abortion as murder, you have to be prepared to defend the refusal to take action you would take if a neighbor were being murdered in front of you.

I don't know if this is sufficient.

The Anchoress on Tiller's murder

Posted at First Things.
Among other things:

Bonhoeffer was a brilliant theologian; his book The Cost of Discipleship is one of those books a Christian reader goes back to again and again in the course of growth. In weighing the moral question of obedience to institutions who were exceeding their own rights, he once argued, "if a teacher says to a child, 'did your father come home drunk again last night,' is the child bound to tell the truth?" Bonhoeffer decided no, the teacher [institution] had intruded beyond her scope, and therefore the child, to honor his father, is not obligated to subject him to judgment or mockery, or for that matter governmental intrusion. Bonhoeffer was, in the course of a terrible war, able to extrapolate that small, defensive lie into a plot to assassinate Hitler.

....
As extraordinary as he was, Bonhoeffer understood that his uniqueness in no way excepted him from the fact that what he was attempting was an evil—his evil, wholly distinct from Hitler's own evil—and one for which he would be held to account. Bonhoeffer knew that he could not rationalize his evil or make it less evil in the sight of Hitler's monstrous regime, and that in the end he would have only God's grace in which to hope.

And...

Tiller, despite his choices, was still a created creature of God, and his life was God's to take, not man's; who is to know at what point in a man's life he will suddenly, like Paul on the road to Damascus, be brought to his knees with an encounter, and then seek out mercy, forgiveness, and the saving blood of Christ he will need to wash away the blood he has himself spilled? There is no man or woman on earth who is beyond this redemption while they live. If you take his life, have you interrupted the time and opportunity that, in Christ's plan, in Christ's fullness of time, would have been his moment of clarity? If so, then what have you done to your own soul, in cutting short the opportunity for his soul to find its redemption?

(Though personally, I've never understood why death should be that much of an obstacle for an all-powerful being.)

blog

http://www.yankodesign.com/: A survey of some innovative designs.

Obamanopoly

http://atrueobamanation.blogspot.com/2009/06/new-game-in-town.html

Releases from Gitmo

From AP News:

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — As visiting journalists walked by, two of the inmates held up sketch pads on which they had scribbled "We need freedom." One of them shouted: "Is Obama communist or democrat?"

The protesters were Uighurs, Chinese Muslims swept up in the Bush administration's Afghanistan war, and their brief protest was indicative of the frustration building up in the Guantanamo Bay prison over the likelihood that freedom will take longer than they expected after Barack Obama became president and ordered the prison closed by January.

In Obama's less than five months in office, the U.S. military has opened communal spaces and started building a new classroom in the prison, and some cell blocks now have satellite television, DVDs and wireless headphones. But nearly half the detainees are still locked up alone for most of the day, and one of every eight prisoners is on hunger strike.

Shane Kadidal, who meets with detainees as an attorney with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, said expectations for dramatic change have ebbed. He said prisoners know that only two prisoners have been released since Obama took office, compared with more than 500 under the administration of former President George W. Bush.

"They're saying, 'At least Bush sent some people home,'" he said.

Some inmates report an increase in hostilities as guards clash with inmates counting down the months to the January deadline.

"Oppression has increased," wrote Adnan Latif, a Yemeni detainee, in an April letter shortly before he slashed his wrist while meeting his attorney. "The best thing that I can hope for is death."

On Monday night a Yemeni detainee was found dead in his cell, an "apparent suicide," the military said.

Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, a 31-year-old Yemeni, had been held here since February 2002 and was the fifth apparent suicide in the prison. Like most Guantanamo inmates, he was never charged.

The U.S. is seeking foreign governments willing to take in some of Guantanamo's remaining 240 detainees. It plans to keep holding about 65 prisoners slated for prosecution and dozens of other al-Qaida and Taliban suspects who cannot be tried for lack of evidence or other reasons.

Holder on torture

From NRO:

There was a little noticed bombshell in Washington's waterboarding melodrama last week. And it wasn't Nancy Pelosi's implosion in a Capitol Hill press room, where she yet again tried to explain her inexplicable failure to protest the CIA's "torturing" of detainees. No, this one detonated in the hearing room of the House Judiciary Committee. There, Attorney General Eric Holder inadvertently destroyed the warped basis for his claim that waterboarding, as administered by the CIA, amounted to torture.

As originally reported by Connie Hair of Human Events, Holder's undoing was the result of deft questioning by two committee Republicans: Dan Lungren, California's former state attorney general, and Louie Gohmert, the former chief judge of a Texas appeals court. The two congressmen highlighted a fatal flaw in Holder's theory. Moreover, they demonstrated that — despite having accused the CIA and the Bush administration of war crimes by cavalierly branding waterboarding as "torture" — the attorney general has still not acquainted himself with the legal elements of a torture offense, particularly the required mental state. This is remarkable, given that Holder's own department explained these elements less than a month ago in a federal appeals court brief.

Rep. Lungren pointed out that if the attorney general truly believes "waterboarding is torture," he must also think we torture our own Navy SEALs and other special-operations personnel when we waterboard them as part of their training. "No . . . not in the legal sense," countered Holder. You see, said he, it's "a fundamentally different thing," because

we're doing something for training purposes to try to equip them with the tools to, perhaps, resist torture techniques that might be used on them. There is not the intent to do that which is defined as torture — which is to inflict serious bodily or mental harm. It's for training. It's different.

But it's not different because "it's for training." Look at the torture statute (Sections 2340 and 2340A of the federal penal code) and try to find a "training" exception. There isn't one. What removes an act from the ambit of torture (besides lack of severe pain) is intent. Lungren pressed this point, and Holder admitted that the training was "not torture in the legal sense because we're not doing it with the intention of harming these people physically or mentally." Intent, he acknowledged, was the key question.

 

Holder ... responded with some blather about how "when the Communist Chinese did [waterboarding], when the Japanese did it, when they did it in the Spanish Inquisition, we knew then that that was not a training exercise they were engaging in. They were doing it in a way that is violative of . . . all the statutes that recognize what torture is."

 

Let's put aside that it's unlikely the Spanish Inquisition had a torture statute — after all, the United States managed to get along without one until 1994. Let's even ignore the fact that the regimes Holder cited are not known to have rigorously limited their practitioners to no more than six applications of water (none longer than 40 seconds long) during any interrogation session (none longer than two hours long) on any day (during which there could be no more than two sessions) in any month (during which there could be no more than five days on which waterboarding occurred). Let's just stick with intent. Holder's exemplars involve the sadistic, programmatic infliction of severe, lasting, and often lethal pain — "water treatment" nowhere near as benign as the CIA's, frequently coupled with atrocities like beating, rape, burning, and other unspeakable abuses. The practices of those regimes were designed exactly to torture, whether out of vengeance, the desire to intimidate a population, or the coercion of false confessions for show-trials — not to collect true, life-saving intelligence for the protection of civilian populations.

....

Gohmert [asserted]: If "someone has to believe that they are doing harm to someone in order to . . . torture, then if . . . you knew without any question there was no harm being done, then there's no torture."

 

Holder replied,

No, I wouldn't say that. . . . You can delude yourself into thinking that "what I'm doing is not causing any physical harm, it's not causing any mental harm," and somebody, a neutral trier of fact . . . could look at that and make the determination that, in spite of what you said, that what you have indicated is not consistent with the facts, not consistent with your actions, and therefore you're liable under the statute for the harm that you caused.

That is completely wrong. What Holder described is the legal concept of a "general intent" crime. Most crimes fall into this category. To find guilt, all the jury (the "neutral trier of fact") has to determine is (a) that you knew what you were doing (i.e., you intended to shoot the gun or rob the bank — you didn't do it by mistake), and (b) the result was the logical outcome that anyone who performed such an act should have expected.

 

Torture, however, is not a general-intent crime. It calls for proof of specific intent. As I recently recounted, the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals explained the difference in its Pierre case last year: to establish torture, it must be proved that the accused torturer had "the motive or purpose" to commit torture. Sharpening the distinction, the judges used an example from a prior torture case — an example that thoroughly refutes Holder's attempt to downgrade torture to a general-intent offense: "The mere fact that the Haitian authorities have knowledge that severe pain and suffering may result by placing detainees in these conditions does not support a finding that the Haitian authorities intend to inflict severe pain and suffering. The difference goes to the heart of the distinction between general and specific intent."

 

 

More debate on the Yoo memo

John Eastman vs. Erwin Chemerinsky — transcript

Waterboarding legal

According to Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy:

AM: I think the use of waterboarding has never been illegal in the United States. No prosecutor who was a competent, professional prosecutor doing a non-politicized case would indict a waterboarding case, because there’s not enough certainty that it’s actually been illegal. And in fact, I think the better of the argument is that it hasn’t been illegal.

HH: Has Congress had ample opportunity to define waterboarding as illegal and it refused to do so, Andy?

AM: Yes, they absolutely have. In fact, it came up directly, the question came straight up in the Senate, and they voted it down, to add waterboarding. They also, Hugh, did, if you remember I think it was a couple of years ago, they did a major amendment to the War Crimes Statute. I believe it was in connection with the Military Commissions Act in ’06 where they clarified the atrocities that would be prosecutable for war crimes. They could certainly have added waterboarding. Everybody knew at that point that it was a controversial issue, and yet again, they ducked it.

Questioning worked

So says Marc Thiesen at the Washington Post

In releasing highly classified documents on the CIA interrogation program last week, President Obama declared that the techniques used to question captured terrorists "did not make us safer." This is patently false. The proof is in the memos Obama made public -- in sections that have gone virtually unreported in the media.

Consider the Justice Department memo of May 30, 2005. It notes that "the CIA believes 'the intelligence acquired from these interrogations has been a key reason why al Qaeda has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since 11 September 2001.' . . . In particular, the CIA believes that it would have been unable to obtain critical information from numerous detainees, including [Khalid Sheik Mohammed] and Abu Zubaydah, without these enhanced techniques." The memo continues: "Before the CIA used enhanced techniques . . . KSM resisted giving any answers to questions about future attacks, simply noting, 'Soon you will find out.' " Once the techniques were applied, "interrogations have led to specific, actionable intelligence, as well as a general increase in the amount of intelligence regarding al Qaeda and its affiliates."

....

The Office of Legal Counsel memo states "we discuss only a small fraction of the important intelligence CIA interrogators have obtained from KSM" and notes that "intelligence derived from CIA detainees has resulted in more than 6,000 intelligence reports and, in 2004, accounted for approximately half of the [Counterterrorism Center's] reporting on al Qaeda." The memos refer to other classified documents -- including an "Effectiveness Memo" and an "IG Report," which explain how "the use of enhanced techniques in the interrogations of KSM, Zubaydah and others . . . has yielded critical information." Why didn't Obama officials release this information as well? Because they know that if the public could see the details of the techniques side by side with evidence that the program saved American lives, the vast majority would support continuing it.

Hayden and Mukasey on Interrogation Techniques

From the Wall Street Journal:

Proponents of the release [of the Yoo memo] have argued that the techniques have been abandoned and thus there is no point in keeping them secret any longer; that they were in any event ineffective; that their disclosure was somehow legally compelled; and that they cost us more in the coin of world opinion than they were worth. None of these claims survives scrutiny.

....

Disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage, and is perfectly packaged for media consumption. It will also incur the utter contempt of our enemies. Somehow, it seems unlikely that the people who beheaded Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl, and have tortured and slain other American captives, are likely to be shamed into giving up violence by the news that the U.S. will no longer interrupt the sleep cycle of captured terrorists even to help elicit intelligence that could save the lives of its citizens.

Which brings us to the next of the justifications for disclosing and thus abandoning these measures: that they don't work anyway, and that those who are subjected to them will simply make up information in order to end their ordeal. This ignorant view of how interrogations are conducted is belied by both experience and common sense. If coercive interrogation had been administered to obtain confessions, one might understand the argument. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who organized the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, among others, and who has boasted of having beheaded Daniel Pearl, could eventually have felt pressed to provide a false confession. But confessions aren't the point. Intelligence is. Interrogation is conducted by using such obvious approaches as asking questions whose correct answers are already known and only when truthful information is provided proceeding to what may not be known. Moreover, intelligence can be verified, correlated and used to get information from other detainees, and has been; none of this information is used in isolation.

The terrorist Abu Zubaydah (sometimes derided as a low-level operative of questionable reliability, but who was in fact close to KSM and other senior al Qaeda leaders) disclosed some information voluntarily. But he was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of Sept. 11, who in turn disclosed information which -- when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydah -- helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists, and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the U.S. Details of these successes, and the methods used to obtain them, were disclosed repeatedly in more than 30 congressional briefings and hearings beginning in 2002, and open to all members of the Intelligence Committees of both Houses of Congress beginning in September 2006. Any protestation of ignorance of those details, particularly by members of those committees, is pretense.

The techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of the techniques discussed in these opinions. As already disclosed by Director Hayden, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations.

GitMythology debunked

In Commentary Magazine, Arthur Herman writes:

Obama’s order “closing” Gitmo actually left it open for a year, ostensibly until new arrangements could be made for the 240 or so inmates still detained there—though Obama admitted privately it might have to stay open longer than that. Later, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that, far from being “the Bermuda Triangle of human rights” that Human Rights Watch’s Wendy Patten had dubbed it, Gitmo was in full compliance with the humane-treatment provisions of the Geneva Convention. Meanwhile, the military commissions, which Human Rights Watch and others groups had denounced as a travesty of justice, were only being suspended for 120 days, pending a review—and, indeed, following that review, will be reinstated almost exactly as they were before.

• the twelve separate inquiries into the abuses alleged by critics and former detainees at Gitmo that found no evidence of those abuses taking place;
• the revelation during the release earlier this year of the so-called “torture memos” that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques had been applied to exactly three suspects in the course of eight years and had never been standard operating practice at Gitmo;
• the evaluation by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point that 73 percent of Gitmo detainees were “a demonstrated threat” to Americans;
• and, finally, the fact that the detention facility was created in the wake of a declaration by Congress in September 2001 that “all necessary and appropriate force” should be used “against those nations, organizations, or persons” [emphasis added] responsible for the attacks of September 11;

So why the opposition?

At least some of the blame goes to:

...the aggressive and unending efforts of a cadre of lawyers, activists, left-leaning Democrats in Congress, and civil libertarians against the facility, its purpose, its goal, and its existence. These efforts began even before it was opened, in November 2001, and continue to this day. The anti-Gitmo forces worked tirelessly to shape the public perception that Gitmo was the red-hot center of an aggressive policy approach that led the leftist financier George Soros to declare: “The biggest terrorist in the world is George W. Bush.”

Some of the myths discussed are:

Most of the detainees aren't terrorists at all.

In point of fact, the military captured more than 70,000 men and put every one through a rigorous screening process. Ten thousand were released immediately. By the time the military had completed its work, only 800 remained in custody. These were the ones they had deemed hard-core trained terrorists who could not be released without running the risk they would rejoin the battle. The question was what to do with them.

And about the Yoo "torture memos":

Yoo was tasked with providing a set of ground rules for detention, interrogation, and trial of the detainees. The Department of Defense had wanted to treat these as three separate issues. However, Yoo and the OLC lawyers believed they had to be handled as parts of a single policy—especially since at the same time they were also setting guidelines on how the CIA would be allowed to question suspects that fell into its hands.

Those rules and memos were assembled over the course of many months bridging 2001 and 2002, in the immediate shadow of 9/11 with the possibility of a second massive attack looming on the horizon. Later, the press would brand them “torture memos,” and the Obama administration’s decision to release the full texts of those memos in April 2009 fed the frenzy. However, they could just as well be branded “anti-torture memos.” Yoo and his colleagues used them to define the boundaries at which interrogation of unwilling and uncooperative prisoners would cross over into the category of torture. Once those boundaries were breached, any action would be illegal under United States law and international treaties, including the 1994 United Nations Convention Against Torture. They looked to practices by Israeli as well as British intelligence services that had undergone legal scrutiny in their own countries, and they also considered historical norms about torture since the Middle Ages.

The OLC understood as well as any of its later critics that torture—the cruel and needless infliction of pain in order to dominate and control others or to exact confessions or information—was barbarism. It was precisely in order to prevent such barbarism that the memos were drawn up in the first place. It was also why then, and later, army and CIA interrogators tried to avoid even drawing close to those boundaries without explicit authorization.

Read the whole thing.

Torture in Vietnam

Scott Johnson at Powerline Blog cites a column by Col. Leo Thorsness. Thorsness was shot down in Vietnam in 1967, tortured for 18 days after his capture, and then intermittently until he was released in 1973. An excerpt:

When I wrote Surviving Hell in 2008, initially I did not include discussions of torture, knowing that others had earlier described it. My editors encouraged me to add it; if our younger population reads only current books, they may perceive that the treatment at Abu Grab and Gitmo was real torture. I added my experience being tortured so that readers will know that there is abuse and humiliation, and there is torture.

If someone surveyed the surviving Vietnam POWs, we would likely not agree on one definition of torture. In fact, we wouldn't agree if waterboarding is torture. For example, John McCain, Bud Day and I were recently together. Bud is one of the toughest and most tortured Vietnam POWs. John thinks waterboarding is torture; Bud and I believe it is harsh treatment, but not torture. Other POWs would have varying opinions. I don't claim to be right; we just disagree. But as someone who has been severely tortured over an extended time, my first hand view on torture is this:

Torture, when used by an expert, can produce useful, truthful information. I base that on my experience. I believe that during torture, there is a narrow "window of truth" as pain (often multiple kinds) is increased. Beyond that point, if torture increases, the person breaks, or dies if he continues to resist.

....

Our world is not completely good or evil. To proclaim we will never use any form of enhanced interrogations causes our friends to think we are naïve and eases our enemies' recruitment of radical terrorists to plot attacks on innocent kids, men and women - or any infidel. If I were to catch a "mad bomber" running away from an explosive I would not hesitate a second to use "enhanced interrogation," including waterboarding, if it would save lives of innocent people.

Torturing the language

Laer at Cheat-Seeking Missiles observes that the word "torture" has been redefined out of much of its shock value.

I’m old school. I still think torture involves breaking bones, stretching joints, electrocuting testicles, raping or murdering one’s spouse or children before your eyes, creating long-term craziness and, possibly, exposing one to lengthy recordings of Nancy Pelosi.

But I’m no dummy. I realize that the left has succeeded once again in seizing a perfectly good word and transforming it for their purposes. Remember tolerance? Gay? Torture has joined the club.

Now torture is widely accepted by liberal westerners to mean anything that causes discomfort - being growled at by dogs, having bugs in your cell, being exposed to heat or cold, or being waterboarded.

Another example is "rape". It used to be an appalling crime, but the feminist movement has redefined it as "any sex the woman the next day regrets having had." "Fascist" or "Nazi" means "anyone who dares to disagree with a Liberal". When words are redefined in this way, they lose their meaning.

Now, when someone calls something "torture", we don't know if we're being told about real torture (hot coals, bamboo slivers under nails, etc) or mere "not nice" treatment (food not piping hot when served, Koran not handled with kid gloves, the air conditioning not set at 72°F, etc).

Quote of the Day

(Hat tip: Concurring Opinions)

“No one really understands the true nature of fawning servility until he sees an academic who has glimpsed the prospect of money or personal publicity.”

“The surprising thing about academics is not that they have their price, but how low that price is.”

— Yes, Minister on Professors.

What works for interrogators?

From the McClatchy newsletter:

The heated debate in recent weeks about harsh interrogation treatments at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere highlights what some scientists have been warning the U.S. for years: that almost no research exists to tell interrogators the best way to get information out of suspected terrorists.

....

Now, as details emerge about coercive techniques and as the war on terror continues with no end in sight, some in Congress think the U.S. needs a more systematic way of going about interrogations.

Some researchers and veteran interrogators have urged the creation of a Center of Excellence for Interrogation, a place to capture the best science, to share research among the nation's intelligence services and to train military interrogators on a career path.

"If we can be more effective by being skilled than by being brutal, then we're fools not to be more skilled," Coulam said.

There are some people who don't want this kind of research being done, though, because we might find out torture sometimes works.

The plans for interrogation research make some observers queasy, including anti-torture advocates who worry that research might open the door to coercion.

....

Still, the quest for more research could raise important ethical questions for Price and others. If science says harsh coercion tactics work, for example, should the U.S. take part? What if lives were at stake? How many lives?

"This is Ethics 101," Price said.

"There are some things that we don't do to other human beings in a country with our values," he said. "There are certain moral standards you live by."

But the problem remains, as I've written elsewhere, that we're assuming the answers rather than knowing them. As John Hutson, a retired rear admiral and former Judge Advocate in the Navy notes:

"People might concede that torture does work. At least, it works on occasion. The real question is: Do other techniques work better?"

I can see arguing that noncoercive techniques work better than coercive ones. I've seen to many accounts of torture working to buy the argument that it doesn't work. But I can buy, "Yes, torture works, but these techniques work better." Just show me the data.

But apparently, there isn't any.

Just after becoming president, Obama ordered that the Army Field Manual — largely unchanged since World War II — would be used as the guide to interrogations. It includes techniques with monikers such as "Pride and Ego," "Mutt and Jeff," and "We Know All."

The decision was meant to quell coercive techniques. Scientists, however, said even the Army's methods require study.

"Virtually none of them — or their underlying assumptions — are based on scientific research," Randy Borum, a forensic psychologist at the University of South Florida, wrote in the Intelligence Science Board's report.

James Carafano, a senior fellow in homeland security and defense at the conservative Heritage Foundation, agreed that research might help. However, he said that it might come too late to be useful in the U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He said it would be wrong to presume that noncoercive techniques would work better than coercion.

In this week's column, Dennis Prager compares assumptions about torture to assumptions about cancer treatment.

...It is as if the President, or anyone else, announced that brutal methods of combating cancer like chemotherapy and radiation were “not the most effective means” of combating cancer – and then refused to say what non-brutal means were more effective.

Indeed. And what's more, there are a variety of treatments available for cancer, because some cancers respond better to one treatment than to another. I suspect some people will respond to noncoercive methods of interrogation better than others, but some people will keep their secrets unless subjected to severe duress.

If it turns out some secrets can only be obtained through torture, then we have to decide whether those secrets are worth the price. And conversely, if we're determined never to torture, we have to be willing to pay that price as well.

In the absence of data, moral preening is a lot easier. We can assert truths without having to prove them. But if we do actual research, moral preening gets to be a lot more difficult.

Another fake soldier?

This Ain't Hell hopes one Carl Webb will provide some documentation.

See, the Army totally F’d you my man. I mean, more than when they enlisted you through our fascist poverty draft, and the stop loss. Would you believe those silly sonsabitches have documentation that doesn’t match your stories? I mean, I was shocked as well. It’s like I tell everyone all the time, if you can’t trust Carl Webb, who in this world can you trust, eh?

....

How ’bout you just send us one shred of paper that proves the record you claim. You know, something from say, oh, I don’t know, the month before 9/11/01 through now. I know you have it. I mean, you loathe everything about the military, but shit, you’ve been living off the legacy of it since you enlisted on December 16 of 1982, so you must have a love me folder.

UPDATE:

Carl Webb Says: May 30th, 2009 at 12:47 am edit Exactly what have I claimed that you need me to verify?

NGB 22 showing service in this millennia. Also, an MOS that shows Nurse. Or, any form, document, scrap of paper, hieroglyphics or other confirmation from someone NOT YOU, that shows you were ever a deserter. IVAW should have it on record since they verify all memberships, and none of your info shows you are.

Abortion and torture

Just spotted over at Clayton Cramer's blog:

Dave Kopel over at Volokh Conspiracy has a fascinating item about the U.N. Convention Against Torture and abortion--but not the connection that you might be thinking. It turns out that Nicaragua (under the Sandinistas, no less), prohibited abortion "even in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother was at stake." (And you thought that only right-wing Americans would even consider something that extreme.) And now the crowd at the U.N. charged with the Convention Against Torture is asserting that such a law violates the convention--because forcing a woman to give birth qualifies as torture.

One particularly vocal "professional interrogator" with the Army has defined "torture" as "any physical or mental coercion – any." Under this definition, forcing anyone to do anything is "torture".

Some of the comments to the Volokh Conspiracy post are interesting:

I agree that international law barring torture is inapplicable in this case, but at the same time, I would argue that while reasonable people can differ on non-therapeutic abortion, preventing a woman from having an abortion when carrying the child to term puts her at risk of serious injury or death is a violation of fundamental human rights, namely the right to self defense. A woman is surely entitled to decide that her life is privileged over that of her unborn child, even if one believes that a fetus is a person.

Setting a broken leg is an extremely painful process. Should that also be prohibited as torture? Obviously not.

On the other hand, breaking someone's leg and then setting it without anesthetic, with the proper intent, is torture. Then again, so is breaking legs of prisoners for more or less any reason, with a small number of medical exceptions.

I suppose you could propose an analogous situation (if you intentionally inflicted a pregnancy on a woman and then denied her an abortion in order to make her go through painful childbirth), but I don't know that denying her the abortion when the government wasn't responsible for the impregnation is equivalent to torture, any more than it would be for a doctor to inflict distress setting a leg that some criminal had broken.

I don't know that denying her the abortion when the government wasn't responsible for the impregnation is equivalent to torture

is actually

I don't know that denying her the setting of her leg when the government wasn't responsible for the accident that broke the leg is equivalent to torture

...I'm fascinated to hear that according to ruuffles aborting a fetus is now akin to denying someone medical treatment to an unnatural injury.

I'm sympathetic to the people involved. I don't have anything against abortion and it would be nice if it was legal and thus not denied to people who wanted to have one. The "I should not be forced to go through painful/dangerous childbirth" argument is compelling.

At the same time, there is a moral case against abortion, even if I do not subscribe to it; it is a topic upon which individuals (and societies) can have differing opinions.

Thus, equivocating "lack of access to legal abortion" torture is, at best, a poor debating tactic; the situations are clearly not the same, and using the terms for one situation to describe the other is outright malicious. Why not compare getting a speeding ticket to the Holocaust? Because when you do, you're implying that they are the same thing, or different manifestations of the same thing, but your discussion of speeding tickets is not enhanced by comparing the cop who pulled you over to Hitler.

Marriage -- a comment at Chaos Manor

From Jerry Pournelle's mail column:

Marriage

"explain to me how denying the rights and privileges attendant to heterosexual relationships called 'marriages' can be denied to one who is not a heterosexual but wishes to establish a long term legal relationship with another adult person ."

I love the scare quotes around "marriages." They're so cute. Also, I love the default assumption that it is all about rent-seeking from the government goody-bag.

But marriage is not about establishing long term legal relationships. The essential nature of marriage is set out by Plato in The Laws, Book IV.

The Athenian. What will be our first law? Will not the the order of nature, begin by making regulations for states about births?
Cleinias. He will.
Ath. In all states the birth of children goes back to the connection of marriage?
Cle. Very true.
Ath. And, according to the true order, the laws relating to marriage should be those which are first determined in every state?
Cle. Quite so.

If we also examine the Code of Khammurapi, we find no general principles (for that was not the Mesopotamian's forte) but ad hoc, positive laws confined to two matters: provision for the children of the union and how the resulting legal obligations of the man and woman are to be jointly handled.

IOW, marriage has to do with the birth of children. It was not All About Me, i.e., about the obligated couple and their "commitment." Marriage is no more ordered toward the validation of "commitment" than it is ordered toward filing joint income tax returns. The "commitment" (and the joint filing) are requirements annexed to the primary purpose, the provision for the raising of children. (=Not= simply their procreation.)

This is true even if the couple appears to be infertile. This potential is essential to the nature of male-female coupling even if it is not actualized. Just as humans are rational animals in essence, even if the rationality is not actual (as in a baby or a comatose person), so too is procreation "in potency" for heterosexual couples, even if not "in act." Even today, "infertile" couples often do conceive in the long run. And in any case, from Khammurapi on, infertility has been grounds for divorce. No kids; no marriage.

Therefore, the Prince has a "compelling State interest" in regulating and controlling heterosexual acts that he does not have in other sorts of acts. That's why heterosexual unions were hedged about with various prudential restrictions, bars, permissions, and regulations, most of which are probably not eagerly sought after by activists (and have been safely discarded, in any event). The ancient Greeks celebrated homosexuality in many ways, but they did not celebrate in a "marriage."

The ironic thing is that this movement comes about even while heterosexuals are abandoning marriage in droves, via easy divorce, co-habitation, etc., coupled with all sorts of ways to prevent or cull children. As civil marriage has become more and more purposeless, it has also become more and more tempting to cavort among the ruins.

Mars – er – China needs women

After years of a "one child" policy, leading Chinese couples to abort female children (sometimes very late term), they're starting to really feel the lack of women.

People have taken to kidnapping girls to ensure their sons will have brides available.

WHEN Li Xiang Xiang, aged 2½, went out of her family's home on April 1 to the shop around the corner, as she did every day, her mother expected to see her back in minutes with a big smile and a bag of sweets.

Instead, Xiang Xiang - whose rhyming name means “thoughtful” - vanished and her heartbroken mother and father joined the ranks of Chinese parents who fear they have lost their little girls to child kidnappers.

Small boys have long been abducted for sale in China, but in recent years the country’s strict birth control policy, which has led to abortions of girls in families intent on having a boy, has left the countryside short of female babies.

According to a recent report in the British Medical Journal, 124 boys are born for every 100 girls in the country as a whole, and in one province the figure has risen to 192.