But Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz says it purtier:
Marginal Democratic candidates certainly benefit from moving to the left on national security issues, but serious candidates–candidates who want to have any realistic chance of prevailing in the general election–must not allow themselves to be pushed, shoved or even nudged away from a strong commitment to national security.
Consider, for example, the contentious and emotionally laden issue of the use of torture in securing preventive intelligence information about imminent acts of terrorism–the so-called “ticking bomb” scenario. I am not now talking about the routine use of torture in interrogation of suspects or the humiliating misuse of sexual taunting that infamously occurred at Abu Ghraib. I am talking about that rare situation described by former President Clinton in an interview with National Public Radio:
“You picked up someone you know is the No. 2 aide to Osama bin Laden. And you know they have an operation planned for the United States or some European capital in the next three days. And you know this guy knows it. Right, that’s the clearest example. And you think you can only get it out of this guy by shooting him full of some drugs or waterboarding him or otherwise working him over.”
–
The Democrats may lose the presidency if they are seen as the party of MoveOn.org, Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Dennis Kucinich and those senators who voted against Judge Mukasey because he refused to posture on a difficult issue relating to national security. They will win if they are seen as just as tough but a lot smarter on how to deal with real threats to our national interests.
Read it all, dad.
It’s a quandary really: The netroot types are still lathered up about a host of real or imagined insults to their political dignity and they still think they’re running against Bush in 2008. The harder they pull their candidates away from the sensible center for the primaries, the less likely those candidates are to be broadly appealing in the national campaign. Which is perennially true of course, but Dershowitz is absolutely right in this case: These are existential issues we’re dealing with here, and they resonate far more deeply even than those which touch the pocketbook.
At this point anyway, it’s a better than even chance that the White House will change hands in 2009. Democratic candidates should study hard on the lessons learned by their confreres in the House and Senate – people who have learned that it’s much easier to fan the enthusiasms of their most passionate partisans than it is to both keep their promises to them and govern sensibly. The difference is that senators and congressmen can hide behind cloture – a president is out there in the spotlight all on his own.
That’s why, among Democrats, HRC comes out the strongest in the general election. Me thinks she realizes these things and, already aware of the ‘legacy’ issue, won’t just hand the country to our enemies.
All the other dems are just fools–they might do just that, cuz they don’t see any enemies, just the ‘misunderstood.’
The R’s have it if they hit hard on lowering taxes, and doing something about illegal immigration. D’s have an anchor hanging around their neck, like the NY drivers license for illegals, a raft of new taxes and if Iraq is still showing progress in 2008, they don’t have that as much ammo either. Oh another anchor around the neck of the D’s …. Hillary. Try swimming with all that weight.
I am a Democratic Party member and I think Dershowitz may be onto something:
How about Democratic Party Candidates pledging that they are “personally against the use of torture” but because they are all Big He Men, they want to see the USA use torture all the time and everywhere, even on innocent people.
In fact we should institute random torture. Imagine how afraid our enemies will be when they have to think, “If these crazy Americans torture just for the hell of it imagine what they will do to me!”
We also owe Japn an apology for trying people after WWII for waterboarding POW’s.
Decent, shurch-going America needs to know Democrats are tough son of a guns!
Torture: It’s not just for Nazis anymore!
In fact, all the cool kids are doing it!
Just turn Jack Bauer loose on them when you need something done in the next 24 hours.
The chattering class and the professional politicians (and their cousins the perpetual negotiating diplomats) will still be wondering what happened when a nuke ends thier way of life (and lives) while they refuse to make the tough decisions in increasingly difficult times.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock……
Shhh! We’re in the presence of a morally superior being! (It’s the rapier sharp wit and elevated tone of irony that give it away.)
I wonder what it costs, that moral superiority? Might want to get me some.
Right now the betting is that the White House will change hands, but I’m not so sure. HRC’s answer on immigration has hurt her, as recent polling numbers indicate. It’s still a year off, alot can happen, but I think people are not impressed with what the democrats have done. It’s a long way until November.
Lex, I nearly choked when I read your comment!
I’m thinking I might want to take you as a guide on my next trip through the fever swamps. A “big game guide” kinda thing…
Lex,
You are on a roll (even showing up in the comments), and just think, a few days ago some of us believed we had lost you. Glad you came back up after going sinker.
Lex writes:
“We’re in the presence of a morally superior being! (It’s the rapier sharp wit and elevated tone of irony that give it away.)”
It is sad that being anti-torture, that thinking the USA should stand for some Rule of Law that doesn’t yield to the whims of the age, should be considered some kind of stuffy and fussy democrat (small d).
Torture is morlaly wrong. What is so difficult to acknowledge in that statement. I never realized how PC and Situation Ethical modern day conservatives were until President George W. Bush.
What won’t modern conservatives countenance?
You have read the quote about those who won’t defend freedom too often, so I won’t quote it, but as an American it makes me sick to think my nation tortures people and renders them to countries where they can be tortured.
No moral superiority, just disgust. I suppose being a practicing Catholic has something to do with that moral disgust, and I wonder why so many of us who do go to church each Sunday to praise God and to follow His rules more clearly cannot make our voices heard on this issue.
TJ, pardon me for being so flip in the presence of your evidently heightened sensitivity. We recently had a very long, frequently emotional and ultimately unproductive discussion on this very topic. Read all of it, comments included, if you care to understand a point of view different than your own. Alternatively, rest easy in your sense of smug superiority, secretly satisfied that come what may, you yourself will very probably be safe.
After all, they can’t get us all, right? And what should you care about some poor schmuck who loses his life, his leg, his wife? Just bad luck. Bad place in a bad time.
One thing this modern conservative won’t countenance is the notion that terrorists should be swaddled in cotton batting while a time bomb ticks under the feet of innocents. If this is even a 1% possibility, we ought to have a 1% solution that protects those innocents.
Tendentious statements such as “always” and “never” are usually incorrect on the SAT tests as well as in real life. But you can relax in the warm embrace of your comfortable absolutes.
That’s the important thing.
Lex
Your answers are depressing to anyone who believes in the Rule of Law.
How is your justification different from any common criminal? They do what they have to do to survive, while I wait in my comfortable world and denounce people committing horrendous acts in my name.
Are there two Constitutions? One for those of us who are comfortable (like Senator John McCain who denounces torture because HE was tortured) and one for people who are “terrorists”? Who gets to decide who the terrorists are?
It is depressing to think of how this country viewed torture during WW II when our immediate survival was at stake and how far we have come since then.
Now, all you have to do is announce that only the squeamish believe in the Rule of Law and out-tough each other for the title of “Least Likely to Defend The Rule of Law in Times of Danger”.
Are we really The United States of Torture?
So, I take it you didn’t follow the link, read the comments. Think a bit. Because you really haven’t added much to the discussion.
Not that I thought you would, from your first comment. You’re not here for a discussion, but to hurl bombast, quiver with indignation, deal in hyperbole and express unreflective moral certainties. Somehow this strokes your ego.
In that discussion we debated about people who were unambiguously caught in terrorist acts or attempts and who had perishable tactical intelligence – information that could save lives. We attempted to weigh and balance what was the greater good. You are either too evolved for such a discussion, or too simple. It’s hard to tell which, really.
The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact. And by the way, it applies to US citizens, residents and persons. If the distinction between US persons, residents and citizens is not clear to you – and, although I’m out on a conjectural limb here, I’m guessing that it is not – you should not be attempting to lecture me on the Constitution.
Lex
I did not come here to do any of the things you attribute to me.
Like you, I love this country. It is the only country I love. I have lived here all my life.
There was a time when Americans would have booed and laughed a Torturer out of the Public Square.
Now liberals like Dershowitz and many across the political sphere assume Torture is just one more arrow in our quiver.
I hear this argument: “As long as we are certain we are torturing bad people, then torture away. It might save lives.”
I cannot believe that you and my beloved fellow countrymen don’t see how this is a dangerous idea.
TJ, torture has been defined so broadly as to render the term meaningless. Something that “offends human dignity” has been declared torture by the UN – whatever that means.
When I think of “torture” I conjure images of pliers, the blowtorch, a rubber hose, electric leads. Everyone is now tying themselves into knots over head slapping, cold rooms and waterboarding – a technique that was for many years used on Navy pilots by other US servicemen in SERE school. We didn’t call it torture – we called it training. Worse things happen during rush week in our university frat houses. It’s absurd.
How many strangers’ lives would you be willing to sacrifice for your absolutist clarity? Ten? A hundred? A thousand? One million? Would you be content that one million innocent lives be spared in order for you to feel good about yourself?
Now ask yourself what would you be capable of to protect a member of your own family – a wife or daughter, someone being terrorized to their life’s end by a murdering psychopath. What would you be prepared to do?
You are my family TJ. My extended family to be sure, but family nonetheless. And I know what I would and would not be prepared to do to protect you. I couldn’t use the blowtorch or the pliers, but waterboarding falls well within the lines of things that I could live with.
After all, I have killed for you. Even though you didn’t ask me to. Even if you didn’t want me to.
Maybe you’re a better person than me, I’ll give you that. But render unto me at least the possibility that the things I’ve had to do at the cost of my own soul has given you that luxury.
You weren’t born safe, and you haven’t got a right to liberty. These things must be defended.
I watched a really sick video online the other day. It really disgusted me … set up as a US military “training video”, demonstrating water boarding and intimating other things that should be done to your prisoner. It was stupid. And degrading. In my mind, degrading to the idiots who made it.
But it did get me thinking again about water boarding. I agree completely that its gotten ridiculous what people are attempting to label as “torture” now. In my view, anything that the courts consider acceptable for our domestic law enforcement can’t possibly be turned into “torture” just because its the military doing it. And let’s get real, the military are acting in a much more dangerous and compelling environment than domestic law enforcement is.
But its the water boarding thing I wonder about. I don’t think anybody is going to actually suggest with a straight face that the courts would be accepting of water boarding as a domestic interrogation technique. Not unless we were under a state of martial law or something like that. And I’m not so sure they would even then. I realize that what was portrayed on the video might well have been greatly exaggerated. But even putting that aside, just based on my prior understanding of what’s involved, I’m pretty sure that if it doesn’t qualify as “torture”, its damm close.
Correct me if I’m wrong (I know someone will) but I think, if you keep it up long enough, you can actually kill the person. And even if there is no actual danger to the person’s life, as I understand it, from the point of view of the ‘victim’, its definitely perceived as otherwise. And I can’t quite see how/why the fact that its done in SERE training (where at least there wouldn’t be any ‘real’ physical danger because it wouldn’t be taken that far) changes its character. Its training. So you can test yourself and learn how to react/respond. In case you are ever captured. And tortured. No?
Anyway, personally, I think water boarding either qualifies as torture or comes awful close. But the question of whether it could be acceptable in certain circumstances is a whole other issue. Again, speaking personally, I think it just might be.
Michelle – It is a thing of beauty to observe a rarity – an inquisitive mind that can boldly search and transcend pressured convention and seek some yet unknown truth. May you be comforted by the fact that some true torture experts on our American side tend to support your thoughts and opinion.
Unless I may have missed it, I cannot believe no one has yet referenced the experienced and expert interrogator, Malcom Nance on the hardly leftist and esteemed Small Wars Journal Blog. This former Chief of Training at SERE school has stated under oath in Congressional testimony that waterboarding is indeed torture. Many other experts, including former POW Senator John McCain and Marine Corp pilot and prosecutor, LTC Stuart Couch support this stance against waterboarding.
I have never personally experienced waterboarding. But I have observed it personally at close quarters a number of times. And I know some who have experienced it far from the ‘friendly’ confines of SERE School and far from ‘other’ friendly training venues – those who have experienced it in enemy confinement and truly in fear of their lives (yes, it does make a huge difference).
Waterboarding, done outside of an afternoon training exercise, (and maybe even within) is indeed torture by any and all definitions! The conclusion of our military and other experts is that waterboarding should be defined as torture and thus illegal, as should befit our advanced nation, civilization, treaties, law, and conventions.
[Nevertheless, if I were the most highly trained and experienced interrogator in an extreme and remote, ticking bomb situation, it "might" behoove me in my professional opinion – if all else failed, and fully knowing torture intelligence limitations - to personally and purposely break the law in this most extreme instance, to save a great number of people if a waterboarding victim could – in my estimation - ever give real intelligence – which since the Inquisition has proven to be doubtful… I might do it …. Albeit breaking a law I support. Then a trial would determine whether my torture was justified or not. But all this happens in novels and TV, and rarely if ever in real life.]
It is far better to make something illegal (waterboarding) at the outset. Thus it makes it a limit except for only the most very bold and self-assured to ever breach…and then hopefully under extreme and hopefully justifiable circumstances (yet still breaching the precepts this nation was founded upon), than to make waterboarding now very legal and easy, and give carte blanche to any and every untrained E-2 non-swimmer ersatz interrogator to legally give waterboarding or worse to any and all capturees. Are we either a civil nation of laws and better than our adversaries, or merely hangmen and sadists who want jungle rules as we please?
Umm, gee thanks, Fliterman. I think.
dear lex
and you are a DAMN good writer. I do NOT agree with you, but I hear you.
Have you ever read my favorite novel War and Peace? Prince Andrei makes a convincing case that if we fought wars without any sentimentality we would soon have no wars. Andrei is the ultimate realist and he was probably thinking only of European Wars in the 18th Century, but there is a point there.
And you are correct about what I would do to defend those I love. I hope I would commit sin after sin to defend my family. I hope I would shock anyone who attacked people I love with my ferocity. I know the reasons armies don’t allow such ferocity is that a disciplined attack wins on a greater overall percentage.
I am not more PURE than you; I am not better than you. I am afraid of how easily people say “Torture is bad and unacceptable…..BUT”
I read your original post and the 100 comments that you referred me to .
It is odd stuff to have a successful blog like yours, very much democracy in action and I am happy for you that you have so many writers and very much grateful to you for this interchange.
I think I hear your voice and I think we agree that anyone who lightly talks about committing torture is crazy and I see your point that anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that there are theoretical situations where a moral person would is also crazy.
Hiroshima WAS better than the alternative and Hiroshima was a great awful act of war.
Anyway, as long as you don’t put up a sign that says “Liberals not welcome” I will be a reader.
You write well. You write crazy well, and remember I don’t agree with you here and I find your vitriol a tad off-putting, so this compliment comes from way over on the other side.
Thank you.
Well, fliterman – I’d as much as given up on you it had been so long. It’s interesting that in the final analysis you and I arrive at the same destination, having taken wildly different paths. The lingering distinction is that I think that whatever interrogation techniques are used ought to have carefully constructed limits and government sanction, so as not to leave the honest interrogator retrospectively on the wrong side of a line that was never drawn for him. You would be content personally to break the law a-la Jack Bauer and live with the consequences. Your instance is highly theoretical – mine is not.
TJ you are welcome as welcome as anyone else and we’d be happy with your company. I try very hard not to be the first person to use vitriol, even though I’m not above responding in kind. And thanks for your kind words.
Great thread.
I hated SERE School.
EOM