Piles of Nonsense

From Thomas Frank at the WSJ:
"As an example of this habit of mind, consider the essay that Mr. Gingrich published in Human Events last week. 'The current liberal bloodlust over interrogations,' he wrote, referring to the Nancy Pelosi-CIA flap, is merely 'the Left's attempt to hunt down and purge its political opponents.' And yet, in a different essay he published on the very same day (this one in the Washington Times), Mr. Gingrich regretted that, in all the years of Republican rule, 'there was a strategic failure to root out the left and the special interests of the left.'"

Meanwhile, Jeffery Addicott of St. Mary's School of Law and former JAG, in his defense of "enhanced interrogation":
"In the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, we generally look to authoritative judicial decisions to define key terms in treaty and legislation. Perhaps the leading international case in the realm of defining “severe pain or suffering” in the context of interrogation practices comes from the often cited European Court of Human Rights ruling, Ireland v. United Kingdom. [A conservative quoting international law?!?! Egads, the Right is sticking to its guns about as well as that kid from The Red Badge of Courage.] By an overwhelming majority vote, the Ireland court found certain interrogation practices of British authorities to interrogate suspected terrorism in Northern Ireland to be “inhuman and degrading,” i.e., ill-treatment, but not severe enough to rise to the level of torture. Considering the level of interrogation standards set out in the Ireland case, the conclusion is clear. Even the worst of the CIA techniques that were authorized – waterboarding - would not constitute torture (the CIA method is similar to what we have done hundreds and hundreds of times to our own military special operations soldiers in military training courses on escape and survival)."

[By the way, the techniques the British used were wall-standing, hooding, exposure to noise, exposure to hunger, and deprivation of sleep. Waterboarding, denial of counsel, "compliance striking/hitting", buying alive, exposure to insects, arbitrary arrest of family and friends, injections of sedatives/amphetamines without individual's knowledge/permission, faked executions, sexual assault, disregard for age/physical condiditon, and sodomy were not approved by the Ireland court, in case you were wondering. All of the above, the Bush Adminstration argues, are neither cruel, nor unusual, nor inappropriate for use on suspects.]

And from Tara Overzat at her blog::

"It appears the security of Americans abroad has dropped since President Obama took office. ... Why do these things happen under liberal presidents? Presidential approval ratings may be the answer. Studies have shown that people in the spotlight, like celebrities and politicians, are more likely than the general population to be narcissistic and have a strong desire to be admired by others. Low approval = less people “liking” you. War, tough talk about our enemies, and increasing national security tend to bring about lower approval ratings. [No. Not really. Check out "mortality salience", when you get the time.] It makes sense- no one actually wants to go to war, [Really?] and no one actually wants to not get along with other world powers. [Again, really?] But difficult decisions are made by the government and its security bodies everyday in order to keep our 300 million plus souls safe. To paraphrase a famous saying, what’s popular is not always right, and what’s right is not always popular."


[In addition, Ms. Overzat ignores that foreign powers usually try to push new Presidents - think China with the P-3 they captured early in Bush's admin, and that Republican presidents are just as likely to have terrorists attack - anyone remember Lebanon? Khobar Towers? The hostages held by Hezbollah in the 80s? Ruby Ridge? The Order back in 1984? Nope. Only liberals get bloweded up, because they just want to be your BFF. And of course, Obama's quiet unwillingness to make a circus out of his authorization of lethal force in the rescue of Captain Phillips isn't a show of strength - Obama should've been like Bush, and flown down to the Bainbridge for a photo-op of him holding a rifle. Every good redneck knows you didn't go hunting unless there's a picture of you with your foot planted on the head of the deer, rifle in hand.]

I'm going to merely note that Ms. Overzat means "quote a famous saying," and leave it at that. The pedant in me demands it.

More importantly though, note that the single thread - I originally, and equally justifiably, wrote "threat" by accident there - in these three essays is both subtle and idiotic. We are told by conservative commentators that we must show strength - which is code for "be violent" - while at the same time, with as much shock and indignation as we can muster - deny that committing violence outside of a declaration of war or guilt and without legal oversight is a crime. Don't you get it folks? If we don't break the law by torturing people and running illegal raids then how will people know that we're a moral giant?

Or to put this another way, let's for a moment assume that Americans are made safer by "shows of strength"; then we're made less safe by choosing to limit the exercise of our power in accordance with legal statute - and then we must throw out the laws and admit that we rule in our own interests through naked strength. If we're made safer by being a nation that follows statute, then the people who break those laws are making us unsafe, and must be prosecuted, or at least completely remove them from power and public discourse. In either case, either the Right has failed us by bothering to keep laws in place, which places people under the onus of prosecution, rather than openly rolling back protections and admitting the world is too dangerous for moral restraints, or we can actually follow those moral restraints. In either case, the Right harms us.

Furthermore, it is telling that when FBI interrogators - who don't have the CIA's +5 to succesful skullduggery roll, and are therefore much likelier to get prosecuted for breaking the law (think the Whitey Bulger case) - caught a whiff of what was going on in our detention camps, they had nothing to do with it, and removed themselves from the near occasion of criminality. I don't often say it, but bravo for the FBI, because they realized from the get-go that coerced evidence is inadmissable in U.S. Courts. The very notion then that you're seeking to capture and punish evildoers falls apart when you make it impossible to legally punish them. But then again, thinking long-term is something the Bush administration consciously refused to do - remember when we were going to be out of Iraq in less than a year, 18 months, tops?

But this kind of thinking is replete in conservative circles, producing a rhetoric of Orwellian purity that lead us to spectacle of the poor Supreme Court of California essentially admitting that since the Constitution of CA lacks a clause preventing contradictory amendments from being instituted while a preoccluding clause is still in force, there is no way for the Supreme Court to keep the Constitution from becoming a logical fallacy. How does an "equal rights" clause co-exist with a clause that specifically rescinds a court-enumerated right, as gay marriage was decided to be in CA? By not thinking too carefully about the assumptions that one holds, and certainly not by thinking too carefully about the consequences of one's positions. At this point, there is no effective state limit on what the voters of CA could decide to approve, so long as they get themselves an amendment; they could define away the rights of any group to obtain anything on the state level, from the right of a child to a free, appropriate state public education, to the rights of the handicapped - to the rights of anyone seeking to own a firearm for other ends than to specifically serve in a federal militia.

But, lacking any sort of empathy or imagination, the right in this country cannot, I repeat, cannot imagine themselves as genuine victims of something. For all their alleged victimhood, the Right in this country has never once considered that it could be their sons and daughters which end up being put to enhanced interrogation. Remember, this is a country in which we recently had a case before the Supreme Court asking whether or not schools had the right to perform an on-the-spot strip search of a child - if immediate danger, the "ticking time bomb" is the means of adjudicating what is and isn't permissble, then could you imagine what Newt Gingrich would say about the government if one of his children was anally or vaginally searched because school officials thought it within the realm of possibility that he or she might be hiding pills in an orifice? Why do we even bother with investigating crimes? Let's just waterboard people until they confess! If it's not torture, then it's not torture, and we should use it whenever we feel that there's a slight chance that someone might be less than forthcoming with the full infomation we want. What conservatives other than Edmund Burke seem not to realize is that "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," is not merely advice - in law, doing unto others sets precedent - and therefore is the main justification and guide for doing unto you. Hypocrites or idiots, the "War is Safety, Torture is Cool," crowd is, sadly, only going to get worse as the measures they so fervently fought for get turned against them in the next couple of decades - but they are, undoubtedly, hypocrites and idiots still.