Monday, July 14, 2008
Darth Cheney
A new book suggests, in the words of Frank Rich, that in Bush's White House 'the president is a secondary, even passive, figure, and the motives invoked by Mr Cheney to restore Nixon-style executive powers are theoretically selfless.' I found myself thinking lately that Bush may have undergone some kind of psychological meltdown - I assumed recently because of his increasingly weird demeanour, but perhaps not - and that Cheney was more or less running things. I've wondered about Dick Cheney before; his apparent desire to Israelify American society is disturbing and irrational - it hasn't, after all, worked for Israel. But there are, for the moment, too many unknowables about this. But there is one known - torture. As time passes the administration's embrace of torture - apparently at the command of Cheney - comes to seem ever more catastrophic. Equally, the justification for the legalisation of torture - that, since we do it anyway, we should make it above board - advanced by Alan Dershowitz is ever more beside the point. The only point is that Bush/Cheney stepped across a line we believed ourselves, officially at least, incapable of crossing. And now, unsurprisingly, we don't know who we are.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
To some extent civilisation is about taboos - it's about what you won't do, even if the alternative is death. Outside of civilisation, a savage may eat his own mother's brains if this is what it takes to survive. Within the city walls, however, people would rather die. Hence the interest in cannibalism as forcing people back into savagery (c.f. Ugolino, Inferno, 'then fasting had more force than grief').
ReplyDeleteFor many, including myself, torture is one of those taboos. To actually torture someone yourself would involve becoming a monster. Why would one want to live if it meant you had to become such a person? To nod to a grim-faced henchman and then turn away is little better - one can do this without being a monstrous sadist or ice cold sociopath, but for the victim it's surely no different. What's the point of being alive if you cease to be recognisably human? And don't men like Cheney and Bush, who would quite happily nod to their grim-faced henchmen, look not quite human now? - i mean they have the two legs and the head and everything, but their eyes don't look like human eyes anymore (if indeed they ever did).
As you may recall, in 2001, there were many who found the idea of Cheney serving as Vice President comforting. I'm afraid whoever is the next POTUS will find some reason for not abandoning the Cheney position. McCain's backtracking on the issue earlier this year, and Obama's flip-flop on FISA, are proof that the closer one gets to exercising executive power, the less likely one is to renounce any such power claimed by previous occupants, no matter how dubious it may be.
ReplyDeleteSuppose that you had very good reason to believe that a terrorist atrocity on the scale of 9/11 were about to be committed, but you didn't know where and when. Suppose also that you had captured the brains behind the planning of this atrocity. Would it be morally justified to torture this individual in order to save thousands of lives? I know there are people who give a definite yes or no to this question, but I'm not sure I know the answer.
ReplyDeleteI pose this hypothetical not to justify the putative acts of torture which the US has been committing in the name of national security. In the case of 'water-boarding' and suchlike, there is little reason to believe that the lives of thousands urgently depend upon the elicitation of information from the suspects concerned.
I do, however, think that the hypothetical scenario exposes the difficulty of applying unconditional moral rules, such as the preclusion of torture under all circumstances.
I'm not sure if torture is as alien to our civilisation as we would like to think it is, either. I remember GK Chesterton said something along the lines that torture and civilisation were not incompatible- that on the contrary it is in China and Greece and almost all advanced and refined civilisations, torture has also been advanced and refined. Meanwhile right up until the 1980s the CIA was merrily torturing away and that is no nutty conspiracy theory: they even had a manual entitled KUBARK which you can read online (http://www.kimsoft.com/2000/kubark.htm) thanks to America's freedom of information laws. It's full of info on how to 'coerce' information from suspects. In the mid 80s it was toned down a bit. The real difference between now and then is that in the past it went on in secret amd the president did not ask for public approval. At best America had a 20 year break from 'coercion'; and i'm sure other Western countries are not that far from it either. So to me these kinds of arguments that 'torture just isn't us' seem based on a sentimental self image rather than any facts. Unfortunately it is and always has been very much a part of the West as it is of other cultures; which is not to say that it's good and noble and worthy of acclamation of course.
ReplyDeleteIf I had in custody a person who knew where my kidnapped daughter was, I would be prepared to go pretty far in extracting the information as to her whereabouts from him. I wouldn't employ the equivalent of the rack or the screw - but principally because of my own squeamishness. I see no particular reason to be overly nice to distinctly nasty people. In the meantime, where exactly should we draw the line when it comes to protecting innocent people from blackgurds?
ReplyDeleteOh, and why the hell should I take Frank Rich's word for anything?
ReplyDeleteI learnt recently that apparently CIA interrogators, although not allowed to execute prisoners, are allowed to tell prisoners before torture that they are being executed for failing to reveal necessary information. This combined with water boarding, which doesn't so much as 'simulate' drowning, but actually drown you slowly in a controlled and reversible manner leaves me rather shocked. Now add the fact that the US has had prisoners as young as sixteen in Guantanamo and it all seems to have a pretty solid 'middle ages' vibe.
ReplyDeleteNow I'm not going to lose any sleep over individuals such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who apparently has the record for resisting water boarding torture at about one minute and thirty seconds) but torturing him is only serving to make it more acceptable to torture others who undoubtedly do not deserve such terrible treatment.
If in fighting those who trying to destroy our societies values we legislate these values away; we may as well give up in the first place and save a lot of bloodshed.