Preserve some flexibility
Why Obama shouldn’t follow Cheney’s fitness routine
January 29, 2009 29 comments
In a gibberingly egregious article speculating about how the new President will handle the TWAT, Newsweek says that the Cheney-Bush regime was unfairly criticized for its approach:
The flaw of the Bush-Cheney administration may have been less in what it did than in the way it did it — flaunting executive power, ignoring Congress, showing scorn for anyone who waved the banner of civil liberties.
Right… So, for instance, torturing people was fine, they just shouldn’t have been so obstreperous about it? Well, y’know…
The issue of torture is more complicated than it seems.
Really? Is it?
Waterboarding — simulating drowning by pouring water over the suspect’s mouth and nostrils — is a brutal interrogation method.
It’s not “simulating drowning”, it is drowning, just stopping before the victim’s death.
But by some (disputed) accounts, it was CIA waterboarding that got Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to talk.
It was CIA forced partial drowning that “got” KSM to “confess” to plotting to bomb a bank that didn’t exist until three years after he was arrested.
It is a liberal shibboleth that torture doesn’t work — that suspects will say anything, including lies, to stop the pain. But the reality is perhaps less clear.
Perhaps less clear. And our evidence is… er… say, are you following the new season of 24? (By the way, try saying “liberal shibboleth” very quickly, ten times in a row. Fun, huh?)
As president, Obama may want to preserve some flexibility. (Suppose, for instance, that after a big attack the CIA captured the leader who planned it; there would be enormous pressure to make the terrorist divulge what attack is coming next.)
Sure, Obama might want to preserve some flexibility by torturing the “leader” who “planned” a “big attack”. On the other hand, he might want to preserve some flexibility by doing yoga, or perhaps studying the Feldenkrais method. After all, Cheney’s chosen exercise regime of torturing all and sundry doesn’t seem to have panned out too well.
What are your favourite methods for preserving some flexibility, readers?
I reckon the best way to stay supple when it comes to torture is to not admit to it being official policy,still less to get your minions to boast about it.That way,when you get found out , you can preserve rogue operative-ability.
Yeah, it’s fiction, but so is Newsweek.
As Jim Henley points out, using the ticking bomb scenario to justify torture shows a distinct lack of flexibility. Get yourself sufficiently limber and you could use that cliche to justify anything.
What are your favourite methods for preserving some flexibility, readers?
Naked human pyramids.
My favourite method is to fix the intelligence and facts around my policy. I find that facts can be stubbornly rigid things, unless you carefully use, as their base, your own infinitely flexible policy. That way, they just act as a sort of armour, and hide the twists and bends of your whims and intentions.
I thought ‘liberal shibboleths’ lived in non-Euclidian cyclopean edifices.
‘Or will he let a possibly very dangerous man go, and thereby concede that any Qaeda terrorist who can get into the United States legally is free to roam the country unless (and until) he commits a crime or maybe an immigration violation?’
Surely if someone is a ‘terrorist’ they have committed a crime, even if it is only belonging to a terrorist organisation.
‘It’s likely that the take-the-gloves-off attitude of Cheney and his allies filtered down through the ranks, until untrained prison guards with sadistic tendencies were making sport with electric shock. But no direct link has been reported.’
Making sport? I say how quaint. And no direct link has been reported? Given the quality of American investigative journalism that means that none can possibly exist.
I love the way they say that ‘many’ intelligence personnel ‘believe’ that Bush’s torture-happy methods worked. No names, no definite number of intelligence personnel who agree with the statement, no indication of what rank they hold or how many years experience these torture fans have – just a vague, nebulous number of people who, in some way, ‘believe’ that Bush’s policy prevented another 9/11.
And how exactly is the fact that Obama’s legal counsel is a ‘former abortion rights lawyer’ relevant to any of this? Is Newsweek trying to imply that she cares more for the rights of terrrsts than she cares for the god-given rights of the blastocyst?
“fighting too hard against terrorism”
Just like this man was fighting too hard against yobs and hoodlums – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new.....t-man.html
“It is unlikely he will wildly overcorrect for the Bush administration’s abuses”
How do you “wildly overcorrect” for torture? Surely stopping torturing is as far as you can possibly go, which sounds like enough correcting to me. So what would “wildly overcorrecting” look like? Can you un-torture people?
“His case has become a cause célèbre among civil libertarians, who argue that the government can’t just lock you up indefinitely on suspicion of terrorism”
I am pretty sure it is not just those pesky, ivory-tower civil libertarians who argue this.
“It’s likely that the take-the-gloves-off attitude of Cheney and his allies filtered down through the ranks, until untrained prison guards with sadistic tendencies were making sport with electric shock. But no direct link has been reported”
It’s like the internet doesn’t even exist at times! Honestly, 30 secs with the Google:-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....Jun11.html
“But he might also want to carve out an exception for extreme cases”
Or how about just carving the extreme cases?
“To provide political accountability, the president should be required to sign any such orders”
For “political accountability” read “a noose around his own neck”.
“When she worked in the Clinton Justice Department, some complained, she had an undue penchant for saying “no” to the president”
Undue? How very dare she!
“Obama will discover, if he hasn’t already, that presidents live in a gray area”
I can’t believe he didn’t go for the obvious “White House” joke there. A swing and a miss.
“Obama would do well just to level with the American people about what he is doing to protect their liberties—while keeping them safe”
Trans: “we want the last lot to get away with what they did, but if you do it too, come out and tell us. Then we can get you.”
I nearly did myself, but I decided it was too cheap a shot even for this blog.
It’s kinda significant, I think, that one of the authors is a senior fellow at the Brookings, and yet the piece sounds exactly as if it’d come out of the AEI.
Although I admit I haven’t read any neocon stuff recently, maybe they are much crazier these days…
Sorry to be a pedant, indeed perhaps a twat, but isn’t the word “the” in the phrase “the TWAT” a little redundant? Sorry if I’ve posted this twice…
Hmmm… not if I’ve just decided that it stands for Twatty War Against Terror.
Torture does so work:
1. When you already know what you need the victim to say.
Fer example, you can’t have a proper witch hunt without witches, now can you? Nothing works like torture to produce exponential increases in the number of Satan’s minions, which in turn can be a source of legitimacy for the rule of Popes and Princes we might otherwise lynch.
2. To maintain a social order of extreme injustice.
Seriously, could the institution of slavery have survived a week without torture? Curiously, people just will not accept a future without hope unless the alternative is worse.
3. Information.
Have to be judicious if you’re after that. See the torture scene in Marathon Man. As soon as you let on what it is you want to hear, well, next thing you know, you’re chasing after caches of diamonds that don’t actually exist.
Don’t thank me. Just use this knowledge only for good,
You insist that waterboarding is not “simulated drowning,” but I like the phrase. To actually drown involves death, so what’s actually going on isn’t really drowning. It does, however, feel just like drowning does. For that reason, I think the term is accurate.
The point of the term “simulated drowning” is to draw attention to what “waterboarding” really is. The term “waterboarding” makes me think of doing laundry without a machine. “Simulated drowning” brings to mind a much more accurate (and disturbing) image. The use of the word “simulated” is not meant to trivialize what is going on.
[To actually drown involves death]
So if you see someone fall into the canal, and scream “Help! I’m drowning!”, do you correct their error?
we correct their error by jumping in and saving them! actions speak louder than words — thanks to heroic me you turned out to be mistake in yr otherwise justified belief etc
the torturers are causing additional suffering by failing to correct the (as it turns out) usually mistaken terrors of those they are torturing: they are exploiting the uncertainty (as well as he hard-wired physiology)
seriously (ok “seriously”) part of the problem here is that we have many of us got all superior about the word “simulation” thanks IMO to the late M.Baudrillard, who has persuaded a certain layer of savants the they are tremendously better able to distinguish simulations from non-simulations, in advance of their consequences, merely by having bought his books
simulated doesn’t just mean “quite alike if you’re not paying attention (and aren’t up on critical theory)” — it can just as well mean “so fucking alike that no one could tell the difference in the fearful urgency of the moment”
Sure sure, it can mean whatever we’d like it to mean.
Did I miss the part where everyone woke up to find that Strange Days had become true and “simulations” “felt” just like the “real thing”?
if what’s being simulated is the physical sensation of drowning, the fact that it does indeed feel just like the real sensation of drowning doesn’t strike me as a particularly outlandish claim — it’s kind of the point, isn’t it, up to and including the wiggle room for deniability?
(viz the torturers can say “yes but we weren’t really drowning him at all, whatever he thought, so it can’t have been the real sensation of drowning”; the person tortured will say “it seemed pretty fucking like drowning to me”)
what i’m getting at is (a) that the word simulation – as in “making very like but not identical” — is ambiguous in any given context as to exactly HOW like is “very like”, and that (b) (in my slightly flippant opinion) the word has recently been evolving, or devolving, to imply “allegedly like but actually not a bit like if you know yr onions”, which makes it seem doubly inappropriate in this case
Apologist: “It wasn’t a drowning, it was only a simulated drowning”
Critic: “How well that excuse work depends entirely on how good the simulation was” etc
Absent nonexistent sci-fi brain interfaces, inducing in someone the physical sensation of drowning can only be done by drowning them, stopping before death or not. Nothing is being “simulated” here, whether or not you think some people have read too much Baudrillard.
Your (certainly usefully clear) position is that the unspeak here is an actively wrong usage; mine is that it’s more the knowing and cynical exploitation of ambiguities of meaning (of the word “simulation”, as per me above, and of the word “drowning”, as per Will above).
I’m not sure we’re going to agree on this, or that there’s much to be gained from further attempts at persuasion. But the important point either way, yours or mine, is that there’s an attempted exculpation going on here, of a very nasty kind — whereby the the concept of the “physical sensation of drowning (except stopping before death)” is being deployed by apologists as being somehow OK because of the stuff in brackets. We don’t currently have an agreed-on verbal way to distinguish “drowning the process which may or may not end in death” from “drowning as in actual-death-by-suffocation-in-liquid”; that is, a distinction that helps makes it immediately clear that the former is still unacceptably evil even when it isn’t identical first and last with the latter.
Presumably we don’t have this distinction because until very recently we didn’t know we were going to need it: maybe the solution is to ensure that “waterboarding” (the crime that’s made the distinction necessary) becomes the term for everything it actually entails?
Oh yes, agreed.
Well, the former is obviously torture, which helps to distinguish it from murder in the latter case. I still think that my suggestion of forced partial drowning gets at it, though I doubt we can expect people who perform it or order it to agree publicly on that description.
To respond to dsquared, there is nothing inaccurate about saying “I’m drowning!” when you have fallen into the canal. It’s just like saying “I’m dying!” or “I’m bleeding to death!” after being shot. It would be inaccurate to say “It’s a good thing you pulled me out of the canal, because I drowned,” or “It’s a good thing you treated my wound, because I bled to death.”
I like the term, and I really don’t think it’s attempted exculpation. “Forced partial drowning” is a bit of a mouthful. “Simulated drowning” is a little easier to say, IMO. I think belle is right that the term simulated “can just as well mean “so fucking alike that no one could tell the difference in the fearful urgency of the moment.”” I think it’s true that the word has devolved or whatever, but I still think the term works because I think that meaning is clear.
I think we can at least agree that both terms are better than calling it “waterboarding” because this term obfuscates what’s really going on. It sounds a lot like “washboarding,” which is something very harmless. I think that this is the reason the new term has been introduced. I sincerely doubt Cheney could’ve said with a straight face “Simulated drowning is not torture.” But that’s what he said about waterboarding, which is really the same thing.
As for your main point, I agree that Newsweek’s position here is absurd. Torture doesn’t work–you get far too many false positives to make any meaningful conclusions (not to mention ceding the moral high ground and the resultant loss of support). It’s only recently that I’ve really become aware of how sycophantic many journalists are. They won’t put pressure on politicians for fear that they will lose access. It’s disgusting. I really appreciate the way you call them out here.
[To respond to dsquared, there is nothing inaccurate about saying “I’m drowning!” when you have fallen into the canal.]
then presumably there’s nothing inaccurate about saying “I’m drowning” while you’re being waterboarded, or saying “stop drowning that man!” to some torturers while they’re waterboarding somebody. People can and die from being waterboarded, and have done so, so I also don’t think you could say it’s inaccurate to say that “the USA drowns people and should stop drowning people”. If you put someone in a state where they’ve got water in their lungs, then you are actually drowning them – I don’t see how this can be changed to “simulated drowning” simply because you’ve got an intention in your mind that you’re going to let them back up.
It’s simple: replace the word “drown” with the word “kill.” Did you only read the quoted part of my reply? To use the gunshot analogy again, there’s a difference between losing blood in a way that kills you and losing blood in a way that doesn’t. If and only if someone loses so much blood that they die, they have bled to death. If you are losing an extraordinary amount of blood and you are concerned that you are going to bleed to death, you might reasonably say “I’m bleeding to death!” Someone else might come to your rescue and reasonably say “Oh, no you’re not!” before helping to treat the wound. Similarly, a victim of waterboarding might think he’s drowning, but he would be wrong unless he actually dies. If someone dies, it truly isn’t waterboarding (or simulated drowning)–it then becomes drowning/murder.
This is my last reply to you–you clearly aren’t going to listen to me if you haven’t already.
No, I’m listening, I just don’t agree with you. In your example, if you lose a load of blood but are brought into hospital and saved at the last moment, would you call that “simulated bleeding to death”? Or “partial bleeding to death”? The second sounds a lot more correct, because the word “simulated” implies that there’s something unreal about the process, while “partial” correctly implies that it’s the same process as the one which leads to death, but interrupted.
The gun shot analogy isn’t very useful – it involves a momentary action by the man with the gun, and then a drawn-out process of bleeding. The potential killer can’t decide to stop halfway. Better to think of a way of killing someone that takes a length of time.
So, you would say, to someone with their hands around another’s neck, “you’re strangling him!” (though the victim, rather like waterboarding, can’t say “he’s strangling me!”, because they can’t use their airway). If the waterboarding continued for several minutes, it would kill the victim. You can’t breathe properly during it.
Hmm, “simulated bleeding” and “simulated killing” sound like some magic tricks with fake blood and an empty boxes sawed in half, don’t they?
So, why would “simulated drowning” describe the real thing stopped just before the victim dies? Would you describe beating someone to a pulp as “simulated killing”? I doubt it.
I really don’t know why I’m replying again. No, “partial bleeding to death” doesn’t make any more sense than “partial drowning.” We might say that someone almost bled to death, but not that they partially did. That’s like being partially pregnant. You’re either dead or alive. If you really can’t stand “simulated drowning” then call it “near drowning” or something like that, but not “partial drowning.”
I’ll admit that the word “death” fits better than “kill” here. The point I was trying to make is that if no one dies, no drowning has occurred. “Simulated death” doesn’t sound like some kind of cute magic trick, does it? Because you can look at it that way, but that’s missing the point. I never said “simulated bleeding” although the phrase “simulated bleeding to death” would be closer to what is meant. Doesn’t sound like a magic trick to me–it sounds like causing someone to lose so much blood that it feels like they are going to bleed to death.
To be more precise, no, it’s technically not accurate to say “I’m drowning!” if you don’t die in the process. It is a reasonable thing to say if you are reasonably concerned that you will drown, but not accurate if you do not drown.
I’m really getting sick of this. Accurate language is only worth so much. Honestly the most important thing is that you find something to call it better than “waterboarding” that reflects what’s actually going on.
DOJ releases secret CIA interrogation memos