On "torture"

Note: it should go without saying -- but in American political discourse does not -- that you can always talk about how stupid are most of the people who hold a particular political opinion, simply because most people who hold political opinions hold them for what are, strictly speaking, intellectually sloppy and inadequate reasons. In this post I am challenging the defenders of a particular political viewpoint to come up with logically coherent arguments for that viewpoint, and ridiculing the arguments I've heard so far, precisely because I would like to hear the sane and rational and intellectually careful defenders of the Andrew Sullivan position on "torture," but in the American media world such reasonably and admirable voices -- on either side -- are routinely drowned out by the noisy asses -- Andrew Sullivan, for example, or on the other side of the aisle Sean Hannity. I cringe whenever I hear Sean Hannity defend one of my own positions, because I can hardly help but be tainted by association; and I assure any reasonable person who is uncomfortable with the idea of American use of "torture" that I will not hold their unfortunate association with Andrew Sullivan and John McCain against them.

In short, if you think I'm misrepresenting your reasons for opposing American use of "torture," then fire away in the comments -- because, if you are a more reasonable person than Sully and the other talking heads who make most of the noise on the Left, I almost certainly am misrepresenting your position. And it's you reasonable Leftists' opinions that I'm really interested in. The arguments of fools (like Sully) who disagree with you have the unhealthy effect of increasing your own estimation of your own intellectual superiority. The arguments of wise people who disagree with you have the exceptionally salutary effect of educating you about the ways in which you yourself are being a fool.

In short, don't think for a moment that I think everybody who is opposed to American use of "torture," is the same kind of narcissistic moron that Andrew Sullivan is.

Here’s you a bit of imaginary dialogue between a member of the Religious Right and a member of the secular Left:

JAMES DOBSON WANNABE: Look, it doesn’t matter whether or not legalizing and regulating abortion would result in fewer dead and maimed women. It’s fundamentally evil and our government simply cannot destroy its character by endorsing the practice. We stand at a moral crossroads: the soul of America is at stake.

ANDREW SULLIVAN WANNABE: How dare you impose your arbitrary moral absolutes on me?

Lest you think I am misrepresenting the Sullivanesque position, here are extended quotes from his latest attempt (in Time magazine's edition of 9 Oct 2006) to prove that he (a) detests "fundamentalist" Christians and (b) hasn't bothered to understand them before condemning them. Sully is writing an extended, ill-tempered, and remarkably ignorant screed on the superiority of "humble" religions to religions that feel "certainty" -- his own humble religion (humility being the first word that springs to mind in any word-association session when the shrink says, "Andrew Sullivan") to Benedict's arrogant "certainty," for example. He is boasting about the superiority of his own subculture's approach, the superiority of the kinds of "faith" represented by liberal Episcopalianism, liberal Catholicism, Thomas Jefferson, etc. -- which is to say, religious subcultures whose emotions in religious discussions are dominated by the Results metaphor rather than the Fact metaphor, though Sullivan utterly misunderstands the true nature of the distinction between himself and the detested "fundamentalists."

Those kinds of faith [that is, the "humble" Andrew Sullivan kind of faith] recognize one thing, first of all, about the nature of God and humankind, and it is this: If God really is God, then God must, by definition, surpass our human understanding. Not entirely. We have Scripture; we have reason; we have religious authority; we have our own spiritual experiences of the divine. But there is still something we will never graps, something we can never know -- because God is beyond our human categories. And if God is beyond our categories, then God cannot be captured for certain. We cannot know with the kind of surety that allows us to proclaim truth with a capital T. There will always be something that eludes us. If there weren't, it would not be God...

If we cannot know for sure at all times how to govern our own lives, what right or business do we have telling others how to live theirs? From a humble faith comes toleration of other faiths...In global politics, it translates into a willingness to recognize empirical reality, even when it disturbs our ideology and interests. From moderate religion comes moderate politics. From moderate religions comes pragmatic politics.

That bit of dialogue with which I started the post...I thought of that after listening to months and months of hectoring from the Andrew Sullivan school of thought that believes that the United States is quite simply morally obligated not to engage in “torture,” the definition of which seems to be...well, actually, getting anything remotely resembling a decent definition of the term out of the Left is quite a challenge. But the form of most of the Left’s argumentation is as follows:

ANDREW SULLIVAN WANNABE: Look, it doesn’t matter whether or not using torture would give us the information we need to save innocent lives. It’s a fundamentally evil practice and our government simply cannot betray everything our country stands for by engaging in the practice. We stand at a moral crossroads: the soul of America is at stake.

To which my immediate reaction is: Okay, I know where the Christian fundamentalists are drawing their moral absolutes, and I know why they think the moral principles in which they believe are binding on everybody – they believe that one God created everything, that he built certain universal principles into human nature, that those universal principles hold throughout the human race, and that God has told us what those principles are. Whether or not I agree with them about the details of those principles, there is logical coherence in their claim that their principles are valid for everybody even if not everybody recognizes the validity of those principles. The seasons change for Frenchmen who think the sun goes around the earth rather than vice versa just as surely as the leaves fall in the yards of those of us who have heard about that new-fangled Copernican theory; and Christians think the moral laws are valid even for those who get them wrong, just like the laws of science are. So there’s coherence to their approach even though I think they frequently get the details wrong.

But what am I supposed to think about somebody like Andrew Sullivan? – that is, someone who sees a lurking theocrat in every conservative Christian who expresses a political opinion, yet wants me, on moral grounds, to agree that we should discard a potentially critical tool in our defense against terrorism; someone who demands that we risk potentially tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths of innocent Americans in order to satisfy this moral absolute to which he happens to pledge allegiance; someone who pledges allegiance to that moral absolute for no apparent reason other than the preconceptions and presuppositions of the subculture to which he happens to belong; someone who demands that we kowtow to his subculture’s preconceptions and presuppositions even though that very subculture incessantly lectures all the rest of us about the importance of “tolerating” all the behavior in which they engage, even when the rest of us believe it is immoral and socially destructive. How am I to be expected to respond to such a demand with anything less than derision and contempt?

We say, "Look, what if we capture a terrorist, and by waterboarding we have the chance to save five or ten thousand innocent American lives?" and Sullivan responds, "But torture is evil and we cannot betray our national character merely because such behavior would save American lives." One of those positions, clearly, is the position of a person who believes that he has certain knowledge of a moral absolute; the other, equally clearly is the position of someone whose political calculation is based on "pragmatism" and "empiricism." And it's not hard to tell which is which. That "humble," "moderate" religion of Sully's...where did it go? It's Princeton University all over again for me -- a place where I learned to prefer the narrow-mindedness of the redneck "fundamentalists" I grew up with in the Kiamichi hills, to the narrow-mindedness of the narcissistic Andrew Sullivan intellectuals I went to school with, because while in either case you had to put with fatuous and narrow-minded intellectual provincialism, at least with the Southern Baptists you didn't also have to listen to them congratulating themselves on how open-minded they were.

As far as I can tell, the Left’s case against “torture” consists of four arguments and a strategy. The strategy is to be very, very careful never to define what constitutes torture; this relieves them from the danger that something they find distasteful will be logically proved to be less than torture. If you refuse to draw the line or even give any indication of the general vicinity in which the line might lie, then those whom you wish to condemn can never prove that they have not in fact crossed it.

As for the arguments, they seem to be these:

1. “Torture” (whatever that is) is an intrinsically evil action, and no means can justify an intrinsically evil end. Therefore any appeal to the balance of consequences (that is, to the question of the innocent lives that could be saved by judicious use of “torture”) doesn’t have to be refuted. If your opponent appeals to the balance of consequences, you don’t have to prove logically that your opponent is intellectually wrong by disproving his arguments – you simply declare him to be morally wrong by appealing to the moral absolute that you have just embraced.

If you are a foe of “torture” and you appeal primarily to the idea that “torture” is evil and therefore we shouldn’t use it no matter how many lives it might save, then you should understand that you’re not going to convince anybody of this by appeal to your moral absolute, until you take the trouble to provide a rational justification for your moral absolute. If you have been in the habit of condemning religious fundamentalists for “imposing their morality on the rest of us,” then this justification absolutely must include explaining why all of a sudden moral absolutism is a good thing and not a bad thing. It involves explaining why your moral absolute rests on transcendent and inviolable moral principles rather than on utilitarian/net-social-good ethical premises – since the latter reduce all moral questions, including the question of torture, to precisely the sort of balance-of-consequences argument that you’re trying to claim shows that your opponents are morally depraved rather than practically perspicacious.

Good luck with that one. I’d love to hear it. I don’t mean that sarcastically at all; I’d love to see the moralizing Left genuinely attempt to explain why the government should impose the Left’s moral principles (no discrimination! no sexism! no “torture”!) but not the Right’s. The Left has for as long as I’ve been listening to them indulged in sweeping moral condemnations of the Right’s “judgmentalism” and “legislation of morality,” right alongside a remarkable eagerness on the part of the Left to pass moral judgment and to pass laws enforcing those moral judgments.

To me, at least, the moral case seems very far from being as open-and-shut as the anti-“torture” crowd seems to think. They seem to me to ignore the fact that there are sins of omission as well as sins of comission; it is evil to rape a woman, but it is also evil to stand aside and allow a woman to be raped when there’s a perfectly good pipe to hand with which you could clobber the would-be rapist over the head. The anti-“torture” people seem to me to be saying something very close to, “It’s evil to clobber people over the head with pipes; and therefore we should never do it.”

For example, take waterboarding. Now, I’m no expert, but my understanding of waterboarding is that it breaks people’s will to resist questioning in a matter of minutes; and also that there is no actual physical risk to the subject, nor are there any permanent negative physical effects – and by “permanent” I mean “anything you’d notice half an hour later.” To me, what you have there is an absolutely perfect – an absolutely morally ideal – interrogation technique.

But to Andrew Sullivan, waterboarding is “torture.” I don't know why; but a simple perusal of the hyperbolic and frantic language that the topic elicits from this person who brags of how moderate religion does not flip out when pragmatic considerations disturb its ideology, will show that Sullivan is very much disturbed indeed by the idea of waterboarding.

So let’s say that you have captured a terrorist who you think probably has information that, if you can get it out of him within the next six hours, may make the difference between thwarting an attack like September 11 – that you reasonably believe that five thousand or more innocent lives may hang by the question of whether you can get him to tell you what he knows within the next few hours. To make it simple, let’s say that you genuinely believe that your choices are: waterboard, the consequences of which are that your murderous terrorist subject has a miserable few minutes but emerges perfectly healthy while five thousand American lives are saved; or refrain from waterboarding because Andrew Sullivan thinks it’s “torture,” and let hundreds or thousands of innocent Americans go through something like this (I warn you that that video is traumatic just to watch – much less to live through, or I should say die through). Andrew’s position, if I understand it, is that the person who chooses not to waterboard is morally superior to the person who decides at least to try to get the information needed to save those lives. To which I can only say, perhaps that particular moral judgment is correct; we can discuss that seriously if we are both rational people. But if you think that that particular moral judgment is self-evident – as Sully certainly seems to consider it – then either you are, or I am, morally blind. For it seems to me that you might as well congratulate the pipe-holding pacifist who stands aside and allows the rapist to proceed, while condemning the “vigilante” who whacks the rapist over the head and rescues his intended victim. Inaction can be evil and despicable as surely as action can be. Omission can be just as much sin as can commission. Our government has a solemn duty to protect the innocent against the violence of the murderous, which duty the anti-“torture” crowd appears to disregard most cavalierly. In fact Sullivan appears to me to be arguing that the action of causing temporary discomfort for a terrorist outweighs the inaction that ends in a mass murder of innocents that would have preventable by anyone who cared more about protecting innocents than about protecting terrorists.

I do not find this a convincing argument against “torture.” I find it, on the contrary, evidence that Sullivan’s moral judgment is grossly perverse. I am perfectly willing to be persuaded otherwise by rational arguments; but I require genuinely rational arguments – that is, something a bit more rigorous than are hissy fits, sneers, and shallowly platitudinous self-righteousness. (Which is to say, something other than Sully's stock in trade.)

2. “Torture doesn’t work.” This is an empirical question, and the ability to express an informed opinion on it would seem to require some quite specialized experience. It also seems extremely likely that some types of “torture” work consistently well in certain circumstances, and that other types of “torture” do not work well in those circumstances but might work decently in others, etc. In other words, “torture doesn’t work” is precisely the sort of vague generalization which a practical person may take as a rough starting point, but which anyone sensible will proceed to try to refine into much more specific generalizations about what sorts of techniques work and when they work and whether or not their practical weaknesses can be mitigated in combination with other techniques of interrogation and intelligence-gathering.

But since you can’t even get a decent definition of “torture” out of the anti-“torture” crowd, how can you hope to get from them the sort of definitional precision that makes a meaningful empirical and pragmatic analysis of the effectiveness of various techniques, even possible? If they won’t tell you what torture is, how can you tell whether they’re telling the truth when they tell you it doesn’t work?

It certainly seems to me that if you’ve captured a high-value terrorist and there’s danger of imminent attack, then even if a particular technique only has a 10% chance of giving you accurate information – hell, it’s worth a shot. And that’s especially true if you know that the value of what he knows falls with every minute that passes without your being able to get the information and act on it. Thus the people who say, “Torture doesn’t work,” seem to me to be saying something that doesn’t sound at all reasonable (especially in light of the success of the snatch-extract-dash-to-the-next-snatch waterfall blitzkrieg tactics described by Michael Yon during his time in Mosul). And while I freely admit that I have little expertise in this area, I don’t see any reason to think that, say, Andrew Sullivan has any more expertise than I do. The people who do have the practical experience necessary to have an informed opinion on which techniques work and which do not, are the military intelligence personal who actually conduct interrogations – which seems to me to be an excellent reason to leave it up to them, generally speaking, to decide which techniques will be practically effective and which will not.

3. “The rest of the world will have a lower opinion of us.”

So what?

Hm, let’s try a slightly less dismissive version of that, for the sake of politeness.

By “the rest of the world” people on the Left mean overwhelmingly, “The people from the part of the worldwide political spectrum who pretty much don’t like us anyway, and who are only willing to say they approve of us if we behave in the same very foolish and self-destructive manner that their own governments behave.” We’re talking about the sort of people who believe that our foreign policy should defer to the moral giants of the United Nations, for example.

But one thing that every American father used to teach his children (though the Baby Boomers sort of abandoned this part of the curriculum) is that no man who’s worth anything, backs away from doing the right thing just because public opinion will be against him. On things that don’t matter a whole lot, sure, you can go along to get along, because it’s better to be at peace with your neighbors than to be fighting with them. But when it comes to the things that have to be done, a man who cowers away from his duty because he’s worried about what other people will think, doesn’t deserve to be called a man at all; and his children, if they have any sense at all, will be ashamed of his conduct.

Now the Islamofascists must be stopped, and it must surely be obvious at this point that Europe, at least, doesn’t have the courage and manly virtues necessary to stop them. If they’re going to be stopped, it won’t be by the Europeans. But they must be stopped, and the duty of stopping them falls to those countries that still have brave men and women who will pay the price – countries like America and Australia. It must be done. And if doing what must be done, causes you to be badly thought of by the people who won’t do it themselves...well, I say again, so what?

In short, this anti-“torture” argument is neither more nor less than a teenaged-level appeal to peer pressure. If “torture” is morally permissible, and if there are situations in which “torture” is the most effective, or even possibly the only effective, way for our armed forces to fulfill their duty of protecting the innocent and crushing the Islamofascist threat to Western civilization, then it would be a fundamental failure of moral courage for us to draw back just because “world opinion” would go from “America is run by a bunch of arrogant imperialist jerks” to “America is run by a bunch of arrogant imperialist jerks who torture terrorists.”

Now, if it were going to affect Australia’s opinions, then we might pay more attention to that; because Australia’s conduct in the war against terror has earned them much more respect than, say, Norway’s or Germany’s. But if you just mean, “The people around the world who don’t like America, will now like us even less...” So what? Any man, or any country, that deserves respect, will do what is right even in the face of peer pressure, and the more so when the pressure against doing what is right comes from those whose conduct has never itself been such as to earn respect – into which class continental European voters (in the aggregate) most definitely fall.

Again, if “the world” doesn’t approve, and if they have solid and rational arguments to offer to show why we’re wrong, why then it that case again we should take them seriously. But to back away from doing what must be done simply in order to placate the prejudices of the noisily foolish, is not the act of a man – or a country – of principle and character.

4. “If we don’t follow the Geneva Conventions then people will torture our own soldiers when they are captured.”

This has got to be one of the stupidest arguments ever put forward in defense of any political proposition whatsoever. In the first place, the Geneva Conventions offer no protection to terrorists, and the whole point of the Geneva Conventions is to provide incentives to countries not to use terrorists – which the Conventions accomplish by affording special protections to soldiers of countries that obey the rules, and not affording those same protections to terrorists and to soldiers of rogue countries. I find it hard to imagine that anybody who had actually read the Geneva Conventions and knew the history behind them, could for a moment seriously believe that affording those protections to terrorists would do anything except destroy the whole point for which the Conventions were drawn up in the first place. Instead this appeal is made by people who appear to suffer under the delusion that the Geneva Conventions were designed as a document of moral theology, a sort of Inalienable Human Rights document – a secular Gospel of moral certainty to which all pragmatic considerations must humbly yield. So right away when you hear people appealing to the Geneva Conventions as protection for terrorists, you know that you are dealing with someone who is either shamelessly intellectually dishonest (this would describe, say, Justice Kennedy) or else a complete ignoramus.

But that’s not even what’s absurd about this argument. What’s absurd about this argument is that our soldiers have been getting tortured for decades, by people who never have and never will give a damn about whether or not we follow the Geneva Conventions. What the hell does John McCain think – that the reason the Vietnamese tortured him was that we didn’t follow the Geneva Conventions with enough faux-religious ardor, and that if only we had been more careful to follow international law, the Vietnamese would have been equally scrupulous? Islamofascists thugs kill civilians whom they have kidnapped by sawing through their necks with dull knives, and they celebrate the occasion with a snuff video. What, do you delusional people really believe that, as some would-be al-Zarqawi places the knife at the latest victim’s neck, a messenger will rush and say, “Wait! The Americans are giving us Geneva Convention protections,” and the thug with the knife will say, “Oh, really? Why, in that case, let me help to your feet, sir, and give you a comfortable bed and a hot meal”?

“That’s a straw man,” I hear you reply. “What we’re saying is that other nations that would have treated our troops with Geneva Convention restraint, now will refuse to do so.”

Fine. Name one.

Go ahead. Name a single Geneva-Convention-compliant country that wasn’t planning to torture our troops, but now will say, “Oh, well, since the Americans are waterboarding terrorists we’ll go ahead and start chopping the fingers off of American POW’s.”

I’m still waiting.

You unspeakable morons. The Geneva Conventions will continue to have exactly the same force they always have had – because we will continue to say exactly what every single signatory said when the Geneva Conventions were first created. And that is, “If you make it easy for us to tell the difference between which people on your side are soldiers and which people aren’t, then we will make every effort to keep from killing your civilians; and if you treat those of our soldiers whom you capture with the respect and care that the Conventions lay out, then we will return the favor. But if you try to make your soldiers look like civilians so that we can’t help but kill lots of your civilians by mistake, or you torture our soldiers, then God help your guys when we get our hands on them.” And if we ever find ourselves in a war with, say, France...wait, bad example, I need somebody who won’t surrender before we have had time to capture any of their soldiers...let’s say we find ourselves in a war with Germany. I can assure you that the Germans will be much less likely to torture our soldiers if they know that their own soldiers will pay the price. In other words, the whole deterrent force of the Geneva Conventions lies precisely in the fact that the country we’re fighting knows that if it abuses our guys, their guys will pay for it. The attempt to extend Geneva Conventions protection to terrorists completely pisses away that entire deterrent effect and leaves our soldiers entirely at the mercy of the good will and moral character of our foes – which is to say, it makes it one hell of a lot more likely that they’ll get tortured.

You morons.

Oh, and one last thing for you morons who use that last argument: welcome to the club, from a guy who has frequently made a mountainous moron of himself and could conceivably be doing so again this very moment.