if the American people know how and why we tortured, and how well it worked, they’d support it even more strongly
Fascinating:
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/margin…
At many blogs (Sullivan, Yglesias, DeLong, among others) you will find ongoing arguments for prosecuting the torturers who ran our government for a while. I am in agreement with the moral stance of these critics but I don’t agree with their practical conclusions. I believe that a full investigation would lead the U.S. public to, ultimately, side with torture, side with the torturers, and side against the prosecutors. That’s why we can’t proceed and Obama probably understands that. If another attack happened this would be all the more true.
On top of everything else, major Democrats in Congress are likely complicit and the Democrats as a whole hardly made this a campaign issue in 2004; in 2008 the economy was their winning issue, not torture…
Pushing for prosecution would more likely endanger rule of law than preserve it, which is a sorry state of affairs.
On that note:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB12407702…
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has requested that the administration declassify additional CIA memos that he said would show the tactics worked.
Given that extreme questioning / torture worked, given that Pelosi and other top Democrats were privately briefed on the techniques ahead of time and are now lying about it despite the documentation that could expose the lies, and given that most Americans are willing to waterboard the folks who were behind 9/11 and who planned other terrorist attacks … yeah, it seems like Obama and the Dems are playing it smart, politically, by keeping a lid on this.
(via)
April 28th, 2009 at 9:42 am
“Given that extreme questioning / torture worked” seems like a remarkably generous way to put it. The same level of analysis would make it easy to crow that protectionism “worked,” for example, even in the usual case where sensible people would agree that the opposite was more nearly the case.
Granted, there’s enough ambiguity between “was net beneficial” and “had some beneficial effects” that flat statements in the opposite direction, like “torture doesn’t work,” are usually the hallmark of morons, And I’m embarrassed by those morons, not trying to defend them. Somewhere I have a link, from early in the post-9/11 torture debates, to a history of US nastiness in the post-Spanish-American-War Philippines. I dimly remember at least one example of US torturers there looking for easy-to-verify simple time-sensitive information, like “where are the arms cached?” I’m sorry, morons, if you believe that torture is relatively ineffective at recovering information like that, the burden of proof is on you.
That said, the torture movement has some moron issues as well. E.g., trying to claim that everyone tortured is a terrorist doesn’t look sensible to me. The secrecy makes it harder to falsify, but it’s not such a plausible claim that it stands without evidence, and the secrecy makes it difficult to back up.
And, to my main point, the torture movement has not only a moron issue but a superficially-clever issue as well. Are you in favor of steel and sugar import limits because of their concentrated benefits? And would you, like California Pizza Kitchen and Domino’s, play advertisements to your customers while you put them on hold? The arguments on protectionism are cliched, and I won’t address them. I don’t know the arguments for ads on hold, but I expect it is easy to demonstrate in a pilot program that the ads increase sales of your new Garlic Bready Treats or whatever. But some of the costs are diffuse. Some diffuse costs might be measurable, if you try — I might like to use caller ID, advertise to on-hold callers whose phone numbers are odd, and three months later check whether one’s customer base is skewed toward even numbers. (Except the lab rats would probably react in weird ways as they noticed that some numbers were safe, alas.) But even when it is sometimes possible to measure the diffuse costs, it remains true that the diffuse costs tend to resist measurement much more than the concentrated benefits.
I have no idea how to measure them accurately, but I think the US tends to benefit from the beliefs “the US doesn’t casually blow off treaty obligations,” “being occupied by the US is not nearly as bad as it could be,” and “being captured by the US is not nearly as bad as it could be.” It seems to me that strength of all three beliefs have been significantly weakened by the torture policy. Formal and informal limits on abusing detained suspects also seem to be pretty central to stable Anglospherical governance, and were also probably weakened. I believe weakening those beliefs is bad for any future hot war (or hot showdown, a la Cuban Missile Crisis), and I believe weakening those limits is bad for our risk of the kinds of horrendously dysfunctional governments that have been a serious public health hazard in the last century.
To be fair, I think the get-tough-with-torture folk think the diffuse “blowing up buildings in the US isn’t as dangerous as it could be” belief caused the US problems, and was weakened by US torture policy. They may well be right. (They are probably right about the first order effect; I’m not quite sure about the net effect. E.g., has torture policy fallout perhaps weakened US hot-war-ish capability to put boots on the ground in places like Afghanistan, feeding back into perceived risk of blowing things up in the US?) But I’m sorry, even adding in the risks of nuclear or biological terrorism, I have trouble seeing that that the risk is on the same order of magnitude as the risks of hot war and horrendous government. So once your diffuse costs spill over into hot war and governmental foundations, expect me to be seriously skeptical about net benefits related to terrorism and facilitating the pacification of third-world countries, and scathing about tacitly ignoring the diffuse costs.