Fox News and the Difficulty of Consensus
I was saying the other day that large-scale punishment for the perpetrators of Bush-era war crimes is less important than establishing some form of political consensus that torture is wrong for the future. A decision to kind of wave hands and say “well, it was a crazy time” would disappoint me, but the really important thing is to try to change the dynamic where we essentially have a lot of politicians saying that if it were up to them we’d go straight-away back to doing more torture. This is why it’s great to Senator John McCain back to fighting the good fight on the torture issue:
Nevertheless, as Neil Sinhababu observes, the existence of a large and powerful conservative media apparatus will make the emergence of an anti-torture consensus quite difficult:
But I don’t think that we’re going to be able to establish any such consensus anytime soon. It used to be that we were worried about Fox News defeating us in elections, or beating the drums for another Bush Administration war. Winning by big margins is nice, because we don’t have to worry about those particular horrors for at least a little while. But now we have to worry about how Fox and the rest of the right-wing noise machine are going to continually sustain a substantial minority of crazy people, preventing the formation of an anti-torture consensus, an anti-war-of-aggression consensus, and anti-warrantless-spying consensus. Even if there’s majority support for these views, anybody scrapping for power within the Republican Party will find reason to oppose them, just to get a majority of Republicans.
Indeed, in addition to Fox News you have The Wall Street Journal running pieces arguing that waterboarding is not torture written by a guy who knew waterboarding was torture quite recently. It makes for a depressing situation.
78 Responses to “Fox News and the Difficulty of Consensus”
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April 21st, 2009 at 2:50 pm
This is complete nonsense. If we have a set of strong political leaders on the Democratic side, Fox News and Limbaugh and Hannity would be reduced to side shows in a summer fair in Oshkosh.
Liberals should focus more on pressing their leaders to be more forceful rather than just throwing up their hands in frustration over the infinite powers of Fox News.
April 21st, 2009 at 2:51 pm
They will eventually give up and try to pretend that they never made any such argument, in the same way that “separate but equal” kind of lost its popularity over 10-15 years or so.
April 21st, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Bush has been out of office about three months now. Give it a little time.
April 21st, 2009 at 2:58 pm
MY: [T]he really important thing is to try to change the dynamic where we essentially have a lot of politicians saying that if it were up to them we’d go straight-away back to doing more torture.
This is one of the biggest reason law-breaking torturers must be prosecuted.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:03 pm
I say again: I’ll support making waterboarding illegal if you guys support making abortion illegal.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:06 pm
God what a bunch of gratuitous hand wringing. The last waterboarding was what, 6 years ago? Plus you’re cowering before one cable station, one newspaper, and and one talk show host?
Get a grip people. You’re starting to sound like a gaggle of school girls at a slumber party, when the power gets disrupted and the lights go out.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Hector, you can say it as many times as you like but it sounds equally nonsensical every time you say it. This isn’t horsetrading.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Hector,
You seem confused. Waterboarding is already illegal, regardless of whatever you might think about it.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:13 pm
TSG,
Okay then. Why do you expect me to agree to legal changes that _you_ want, when you won’t make legal changes that _I_ want?
For the record, I oppose waterboarding, as I don’t think it can be done safely, and risks actual drowning. I don’t think that, in principle, the infliction of non-lethal physical pain against criminals either as punishment or, in extreme situations, for interrogation is always wrong. I’m not sure why it would be.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Nine years ago, a Bosnian Croat general was sentenced in the Hague to 45 years for the same crime Obama is overtly perpetrating now – failure to prosecute those who committed war crimes and gross breaches of the Geneva Conventions. This is a case where making a political compromise is a crime, and a very serious one.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Matt,
Maybe I’m interpreting that video differently than you are, but it sure doesn’t sound like McCain is “back to fighting the good fight” again.
Release of the memos is a terrible mistake? Helps nobody? Hurts America’s image?
Yeah, he said “Waterboarding is torture” and that people being tortured will tell the torturers anything they want to hear, but he’s still trying to split the difference.
It sure sounded to me that he’s perfectly fine with torture taking place so long as nobody knows about it and no light is shined upon it.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Hector:
I say again: I’ll support making waterboarding illegal if you guys support making abortion illegal.
Why the special concern for fetuses but no love for grown-up matured non-fetus? I mean the tortured arab dude was once a fetus a long time ago.
Neal:
I think the impossibility of consensus on these issues is part of why nobody thinks about consensus and there’s so much left-wing attention to judicial punishments for the perpetrators.
Yes they want their pound of flesh. Same deal with bank nationalizaion. Contrary to Neal I think there has been a lot of progress on human rights during the last 50 years. No other previous Democratic president would have even thought about considering releasing the toture memos.
The best appoarch is a truth commision and getting on record what happened.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Sean Hannity just said on his radio show that, by stopping the use of torture, President Obama will be directly responsible for any and all future terrorist attacks on America.
Mike
April 21st, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Hector: Why do you expect me to agree to legal changes that _you_ want, when you won’t make legal changes that _I_ want?
I don’t expect anything of you. Torture is illegal. Waterboarding is torture. No legal changes required.
I don’t think that, in principle, the infliction of non-lethal physical pain against criminals either as punishment or, in extreme situations, for interrogation is always wrong. I’m not sure why it would be.
It’s only wrong if you’re civilized.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:24 pm
douchebag:
Nine years ago, a Bosnian Croat general was sentenced in the Hague to 45 years for the same crime Obama is overtly perpetrating now – failure to prosecute those who committed war crimes and gross breaches of the Geneva Conventions. This is a case where making a political compromise is a crime, and a very serious one.
I’d like to see them try to arrest Obama. Especially since we are essentially bailing out their biggest banks via AIG.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:25 pm
ah, That old Republican fascist Richard Nixon is laughing in Hell at this.
Anyone remember Christopher Boyce? The Falcon and the Snowman?
Boyce worked at one of my old outfits, TRW, in a CIA message processing center. In 1975, He was aghast at seeing the traffic showing the CIA rigging elections in Australia to remove Prime Minister Gough Whitlam — in order to protect the Pine Gap facility at Alice Springs, Australia.
Boyce decided to disrupt the op by passing the info to the Russians in Mexico City via his friend Andrew Lee (played by Sean Penn in the movie.) However, walking into the Soviet Embassy is not very good tradecraft. US Citizen Lee was arrested by the Mexican police –at the urging of “certain parties” — and tortured into confessing. When he protested his treatment, he was told “This is not America”.
David Bowie did a haunting soundtrack to the movie with that title: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJRF8xGzvj4&feature=PlayList&p=59A2079B63475269&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=14
Boyce and Lee spent about 14 years in prison. Ironic fate for someone who loved falconry.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:26 pm
DTM has got the right angle. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance on the right at the moment, because it’s never easy to admit that you were wrong.
But given time, people invent creative forms of amnesia. “Oh, I always suspected Nixon was a crook. “You know, I liked Bush, but I never really trusted those guys around Cheney.”
It’s hypocrital, yes, but it’ll be a healthy development in the sense that it permits the consensus Matt is calling for to emerge.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:27 pm
I don’t expect anything of you. Torture is illegal. Waterboarding is torture. No legal changes required.
And yet tyrants and nations which employ torture, like Saddam’s Iraq, Syria, Burma, Iran, etc, are awesome because the US doesn’t like them and picks on them unfairly.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Where are the churches? The synagogues? Faith leaders – priests, ministers, imams?
This is an unfolding moral disaster. We should not be looking to Fox – or CNN, or even the NYT – for answers.
Sadly, the recent politicization of religion into a republican front will make it harder for these voices to emerge, or have moral suasion (Catholic pedophilia, evangelical meth/rent-boying, and non-denominational feel-good-ism hasn’t helped either).
But really, every denomination, sect and faith in America should be taking a public stand against the abomination known as torture (or as enhanced interrogation to the perpetrators and excusors).
Oh, I guess teh gays are a bigger threat. My bad.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:29 pm
For the record, I oppose waterboarding, as I don’t think it can be done safely, and risks actual drowning. I don’t think that, in principle, the infliction of non-lethal physical pain against criminals either as punishment or, in extreme situations, for interrogation is always wrong. I’m not sure why it would be.
Except to religious zealots, nothing is always wrong. One can always meticulously construct a corner case in which the only right action is a wrong action. But we do not build our society (nor even our religious systems) on extremely unlikely hypotheticals.
Torture is wrong in the same way murder is wrong. Sure, if you could go back and time and kill Hitler that would be wrong, but wouldn’t it save untold lives? But we don’t write a time-travel-Hitler-murder exception into our murder statutes the same way we don’t write an “extreme circumstances” clause into our torture statues. If the guys who recommended, approved of, and implemented torture feel they were justified, they are free to make that argument in court.
Also, Hector, whether you oppose waterboarding or not is irrelevant. Waterboarding is torture under the law and is a war crime.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:30 pm
See also “Australian Constitutional Crisis” at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional_crisis
(Note well section 7: Alleged Role of US Government )
Fortunately, Australia was a close ally.
Wiki also has info on Pine Gap.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:33 pm
They will eventually give up and try to pretend that they never made any such argument, in the same way that “separate but equal” kind of lost its popularity over 10-15 years or so.
I agree with this. Future Delong- and Yglesias-like bloggers will link to National Review pieces supporting torture to show how bad the magazines’ track record is.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:33 pm
And yet tyrants and nations which employ torture, like Saddam’s Iraq, Syria, Burma, Iran, etc, are awesome because the US doesn’t like them and picks on them unfairly.
Nice one, Pedro. I can’t count the number of times commenters in this blog have gone on about how awesome Saddam’s Iraq, Syria, Burma, and Iran are. Finally someone has the courage to point that out.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Pedro,
Don’t be dumb. Fetuses have committed no crime. Capital and corporal punishment are legitimate punishments for serious crimes. We are not for preserving some abstraction called ‘Life’, we are for preserving innocent life. That said, I specifically said ‘non-lethal force’- whipping, and so forth. As the recent government of Bolivia has made legal.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:35 pm
And yet tyrants and nations which employ torture, like Saddam’s Iraq, Syria, Burma, Iran, etc, are awesome because the US doesn’t like them and picks on them unfairly.
Why, yes Pedro, that’s exactly what I said! You just put it far more eloquently than I ever could.
It’s also super duper awesome that our government engages in torture like the regimes you cite. Totally awesome.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Concentrate on a consensus of sane people operating in good faith. Let the crazy people have their own consensus, especially if it discredits and marginalizes them.
The trope will eventually evolve into something like: “the American people have reached a consensus, contested as usual by the Republican Party.”
Americans vs Republicans. If they want to accept that sort of role, they are welcome to it.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Not to go too absurdly far down a rabbit hole here, but as soon as Hitler declared war on another nation, he could be killed in the same way as any soldier of the 3rd Reich.
But that’s off point.
Torture is indeed wrong. And as Andrew Sullivan is now pointing out, Bush quite possibly watched one of the dozens of CIA torture videos that were subsequently destroyed.
Evidence destruction of the scale and coordination that took place in the Bush Admin are further indications of possible (likely) war crimes.
To not investigate with an aim towards prosecution (ie: beyond a truth-n-reconciliation frame) may at some point itself rise to a war crime. Obama needs to get out in front of this.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:39 pm
That’s probably why they tortured the one guy 183 times. To prove that he survived without any broken bones or failed kidneys, and therefore wasn’t really “tortured” at all.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:42 pm
It’s also super duper awesome that our government engages in torture like the regimes you cite. Totally awesome.
Actually it’s okay for them to do it, because to badmouth them is to encourage humanitarian intervention, i.e. warmongering, whilst it’s bad for the US to do it because we pay taxes to the US government. That’s the argument. Seriously.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:43 pm
as soon as Hitler declared war on another nation, he could be killed in the same way as any soldier of the 3rd Reich.
I’m sure ultimately the Allies would have come to that conclusion if given the chance, this sort of thing was actually somewhat controversial during WW2. The act of shooting down Admiral Yamamoto was controversial enough that the military actually sought legal advice about whether killing an enemy military leader during a war would be above-board. A blatant assassination — even a military one during a war — was outside everyone’s normal experience enough that they weren’t quite sure whether this was acceptable warmaking.
But the “would it be ok to kill Hitler?” mental exercise is invariably about Hitler the civilian, not hitler the WW2 axis leader.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:44 pm
To not investigate with an aim towards prosecution (ie: beyond a truth-n-reconciliation frame) may at some point itself rise to a war crime. Obama needs to get out in front of this.
hyperbolic talk from an anonymous commenter.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:44 pm
To continue the “don’t engage” thing I’m all about today: do not engage Pedro on the Iraq War. He is the same old Peter K., who will never forgive us for not seeing just how wonderful it is that we illegally invaded a country and killed a lot of innocent people.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Regarding that Bosnian Croat general, that statement was not true. He was in charge and his guys committed the crimes. Those crimes were predominantly linked to mass murder, not harsh treatment of 3 terror suspects. This would be more akin to Hayden being convicted for the crimes of his agents.
murderous psychos, and everything needs to be aired in public and certain people held accountable in some way.
Blaskic was originally convicted on several counts of ethnic cleansing, including the 1993 massacre of Bosnian Muslims in the village of Ahmici.His sentence was reduced after previously unreleased documents largely exonerated him.
He was released on Monday as he had already served more than eight years.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3528288.stm
http://www.un.org/icty/pressreal/p474-e.htm
I know a lot of people are fired up about “torture” and conflate this with Nazi Germany, but waterboarding was way down the list of things those guys were convicted for. At least some people could admit that a lot of this has to do with politics, which it does. Still, America doesn’t and shouldn’t waterboard, even for
.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:47 pm
During the weekly “24″ broadcasts, Fox network is running ads using the “24″ cast to ask people to help fight climate change. There is no slipperiness in the ads at all, just straight “climate change is a fact and we are running out of time to act” spoken directly to the camera by cast members. Odd behavior from the same corporation that brings us Fox News and the WSJ editorial page. More evidence for Matt’s right wing as entertainment theory.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Re: But really, every denomination, sect and faith in America should be taking a public stand against the abomination known as torture (or as enhanced interrogation to the perpetrators and excusors).
RW,
Who the hell are you to tell the churches what they should, or should not do? Their responsibility is not to the fads of the age, or to the whims of the fickle American people, but to the truth as they inherited it. Churches are answerable only to God, not to the American people- they are not, thank God, democracies.
Re: It’s only wrong if you’re civilized.
Actually, a civilized nation (by which I mean one based on natural law) would incorporate both corporal punishment (whipping, etc.) and capital punishment in its legal system, and would forbid abortion except when the mother’s life was at stake, or when the fetus was inviable, or a few other cases. Severe torture (and you can make a case waterboarding falls into this category) would still be banned. But there is no ground in natural law for holding that the infliction of physical pain, in general, is inherently wrong.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:50 pm
To continue the “don’t engage” thing I’m all about today: do not engage Pedro on the Iraq War. He is the same old Peter K., who will never forgive us for not seeing just how wonderful it is that we illegally invaded a country and killed a lot of innocent people.
I tried to “not engage” about Iraq too, but I’m weak. Some stupid anonymous commenter is talking about Obama possibly being charged with war crimes, when Saddam was consistently given the benefit of doubt, because the US was picking on him. Saddam “wasn’t that bad.” It’s okay with me if you were against the war, I just like single standards.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Still, America doesn’t and shouldn’t waterboard
But it did.
And it did worse.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:51 pm
But there is no ground in natural law for holding that the infliction of physical pain, in general, is inherently wrong.
Son, I think you’re nuts.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:53 pm
During the weekly “24″ broadcasts, Fox network is running ads using the “24″ cast to ask people to help fight climate change. There is no slipperiness in the ads at all, just straight “climate change is a fact and we are running out of time to act” spoken directly to the camera by cast members.
I thought that was weird too! Maybe since Obama was elected, they tried to get “hip.” Also a lot of the actors and actresses are liberal.
(last comment for a bit, sorry)
April 21st, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Pedro,
Either provide a quote from anyone on the thread endorsing the use of torture by Iran, Iraq, Burma, or Syrai, or STFU.
The grownups are talking, and aren’t interested in your throwing straw all over the place.
April 21st, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Re Th at 34: “During the weekly “24″ broadcasts, Fox network is running ads using the “24″ cast to ask people to help fight climate change. There is no slipperiness in the ads at all, just straight “climate change is a fact and we are running out of time to act” spoken directly to the camera by cast members. Odd behavior from the same corporation that brings us Fox News and the WSJ editorial page.”
——————-
It’s a lot easier to understand when you realize that Rupert Murdoch is from Melbourne and Australia just suffered a massive, multi-year drought that threatened the water supplies of Melbourne and other Australian cites. Australia lost a lot of farm crops and had to import food. Along with the Middle East and North Africa , Australia is one of the global locations most sensitive to global warming.
It was actually kinda hilarious to watch Rupert shove his hand up puppet Sean Hannity’s ass and turn Sean in mid-rant from a vicious critic of Al Gore into an ardent tree-hugger.
April 21st, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Re Rupert Murdoch’s deciding global warming is a danger,
see http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/05/17/murdoch/?source=rss
April 21st, 2009 at 4:08 pm
BTW, let me make clear that I don’t support waterboarding. I do think that we need reasoned and nuanced discussion about these issues however. For an intelligent discussion of torture, of more intellectual and moral weight than we are accustomed to see, you should check out this like. It distinguishes carefully between infliction of physical pain as a legal method of interrogation, as a legally sanctioned punishment for crime, and as a means of extracting lifesaving information in extremis. The author holds that while 1) is always wrong and cannot be defended, 2) and 3) are not intrinsically evil, and that there can be legitimate debate about their use. I would agree with that.
http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt119.html
The discussion of the ticking bomb scenario is here.
“Thirdly, there remains the question – nowadays a very practical and much-discussed one – of torture inflicted not for any of the above purposes, but for extracting life-saving information from, say, a captured terrorist known to be participating in an attack that may take thousands of lives (the now-famous ‘ticking bomb’ scenario). As we have noted above, this possible use of torture is not mentioned in the Catechism. If, as I have argued, the infliction of severe pain is not intrinsically evil, its use in that type of scenario would not seem to be excluded by the arguments and authorities we have considered so far. (John Paul II’s statement about the “intrinsic evil” of a list of ugly things including torture in VS #80 does not seem to me decisive, even at the level of authentic, non-infallible, magisterium, for the reasons I have already given in commenting above on that text.) My understanding would be that, given the present status questionis, the moral legitimacy of torture under the aforesaid desperate circumstances, while certainly not affirmed by the magisterium, remains open at present to legitimate discussion by Catholic theologians.”
April 21st, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Just so people know, under the U.N. Convention Against Torture and the U.S. Code, torture for the purpose of punishment is just as illegal as torture for the purpose of interrogation.
April 21st, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Kiefer Sutherland is a definite left-winger. His grandfather, Tommy Douglas, was the guy most responsible for introducing single-payer health care to Canada.
April 21st, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Hector,
It sounds like you’re basing your moral decisions upon arguments and polemical distinctions. There are lots and lots of arguments and polemical distinctions. Do you think the people who were tortured to death in Iraq and Afghanistan all had ticking time bombs to confess to?
April 21st, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Let it be noted again that Matthew recently advocated the political rehabilitation of a man who, as Attorney General of New York, directed a thinly veiled threat of torture at a man accused of stealing a lot of money. This threat was made in the context of a New York penal system in which it has been established that correctional officers use torture as a punitive measure, and perhaps for simple sadistic entertainment.
It is always interesting to observe what disappoints Matthew.
April 21st, 2009 at 4:27 pm
By the way, Hector long ago made it clear he was an aspiring Pol Pot, so I don’t know why people are surprised he gets off on the idea of torturing people–you know, for their own good and all.
April 21st, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Hector, I have been watching you babble on here for a while, and I can no longer be silent.
1. You can’t be against abortion but in favor of capital punishment and whipping (!). If you’re pro-life, you have to be completely consistent about it, not just a cafeteria Christian.
2. The “ticking time bomb” scenario is utter and complete bullshit. I used to think that the charge that conservatives thought that “24″ was real life was a below the belt piece of rhetoric, but clearly you losers have lost the ability to differentiate between reality and pretend.
3. The fact is that the US government deliberately employed an ILLEGAL interrogation technique against a prisoner literally every four hours for thirty one consecutive days. They attempted to cover this up by claiming that the prisoner “broke” quickly and ponied up all sorts of useful information. If that was the case, why was it necessary to simulate drowning the prisoner every four hours for thirty one consecutive days.
This is simple, Bush needs to be put in prison for what he’s done. Radio talkers like Hannity should also be put in prison for openly supporting that the US commit war crimes and genocide (a Rwandan radio announcer is rotting in prison for doing the same thing I might point out).
America doesn’t torture. If you want us to torture, form your own goddamn country.
April 21st, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Re: Just so people know, under the U.N. Convention Against Torture and the U.S. Code, torture for the purpose of punishment is just as illegal as torture for the purpose of interrogation.
Just so people know, I don’t give a d*mn what the UN Convention on Torture says. Craven cultural imperialism, and worse, done on behalf of a gravely deficient culture (modern late-capitalist liberalism). Thankfully, neither does the government of Bolivia. As for the US code, it has bearing on what the US should do, but it has little bearing on other countries should do, or on what the moral law prescribes.
April 21st, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Re: It sounds like you’re basing your moral decisions upon arguments and polemical distinctions.
As opposed, of course, to basing them on silly and irrational premises like “Pain is bad”, or “Everybody is equal, so a Jihadist barbarian is equal to Mother Teresa”.
April 21st, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Pete, I know it can be comforting to delude yourself, but America has been engaged in wholesale torture for at least several decades. Many Americans find it quite humorous. Many of them describe themselves (grotesquely) as “liberal”.
Also, Hector is about as “conservative” as Laverntiy Beria.
April 21st, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Hector,
The point is that the necessary laws already exist, so you can continue to indulge yourself in all the fantasy violence your perverse heart desires–we need you for nothing.
April 21st, 2009 at 4:41 pm
This really is the underlying goal of the conservative media establishment: to destroy any consensus on anything so that we never share a common Truth. Thus, anything can be labeled as partisan. So long as there is a stubborn minority there can be no consensus.
Conservatives want the truth to be whatever comes out of your own piehole, irrespective of what anyone else has to say. This way, nothing ever moves forward and progresses, which is conservatism’s enemy. They hate change and progress.
April 21st, 2009 at 4:41 pm
As for the US code, it has bearing on what the US should do
Flat out wrong. I can’t be silent on what just isn’t true: The US Code is the law, Hector. When lawyers cite to, say, 22 USC 1501, they are citing to the federal statutes. Law that is passed by Congress is the Code, which is organized under Titles.
Your argument that it is what we “should do,” therefore, is false. It is what the elected officials in Congress have decided is the LAW OF THE LAND.
Please make your arguments with some understanding of how our system of government works.
April 21st, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Re: 1. You can’t be against abortion but in favor of capital punishment and whipping (!). If you’re pro-life, you have to be completely consistent about it, not just a cafeteria Christian.
Nonsense. Neither Scripture nor Tradition, nor natural law, forbids either capital punishment or whipping. Indeed, both are explicitly and implicitly sanctioned in the New Testament. Christianity demands that innocent life be protected, not life in general. A fetus hasn’t done anything wrong, and isn’t in need of moral correction. As for whipping, see here.
“The lord of that servant will come in a day when he looketh not for him, and at an hour when he is not aware, and will cut him in sunder, and will appoint him his portion with the unbelievers. And that servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes.”
I’m not a conservative by the way, and I voted for Nader. I don’t particularly advocate that America use whipping; I’m more concerned that other countries have the right to if they so choose.
Re: America doesn’t torture. If you want us to torture, form your own goddamn country.
Very good. I just may move to Bolivia, and publicly burn my passport and copies of the US Constitution while I’m at it.
April 21st, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Well, golly, if propaganda as a war crime is going to be raised, let it also be noted that what FDR and Stimson were engaged in, in terms of feeding American military personnel propaganda, especially with regard to the Japanese, which encouraged atrocities to be committed, was the same crime that some German and Japanese officials were executed for. We name Navy ships after Stimson and buid memorials on The Mall to honor FDR.
The overriding factor as to whether a war crime will be prosecuted is the degree to which the side the war criminal was on was successful in waging the war.
April 21st, 2009 at 4:53 pm
If a stress position was good enough to be used on Christ, then it’s good enough to be used on everyone.
April 21st, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Will Allen: Since nobody has responded to you yet in multiple threads in which you’ve made the same point, let me say that torture by prison guards is a terrible thing and the perpetrators (and anyone giving them orders to torture) ought to be prosecuted. I’m all for prison reform and am glad Jim Webb is getting the ball rolling on that. But I find your claim that Eliot Spitzer was threatening someone with torture to be tendentious at best. Moreover, I don’t know why abuse in NYS prisons (where, to my knowledge, there isn’t a credible allegation that it is official policy*) is relevant to a discussion of the appropriate response to the federal government’s documented, official torture policy. And although I don’t know Yglesias or any of the anti-torture commenters on his blog personally, I’m highly confident that they would support prosecution of torturing prison guards. There’s really no basis to claim hypocrisy. You just seem to be trying to deflect attention from the problem at hand and minimize the wrong committed by the Bush administration.
* I’m happy to be corrected on this point if there is such a credible allegation.
April 21st, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Re: The point is that the necessary laws already exist, so you can continue to indulge yourself in all the fantasy violence your perverse heart desires–we need you for nothing.
Fair enough, DTM. You can console yourself with this- I didn’t vote Republican last time around, and I don’t plan to. I oppose Republican foreign policy for reasons quite unrelated to torture. Therefore, my personal views have no effect on whether the US will torture or not, and to the extent that I do have an effect through my voice and vote, it will be to support anti-torture candidates.
I will however, continue to dream of a Florence-in-the-Andes which does use whipping. Incidentally, if you’re so convinced whipping is bad, how about trying to convince me through arguments?
April 21st, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Hector:
The verse you used refers to only God as having this ability. You aren’t God.
April 21st, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Not so sure that Senator McCain has completely “seen the light”…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-j-brown/the-torture-memos-mccains_b_189682.html
“…But he also says that the release of the memos “Helps no one.” He says that it “doesn’t help America’s image.” He says that their release “does not help address the issue.” He believes that “it was a serious mistake to release these memos.”
So on one hand, Senator McCain believes that torture has hurt America’s reputation in the world and that it has encouraged our enemies. On the other, he believes that offically acknowleging torture will hurt America’s reputation in the world and that it will encourage our enemies.”
April 21st, 2009 at 5:07 pm
“This is a case where making a political compromise is a crime, and a very serious one.”
Glad to see you’re willing to charge the sitting president with a crime while completely ignoring, you know, the actual perpetrators.
April 21st, 2009 at 5:32 pm
You can console yourself with this- I didn’t vote Republican last time around, and I don’t plan to.
I have never confused you with a Republican. As I have frequently noted, you are a Christianist version of Pol Pot, which is too strange and perverse even for the Republicans.
Incidentally, if you’re so convinced whipping is bad, how about trying to convince me through arguments?
Fine. Human beings are, by nature, rational and autonomous beings. All torture–including torture by whipping–is an attempt to reduce human beings to something less than a rational an autonomous being, whether the mechanism is severe pain, intense fear, drugs, induced psychosis, or so on. That is why torture is properly called a crime against humanity, as any unperverted practitioner of natural law theory would immediately recognize.
And in fact torture does violence to the torturer as well as the tortured, for the torturer also has to become something not truly human in order to commit the crime (because it is in the nature of humans to sympathize with the suffering of other humans and to seek to alleviate that suffering). So, torture necessarily incorporates two crimes against humanity.
April 21st, 2009 at 6:15 pm
I will however, continue to dream of a Florence-in-the-Andes which does use whipping.
Quoted for LOLphasis. Hector is one weird fucker.
April 21st, 2009 at 6:26 pm
…which IMHO requires big-time punishment. If they learned a lesson from Iran-Contra it was to be bigger and bolder next time. If they don’t get a clear message after all this, I shudder to think what they’ll bring us in another decade.
April 21st, 2009 at 6:28 pm
Hey, it’s my old friend Will. How’s it going Will? Have you any tall tales to tell us about how Iraq was a ticking time bomb and that if we didn’t invade and cause the murders of hundreds of thousands of innocents then eventually we would have been the victims of a nuclear war?
Listen you apologist for mass murder (tell me, are you still asserting that McGovern was more at fault for the Khmer Rouge than Nixon?), all of your sophistry is nothing but self-justification for your long-held support of whomever will kill the most brown people. That Bush’s administration committed war crimes is not in question. The only question is whether thugs like you will hold sway and prevent the prosecution of those war criminals.
April 21st, 2009 at 6:34 pm
Will Allen,
While WWII against the Japanese was certainly racist, I’m hard pressed to think of public campaigns that encouraged our soldiers to commit war crimes against the Japanese people. Again, since we’re bringing up WWII, don’t you find it ironic that the waterboarding that so delights conservatives was the very reason some Japanese officers were executed during war crimes tribunals?
On the other hand, the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” that the neo-cons like to tout are commonly known by all other signatorees to the Geneva Conventions and other Human Rights treaties as “torture”. If a radio/TV pundit like, say Glenn Beck, goes on the air and says “who cares about torture prohibitions, we should do whatever it takes to anyone to keep us safe”, then you veer into war crime territory. All it would take is ONE person who was tortured who turned out not to be a terrorist to file a case. It wouldn’t be that hard to show a commonality between the actions of elected officials who signed off on torture and the media personalities who publicly cheered them on. A Rwandan man was convicted of genocide for making a statement on the radio, even though he didn’t personally kill anyone.
If anything, a radio station who airs programming where the announcers openly call for illegal activities ought to have its license pulled.
April 21st, 2009 at 6:42 pm
For those without much Will Allen exposure, he is little different from Mixner. His arguments cannot be taken any more seriously than Mixer’s. He is recognizably different though. He will ignore all parts of an argument in order to focus on some trivia and will go on about it forever. His hatred for anyone who suggests that perhaps we shouldn’t murder people for fun and profit is boundless (hence his constant smearing of McGovern as a supporter of Pol Pot). Engagement with him, as with Mixner, is best done at the level of mockery. He combines Mixner’s love of arguing with a level of unwarranted arrogance that is, I must say, pretty entertaining. Also entertaining is his resculpting of your posts into something you didn’t say and his ultra-sensitivity to even the slightest reading into his words. If he says it’s noon and you say that he said it’s day, he will whine for hours about it. Funny stuff.
April 21st, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Yes, Led, you find it tendentious because youe you are either ignorant of what Spitzer did, or are in deep denial. I susopect the latter, since you imply the absolutely toxic notion that a toruture regime which is not “official policy” is of a lesser evil. How grotesque. Most torture which occurs in U.S. prisons, by means of setting one predatory inmate(s) against a physically weaker inmate, is not “official policy”. That doesn’t make it any less evil or widespread, espcially, as has been established in civil lawsuit is New York and other states, the correctional officers see the practice as a means of punishing inmates.
I have brought this up now in several threads because I was struck by the juxtaposition of Matthew calling for Spitzer’s political rehabilitation a few days ago, while frequently posting about the evils of the Bush Administration’s torture regime (by the way, I’ve been supporting indictments and trial for some time now). For the record, this is what Spitzer said, while Attorney General, about what he had in store for a person accused of stealing a large amount of money….
“This is state time…State prison has a certain edge to it that is not always present in the federal system. These prisons are not country clubs.”
….in the context of a prison system in which it has been established that prisoners are tortured as a punitive and/or control method. In addition to the people who have told me, like you, that since the torture isn’t “official policy” it is less systemically evil. I’ve also had people who describe themselves as “liberal” who have written to me that we really can’t be sure what “edge” Spitzer is referring to, as if it might be poor food or recereational facilities. Really. In a justice system in which the prosepct of prison rape is frequently used to compel testimony. There was a South Carolina politician in the early 20th century who used to give his stump speech while holding a noose. Golly, perhaps he was just suggesting the agricultural potential of hemp!
I suspect that Matthew’s outrage at the use of torture is highly dependent on what sort of politician is seeking to use torture to accomplish something.
April 21st, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Peter K. @ 31. says hyperbolic talk from an anonymous commenter
I didn’t realize that everyone else here is fully identified.
As to the hyperbolic talk, I admit I overreached. I should have said that the current President could be committing a crime. Here’s Andrew Sullivan on that (I’m sure Peter won’t care what Sully says, but for the rest of you:)
emphasis added
April 21st, 2009 at 7:32 pm
I’ve got to throw my hat in with Snowman here. Insofar as the bolded quote from Sullivan above is true, Obama could very well be committing a war crime by choosing to knowingly let war crimes go uninvestigated.
April 21st, 2009 at 8:06 pm
[...] previous post on torture (it really is the story of the day, I suppose) here’s Matt Yglesias on the issue of reconciliation: I was saying the other day that large-scale punishment for the perpetrators of [...]
April 22nd, 2009 at 8:54 am
Even if there’s majority support for these views, anybody scrapping for power within the Republican Party will find reason to oppose them, just to get a majority of Republicans.
Consensus never meant that everyone would agree on a principle-that just isn’t possible. Even now, there’s not even consensus about whether or not the US should have ended it’s engagement in Vietnam, but most of the dissenters on the issue have been marginalized. The GOP isn’t marginalized to that extent yet, but if they keep showcasing Limbaugh and Hannity and Palin as their standard-bearers, and their water-carriers keep being exposed as liars, that will come soon enough. Let them continue as they are-it’s how they will come to ruin themselves, and be as marginal as those still championing old confederate grievances.
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:01 am
“The discussion of the ticking bomb scenario is here.”
The ticking time bomb scenario is a canard. It suddenly changes it’s meaning to the most ardent torture supporter when the question changes from “would you torture an known avowed terrorist” in that situation to gain information to “would you allow the gang rape of your daughter if the terrorist told you that would get you the information you need.”
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:03 am
“Sean Hannity just said on his radio show that, by stopping the use of torture, President Obama will be directly responsible for any and all future terrorist attacks on America.”
Really….who cares what Sean Hannity has to say about anything? He’s speaking to an audience that already believes every word he says, who won’t be converted no matter what the evidence shows.
April 22nd, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Courtney H @33:
Before you declare that something is not true, you should read the source. I know the verdict is long, about 300 pages, but I have read it, and you, based on your post, have not. Blaskic’s original conviction (overturned on appeal other than in parts unrelated to this, but that’s irrelevant – ICTY works differently from American courts, and the basis for the reversal was mostly matters of fact, and only to a lesser extent matters of law) was based on a specific type of command responsibility, the failure to prosecute and punish subordinate offenders. That was the “alternative” basis for conviction, because the trial court did not agree on sufficient evidence for his command responsibility before and during commission of crimes.
The point is that, by international law established or applied in Blaskic and similar cases, failure of authorities to prosecute war crimes is itself a war crime.
As for your comparison of mass murders to “harsh treatment of 3 terror suspects”, it is a fallacy. My comment was not limited to this one case. I am talking about prosecution of all war crimes of the Bush administration. Invasion of Iraq alone seems like a crime at least as serious as the massacre of a village of 130 inhabitants. Civilian victims of the war (a direct consequence of the invasion) are estimated at about a thousand times the population of Ahmici.
I voted for Obama and will almost certainly vote for him again – the alternatives are horrifying – and I understand the potential political fallout of prosecuting Bush and Cheney, but people have got to understand what this “forward-looking” nonsense is – a serious crime.
April 24th, 2009 at 4:56 am
Argument ad baculum, which is what leftists constantly use, has no congruence with “consensus”. The “my way or the highway” attitude of cowards who give bill clinton a free pass for causing 9/11 while simultaneously belabor the legitimate and justified method known as waterboarding, fail in what matters most, namely honesty.
Those who are so broken up by the methods used know nothing about dictators recent and in history nor do they have a clue about the difficulties people face in Cuba, North Korea, Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran or Somalia. It’s both an ugly display of hypocrisy and indifference to lecture on frivolous issues but to remain silent about the people who are really suffering. Ignorance is not bliss and for those who think this is a joke, they should read The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression.
Last, the vast majority of no nothings on this blog should tell the truth, namely that Pelosi and everyone else knew and approved of the interrogation methods. If you believe otherwise, you are a first rate dupe!