pecunium

There will be a two-day seminar: Torture is Moral Issue at the end of June.

I'll be participating. Feel free to spread the word.

The organisers are trying to line up recording. If that happens, I will let people know how to get a copy.

If you have an excuse, the costs are reasonable (esp. since this is not a group with a huge budget).

Today they finally said this was torture.

For most of that time, he was kept in a dark, damp cell with no bed and no opening except a slot in the door through which a bowl of food could be pushed. Much of the time he was handcuffed. Hour after hour, a high-frequency whistle pierced the air.

No weasel words, no scare quotes. A simple declaration of fact.

No slaps, no waterboard, no hypothermia, just isolation, deprivation and persistent noise; while in a stressed position. What, one wonders, can so mild a torture regime (no one even pretended they were going to hurt him, or kill him; much less actually inflicted pain, "equal to amputation or organ failure.") produce?

"“I was grilled day and night, over and over, week in and week out, and in the end, to get [him] and his gang off my back, I confessed to both charges. The charges, of course, were ridiculous. I never participated in germ warfare and neither did anyone else.

Whoa... it got a false confession. But how?

I will regret what I did in that cell the rest of my life,” [he] continued. “But let me say this: it was not really me... who signed that paper. It was a mentality reduced to putty.”

A mentality reduced to putty.

From a bit of dark and damp. Some time in handcuffs, with a whistling noise. That broke him? What a wuss.

He wasn't a wuss of course he was a victim of torture.

Torture?

Damn straight. So what made the the New York Times willing to call a spade a spade? The reason the New York Times is willing to call it torture, not, "techniques some decry as torture", is it was done to an American. Capt. Harold Fischer, USAF. It was done by the Chinese. It was, in fact, the very model for the system we put in place in Guantanamo, and which managed to get to Afghanistan, and Abu Ghraib (which I think happened because people who had been at Gitmo ended up working in both those places; they'd been taught to do something, and they did what they'd been taught. That's what I mean when I say there were systemic problems).

The Right Wing Wurlitzer is going to be running at full-speed, explaining that this is different. The Chinese weren't looking for the truth, the Americans weren't, "bad guys" trying to overthrow the Chinese; they were soldiers, merely doing their duty, America is different.

Nonsense. These are also the people who say, "Rules are rules, and actions have consequences." The party of Three Strikes, and Mandatory Sentencing. "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time" (and yes, I know those ideas have percolated out to the greater society, but that's where they started; it's where they are the strongest model of how to run the nation).

On this topic I agree. Torture is torture, no matter who does it. Those who do it, need to be called to account. There need to be investigations. Not blue-ribbon commissions, criminal investigations. No agenda, find the facts and let the chips fall where they may.

The Right is doing a lot of tu quoque nonsense too. Trying to say Pelosi, and Murtha, and the rest of the Democratic leadership knew; and that means we can't prosecute. Others have said we knew and that we didn't rise up, as a mass, in outrage, means we accept it, and therefore it's ok, no one needs to investigate (and certainly no one needs to go to Prison; a real one, not the sort of minimum security ones that people like Irve Libby would have ended up in if his boss's boss hadn't given him a don't even go to jail card).

Bullshit. This is a big deal. To quote a previous scandal, it's not the torture (though, were it just the torture, that would be enough). It's about making the president somehow above the law. It's about having an adminsitration which flouted the laws, and when caught says, "Yes, we did it, so what?"

If Pelosi, Murtha, etc., were briefed in detail. If they were given information enough to know it was torture, and they signed off on it, try them too. For conspiracy, if nothing else.

I suspect they are in the clear. Those were classified briefings. The CIA got to pick and choose what they said, and the people who got them were forbidden to talk about what they were told (on pain of prison... and who doubts the Bush Administration would have gone after them? Just look at Thomas Tamm). I suspect the CIA shaded things, and made it look as though they were being harsh, but not crossing the lines.

I also suspect they don't have as solid a grounding in how interrogation works, or what defines torture, as they need to actually know if something crosses those lines.

Should they have done something. Yes. They should have done what they are paid to do, be a counterweight to the presidency. Exercise the oversight which was more than just their job, more even than their responsibility. It was their duty.

But this is a time for looking forward, so lets look forward; to a time when we can say we fucked up, and we fixed it.

Because we tortured, and we admitted it, and the world knows it.

Quite apart from my personal reactions to the memos, there is the question of how well the system of interrogation they describe works.

The first two memos pretty much cover all we need to go over (after the first forty pages they become redundant, as they elaborate the various excuses, rationalisations, and "justifications" behind the answers they came up with. You can find them all here. You can find some legal commentary here at Law of War.org). The short answer to the questions the 'utilitarian', who wants to justify the use of torture, needs to ask: 1: does it get good information, 2: does it make the US, and her residents, safer, and 3: Does it further the overall agenda of the US in the "War on Terror"? is no, it does not.

So let's look at them, and see why.

Right at the front, in the second graf we see the largest part of the problem. "In light of the information you believe Zubaydah has and the high level of threat you believe now exists, you wish to move the interrogations into what you have described as an "increased pressure phase."

The information they believed him to have. From the get-go that’s a red flag. One doesn’t interrogate to get confirmation. One interrogates to find out what the subject knows. The only confirmation one is ever looking for is not what one “believes” the source to know, but rather corroboration of things other sources have said.

Even that’s problematic. Going “fishing” for specific facts runs the risk of leading the source to the answers the interrogator is looking for. It’s a form of training, and leads to confirmation bias. (when one gets to the end of the memos, one finds that half of the reports the CIA filed in 2004 came as a result of just “a few” subjects. When just a few sources are the basis for more than 3,000 intelligence reports; in a single year, something is wrong).

The training starts when they begin to remove his, “expectations of treatment.” They lay out 10 techniques, designed in concert with the “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) training psychologist” they were working with. SERE isn’t meant to be a blueprint of “how-to”; it’s meant to show the students that torture can be used to break anyone. Even those who know they can actually get out. SERE is a form of the Milgram Experiment, writ small, and with more safeguards.

The ten things they outline are: ”(l) attention grasp, (2) walling, (3) facial hold, (4) facial slap (insult slap), (5) cramped confinement, (6)wall standing, (7) stress positions, (8) sleep deprivation, (9) insects placed in a confinement box, and (10) the waterboard. You have informed us that the use of these techniques would be on an as-needed basis and that not all of these techniques will necessarily be used. The interrogation team would use these techniques in some combination to convince Zubaydah that the only way he can influence his surrounding environment is through cooperation. You have, however, informed us that you expect these techniques to be used in some sort of escalating fashion, culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this technique.”

"Not necessarily ending with that technique." Nice to know that they aren’t planning things out so carefully. After they waterboard him, they might go to “the stand-up”. Every one of those techniques can be torture. Some of them are torture on their face (The Stand-up, Waterboarding, Cramped Confinement). The others might not be torture, but in this context (convincing him that his present “circumstances” are changed), they probably are.

The one which is most problematic and the one which most people in this line of work keep in the “gray area” is sleep deprivation.

Lack of sleep makes for odd reactions. It reduces willpower. I’ve been sleep deprived, and done some strange things. I’ve had hypnogogic events. My personal feeling is that sleep-dep is less than useful.

If I were brought a source who’d not slept, I’d not refuse to question him. In that state he’d be less likely to recall any training he had against interrogation. The second thing I’d do is get him a meal, and a bed. Then I’d do my best to get enough sleep to be alert when I talked to him the next morning.

That’s not what they had planned.

Sleep deprivation may be used. You have indicated that your purpose in using this technique is to reduce the individual's ability to think on his feet and, through the discomfort associated with lack of-sleep, to motivate him to cooperate. The effect of such sleep deprivation will generally remit after one or two nights of uninterrupted sleep. You have informed us that your research has revealed that, in rare instances, some individuals who are already predisposed to psychological problems may experience abnormal reactions to sleep deprivation. Even in those cases, however, reactions abate after the individual is permitted to sleep. Moreover, personnel with medical training are available to and will intervene in the unlikely event of an abnormal reaction_ You have orally informed us that you would not deprive Zubaydah of sleep for more than eleven days at a time and that you have previously kept him awake for 72 hours, from which no mental or physical harm resulted.

They didn’t plan to keep him awake for more than 11 days at a time. 11 days. I’ve never gone more than about 60 hours without sleep. That led to some of those “waking dream” states I mentioned. I wasn’t being forced to do it. It’s just the way the training went. If I’d been lower in the chain of command, I’d have gotten a couple of hours of sleep in that time. But I wasn’t, so I didn’t.

The other time I recall such events was in the middle of Basic Training. I’d been averaging about four hours of sleep a night, for about three weeks. Then I had a run of nights where events conspired to cut that to no more than three hours (or a couple of two-hour stretches). Next thing I knew I was reading about how to defend myself against chemical attack, while
dreaming about something else at the same time. Deuced strange, and I’d
rather not do it again, thanks. Eleven days at a time. Which implies they might let him sleep a few days, to allow “the effect of such sleep deprivation to remit”, and then do it again.

Which is stupid. One of the things sleep-dep does is blur the lines between real and unreal. When one is having hypnogogic events, one is in a dream state. Who among us hasn't awakened from a dream while slightly out of phase with the world? The rules are different in dreams. I don't want a source to be the victim of that sort of thing because he will believe things which aren't true. Which will come back to bite me in the ass, because when I repeat them to him they will become true; in his mind. After that, good luck sorting the fantasy from the real; you will have screwed yourself over.

There is then a bunch of blather about how many people went through SERE training without ill-effects. This is irrelevant. The people taking SERE know it will end. They went to the course voluntarily. That’s not the case for a prisoner. He doesn’t know when it will end. He doesn’t know the people holding him won’t decide to just kill him.

Then comes the “definition” of torture. First they divorce the mental from the physical. Then they say that the acts they are being asked about aren’t the same as beatings with clubs or weapons, and don’t inflict, “severe” pain, and therefore they aren’t, ipso facto torture.

When they move on to the question of mental, they rationalise that, “pain and suffering,” are linked, so the suffering the waterboard causes isn’t torture, because it doesn’t involve pain (because no one is beating on the prisoner), and even that’s not a problem, because the pain and suffering have to be, “severe” to rise to the level of torture.

Even when all of these methods are considered combined in an overall course of conduct, they still would not inflict severe physical pain or suffering. As discussed above, a number of these acts result in no physical pain, others produce only physical discomfort. You have indicated that these acts will not be used with substantial repetition, so that there is no possibility that severe physical pain could arise from such repetition. Accordingly, we conclude that these acts neither separately nor as part of a course of conduct would inflict severe physical pain or suffering within the meaning of the statute.

Got that. Neither separately, nor as a course of conduct.

What about that bugbear, “mental pain and suffering” (after all, I’d think being convinced one was being drowned, would count. The idea that my captors were trying to kill me slowly, I think I’d call that "suffering.”

Certainly, in light of what 18 U.S.C. § 2340(2) says:

(I) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering; (2) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application of mind-altering substances Or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the
personality; (3) the threat of imminent death; or (4) the threat that any of the preceding acts will be done to another person. See 18 U.S.C. § 2340(2)
(A)-{D).

They say it’s not a problem: the question is whether any of these acts, separately or as a course of conduct, constitutes a threat of severe physical pain or suffering, a procedure designed to disrupt profoundly the senses, or a threat of imminent death. As we previously explained, whether an action constitutes a threat must be assessed from the standpoint of a reasonable person in the subject's position.

Me... I’d say a reasonable person being held prisoner, abused, repeatedly half-drowned, forced to stay awake, bounced off walls (which were designed to make it seem worse than it is: which is part of the plan), part of a system meant to convince the prisoner that his circumstances are not what they were, that, “the gloves are off,” might conclude that the threat of severe physical pain, or imminent death, was a real possibility.

Waterboarding is something they say does just that. But (you knew there was a but), because he doesn’t actually die, and the effects are transitory; and they aren’t, painful, they don’t count, because “profound mental harm” is, so they say, a predicate requirement of the act.

What it boils down to is them saying, unless you do ALL the things listed in 18 U.S.C. § 2340(2) (A)-{D);at the same time, then it isn’t torture.

That gets us through the first memo (about 20 pages).

Memo number 2

Right at the start we see amother problem. To avoid becoming a subject for the “enhanced” techniques the prisoner has to "provide information on actionable threats and location information on High-Value Targets at large-not lower-level information, for interrogators to continue with [this]
neutral approach”

Right there is an institutional disaster. The only way to avoid being tortured is to give up information. If one doesn’t have the information, than one is doomed to be abused. The most willing “detainee” will not be believed, unless he has information about high value targets. This is defined as a “very high” standard.

What it actually is, is no standard. Everyone is presumed to be knowledgeable, and the only way to avoid being tortured to get at that knowledge is to have it to give up.

Honest ignorance will get you tortured. Devotion to the truth of one's ignorance will only "prove" that one is a die-hard fanatic. And "die-hard fanatics" need to be abused, so they will "give up" the information we knew they had. Catch-22.

The report just released about Zabudayah shows where that leads. Millions of dollars, and thousands (if not tens of thousands) of wasted man hours chasing false leads.

To get the prisoner to cooperate the neutral techniques are abandoned, and a “baseline state of dependence” is established: by stripping them naked, depriving them of sleep (while shackled) and manipulating their diet. This isn’t torture, no, it’s meant to "demonstrat[e] to the [detainee] that he has no control over basic human needs" and helping to make him "perceive and value his personal welfare, comfort, and immediate needs more than the information he is protecting

Heaven help the detainee who has no information to protect.

Why? Because the methods being used will teach him to lie. He will, in fact, have to lie. His comfort is dependent on his “cooperation": The insult slap is used "periodically throughout the interrogation process when the interrogator needs to immediately correct the detainee or provide a consequence to a detainee's response or non-response... Another corrective technique, the abdominal slap, "is similar to the insult slap in application and desired result" and "provides the variation necessary to keep a high level of unpredictability in the interrogation process... a third corrective technique, the facial hold, "is used sparingly throughout interrogation. It is not painful; but "demonstrates the interrogator's control over the detainee... Finally, the attention grasp "may be used several times in the same interrogation"

In short, when one says something the interrogator doesn’t like, one gets smacked.

The only way to not get smacked is to tell the interrogator what he, or she, wants to hear.

If there is any doubt that this is what was (is?) going on: The interrogators remove the hood and explain that the detainee can improve his situation by cooperating and may say that the interrogators "will do what it takes to get important information." As soon as the detainee does anything inconsistent with the interrogators' instructions, the interrogators use an insult slap or abdominal slap. They employ walling if it becomes clear that the detainee is not cooperating in the interrogation. This sequence "may continue for several more iterations as the interrogators continue to measure the [detainee's] resistance posture and apply a negative consequence to [his] resistance efforts." The interrogators and security officers then put the detainee into position for standing sleep deprivation, begin dietary manipulation through a liquid diet, and keep the detainee nude (except for a diaper). The first interrogation session, which could have lasted from 30 minutes to several hours, would then be at an end.

The next session starts with a slap, and the process repeats itself, until the interrogators hear what they want to hear. This can go on for 30 days. If the subject continues to resist, it can be continued, until he breaks.

Which is no way to collect information.

The final grace note is the “detention conditions”

The CIA maintains certain “detention conditions" at all of its detention facilities. (These conditions "are not interrogation techniques,” and you have not asked us to assess their lawfulness under the statute.) The detainee is subjected to white noise, not to exceed 79 decibels, and to constant light during portions of the interrogation process."

They do admit there are some gray areas, in which the pattern of behavior might combine to make otherwise legal methods torturous:

Finally we emphasize that these are issues about which reasonable persons may disagree. Our task has been made more difficult by the imprecision of the statute and the relative absence of judicial guidance, but we have applied our best reading of the law to the specific facts that you have provided.

Absence of judicial guidance means that the courts haven’t decided what tortures are legal, and which are beyond the pale, which has made their task “more difficult,” but never fear, they applied their best reading of the law to it, and decided that, so long as there were doctors present, none of the things they are talking are likely to rise to the level of torture.

What they did (as is plain in one of the footnotes) is decide that “torture” wasn’t really defined, and there was no way to interpret it which was useful so they could chop it up and make it legal. This, of course, flies in the face of the intent. Torture was broadly defined so that people couldn’t game the rules and say, “We didn’t chop his fingers off, we just scored his flesh with shallow cuts.”

Their best reading of the law.

Jesus wept.

james_nicoll was talking about Michael Ignatieff (vis-a-vis this NYTM article).

Ignatieff, among other blather, says that we're going to have to accept torturing people. It's a trifle more dressed up, but it's the "ticking bomb" nonsense, clothed in delicate terms of, "Stress," and "disorienting" and the like.

So it occurs to me, as he says none of this is torture, and Alberto Gonzales, and the like, all say we don't use torture, we just use "means of, mild, physical coercion," that I (yes I, the rabid anti-torture hippie-interrogator) can see a way to make it something I won't condemn out of hand.

Those at the top. Those who have to approve the legislation (as well as the hacking authority, so some upper level, Colonels and suchlike will be included) have to test the approved methods.

If waterboarding isn't torture, then let them show it. We'll waterboard them. Someone who has no reason to go easy on them will get to subject them to every method they want to approve. If they say 1 hour of stress-position A is acceptable (say hanging from the bars in handcuffs, stripped naked and doused with cold water) then they get one hour and 15 minutes (to show that we are stopping well short of the point of you know, "actual" torture). The times in question can be kept classified, but some oversight committee will get to see that it's actually done.

Each approved method has to be renewed every year, and prior to renewal it has to be re-administered to all those who would be in position to authorise it.

After all, it isn't as if this was torture.

I just took a look at the text of the McCain Amendment Bush agreed to, and the rhetoric coming out of the White House.

McCain, and the press, have been played; the White House got everything it wanted, and more.

The important text is, "it shall be a defense that such officer, employee, member of the Armed Forces or other agent did not know that the practices were unlawful and a person of ordinary sense and understanding would not know the practices were unlawful."

Now, that's a small thing, for those in the Army. The regulations, presently in place, make it a crime. But the other text makes, even that, negotiable, because § (a) IN GENERAL.--No person in the custody or under the effective control of the Department of Defense or under detention in a Department of Defense facility shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by and listed in the United States Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation.

So all they need to do to make torture legal (sort of, we're still signatories to a couple of pesky treaties which make torture illegal) is add a chapter to FM 34-52. They can even classify it, so no one not in the Army can point to any sanctioned torture. Which would make, "I was only following orders," an absolute defense in an American court, be it civil or military.

And if we doubt that, there's what Hadley said about the amendment, ""The discussion has been less of the text of the McCain amendment as it was originally submitted, and more discussion about the protections for the men and women, both in uniform and civilians, who are engaged in activities involving detainees and interrogations."

So the concern isn't what we do to prisoners, but rather how we protect the people who might be abusing them.

But the services are likely to resist such a change, because it puts people service members at more risk (we won't even go into what I think of such a relaxing, given that as an interrogator I could expect some special forms of payback, no matter what I may personally have done), but, under the Yoo/Gonzales doctrine of the inherent powers of the presidency (see the whole "we don't need no stinkin' warrants to wiretap and read the e-mails of citizens we think might be in touch with terrorists) to set aside such laws as he sees fit, and do whatever he wants in the prosecution of a war (because once Congress authorises force [no need to even go so far as to get a declaration of war] the Prez, can do anything he thinks useful in pursuit of that aim, and the only thing congress can do is cut the funding. The best part is that he doesn't have to tell them what it is, nor from whence the funds come. They wrote him a , mostly-blank, check, and he gets to keep as many sets of books as he likes. It's all for our own good).

Under this principle, "If the president orders in, in time of "war", it's not illegal, then "a reasonable person" could construe the command to torture someone as a lawful order.

This is better than the CIA getting a bye, no everyone gets a bye. Jury nullification as a tenet of the law, and the "ticking bomb" as an article of faith. I can see the summation now:

"Yes, he did a terrible thing (and our hearts go out to Mr. Doe, and his family, it was an honest mistake) but he's not a monster, look at his record. He's an honorable man [yea, they are all honorable men], and had good reason to believe Mr. Doe had knowledge of a plot which was going to kill hundreds, perhaps even thousands. What sort of callous creature would he have been, unfeeling; and unthinking, to not take every available means to try to save those people? His superiors told him the information was crucial, and that he was the only person who could stop it. All he had to do was do what needed to be done to get the information from Mr. Doe"

At which point the college bull-session becomes an article of law. "If you knew killing someone would save the lives of millions, would you do it?" I can see the heated debate in the jury room. Take twelve people, who's only knowledge of interrogation is what they got from 24, Kelly's Heroes, NYPD Blue, and movies with Arnold and Harrison Ford, and I can't guarantee, but I'd be willing to lay a year's salary; at odds, that the best you can hope for as a prosecutor is a hung jury.

"If he has the knowledge would you refuse to torture him, and let all those people die?" is going to be the topic in deliberations. They aren't going to be haggling about the fine points of law, or the mechanics of actually getting useful information. No, it's going to be about babies in coffins and mere hours to save them, no matter what the cost.

There's a story about Sparta. The King of Persia was bearing down on them, and his emmisary has come to negotiate a surrender. He tells the Kings of Sparta, "If His Majesty takes the city by storm His soldiers will rape your women, defile your daughters and kill your sons. Your city willl be torn asunder; not one brick will left atop another and the burnt desolation of it will be the last you see of it as you are led away to slavery."

And the Kings of Sparta looked back at him.

"If."

There's a lot of power in that word.

If.

Digby (who reminds me of someone I know by that name, but I am sure it isn't him... it's very strange. I want to meet him just so the disconnect of hearing his words in someone else's voice will go away) has a piece up (Burning Witches about torture, and why we need to keep railing against it.

Why it must remain completely beyond the pale of what we will accept.

Do I think the US has used, winked at, conived and suborned torture? Of course I do. Do I think it recent, and only of such recent ilk as the present flap has brought to light? Of course not.

We supported death sqauds in El Salvador. We knew they existed, and the Reagan administration broke laws (a lot of them, from the Boland Amendment to letting cocaine come in the side door while we were slipping illegal arms out the back) to keep the people who had them in funds so they could keep up the killing.

Digby points out one of the crucial things about torture, it isn't really about getting information, not when it becomes an instrument of policy.

One might assume that there is no one on the planet who thinks that torturing innocent people is right. Certainly, it's going to be hard to find intelligent educated people who believe that it is a moral good to do so. But not impossible. As it turns out there is a moral argument for torturing innocent people:

From Orrin Judd:

You might want to go back and brush up on your history, witchcraft was quite popular, even within the Church, for an awfully long time. In fact, it's back today in the form of Wicca. In its denial of the basis of Western Civilization it is so transgressive that it deserved to be and was persecuted. People who deny there were witches because they don't like how the religious treated them are akin to the Left denying there were Communists because they don't like that Americans reviled them. Jews too were justifiably, though unnecessarily, persecuted for their beliefs and inability to conform to social norms. The great injustice was the persecution of the conversos in Spain, who were sincere converts to Christianity.

I think he understands something I failed to understand about this argument. This isn't about terrorism. It isn't about national security. It isn't about the rule of law or enlightenment values. It's about conforming to social norms. That puts the whole thing in perspective, doesn't it? What I call "innocent" isn't innocent at all. Just being a practicing Muslim makes one guilty.

It's nice to know that we shouldn't be persecuting those who have converted to Christianity (or properly protestantised Islam, which translates into an embrace of Western Civilization.) The good news is that "protestantising" (forcing Western conformity on) the billion Muslims out there will be a cakewalk:

You can have a number of voices so long as everyone has just one hymnal. That's the essence of the protestantism that the End of History requires. It'll be easy enough to Reform Islam, just as we did Catholicism, Judaism, and the rest.
Posted by: oj at November 25, 2005 10:56 AM

And here I thought the whole "End of History" thing had been laughed out of town by the events of 9/11. Apparently History has only been postponed. Protestantism is still on the march, "reforming" witches and Muslims alike. And if it takes a little waterboarding or burning at the stake to get the job done, so be it. These people have to understand that we're going to end History one bloody non-conformist bastard at a time if we have to.

It's all of a piece. Hussien used torture to make people conform, to suppress dissent. Stalin did the same. Say something out of line to the wrong person, and "poof" you disappeared. Hitler, well he could be kinder. Von Stauffenberg was slowly killed, as an example. Rommel, implicated in the same plot was allowed to kill himself, which would spare his family the same, inevitable, fate, if he was publicly accused, and then; of course, convicted.

What could Rommel do? Even if he was innocent, his fate was sealed. Suicide, and his family lives, insist on his innoncence, and they get killed.

Torture works; if a state where fear of the denouncement is the place you want to live.

To quote A.E. Houseman, slightly out of context,

He gathered all the springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.

This weekend was drill. In it's way drill is one of those things which never change, and are never the same. Sadly I am moving up in the world, which means more paperwork. As a middle manager I have to do annual reviews of some of the NCOs junior to me. In the active side of the house this isn't too hard. I'd get to see them every day. Once a year we'd sit down and go over expectations and how to achieve them. Once a quarter we'd review them, and see how much progress was, or wasn't, being made. Once a year I'd write it all up.

Some of it would reflect on me. If my expectations were out of line the senior rater can talk to me, and the reviewer can backstop him.

On the Reserve Component it's a little different. We only see each other once a month (and in my unit I don't have the advantage of a two-week Annual Training to try and squeeze some observational time in, because we do our ATs one at a time).

Last week I got told I had two to do. One of them on someone who has been away for ten months, and I've been away for the two he wasn't. Great. When I got to drill it turned out I had to do one more, and that one on someone whose in his fifties, and used to outrank me. Fun.

That wasn't the high point of the weekend. I suppose the high point might have been the fellow who stopped me to ask a metaphorical question about coercive interrogation (no he didn't know I was an interrogator, he just saw PFC Jones and I in uniform; on a coffee run. One of the perks of rank is being able to draft help. I didn't want to drive, and needed two more hands to carry things, so I grabbed the nearest private. I had practical motives as well, since I needed to teach him how to run a guidon, so there was a justification for choosing him, but the power is there. Ah, what abuses I could practice!).

He probably got more than he bargained for, what with illustrations running from Vietnam, to Louis XIV and all sorts of points in between. Had we not been in uniform, and such a situation come up, it might have been a shorter catechism on my part, but I wanted him to have this in his mind the next time the subject came up.

Or perhaps it was the Army Physical Fitness Test I took Sunday morning.

I hate PT tests. Even when I don't have questions about passing the damned thing, it hurts. Two minutes each of push-ups and sit-ups, followed by a two-mile run. All of these done to muscle failure. One (at least this one) hurts for three to four days after.

To make it more fun, I've not been in training. Seriously, between my general dislike of exercise for the sake of exercise, and the Reiter's, I've done damn all. Used to be I had a notable fraction of an acre I was gardening. I walked the dogs a couple of miles, at least every couple of days. I rode the horses more. No longer.

The closest I come to real exercise is baking bread.

To pass I needed to do 38 push-ups. I had to do the same for sit-ups, but so what. Push ups are my bête noire. If I can pass them the rest is a done deal. Given my slight frame, long arms and lack of upper body mass, push-ups kill me. The most I've ever done was 44, and that was when I was in the best shape of my life. A regular workout 4 times a week, followed by 3-8 miles of running.

I more than half expected to fail.

Push-ups: 44
Sit-ups: 61
Run: 14:23

The only thing I can credit for the push-ups is the baking. I've been kneading a lot of bread, and when I had Maia checking my kokyu (because I was trying to incorporate one of the most important aspects of my aikido into some of my regular routine) I noticed my lats are more developed than I tend to think them.

Before I cut this off, and get to the food porn, some quizzy-goodness.

Kitsune You scored 17 in Malice and 27 in Chaos!

You are the Kitsune, or "Fox demon," the ultimate doer of mischief. Kitsune belong to a class of demons known as "Henge," or animal shape-shifters, along with the Tanuki, or badger-demon. They are uncanny creatures who are notorious as much for their malevolence as for their wild and unpredictable behavior; a fox demon may help a human, only to betray him in deepest consequence at a later date. Kitsune are known to frequently possess women or pose as humans, causing chaos and catastrophe where ever they go. They are mischievous creatures who take great pleasure in playing terrible tricks on unsuspecting mortals; however, this behavior indicates that they are more perversely playful and apathetic to human suffering than genuinely evil and desirous of harm.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 44% on Malice You scored higher than 57% on Chaos

Link: The Japanese Demon Profile Test written by Maharbal on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

It seems appropriate, mostly.

It's a sad day when learns one of one's friends, even a distant one with whom one is pretty much out of touch, turns out to be out of touch in a way one finds, at best disturbing; at worst, reprehensible.

Eugene Volokh thinks torture, as a norm in judicial punishment isn't wrong. Worse, he seems to think it laudatory.

I've not been reading the Volokh Conspiracy much lately because I have been a coward. I dislike the amount of time I have spent in the past year or so defending what I do for a living, while trying to correct those who either see it as evil, or needing torture to work best. Eugene's various comments on the matter (that torture, per se, isn't necessarily to be shunned... the Ticking Bomb defense, writ large) made me unwilling to wade in much where so many others, with wider followings than mine, were doing yeoman's work.

But this, gives me the willies.

If you look at the bottom you will see links to more of his general philosophy on the matter, but in brief I think it can be summed up like this. "Make criminals suffer, not so much to discourage others, but because vengeance is good for society."

His summation of his views is this, One can certainly reach a different judgment than I do: Even if one thinks there's some moral benefit to executing the Eichmanns or even the serial rapist-killers, one might say that the benefit is small enough that it's exceeded by the risk of error, and the very serious moral cost of that error. As I mentioned at the outset, I am keenly aware that I may be wrong on this general question, and the matter that causes me the most trouble is precisely this one. Yet my tentative current sense is that for a small number of extraordinarily monstrous crimes, the need for retribution is so strong — and the risk of error can be made so low — that not just death but deliberately painful death is the proper punishment.

The part I have the most disagreement with is this one, from higher up the piece,

"5. Humanity: Likewise, I think, with Mark's argument that deliberate infliction of pain, even on monsters, "makes the person who engages in it a little bit more of a beast, and a little bit less of a human being, than he would otherwise be." First, we should recognize that this is a metaphor; I may be mistaken, but my sense is that most literal beasts (i.e., animals) don't actually try to inflict pain as punishment for wrongs. Literally speaking, this desire is quite characteristic of human beings (though perhaps some other higher primates might be included; I'm not sure). This doesn't make Mark's argument wrong, but only shows that we need to look behind the metaphor.

So what's behind the metaphor? It could be a judgment that it's beastly, less-than-human, and thus morally improper to succumb to our visceral emotional impulses. But I don't think that's what Mark literally means. Love, empathy, the desire to pick a mate, the desire to have children, and other worthy emotions are also visceral emotional impulses; while we should certainly indulge in them with rational caution and care, there's nothing wrong in following emotions, and it's sometimes bad to resist them.

I take it, then, Mark's point is that it's beastly, less-than-human, and improper to indulge this particular emotion. But that too, I think, assumes the conclusion. When someone rapes and murders twenty children, why is it a "beastly" impulse as opposed to a worthy one to try to exact a harsh retribution? Mark acknowledges that retribution in general is a proper goal of punishment — but his argument doesn't, I think, explain why this particular sort of retribution is not. (To be fair, he does say "in my eyes, at least" — here we may be returning to a point I mentioned in my original post, which is that a lot in this debate rests on people's visceral moral intuitions.)

My response to this is that I have met people who have crossed the line, and been torturers, most of those in the pursuit of what they deemed to be higher moral aims (that is to say they were not indulging personal desires, not wallowing in some deviant urge, whereby they got a specific pleasure from inflicting pain on those who were not able to avoid it) and they are now damaged, mentally, and morally. They no longer see people as people. They see some as being not-quite people (I don't know how better to put it) and therefore not to be treated with the same respect, humanity; if you will, that everyone else gets.

The problem is, that as time goes on, they seem to have put more and more of the world into the category of, "not quite human."

This is not a new thing. A huge amount of the shift in human relations, the benefit of nations, even of empire, is to increase the number of people who counted as people. The Clans of the Highlands used to exterminate each other, root and branch, because those not in one's own family weren't quite as human. The scale shifted too, after all, those who weren't speakers of some form of Gaelic were less human still.

Read the Icelandic sagas; we see people casually settling scores by killing people's slaves. Person A (a family member) had given grave offense, so that night person B whacked person A's favorite slave in the side of the neck with an axe. It made him feel better, proved a point to his father (person A), but wasn't all that nice to the slave. More interesting, one must presume Person B knew the slave, had known him for years, but didn't think his life was as important as making the point.

Where am I going with this? I don't want to live in a place where hanging someone with piano wire, from a meathook, is seen as not enough punishment (and Eugene makes exactly that argument).

Call me sentimental, but if we are to have a death penalty, I want it to be more parallel to putting down a rabid dog; distasteful, but a sad necessity; and done without passion, than to having heritics hung, drawn and quartered.

Appealing to the base in human nature seems to me a poor thing, and I don't see that vengeance has had a calming influence on the countries which put it's practice into graphic; even public methods of punishing malefactors.

I thought the folks in charge were clueless when I was in Iraq (don't get me started on how V Corps managed EPWs during the shooting war), but as I look at what is being bruited about in the national fora, I ponder the shortest sentence in the Bible, "Jesus wept."

I'm a soldier. I don't talk about what that means much, mostly because it is a needful job, but dirty.

In a nutshell what I do is kill people.

To quote Shakespeare, "I could be bounded up in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams."

But I manage to avoid those bad dreams (as to most of the rest of my fellows) because I am bounded by more than that nutshell (rules are not the enemy... they are tools).

I have things like the Geneva Conventions and I have accepted a wealth of tradition, some of which must go back to the very first armies... one of those traditions is that non-combatants are spared (in the early days non-combatant was a bit more vague a concept, but those who were such got off more lightly than those who weren't, but I digress).

Which is why when I see things like this http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/04/opinion/04BROO.html my bile rises and I want to scream (this, is that scream).

"Try to put yourself in the mind of the killer, or of the guy with the plastic bag. You are part of Saddam's vast apparatus of rape squads, torture teams and mass-grave fillers. Every time you walk down the street, people tremble in fear. Everything else in society is arbitrary, but you are absolute. When you kill, your craving for power and significance is sated. You are infused with the joy of domination....

What will happen to the national mood when the news programs start broadcasting images of the brutal measures our own troops will have to adopt? Inevitably, there will be atrocities that will cause many good-hearted people to defect from the cause. They will be tempted to have us retreat into the paradise of our own innocence.

Somehow, over the next six months, until the Iraqis are capable of their own defense, the Bush administration is going to have to remind us again and again that Iraq is the Battle of Midway in the war on terror, the crucial turning point where either we will crush the terrorists' spirit or they will crush ours.

The president will have to remind us that we live in a fallen world, that we have to take morally hazardous action if we are to defeat the killers who confront us. It is our responsibility to not walk away. It is our responsibility to recognize the dark realities of human nature, while still preserving our idealistic faith in a better Middle East."

DAVID BROOKS
November 4, 2003

So, to eradicate the last holdouts of the evil aspects of Hussein's Iraq we have to (for just a little while) replace them with our boys, doing similar work.

After all this is not going to be done with the niceties of Stateside Police Procedures, "...the brutal measures our own troops will have to adopt? Inevitably, there will be atrocities that will cause many good-hearted people to defect from the cause."

It sounds like the guy in the bank saying, "Don't make me shoot these people, if you do the blood is on your hands."

But it won't be, it will be on the hands of the troops who are convinced to commit them. It may not get to My Lai as policy, but how will we decide the practical aspects of the brutality? I don't think we'll resort to summary decapitation, but we've already engaged in hostage taking (a COL left a note that a man's family was being held, pending his turning himself in... a violation of the Geneva Conventions).

Will it stop there? I doubt it. Israel did away with the rational of, "the ticking bomb" when dealing with Palestinians because they all became people who could be justifiably, "coerced."

And the Israeli Army says that such tactics are bad policy, they cause the troubles they are used to cure (Valium does that, one of the listed side effects is anxiety, but I digress).

What dreams will we foist on those who become not merely bound in that nutshell, but trapped?

TK