Pelosi, CIA...briefings on interrogations

[Caliga]

Agreed! Really, I'd love it if they could find some way to remove her as my rep.

Spread a rumor that she's a homophobe? 

[DontSayBanana]

The woman still had credibility? Seriously?

[Sheilbh]

Why bother investigating?  It's not like waterboarding and whatnot is a big deal.  All that fake outrage has served its purpose:  A Democrat is in the White House.

I think it's very important to open it out so that we know who knew what was going on and who approved it.  But in particular, I think that if the CIA misled Congress then that's very worrying and deserves a lot more inveestigation, and if Pelosi's lying to Congress now she deserves to lose her seat.

[DontSayBanana]

I think it's very important to open it out so that we know who knew what was going on and who approved it.  But in particular, I think that if the CIA misled Congress then that's very worrying and deserves a lot more inveestigation, and if Pelosi's lying to Congress now she deserves to lose her seat.

Yeah. I guess we should applaud her for shaking up the status quo, even if that's simply losing her seat. "He said, she said," and whoever's lying gets to walk.

[Scipio]

Why bother investigating?  It's not like waterboarding and whatnot is a big deal.  All that fake outrage has served its purpose:  A Democrat is in the White House.

I think it's very important to open it out so that we know who knew what was going on and who approved it.  But in particular, I think that if the CIA misled Congress then that's very worrying and deserves a lot more inveestigation, and if Pelosi's lying to Congress now she deserves to lose her seat.

Aww, that's so cute and principled.

[Hansmeister]

The Hammer of Krauts:

The Torture Debate, Continued

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 15, 2009



This month, I wrote a column outlining two exceptions to the no-torture rule: the ticking time bomb scenario and its less extreme variant in which a high-value terrorist refuses to divulge crucial information that could save innocent lives. The column elicited protest and opposition that were, shall we say, spirited.

And occasionally stupid. Dan Froomkin, writing for washingtonpost.com and echoing a common meme among my critics, asserted that "the ticking time bomb scenario only exists in two places: On TV and in the dark fantasies of power-crazed and morally deficient authoritarians." (He later helpfully suggested that my moral deficiencies derived from "watching TV and fantasizing about being Jack Bauer.")

On Oct. 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car. He was interrogated with methods so brutal that they violated Israel's existing 1987 interrogation guidelines, which themselves were revoked in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court as unconscionably harsh. The Israeli prime minister who ordered this enhanced interrogation (as we now say) explained without apology: "If we'd been so careful to follow the [1987] Landau Commission [guidelines], we would never have found out where Waxman was being held."

Who was that prime minister? Yitzhak Rabin, Nobel Peace laureate. The fact that Waxman died in the rescue raid compounds the tragedy but changes nothing of Rabin's moral calculus.

That moral calculus is important. Even John McCain says that in ticking time bomb scenarios you "do what you have to do." The no-torture principle is not inviolable. One therefore has to think about what kind of transgressive interrogation might be permissible in the less pristine circumstance of the high-value terrorist who knows about less imminent attacks. (By the way, I've never seen five seconds of "24.")

My column also pointed out the contemptible hypocrisy of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is feigning outrage now about techniques that she knew about and did nothing to stop at the time.

My critics say: So what if Pelosi is a hypocrite? Her behavior doesn't change the truth about torture.

But it does. The fact that Pelosi (and her intelligence aide) and then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss and dozens of other members of Congress knew about the enhanced interrogation and said nothing, and did nothing to cut off the funding, tells us something very important.

Our jurisprudence has the "reasonable man" standard. A jury is asked to consider what a reasonable person would do under certain urgent circumstances.

On the morality of waterboarding and other "torture," Pelosi and other senior and expert members of Congress represented their colleagues, and indeed the entire American people, in rendering the reasonable person verdict. What did they do? They gave tacit approval. In fact, according to Goss, they offered encouragement. Given the circumstances, they clearly deemed the interrogations warranted.

Moreover, the circle of approval was wider than that. As Slate's Jacob Weisberg points out, those favoring harsh interrogation at the time included Alan Dershowitz, Mark Bowden and Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. In November 2001, Alter suggested we consider "transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies" (i.e., those that torture). And, as Weisberg notes, these were just the liberals.

So what happened? The reason Pelosi raised no objection to waterboarding at the time, the reason the American people (who by 2004 knew what was going on) strongly reelected the man who ordered these interrogations, is not because she and the rest of the American people suffered a years-long moral psychosis from which they have just now awoken. It is because at that time they were aware of the existing conditions -- our blindness to al-Qaeda's plans, the urgency of the threat, the magnitude of the suffering that might be caused by a second 9/11, the likelihood that the interrogation would extract intelligence that President Obama's own director of national intelligence now tells us was indeed "high-value information" -- and concluded that on balance it was a reasonable response to a terrible threat.

And they were right.

You can believe that Pelosi and the American public underwent a radical transformation from moral normality to complicity with war criminality back to normality. Or you can believe that their personalities and moral compasses have remained steady throughout the years, but changes in circumstances (threat, knowledge, imminence) alter the moral calculus attached to any interrogation technique.

You don't need a psychiatrist to tell you which of these theories is utterly fantastical.

[garbon]

Aww, that's so cute and principled.

When it involves the potential ousting of Pelosi, I hope we all feel motivated to be cute and principled.

[DontSayBanana]

The Hammer of Krauts:

You're shitting me, Hans. Krauthammer? You like combating a lack of credibility with an even bigger lack of credibility? The man who so believes in the spirit of the law that the letter of the law is an unpleasant formality? Gimme a break.

[Hansmeister]

The Hammer of Krauts:

You're shitting me, Hans. Krauthammer? You like combating a lack of credibility with an even bigger lack of credibility? The man who so believes in the spirit of the law that the letter of the law is an unpleasant formality? Gimme a break.

I guess making a coherent argument is beyond you.

[grumbler]

I have said before that there prbably are circumstances in which torture is morally permissable, even if there are none in which it is legally permisable.  If someone really thinks they are in a "ticking time bomb" scenario or one in which innocents are in iminent danger, they probably should torture, and have their careers ruined, but be forgiven and pardoned (but not reinstated) should they prove correct.

If the situation is not one worth assuredly ending a career over, or one in which the evidence isn't clearly that of one worth assuredely ending a career over, then torture is neither legally nor morally tolerable.

In short, no one should be allowed, in my name, to torture without suffering consequences.  I would ask no less of constituents if I were in a position to torture the likes of Al Quaeda-types.  The temptation would be too great.

[The Brain]

KC Hammer thinks that the "ticking bomb scenario" encompasses cases where mere single lives are at stake? So he's either a retard or a liar or both.

[DontSayBanana]

Hans, there is no substance to the post you provided. In both exception scenarios, there needs to be a reasonable belief that a party larger than the interrogator and the questioned will be served positively by the use of extreme methods. Applying either situation on the individual level is nothing more than a Hamurabi-esque, state-sanctioned form of vigilante justice.

This is why I normally ignore Krauthammer; he claims that the law can be bent or broken virtually every time it interferes with his own personal moral compass.

[Scipio]

Aww, that's so cute and principled.

When it involves the potential ousting of Pelosi, I hope we all feel motivated to be cute and principled.

The Demoncrats in the House, unfortunately, are neither.

[CountDeMoney]

Oh Hod please let this force the Democrats to remove her as Speaker.

Actually, please let something, anything, lead the Democrats to remove her as Speaker.

This is one of those examples where Obama needs to drop the academic persona and channel LBJ on her ass.

Honestly though, not just on this topic but others, Obama needs to drop the hammer on the Dems in Congress and remind them who is the party boss, and who should be pushing who's agenda.

[CountDeMoney]

This is why I normally ignore Krauthammer; he claims that the law can be bent or broken virtually every time it interferes with his own personal moral compass.

The Hammer of the Krauts is usually correct on such issues, however.