Light On Dark Water

EITN?

An email from Rob Grano:

You all have heard of the Catholic TV network EWTN.  I'm recommending to Fox that they change their name to EITN.

Enhanced
Interrogation
Techniques
Network

That's pretty much all they've talked about since Ben Ladin got nailed. The motto could be something like, "All torture talk, all the time."

I haven't watched Fox lately, but I don't doubt this is true. I said several years ago that it was looking as if torture might turn out to be for the right what abortion has long been for the left: a fatal abdication of principle. The usual pattern in these things, with groups as well as individuals, is often that unacknowledged and repressed guilt becomes anger toward anyone who challenges the guilt-inducing position. 

Happily, there are some on the right who have not joined this parade: columnist Jeff Jacoby and Senator John McCain, who can hardly be accused of being soft on terrorism. And here's David Mills at First Things, not primarily a political commentator but more or less on the right as well.

Maclin Horton

24 responses to “EITN?”

  1. Janet

    John McCain is not a great favorite of mine, but I have to say that it would be very easy, and politically expedient for him to say that waterboarding, etc., to obtain information is different from the kind of torture that he endured and one has to give him credit for not doing that.
    AMDG

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  2. Mac

    Also, waterboarding is a relatively mild form of torture, which is how a lot of people who ought to know better talk themselves into approving it, and he might have been able to do the same. So it is definitely to his credit.
    Not a favorite of mine, either, to say the least. I voted for him reluctantly and then was a little relieved that he didn’t win.

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  3. Daniel Nichols

    As you may recall, I REALLY do not like McCain; if he was president we would have bombed Iran by now, and bombed Libya earlier. And while he hedged during the election I must say that his latest denunciation of waterboarding is most welcome…
    Waterboarding may be “relatively mild” but only if compared to ripping out your fingernails. I forget his name but one of those vulgar morning show shock jocks did a big publicity stunt and was going to show the world that it was not that bad. He lasted about five seconds…

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  4. Mac

    …”relatively mild” but only if compared to… — right, that was my point.
    I haven’t heard the story about talk radio guy, but Christopher Hitchens arranged to have himself waterboarded. His conclusion is contained in the title of the piece: Believe Me, It’s Torture. This is a good instance of the reasons why so many people who disagree with Hitchens nevertheless have so much respect for him.

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  5. Francesca

    I remember the first time I heard the topic of torture mentioned in a contemporary sense. It was in the late 1990s, before the 2nd Gulf War. An Episcopalian, politically conservative philosopher colleague said in a public seminar something to the effect that torture might sometimes be necessary to obtain information, and when he said it, he looked at me. I thought, SH!T man, don’t look at me, count me out! As with most of my ethical opinions, it was sheer gut reaction. I could see it was ‘conservative realism’ or pragmatism. To me, that’s not genuine conservativism. That’s about as far as I could go in rationalising my response, then as now.

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  6. Mac

    This is one of the cases where I find it useful to distinguish “right wing” from “conservative,” although they’re never very precise terms. The latter is more straightforwardly and unreflectingly nationalist, capitalist, hawkish. Fox News is right wing, but hardly conservative.
    I think this question is also a classic instance of “hard cases make bad law.” It’s a little like saying “if my children were starving I would steal” and then trying to erect a whole legal structure on that extreme case: how hungry do they have to be, how much can you steal, who can you steal from, etc. It’s folly.

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  7. Marianne

    Interesting that in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the statement on torture seems to leave a hole big enough for a bus to pass through with regard to whether torture can be used in a “ticking-bomb” situation:
    “Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity. Except when performed for strictly therapeutic medical reasons, directly intended amputations, mutilations, and sterilizations performed on innocent persons are against the moral law.” http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c2a5.htm
    I point expressly to that “which” phrase — is that not used to limit the restriction to just those particular instances, i.e., to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred? Or at least to leave some room to debate its use with situations like the ticking-bomb?
    There’s a thorough discussion of this and more concerning the Church’s position on the use of torture by Fr. Brian Harrison, a professor at the Pontifical University of Puerto Rico, here: http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id=7390&CFID=80871308&CFTOKEN=80030558.

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  8. Mac

    I don’t have time to read Fr. Harrison’s piece right now–later this weekend–but I had some thoughts along the same lines as yours in this post, which is now almost five years old.

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  9. Louise

    This is one of the cases where I find it useful to distinguish “right wing” from “conservative,” although they’re never very precise terms. The latter is more straightforwardly and unreflectingly nationalist, capitalist, hawkish. Fox News is right wing, but hardly conservative.
    It is often the case that people who identify as “right wing” are pretty liberal in social philosophy, but are not in favour of big guvvermint. They like personal responsibility, but not in a way that is consistent with the social doctrine of the Church for example.

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  10. Marianne

    Well, heck, Maclin, I was reading you back in 2006, when you wrote that piece, so I’m sure I noted it. And it probably lodged in my memory and that’s what led me now to check out the Church’s position. Which is a lesson learned: namely, always do a search of your archives before holding forth here! 😉
    Anyway, if I read your 2006 entry correctly, it seems that what you object to most strenuously is the idea of granting statutory/regulatory status to the use of torture. Is that so?

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  11. Mac

    It’s a lot worse when you wrote the dang thing and are surprised when you read it. That happens to me constantly. Just the other day I was thinking about writing something about Ayn Rand, on the occasion of the Atlas Shrugged movie. I did remember that I’d written about her before (it was memorable because of the record number of comments it provoked), but I thought I had some new things to say. Well, when I found the two posts, I saw that I’d said pretty much everything I have to say now, including the comparison to Marx, which I thought was new.

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  12. Mac

    “…it seems that what you object to most strenuously is the idea of granting statutory/regulatory status to the use of torture. Is that so?”
    Well…sort of, I guess, but I wouldn’t put it that way–I wouldn’t put the legal status as my first concern. I do object to that, but more fundamentally I object to making it an accepted practice, a standard part of our treatment of captured terrorists or suspected terrorists. I think that’s an extremely slippery slope that we shouldn’t be on.
    I’m willing to grant that there might be a valid argument that torture is justifiable to prevent a terrible crime, as in the scenario I imagined in that post. But situations like that are vanishingly rare. I suppose it might be possible to construct a legal framework which could allow for that, but since it’s the government granting permission to itself, it seems extremely dangerous to allow even that step.
    I know of one real-world event to which this applies, if the book I read on the Israeli secret service was accurate. According to it, a group of Palestinians was equipped and positioned to use a portable missile launcher to shoot down a plane taking off from the Paris airport. The Israelis discovered the plot but they didn’t know exactly where in the area near the airport the Palestinians were hidden. They caught one of the Palestinians as the plane was being readied for take-off and somehow forced him–the book didn’t really say how–to reveal the location, and the plan was thwarted at the last minute.
    So, if that story is true, were the Israelis acting morally? Well, I’ll just say I don’t blame them. But that’s a very different situation from capturing a Palestinian believed to have terrorist associations and torturing him to find out what, if anything, he knows. The apologists for waterboarding etc. make those two cases morally identical, and they just aren’t.
    Btw the comments on that post I linked to are interesting.

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  13. Mac

    Louise, your description fits American libertarians. I suppose you have those in Australia, too. There is a very vocal secular libertarian contingent in this country which is every bit as hostile to the Church as is the secular left. American conservatism, as opposed to mere right-wing-ism, usually has a strong religious orientation, which is totally unpalatable to doctrinaire libertarians. There has long been a conservative-libertarian alliance, because their specific political ideas do overlap in some ways, but it’s a very tense one, and it seems to me more so of late.

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  14. Francesca

    Yesterday, working on a dictionary article, I googled someone to get their dates (I am too lazy to get up and look at Chambers), and got the dates – in a copy of a book I wrote, and have on my hard drive.
    Mac’s exerience about Ayn Rand is my normal one, and probably the one of very many writers. It’s not just that one doesn’t remember what one said in the material sense, it’s that one is surprised to learn what one had written. I used constantly to think I had some new ideas on theological aesthetics, only to realise they were all in my first book.

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  15. Mac

    At the age of 62 and beginning to notice that my memory is even worse than it used to be, it’s always gratifying to me to learn that someone else has the same experiences of this sort. I was really happy yesterday at work–well, back up, first I was quite unhappy, when I discovered that a problem which someone else and I spent hours chasing on Thursday was in fact something we ourselves had done–emails to prove it–only in early February. The happy part came in because she’s “only” 49 (or is it 50?) and she had no more memory of it than I did.
    Programming is a lot like writing in that respect. You think about something, you write it, you go on to the next thing. It’s not unusual for me to find some code that I wrote and have no memory whatsoever of, even when I look at it. Or to see something weird in a program, and wonder “why did someone do that?” and discover that I was the someone, and then reconstruct the reasons in my mind as if it were a completely new question. I guess the time to worry will be when I discover that the original line of reasoning was cuckoo.

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  16. Janet

    Well, by then it won’t seem cuckoo. It will seem absolutely brilliant.
    AMDG

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  17. Mac

    And I won’t understand why they’ve disabled my account. They’ll tell me I just wasn’t typing my password correctly as they escort me to my car.

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  18. Dave

    I have done the same thing with programming, Mac. I do write all my code keeping firmly in mind the poor bastard who will have to fix it years from now and knowing that the most likely poor bastard will be me. A common reaction is “What on earth was I trying to do here! Golly, what a mess.”

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  19. Mac

    Glad to hear it. 🙂
    In my current jack-of-all-trades job I don’t do all that much actual programming, just tinkering around the edges of a big system written by others, which may make it even easier for me to forget half a day or so spent writing code.

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  20. Dave

    Just occurred to me that it was Fox who uses ‘homicide bomber’ for ‘suicide bomber’ and succeeded only in making themselves look stupid.

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  21. Mac

    Or perhaps stupid, stupid, stupid. The only thing worse in that vein was “freedom fries.” That still makes me cringe.

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  22. Dave

    I like being a jack-of-all. Hope you do too.
    I’m able to laugh more than cringe now with some space behind us, but yes, ‘freedom fries’ was surely bad.
    When Japanese quality programs were all the rage 15 or 20 years ago, one of the axioms was “Forget about attitude. Change the behavior, and attitude will follow.” It’s similar with language and why propaganda is powerful and why I insist on being a school marm sometimes.
    In this wordy crowd perhaps I can indulge myself a bit. Most commentators mention the ridiculous redundancy of ‘homicide bomber’, but I don’t recall seeing this other objection anywhere: Fox and others complain that ‘suicide’ somehow honors the bomber. That would be true if we called them ‘martyr bombers’, ‘sacrifice bombers’, or as other complainers suggested, even ‘kamikaze bombers’ (kamikaze means ‘divine wind’). Since when is suicide honorable? Sure their proposed solution is laughable, but the problem they complain about isn’t even a problem. Sheesh. So yes, not just stupid, but stupid, stupid, stupid.
    (You’ve heard of the Italian suffix ‘-issimo’ as a superlative, but almost as common is simply repeating the adjective three times.)

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  23. Mac

    I don’t really much like being a jack-of-all. Too many technologies not thoroughly learned. The other day I counted at least 12 software specialties that could each be a full-time job (Unix sysadmin, Informix dbm, Perl programmer, etc etc.) that are covered by my staff of three, half of them by me alone.
    One of the things wrong with “homicide bomber” is that it’s redundant. It goes without saying that killing people is the point. What makes suicide bombers different is precisely the fact that killing themselves is an intentional part of the plan. It’s ridiculous to downplay that. It doesn’t mean they’re noble, but it does mean that they’re really committed, and what’s the point of trying to de-emphasize that?

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  24. Mac

    Marianne, I read Fr. Harrison’s piece. I agree with his reasoning and assume he’s correct in his history. But I think it would be a bit imprudent to make too much of that possible exception. His last couple of paragraphs make it sound as if he might be equating the ticking-bomb scenario with what was actually done by the Bush administration, and I don’t think they are the same thing. Information that might help prevent future attacks isn’t the same as information needed to halt one in progress. I don’t know if he meant to be doing that or not.

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