We might as well start wearing black and putting skulls on our caps. The Senate Torture Report (it’s chilling that we even have to have a “torture report”) has been released, and it’s just full of the evil crap the CIA has been doing.
Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.’s medical staff, some C.I.A. prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.’s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”
Couple that with the discovery that the CIA was fucking incompetent, kept poor records of what was done, held 26 detainees without cause, and tortured poor schmucks who had committed no crime, but was arrested “solely as leverage to get a family member to provide information”. Thanks, GW Bush and Cheney, for cheerfully approving horrors.
And the end result?
At no time did the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques lead to the collection of imminent threat intelligence, such as the hypothetical ‘ticking time bomb’ information that many believe was the justification for the use of these techniques.
Fuck you, Sam Harris, you incompetent amoral hack, smug apologist for monsters.
What about pure Aryan skull shape?
Where’s the news? Did anyone believe any different before?
PZ: You are 100% correct. This goes way beyond disgraceful, unlawful, and inhumane; this pushes us into the “evil empire” category. This is what truly evil governments do. The thing is, the CIA and Cheney, et al, knew full well that torture was an ineffective means to get information. I believe they did this solely to instill fear in our perceived enemies (i.e. US sanctioned terrorism). It’s skulls on our helmets and hats and “Gott mit uns” on our belt buckles.
I can easily see how people will try to justify torturing individuals who are suspected to have information. That type of blind Jack Bauer machismo I can understand. Hate, but understand.
How the hell do you justify to yourself torturing someones family members for leverage?
I moved to the USA from a nation that is brutal and has no concept of human dignity. This news makes me even more sadder than before. When you know what to expect, you are unhappy, but when bad things happen in a place where it is unexpected, it is terrifying.
American exceptionalism at its finest(?). It’s OK because of MERICA!! and if you disagree you want the terrorists to win. It’s the same kind of cognitive dissonance we see in religions like christianity. Coincidence?
I would suggest that this might finally end the (insufficient) justification of torture with those endless ‘ends justifies the means’ defenses, but then, this was already known and didn’t stop shit.
Inexcusable, especially since we already knew that torture is not a reliable way of collecting intelligence. But nope, instead we got this vile conduct and set of practices, which almost certainly is not going to result in an indictment for anyone involved.
Holms
It certainly should end the justification of torture, but I just skimmed through comments on the Daily Beast article. Fully half of commenters are torture apologists or even deniers (). It’s sickening.
General reminder: this isn’t the actual report, it’s the redacted, CIA-edited executive summary. If this is turning your stomach, imagine what the unredacted, actual report says. And pressure Udall to read the whole thing into the Congressional record.
At least the SS were open about being bad. They had the courage of their convictions.
This type of bad guy wants to torture and murder and oppress and to demonstration racism and bigotry of every kind–and still be considered a good person. Oh, how they freak out when you point out their actual nature to them!*
* See all of Fox News.
The dudebros will be shouting down everyone with even one iota of morality with declarations such as:
“Hey! This is war! MERIKA FUCK YEAH!”
“USA! USA! USA!”
“Fuck those sand n****rs!”
“Shut the fuck up, I’m watching Duck Dynasty.”
I do wish I was joking. :-(
Land of the free and the home of the brave.
Free to freely torture people who hate you for your freedom, and brave enough to kill hundreds of innocents in trying to kill one “bad” person…all bravely behind a joystick and a screen, thousands of brave miles from danger.
Baddies indeed.
My brain is refusing to get past this.
I expect to hear the “I was just following orders” defense any time now.
Doctor Josef Mengele gets a much better deal working for obama than hitler.
Cheney will never admit to being wrong about his position on enhanced interrogation. If he did he is confessing to war crimes. I bet he never travels outside the states for fear of being charged with war crimes.
Well, now, Coyne’s changed his tune.
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/12/09/the-senates-torture-report/
He was previously all “Sam Harris has a point”
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/05/02/sam-harris-on-torture/
@robertfoster #17:
It’s already started, in a way, with this ‘CIA officers weren’t really to blame’ moment:
(http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/09/cia-torture-report-released)
I’m waiting for the Sam Harris blog post where he will argue that because America did not cut off body parts they have shown restraint and must have benign intent, and then Harris will propose a thought experiment suggesting that if al Qaeda ran Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons it would be much worse.
Christopher Hitchens, for all his faults, at least had sufficient courage of his convictions to subject himself to waterboarding and came to the conclusion that, yes, it was torture. Would Sam Harris care to display similar backbone with this “rectal feeding” business? If nothing else, it would be interesting to observe the shit going into him for a change instead of the other way around…
Stop saying “enhanced interrogation techniques”. It should bother you that that phrase comes so naturally to you. It bothers me.
Cat Mara, #23,
What goes in one end comes out the other. The evidence suggests Sam Harris has been enjoying rectal feeding for years now.
I heard on NPR, I forget which senator or congresswoman it was, (couldn’t be many), the most obnoxious self-serving and ludicrous spin on this. “At least we’re big enough to admit when we’re wrong.”
Total WTF. No, fuck that, no, No no no. Fucking WRONG. No free pass. No, we are a horrible shitting country with horrible shitting politics and horrible shitting abuses of human rights. We are not “big enough” to admit we are wrong. We are small-minded enough to think that all that matters is our PR campaign and how to spin this. Fuck me.
@dereksmear #22:
I’ve seen patriots arguing this on Twitter. Setting your baseline for moral behavior at “al-Queda’s greatest atrocities” strikes me as the laziest possible way of being one of the good guys.
Given the known unreliability of torture, I say that the purpose of torture is deception, not interrogation. Hint: It’s not the terrorists who are being deceived.
You can make an innocent person confess to anything (or slowly kill him if he’s strong enough to resist the coercion, thus adding murdering innocents as a secondary purpose, especially if the torturer knows they’re innocent). If a terrorist’s truth sounds implausible or politically inconvenient, the torturer likely won’t believe it and instead coerce them into telling appealing lies that don’t help in the real world. Worse, if a terrorist is tough enough to endure, they can pretend to break and any lies they tell as a result will be treated as sacred words by those naive enough to believe torture makes people tell the truth.
Thus, I consider advocating torture as an interrogation technique to be synonymous with openly sympathizing with the enemy. None of this argument requires being “soft on terrorists” or whatever they might chant in response. It only requires that one be in touch with reality, and torture advocates do not meet this qualification.
On the eve of the release, this came up as a trending topic on Facebook, and I made the mistake of clicking on the Fox News entry at the top. The commenters there were mad that they were releasing this report, for security reasons. I.E., the terrorists will be mad at us if they find out what horrible shit we did. And they wonder why people are ashamed to be American.
Contact information for outgoing Senator Mark Udall can be found here. He still has the chance to read the full report into the Senate Record.
Reminder in case anyone in the DoJ still cares about the rule of law:
18 U.S. Code § 2340A – Torture
Josh, Official SpokesGay, #24
“Enhanced interrogation techniques” sounds much better in the original German, anyway.
And it of course was Dianne Feinstein… Cheee-rist.
I mean, yeah, golf clap. Woo-hoo. Red-white and blue. Yay, I guess.
Calling it a “stain”. Nah, the tapestry is threadbare and any semblance of design has been blotted by all the stains of our history. It is one giant fucking stain from an endless cup that people are still insisting on spilling in this fucking country. Learn from our mistakes? Fuck, we can’t even admit to them and own them long enough for the shame to sink in before we’re all like “Hey world, what are you so mad about? Geez, we said we’re sorry, OK? Let’s move on!”
Fuck the USA.
Josh, Official SpokesGay, #24
I had a mini debate in my head on which wording I would use. I chose the wording I think Cheney would have used because in the back of my head I thought someone would comment on using the torture word instead of enhanced interrogation. I think I may have overthought it.
Cross posted from the Lounge:
Here’s an article that describes in detail how torture does NOT work: Politico link.
Info on the man quoted above:
Bronze Dog/#28:
That. With some expansions.
Among them:
Torture is a tool of political control, not an intelligence-gathering instrument. The regimes who use it aren’t particularly concerned with getting the truth from their ‘suspects’.
They are concerned, rather, with:
1) Political theater. It’s how to look all ruthless and determined and war president, to the constituency impressed by such gestures. That’s our alpha mad dog. He’ll do anything. He has my vote, therefore…
2) Demonization/dehumanisation. Nothing sends a message more clearly that your enemy are ‘animals’ than treating them as such.
3) Intimidating potential dissenters. Got a beef with our approach? Got a skin tone or cultural or political background we can use to imply makes you an ‘other’, and ‘justly’ subject to these techniques? Merely acquainted with/related to/married to someone who has? An appointment can be arranged.
4) In for a penny effect. Once we’ve given a political pass to allow this, some will justify it all the more, rather than face their own part therein. Drastic measures, they must have been drastic times. Support our troops, or admit that yeah, you’re an accessory, after the fact.
5) Creating the reality they want/that serves their political narrative. Under sufficient stress, even the battered, brutalized brain of the victim may come to believe their confession, and this is potentially useful, too.
The people who argue for its utility may even know this, to varying degrees. But they know they can’t say it out loud. The ticking bomb is an excuse, no more.
Does the torturer or their employer believe to some degree whatever bizarre, expedient ‘confession’ is coerced out of the victim? I don’t even know…
… but does it even matter, if they do? No more than that a con artist may come to believe their own line, in some confused fashion, after lying long enough…
… the point is: they shouldn’t. And this is the nature of torture, and the character of a regime that uses it.
Cross posted from the Lounge:
Cheney is, as expected, defending the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. John McCain is on the opposite side of the fence. McCain gave a speech against the use of all kinds of degrading interrogation techniques, let alone the dangerously harmful techniques. McCain’s point is that torture is also an ineffective interrogation technique, and that even if it was effective we should not act against our values.
Cheney said: “What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it,” he said in a telephone interview. “I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.”
Cross posted from the Lounge:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the committee’s chairwoman, summarized the four key findings of the report this way:
1. The CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” were not effective.
2. The CIA provided extensive inaccurate information about the operation of the program and its effectiveness to policymakers and the public.
3. The CIA’s management of the program was inadequate and deeply flawed.
4. The CIA program was far more brutal than the CIA represented to policymakers and the American public.
Maddow blog link.
Regarding Feinstein’s statement:
She’s right that it is just a “step”.
BEING (not just “showing”) a just and lawful society requires more than this.
It requires all responsible to face the appropriate legal sanction, in open, public trial.
It requires payment of reparation to ALL the victims.
It requires as well a commitment followed by demonstable action to never engage in such activities again.
More on Senator McCain’s response, both video and transcript.
Excerpt below:
Torture doesn’t work? Wow. It’s too bad nobody said that before. Oh, wait, people did….
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Some comments up-thread noted that this is not news, that we have known for some time that the CIA tortured detainees. One thing is new: the report proves that Cheney lied when he claimed that torture resulted in actionable intelligence.
Some detainees were tortured AFTER they had provided actionable intelligence as a result of acceptable interrogation techniques.
Hasn’t that been official since at least Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
(I’m sorry, but I still hold that those were war crimes, and I think WWII is where the USA truly became the baddies.)
Please remember all of the members of the House and Senate who let Bush/Cheney have their way. And how little most of the population of the US did not even question the march to wars, despite the fact that the plan for war against Iraq was known for years before the terrorist attacks.
While Bush, Cheney, Yu, Rice and others deserve jail time for these crimes, they were hardly operating in a vacuum. Large parts of the US population approves of these crimes.
At least we’re not marching under a flag with a rat’s anus on it.
From the report:
Those 20 examples included Khaled Sheikh Mohammed.
Dick Cheney said:
Conclusion, Cheney cannot separate fact from fiction.
Hey, can’t have an empire without killing a few million people – torture’s small fry. Reminder that the US is still the only nation to ever have used nuclear weapons. On civilians, no less. Imagine how that one would look in the history books if Germany had won WWII.
Love all the Mitchell & Webb references. Hate that I have to identify with those two characters now.
@44
Yeah, Sam Harris was calling for the torture of KSM.
Janine @ 42 – No. Many, many people in the US were loudly questioning the invasion of Iraq. Millions of people were in the streets protesting right up until the first shot was fired. There was in no way unity across the United States in supporting the invasion of Iraq. (There were some polling numbers that found overwhelming support for the military because “support the troops” and all that, but the polls did not differentiate between supporting the troops and supporting their mission). There was a greater consensus about invading Afghanistan, largely due to reaction from 9/11 although even then there were people questioning whether invading the country was a sound way to get to bin Laden and his people. The fallacy that the entire US was united behind the invasion is largely the product of corporate media that refused to acknowledge or cover the massive global protests against the war in Iraq, just as the US corporate media refused to cover the massive protests when Bush was inaugurated. The media decided on a narrative and refused to cover anything that might dissent from it, as they have done for decades.
Don’t forget Obama too – he condoned the ongoing torture despite his hollow platitudes. In fact it seems some people in the executive branch really didn’t like the idea of Diane Feinstein publicizing the report; I don’t know what Obama’s position is, but Kerry would rather keep the brutality secret.
drst, I am aware of that. Dammit, I had people scolding me, lecturing me and yelling at me when I said that invading Afghanistan would not be the right way to go after Bin Laden.
And I am aware that the MSM has the narrative that the US, on the whole, marched oh so patriotically off to war (Never mind the extremely small percentage of the population that actually served in the military.)
So even though I opposed everything that administration did, hated how the MSM portrayed the large anti-war movement, I have to accept that these crimes were done in my name. And not enough was done to keep this from happening. While I place most of the blame on Bush, Cheney, Yu, Rice and all of their corporate cronies that cheered them on and profited from their actions; I feel culpable.
And I fucking hate that.
Now everything is fine again, right?
You have kind of almost said “sorry” and now it’s the other’s duty to forgive and forget. Anybody who ever mentions the fact that the USA tortures people to dead is now a meany and indeed the bad person. Because torturing people to death is kind of OK if you say it was wrong afterwards, and kind of promise not to do it again (until you do it again. Tell me, when exactly was Guantanamo closed?)
And now the rest of the world has to take you at your word, right? Just like you’re no longer spying on us. Just like you are indeed such a lawful society that policemen can kill unarmed black people and get a paid holiday as a reward.
Just and lawful.
You’re sounding like North Korea, Ms Feinstein
mad scientist: That may be but the Republican Senate leadership certainly attempted to prevent Feinstein from releasing the report because it makes the previous administration look bad.
The released report is abridgment. The full report is something like 6000 pages and is classified.
The Washington Post article suggests that the report provides some CYA to the administrations by suggesting that CIA agents obfuscated what they were doing. Sounds like “plausible deniability” BS to me.
Not keeping records was probably deliberate. They learned their lessons from the Germans who kept meticulous records. More “plausible deniability.”
I tend to agree with Josh that we shouldn’t ape their Orwellian language, even in a sense of irony.
By the way, any mention in the report of deaths as a result of this torture? It would not be surprising that someone died as a result of say “near drowning” or “rectal hydration” but I’m sure such an outcome would be carefully managed to keep the real cause of death from appearing on any report.
Torture won’t get the prisoner to tell you the truth. It’ll only get them to say what you want them to say, so you’ll stop the torture process. Isn’t that obvious? It still boggles my mind that anyone thought torture will provide valid information, and not just they way to pre-punish the “bad guys” for crimes not yet committed (or punishing them for crimes their cohorts, still free, committed. Forget all that “due process” claptrap, Punish first, ask questions later.
*blech* I still can’t comprehend how those warmongers got duly elected.
re 53:
oh, I forgot, Bush stole that election (lookin at you ‘hangin chads’).
NateHevens #41:
The USA were baddies long before WWII.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States
Mother Jones has a summary of some of the points that are previously unconfirmed information that’s pretty interesting. My favorite excerpt:
That sounds like the definition of evil to me.
In case I clipped too much of the explanatory text from that quote, the attorney for the CIA is worried that the administration is saying detainees are being treated humanely because he knows they’re not and thought the administration was cool with that. And the Mother Jones link I meant to include: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/12/cia-torture-report-abuses-rectal-feeding
And they proved incompetent here too: torture instilled a lot more scorn, hatred and revanchist fantasies than fear toward the US.
I am appalled and ashamed that any of this happened. And with regard to Cheney and Bush—on one hand, the summary says that they were given incomplete truths or blatant lies about the program. Some people are interpreting this as them not being in collusion with the CIA on torture, but then there’s this excerpt from the MJ article:
Unmentioned is that Bush probably didn’t want to know to cover his own ass.
“Torture is an ethical concept but it is also a legal concept. We went to the Department of Justice several times for advice and we were told what we were doing was not torture. We feel very confident what we did was not torture.”
“The people we interrogated were not signatories to the Geneva Convention, so the notion that we violated that convention is not correct.”
“We may have made a few terrorists uncomfortable for a short period of time in order to get invaluable information. Remember we had credible information that Bin Laden had met with nuclear scientists in Pakistan. We were in the ticking time bomb scenario.”
“There were a few situations where the program got harsh, but the committee over-emphasizes that to the exclusion of other things that were beneficial.”
“This program was not perfect but we struggled to make it better.”
“When we discovered things that were not proceeding the way things were approved by the DOJ we reported it.”
“I don’t see anything wrong with transparency as long as it reflects the opinions of all sides.”
John McLaughlin, former Deputy Director of the CIA, interviewed on NPR.
It’s difficult for me to imagine who is the bigger villain, this guy or the folks who did the deeds.
You’d think someone like McLaughlin would know that bin Laden didn’t have the resources to build a nuclear weapon, and that no one would give him one. Not to mention that building an A bomb isn’t a ticking time bomb scenario anyway. How long has Iran supposedly been working on an A bomb?
Al Qaeda et al didn’t sign the Geneva Convention. So what? Some of the people they tortured weren’t terrorists of any sort, just poor suckers who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I presume none of the Afghan militias that were the “good guys” did either. So I guess someone can legitimately torture them.
Obviously, this report doesn’t paint an entirely accurate picture. The only way we’ll know the extent and truth of what happened is to torture every member of the CIA who participated until we know exactly who did what, and when.
This is the line I just can’t get over: ““These included an ‘intellectually challenged’ man whose C.I.A. detention was used solely as leverage to get a family member to provide information,…”
They weren’t just torturing people they thought might be terrorists or whatever, they were torturing hostages. That’s like several levels down on the “bad guy” spectrum.
That doesn’t make a difference. Convention III relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Article 2 reads in part:
The US is a signatory to this convention and is bound to honor it even if the other side isn’t a signatory.
#12 davidnangle:
Did you ever look at the Nuremberg trials? Or Eichmann’s trial?
Most of the Nazi middle managers, or boots on the ground for that matter, did consider themselves a good person.
At the Nuremberg trials, the US made a lot of “I just followed orders” not being an excuse. Of course, as soon as it was US personnel on trial, that was completely forgotten and the excuse was good again …
The US didn’t invent hypocrisy, but they sure behave as if they bought up the patent. (“A method of avoiding accountability for behavior while sanctioning everybody else for it.”)
Now? The USA has been the bad guys since forever. Except in the cold war there was the USSR, so there were two bad guys.
Unlike most of his fellow Republicans, John McCain is supporting the report’s release and is justifiably appalled at the lying that went on to support it. I suppose it makes a difference to have actually been a victim of torture, as opposed to being a hawk who avoided war like GWB and Cheney.
timgueguen
This. Even if he was meeting with nuclear scientists in Pakistan, what they’d have told him was ‘no chance, mate’.
There’s ALWAYS been AT LEAST two bad guys….
@Amphiox
Yeah, should have put more thought into that one.
Can’t these people be prosecuted?
How can a nation call itself “democratic” if those who make decisions are above the law?
This DK piece pulls quotes from the report. Most of this is CYA for those responsible for the CIA…the CIA was bad because they didn’t tell on themselves. So, Dick and George didn’t know what was going on (although Dick assured us that it was helping). The CIA Inspector General didn’t know. Congress didn’t know. Even though we all knew, nobody who could do anything about it knew. Gosh! Just like those fabled “weapons of mass destruction”…yet another CIA fail.
Plus, according to the last excerpt, the practices ended by 2006. Right. So, the Obama admin is completely off the hook.
What we may have here is well-crafted revelation that essentially scapegoats the CIA. Typical Washington bull-shit.
I think Hydra have won. :(
Maybe Obama will order up a grand jury.
I think the focus on Sam Harris is misplaced, and I worry that it lets the true culprits off the hook. Harris doesn’t bear any responsibility for the US torture policy. For one thing, he didn’t even support it, but more importantly, we were torturing people long before anyone ever heard of him. Even if he had agreed with what we were doing, he wasn’t responsible for it.
He also wasn’t responsible for shielding the people who were responsible from prosecution. The United States has a legal obligation to prosecute war crimes, which we simply ignored. It wasn’t Harris who decided to look forward, not backward. When you let people get away with torture, you guarantee future torture. Harris is also not responsible for the force-feeding of hunger-striking detainees at Gitmo. That’s torture too, and it’s continuing even to this very day.
Obama is responsible, and Obama could do something about it. Harris can’t. So why is anyone talking about Harris?
Oh really. Mind showing the quote where he explains explicitly any form to torture, no matter what the cause, is WRONG. Waffling means acceptance of torture…..
I guess it’s because he’s talking about this shit, and as you insist, he’s so fucking irresponsible.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls,
Harris has said that torture should be illegal in all cases without exception as a matter of policy. Thinking that torture may sometimes be justified, however vile you may find that opinion, is not the same thing as supporting actual US torture policy.
@77 Nerd of Redhead and others
Why the continual misrepresentation of Harris’ views on torture?
His position (as I understand it) is that there is no ethical difference between
1 – deliberately killing and maiming innocent non-combatants (as ‘collateral damage’) in pursuit of your aims (e.g dropping bombs in an effort to kill bin Laden)
and 2 – deliberately hurting or maiming an enemy combatant in pursuit of those same aims (e.g waterboarding an aide in an effort to locate and kill bin Laden)
Note that Harris explicitly states that torture should be illegal, but adds that in some extreme, hypothetical ‘ticking time-bomb’ situations it might be ethical. His position is not, and never has been, that torture is OK. His argument (again as I understand it) is that acceptance of ‘collateral damage’ is as bad as accepting torture and should be condemned in equally strong terms.
I think he has a point. I’d like to hear some considered answers to the basic question: If it’s OK to almost casually drop bombs and support military actions that kill and maim thousands of ‘innocent’ children (think Gaza) for little or no gain why is it unthinkable to consider inflicting the same harm on a single ‘evil’ man for potentially great gain?
No quote, no evidence, just vague apologetics, dismissed by this working scientist who requires real evidence. And any justification, equivocation, or vaguaries, means he doesn’t dismiss it out hand, which is the ONLY ethical response.
So unless that is the case, he supports and condones torture….
Aw no, I’m sorry. The last thing I wanted to do was provoke more discussion of Harris. I should have seen that coming.
The UN is calling for prosecutions, and there is no question that the US is legally obliged to prosecute, but does anyone think that we actually will? And what will that mean for the future? As David Kurtz points out, the CIA is still arguing for the efficacy of torture, and the only thing standing between us and full resumption of the Bush era program is an executive order, which can be rescinded at any time by a subsequent president. When you have powerful people who support torture operating in secret and protected from prosecution, you’re going to get more torture. It’s only a matter of time.
Suppose I claimed murder isn’t actually wrong (and you characterize this as an “opinion”), how it’s justified and might be “necessary.” That’s no big deal and nobody should hold me “responsible” for making such claims? But wait — at the same, as some matter of arcane legal principle or mere practicalities about law enforcement, I would say murder should be illegal even though it’s morally acceptable. This second claim is very, very important and where all of the focus should allegedly be in criticizing Harris, according to you. (That is, assuming we’re allowed, according to you, to criticize Harris for anything at all. But maybe I’m not so special.) Laws always trump morality, don’t they? Not in a normal person’s mind they don’t.
When people in our society read that kind of garbage, those who have some stake (because they can vote, etc.) in deciding what we ought to do and whether our representatives who make such decisions for us should make laws to that effect, they decide whether it is something that ought to be done in the first place in any circumstances. That is exactly what Harris is talking about when he says it’s sometimes “necessary” in ticking-time-bomb scenarios and the like: whether it’s morally acceptable. He is attempting to color our thinking about it and influence what further decisions we make based on that kind of evaluation. Otherwise, he wouldn’t bother to write in the first place, because he wouldn’t be saying anything useful to anyone or have any motivation for communicating this nonsense to us. Anyway, thinking about how to implement such norms at a societal level, about enforcement and legalities and so on, comes later. And whether he is personally making that all happen by himself (as if we don’t live in a complex quasi-democratic society) and is thus “responsible” for it in your extremely contrived sense, is irrelevant to the actual criticisms made about him, because he is in fact responsible for his part in this process. He is an apologist for this bad shit, even if not an apologist who makes it all happen directly and single-handedly. It’s extremely unreasonable to think anybody really thought that, just by writing about it, he somehow accomplished all of that himself. That’s not what anybody is saying, so you don’t need to correct such absurd strawmen.
In case anyone has missed that this isn’t a philosophical “If only one person dies when you flip the switch to save 20 people then it’s okay to flip the switch” scenario, but is in fact real fucking life, then let’s do it.
Who wants to argue that in extenuating circumstances, with a literal time bomb literally ticking away with only a literal hour before it literally goes off and literally kills people, torture is justified?
Anyone? Okay, then you are the one who’s going to be doing the torturing. Literally. You. There’s no clandestine “I can pretend not to know what’s going on” or blame-shifting. There’s no “we have people for this.” You are the one who is going to “save” everyone from a ticking time bomb. Don’t you feel brave?
You’re so brave, you’re prepared to beat someone so badly that the bones in their legs have pretty much liquefied. Steel yourself to shove a tube up a person’s rectum, against their will and without medical necessity (congratulations, you are now a rapist). Feel good about threatening and actually torturing a mentally-challenged person, who probably doesn’t even understand why all of these awful things are happening to them, so that you can get the “information” you need out of the person that cares about that mentally-challenged person. Rejoice in forcing someone to strip naked and stand in humiliating and physically stressful poses for hours at a time – feel free to sexually assault them while you’re at it (you’re already a rapist, after all). Threaten to rape their family members. Threaten to kill their family members. Lock them in a hole with their own filth and deny them sleep. Traumatize them with dogs. Bury them alive. Pretend to drown them. Pretend to execute them. Really execute them.
You do all this, if you think it in any way can be justified. You do this, to real people. Not to hypothetical scary bad people, in a “we’re just talking” sense, but to real people who scream and cry and beg and bleed and shit and vomit and refuse to eat because all they want is to stop feeling what you’re doing to them over and over and over, every day. Because death is better than you.
Any takers?
With anecdote versus real data. Anecdote loses every time. Torture is nothing but making yourself feel good at the expense of others, especially if you know it doesn’t work as well as you describe. So why bother, unless you are a sadist?
So, he doesn’t say that it is okay, but that it might be okay. But not just that: he says it might be necessary (ethically obligatory, not merely acceptable). That language puts a new spin on it. This is supposed to be more encouraging for prospective torturers than the claim that there’s a mere possibility of it being not-bad. There’s the mere possibility, he says, that it might be bad to not torture someone, because we might need to do so to be moral. Perhaps we should torture, because to do otherwise is worse. Oh noes! The implication that he doesn’t accept or actually believe in the supposed necessity of “collateral damage” (by analogy) or the necessity of torture never appears. That is the claim a responsible person would make: that it is not good to torture, nor is it good to have “collateral damage.” Even to use the Orwellian language of “collateral damage” is fucking irresponsible. But he should just shut the fuck up, if this is the best he can do.
@ LicoriceAllsort #60
“Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?” — King Henry II, ca. 1117
You’re free to read Sam Harris’ books or check out his blog if you’re interested in knowing what he’s actually said about torture. I realize it’s far easier for the regulars here to just fly unthinkingly and reflexively off the handle whenever PZ Myers says “fuck that guy! Fuck those assholes!” and that by this time tomorrow, half of you will be convinced that if Harris hasn’t actively and viciously condemned what’s in the Senate report, by god, he probably tortured every one of those fuckers single-handedly. I mean, every public intellectual who says raping kids should be illegal even though he understands that some people feel compelled to do it, but has never wasted 10,000 words explaining why child molestation is immoral, is obviously a closet child molester himself.
Or, if you actually want to point the finger at someone, try pointing it at the fucking U.S. government.
Two fingers, no waiting.
*Transatlantic rebound!
And that stream-of-consciousness vomit of mental filth , mythbri, demonstrates a big part of the problem.
While it’s OK to imagine pressing a button or dropping a bomb to solve a problem, all reasonably normal people have a visceral aversion to the idea of inflicting huge physical damage to another living being – which is why it’s so hard to have a rational conversation about torture, and why no-one raises anything like the same level of uproar at the idea of bombing a house or building and killing dozens of bystanders…
So
*ticking time bomb scenario makes torture OK*
do you advocates think this would work on a suicide bomber?
Still not a notch in Harris’ favor. His scenario of a “ticking time bomb” is pretty much in line with the rationale behind the US torturing regime. When your only tool is torture, every bomb sounds like it’s ticking…
That vomit of mental filth has actually happened to people, courtesy of the U.S. government. It’s not a hypothetical. And it’s disgusting for you to assume that anyone who is opposed to torture are not also opposed to bombs and drones that rain death from above, whose operators call people trying to escape “squirters” and people who have been killed “bugsplats.” If you haven’t seen any outcry about bombing then you haven’t been listening hard enough. Torture is the topic of this discussion, however, which is why I think it’s absolutely fair to get people to realize what exactly it is they’re trying to “rationally” discuss. And if you’re okay with trying to argue the merits of torture, then you should have the guts to be the one willing to do it.
poultrystrangler
You’re free to check out PZ Myers’s blog if you’re interested in knowing what he’s actually said.
As opposed to ‘quoting’ PZ , “fuck that guy! Fuck those assholes!”
I’m sure Sam will give you a cookie.
Bless your heart.
They do this because they believe in a God that tortures. Infinitely. With fire. Cruel Gods make cruel men, and vice-versa.
I do see what Harris is saying. He says dropping bombs on innocent civilians is less preferable than physically and psychologically torturing one alleged terrorist, so that torture is justified in that ideal scenario where people “know” the person has the information.
Harris answers the question “Is it ever ethically permissible to torture?”
His answer is “Yes, in some fictional scenario it is better than the alternatives.”
But that’s presuming torture will even work in the scenario.
Here’s what happens when the torture doesn’t solve the TTB situation: those multitudes die from the bomb, a human being has been irrevocably damaged and psychologically tormented, and those who permitted such acts to occur and who acted in a manner as to procure the information are as well forever changed by the experience.
So he is cherry-picking the one positive result to compare it with indiscriminate bombing resulting in “collateral damage.” That’s not very rational, I don’t think.
@mythbri
What makes you think I assume that? Certainly there are many people who are opposed to both torture and to remote-control killings by bombs and drones. But there are also huge numbers of people who get angry, agitated and vocal at the mention of torture, but who don’t even notice the suffering inflicted as ‘collateral damage’ by the bombs.
The pain and suffering from bombs and drone attacks affect many more people than does torture – and should be subject to equal scrutiny and revulsion – which is isn’t.
And this isn’t a just discussion of torture – or at least it didn’t start out that way. It started, for me , with PZ’s “Fuck you, Sam Harris” – and the knee-jerk “Harris is evil he supports torture” responses.
Be clear – Harris’ limited situation in which it might be ethical to use torture was limited to ‘we can hear the timebomb ticking’ type scenarios, and most definitely did not include the CIA’s ‘torture to find out if there might be a timebomb going to be set somewhere sometime’ that prompted PZ’s outburst.
Al Qaeda et al didn’t sign the Geneva Convention
That was always a red herring too.
International Humanitarian Law deals with the rights of civilians in armed conflict, and specifically avoids any requirment for whether one is in a nation that is signatory, or in a declared war, etc. There is no such thing as an “illegal combatant”‘- they are a civilian and a criminal, or they are military out of uniform and a criminal of a different sort. There is no “grey area” uncovered by law (how stupid do you think the ICRC would have to be to overlook something like that??) and the “armed conflict” term, per ICRC was deliberately used to clarify that civilians should be protected during insurgencies or revolutions; armed conflict can occur within a state and it remains the responsibility of all parties in the conflict to protect civilians. The intent is clearly to criminalize insurgency/terrorism against civilians or military/government repression of civilians.
The only grey area is the shrivelled evil thumping blob between Cheney’s ears.
Why would that make any difference? They’re both wrong. That’s me being clear. Maybe PZ will have an “outburst” that is clear in some other way, but I don’t expect that.
What do you think? Is one okay and not the other? Why would that be? What is the relevant, ethical distinction you’re making?
To everyone talking about Sam Harris in this thread, nobody was talking about him except PZ giving a quick “Fuck you” at the end of this post until you started defending him. It’s vile to think that torture will even work in the said scenario, especially if the one being tortured has no expectation of surviving anyway.
We also must remember that the CIA comprises thousands of whistle-blowers who … Didn’t blow that whistle.
There were FBI agents who complained about it… To their superiors, then … Didn’t blow that whistle.
There were congresspeople responsible for oversight who oversaw this, then … Didn’t blow that whistle and instead produced a redacted report.
There is an account of CIA staff who were so horrified they requested transfer. Transfer. Wouldn’t blow a whistle. Complained to the boss. Maybe used capital letters. Didn’t
Blow
A
Fucking
Whistle.
We should not condemn just the big monsters.
There are menial, piddling monsters as well. People who knew what was going on – program managers who reviewed the budget requests for instruments to break humans, who approved outsourcing torture to sick psychiatrists. People who prepared food for man in cages, and fed them and … Didn’t blow a whistle.
The CIA should be burned to the ground and every person who knew what was going on is complicit.
Shorter Sam Harris: in a hypothetical situation in which torture would be helpful, it would be helpful.
For a philosopher, he’s an OK neuroscientist.
Wrong.
The US did not do this in a vacuum. They did this in a climate in which large parts of the population did and do think that torture is good and justified. Sam Harris contributed to that climate in an unholy alliance with people liek Sarah Palin.
poultrystrangler
FIFY
Because that’s your analogy. It’s not “this is bad and horrible, but bad and horrible people exist* and we need to accept that fact (and find a solution)”. It’s “sure, traffic rules apply, but emergency vehicles have special rights”
*double bad, because paedophile does not mean child rapist. Also fuck you for making rape victims your default analogy.
throwaway
I suggest he reads up on the German Constitutional Court’s decision to cull a law about terrorist attacks. The law said that if you suspected a 9/11 style scenario you could shoot passenger planes. The court decided that it’s NOT justifiable to kill innocent people in an attempt to save the lives of other people.
flippertie
Only that, of course, the people who did the torture thought that this was enough of a “ticking bomb scenario”. Because there are no good and scientific rules for what exactly IS a ticking bomb scenario and what isn’t. Harris can always backpedal and say “oh, I didn’t mean this situation, I mean a different, not really specified situation. You need to ask the question the other way round: Do the torturers feel supported by Harris’ argument and writing?
Don’t feel so bad as an American, you have company. Unfortunately as a British I can’t claim it’s just an US crime, UK was complicit in the torture, thousands of pages were withold due to UK’s objections. Tony Blair, his government and the UK population that kept him in power in the 2005 genreal election are also complicit (although seeing the current Tory-LibDem coalition’s actions, I do shudder imagining what could have happened under a Tory rule in 2005).
One can dream of a day when Cheney, Bush and Blair are dragged in front of a court and asked to justify their actions, it will not happen.
There was no focus on Sam Harris until you brought it up.
re: the ticking time bomb scenario
Since torture doesn’t work and is less effective than other means of interrogation, the ONE THING YOU WOULD NOT WANT TO DO in the ticking time bomb scenario, where it is utterly imperative to get ACCURATE VERIFIABLE INFORMATION, is torture.
This on purely utilitarian considerations.
Torture in a ticking time bomb scenario is nothing more than pre-emptive revenge. Doing it means you have de facto given up trying to stop the time bomb, since you have deliberately chosen the empirically proven least effective way of getting the information you actually would need, and are just interested in making one of the people you deem to be responsible for it suffer in retribution.
To shift the focus back from “Torturer Harris”* (and yes, I have read his convoluted explanations of his position and yes, they do come down to “Sometimes it’s right to torture”), the USA** has a legal duty to prosecute not only those who physically carried out the torture, but those senior members of the Bush administration who knew about it. Not to “move on”, in Obama’s sickening phrase. The future American People’s Revolutionary Tribunal should therefore arraign Obama alongside Bush and Cheney in relation to these crimes.
*Bomber Harris.
**And, I am sure, the UK. Our own “security services” may have preferred not to get their hands dirty, but they supplied questions to the CIA torturers, and there’s little doubt Blair and his cronies knew this. In a not-directly-related case Jack Straw, Home Secretary in Blair’s government, and Mark Allen, former head of the “security services”, are currently being sued by Abdul-Hakim Belhaj and his wife Fatima Boudchar for “rendering” them to the Gaddafi regime, which tortured them.
I see some people saying that Harris does not support US torture policy. He specifically calls for the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and leaves open the possibility of Osama bin Laden. He does not merely advise we should torture KSM. He says that not to do so would be morally “perverse”:
‘ Given the damage we were willing to cause to the bodies and minds of innocent children in Afghanistan and Iraq, our disavowal of torture in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed seems perverse. If there is even one chance in a million that he will tell us something under torture that will lead to the further dismantling of Al Qaeda, it seems that we should use every means at our disposal to get him talking.’
(The End of Faith, p. 198)
Ultimately, Harris’ “defense” is “look what the bad guys made us do!”
It is true that Harris thinks that torture should be formally outlawed, but he has also stated that interrogators ought to be instructed they will not face prosecution if they do torture a suspect.
Anybody defending Harris must provide the evidence. I have no desire to read philosophical tripe. Why are the philosophically inclined so averse to providing evidence? /rhetorical.
I heavily suspect that Harris is a closeted Leo Strauss fanboy who just looooooves his
“Sure, let’s make laws based on high-minded principles, but let’s never forget that 99,9% of humanity is comprised of cognitively stunted morons and that hyper-intelligent übermensch like ME must be willing to crush them into compliance so that out Great Civilization can endure” self-serving bullshit.
The CIA commits crimes against humanity, and therefore fuck you, Sam Harris*?
How about fuck you, CIA, and fuck all us Americans for our complicity in this shame. Why do the atheist blog wars need to intrude on every goddamned story. Jesus H.
*this is not a defense of Sam Harris, btw. Fuck Sam Harris, but fuck him so much less than the CIA.
The war criminal Cheney calls the report a “bunch of hooey”. Well, that settles that. Surely he would be perfectly honest on the topic.
Those specific details from the report are fucking chilling. Mock executions, threatening to cut the throat of someone’s mother, keeping people hanging for hours so their toes barely touch the ground.
(Cross-posted on Dispatches from the Culture Wars)
Has any right-winger made the argument that the reason the report was so heavily redacted was to hide the (no-doubt numerous) real successes of the Torture Program – that this edited report is just a double-blind for all of the Good Work the CIA is actually doing in The Name Of Freedom?
And what’s this I see?
https://twitter.com/peterboghossian/status/542677359984246784
The U.S. is a society in decline. The report is just another bullet in the head.
Remember when NSA spying was all the rage? Nothing happened there either.
Nothing will happen to the CIA, the torturers, or the people who ordered them to torture.
Nothing.
Everyone will get away with it, because USA! USA! USA!
Two military psychologists were paid $80 million to come up with torture tactics
Tax dollars well spent, right GOP?
Two military psychologists were paid $80 million to come up with torture tactics
The American Psychological Association took a look at their guidelines on ethics, then changed them in order to accomodate members involved in such high-paying crimes.
You’re free to read Sam Harris’ books
I did. That’s why I don’t like his views.
He also tried to make an argument for preemptive war, which was amateurish and utterly ignored a large mass of deep thinking regarding “just war” and states’ rights of self-defense. Note: I am not saying “he is wrong because he ignored sophisticated philosophy” I am saying “he appears to have ignored more rigorous thinkers, and happens to be wrong, possibly as a result of it.”
Michael Scheuer, who was the head of CIA’s bin Laden unit from 1995-1999, was on a Canadian political show yesterday. He was adamant that torture was a very effective way to obtain information and that this report was full of crap. http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/Politics/Power+%26+Politics/ID/2632288218/
Another gem from Harris on torture
“Whenever we consent to drop bombs, we do so with the knowledge that some number of children will be blinded, disemboweled, paralyzed, orphaned, and killed by them. It is curious that while the torture of Osama bin Laden himself could be expected to provoke convulsions of conscience among our leaders, the unintended (though perfectly foreseeable, and therefore accepted) slaughter of children does not.
So we can now ask, if we are willing to act in a way that guarantees the misery and death of some considerable number of innocent children, why spare the rod with suspected terrorists? What is the difference between pursuing a course of action where we run the risk of inadvertently subjecting some innocent men to torture, and pursuing one in which we will inadvertently kill far greater numbers of innocent men, women, and children? Rather, it seems obvious that the misapplication of torture should be far less troubling to us than collateral damage: there are, after all, no infants interned at Guantanamo Bay, just rather scrofulous young men, many of whom were caught in the very act of trying to kill our soldiers.”
(The End of Faith, p 194)
Scrofulous, Sam? It’s a posh way of saying they’re only dirty Muslims.
44. jonmoles ,
No.
You’re marching under fifty of them.
When bin Laden was caught/killed, Cheney and some other right wing ghouls crawled out of the woodwork to claim the intelligence was gathered through torture (and take credit by proxy). The CIA released a statement (or held a press conference?) that was categorically false. The right wing continued to repeat the lie so well people apparently forgot it was denied.
Haven’t made it to the end yet, but this? The CIA explicitly said they could hear the ‘timebomb ticking’. Thus, according to Harris, it was necessary!
How bloody hard is this to understand? Harris’s hypothetical justification is precisely the justification used by people who fucking tortured people. You really can’t hand-wave that away.
Oh yeah, the link for that quote. Woops.
And of course, if I’d read down, Gilliel beat me to it. But the stupidity is just so … stupid. I could hear it ticking, so I had to post immediately.
Don’t worry, everybody needs to say what you did. It is obvious except to the real sadists who believe Harris is not an intellectual pimple.
Former vice president and war criminal Dick Cheney:
You’re marching under fifty of them.
Appropriate, given we’re ruled by a whole lot of rats’ anuses.
And one of the worst things about torture is not only what it does to the person being tortured, but what it does to the person doing the torturing.
“There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.” Terry Pratchett, Small Gods.
It normalises cruelty, and callousness, and inhumanity.
You all get credit for entrenching yourselves in an untenable position — that not only does Sam Harris support torture, but that he basically played a role in the sordid facts concerning U.S. policy in this area in recent years. You’d mrely have to be ignorant to believe the former, but you’d have to be a fucking idiot and a simpering douchebag fanboy to believe the latter.
I’d say this even if PZ had used a different irrelevant name in his OP: “Fuck you, Hillary Clinton, you amoral shitbag, for presiding over this.” She probably had more influence on the abominations and disgraces in Gitmo, etc. than any philosopher ever had.
Useless wind-up toys in this place. PZ could blame fuckin’ Walt Disney for something and the idiots in this place would snap into action and rip into Scrooge McDuck, Michael Eisner and probably ABC too.
@132: go choke your chicken elsewhere, your brain must be this tall to enter this ride.