Threshholds

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. ... On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

-- from an FBI agent’s report from Guantanamo

I’ve written a good bit here about Powerball, the popular multistate lottery that often features a jackpot advertised as tens of millions of dollars.

Because the odds against picking the winning numbers in Powerball are 121 million-to-1, I’ve argued that the game is for suckers. It’s not a fair bet, which is to say the odds against winning are greater than the payout. It would be a fair bet to wager $1 for a $10 million jackpot if the odds of winning were 10 million-to-1, but not if the odds are 121 million-to-1. Thus, I argued, playing Powerball is irrational unless the actual jackpot equals or exceeds $121 million.

This argument makes mathematical sense, but it is nonetheless wrong. The idea of a fair bet, it turns out, only makes sense at a certain scale, up until a certain threshhold.

The Powerball jackpot, even at its lowest, would be for most people a life-changing sum. And conventional arithmetic does not apply to life-changing sums. A $10 million jackpot would radically alter the winner’s life in a way that any additional tens of millions of dollars would not. For most people, therefore, the difference between a $10 million jackpot and a $121 million jackpot is inconsequential compared to the difference that initial $10 million would make in their lives.

The point here is that once you get beyond a certain threshhold, relative comparisons don’t really matter.

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. ... On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

The United States of America -- as a matter of official policy conducted with our money, in our name -- tortures and abuses prisoners and detains people indefinitely without charge or due process.

Defenders of this practice point out that A) these prisoners are suspected of being very, very bad people; and B) America’s torture regime is nowhere near as widespread, systematic or brutal as the worst examples of such regimes. Point A is factually suspect, but even if 100 percent true, irrelevant. I’ll get back to that point in a future post. I want here to deal mainly with point B.

In an earlier post, I described this as the “NABA defense” -- Not As Bad As. The NABA defense is, for what it’s worth, arithmetically accurate. The American prison camps in Guantanamo, Bagram, Afghanistan and elsewhere are, in fact, not as vast or as brutal as Stalin’s gulags. The American camps are also Not As Bad As the contemporary torture facilities that the U.S. occasionally subcontracts in places like Uzbekistan.

But such comparisons are beside the point. The threshhold has been crossed and conventional arithmetic no longer applies. The only relevant and meaningful comparison is between those regimes that countenance torture and those that do not. Once a nation crosses that line any difference between it and other torture regimes is inconsequential in comparison to the difference between it and those nations which have refused to cross that threshhold.

The NABA defense correctly insists that Guantanamo is different in degree from Stalin’s gulag. It is different in degree, but not in kind. And that difference of kind is the only difference that matters. America has entered the wrong category. We have crossed a threshhold.

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. ... On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

(The FBI agent’s report from Guantanamo comes from a statement by Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., which I read via TalkLeft, Eschaton and Making Light, where Patrick Nielsen Hayden notes: “This is your country. This is your people. This is your relatives. This is us. ... This. Is. Who. We. Are.”)

Comments

[wintermute]

The main reason torture is a Very Bad Thing is that it doesn't do any good.

Evidence gained under duress is invalid in a court of law for one very good reason: people say whatever they think is neccessary to end the duress. They do not tell the truth. With torture, this is taken to a whole new order of magintude. If you don't have enough reliable evidence to convict or start an investigation, then you can't trust evidence gained under torture. If you *do* have sufficient evidence, then you don't need to torture anyone.

I've found that argument to be far more effective at convincing people that torture is bad than the moral argument.

[Karmakin]

The people calling the shots here..and by extension good portions of society, have no concept of right or wrong. They believe that their rightoushness is determined by their religious faith, and not by their actions, and by this way, their actions are beyond reproach, that nobody can say anything to them.

The unfortunate part, is that in this day and age...

They're right.

[bad Jim]

Powerful writing, as usual. You're the master of the unexpected refrain.

[bulbul]

"They believe that their rightoushness is determined by their religious faith, and not by their actions".
What a coincidence - I have just spend couple of hours reading up on the doctrine of justification and the Protestant-Catholic dispute. Please forgive my overworked and sleep-deprived Catholic self, but there kinda seems to be a pattern there...
Somehow, however, I think that while Karmakin is absolutely right, religion (in this narrow sense of the word) is not the culprit. It's the entire "neoconservative" ideology that is responsible for these and other crimes. The belief that we - the West, the Free World, insert-the-metaphor-of-your-choice-here - as a society are better because we have the right values and those who do not have the same values we do are simply inferior. This "religion" is being spread to all the corners of the world and even here in Eastern Europe you will find the likes of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh who defend the atrocities in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo in the name of "justice", "safety" and - my favorite BS - "war on terror". I find this scary, especially since the last time I read one of the leading wingnutty-right-wing weeklies and its leading article on the war on terror and why "we" are meant to be victorious. Somewhere down the page I suddenly realized that you could replace the words "west" or "our civilization" by "Aryan", the word "muslim" by "Jew" and the words "international terrorism" by "international Jewry" and if you listened really really hard, you could hear thousands of steel-heeled boots marching to the tune of "Das Horst Wessel Lied" (or that march in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade", the book burning scene). Another coincidence? I doubt that very much...
You Americans probably don't need this from us, but I want to go on the record here and say - at least for myself - that while we do look down on you a bit (wrestling? country music? ketchup on fries? I mean, come on!), we don't think Gitmo and Abu Ghraib is who you are. And we hope you prove us right.

PS: That "country music" bit was inserted for rethorical purposes only. I actuall own all of Garth Brooks' records and I am listening to Kathy Mattea while writing this. And isn't it Friday?
PPS: I almost forgot: great stuff, Fred. And wintermute is perfectly right, too. I once had access to some confidential army material - special forces training and military inteligence (my favorite oxymoron :o). While it included some information on various torture techniques, the introduction was quite blunt: learn your lesson from the Inquisition. You want information, be smart, do your job.

[Mark@CM]

Your "crossing the threshold" argument really makes it clear that, if we're actually discussing how bad we are, the country is already in a place it really should not be.

It reminds me of the old joke, where a man asks a woman if she would sleep with him for a million dollars. After a moment's thought, she tells him yes. Then, he asks her if she would sleep with him for $100. She says, "Of course not, what do you take me for?"

He replies, "We've already established that. Now, we're haggling."

As you point out, we've already crossed the line as to whether we are on the "good" or the "bad" side with respect to torture. Now, we're just haggling over "how bad" we are.

[Donald Johnson]

The other reason the NABA defense is worthless is that person people who employ it take one particular atrocity of the US and compare it to the decades-long record of atrocities of some Really Bad Guy. Examine the record of the past several decades and add up all the innocent people who've been killed by the US directly or by actions taken by our allies that we've supported (and US support has been given to those actions) and we've really accumulated quite a respectable record of evil. The really huge difference between the US and the old USSR is in the level of freedom inside the respective borders--outside the borders, people in Vietnam or Afghanistan or El Salvador or Guatemala or Indonesia or Ethiopia or Angola or Mozambique or Poland etc.. might have very similar stories to tell.

It's not some strange accident that a man like Bush is President of the US and lies about wars and the practice of torture aren't weird new aberrations in US history, as people like bellatrys and others keep pointing out. Of course for pragmatic political reasons one can't say this while fighting the torture policy because people on the fence will dismiss you as just another raving anti-American. But it's true nonetheless.

[R. Mildred]

The main reason torture is a Very Bad Thing is that it doesn't do any good.

No. The main reason it's a Very Bad Thing is that keeping a person or even an animal in a prolonged state of pain and suffering is Wrong. We don't hold it as just or right when applied to murderes in our country, we don't hold it as acceptable for police to use on criminal suspects (which is why rationál A is just plain wrong, these people aren't very very bad people, they are Suspected very very bad people) and we prosecute civilians who perform such acts of barbarity on humans and animals, regardless of motive, because it's wrong and cruel.

That it doesn't work is just another good reason to not use it, that you need to explain why torture is wrong simply shows that the people you're explaining it to are totally insane.

[Zossima]

Ironically, at very high payouts, lotteries may actually have slightly positive expected returns. Another mathematical anomaly. So, $1 wagered even with the narrowest of odds of winning might have an expected return greater than $1 given the size of the pot.

Another irony is that the very same people who throw the phrase "moral relativism" at anything they don't understand are the very ones using the NABA defense for torture. Violence is violence.

[mecki]

And to amplify what Patrick said: We're all responsible for this. Even if we did everything we could to defeat Bush in the last election. This is exactly why I'm against capital punishment: Every person killed is killed in the name of every single US citizen.

My name is mecki, and I'm a murderer.

It's not a pretty thought, is it?

[Scott]

I finally saw the quote I was looking for earlier on Kos:

A quote by Avi Schlaim, an Israeli historian, on the issue of comparisons to Nazi Germany (in this instance referring to Israeli government and military leaders, but the parallel works here as well):

The issue isn't whether or not we are the same as the Nazis, the issue is that we aren't different enough.

[Kim]

Beutifully said, Mecki.

I also with bulbul that religion itself is not the cause of the rationalization of torture, rather adherance to a certain type of religion - or what I consider the perversion of the Christian religion. Believing that one's actions are right because he or she lives in a certain country, adheres to a particular creed, or is on the correct side of any given issue, is idolatry of the most blatant sort.

[Lila]

True, Kim. The scariest sentence a person can utter is "We can do no wrong."

Or, in the version used by my diocese's Vocational Testing Committee back in the early '90s, "The Holy Spirit will not allow us to make a mistake."

More than 10 years later my blood is still running cold.

[Mark]

Fred - perfect description and great writing; it's sad that we're reduced to debating torture, as if there should be any question. Scott - thanks for the quote. I'll add one from Rabbi Sheila Peltz, on her visit to Auschwitz:
"As I stood before the gates I realized that I never want to be as certain about anything as were the people who built this place."

[Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little]

Kim, yes. Another way to put it: The current creed in politics is very similar to the twisted creed of Faith Trumps Works.

"It doesn't matter whether my behavior is patterned after Jesus's example. What's important is I believe in Jesus. The fact that I believe means I'm saved no matter what I do."

"It doesn't matter whether I'm living up to the ideals of America. What's important is I am an American. The fact that I'm American means I'm right no matter what I do."

Or, to put it yet another way: "I am American. That means I believe in America's ideals. America's ideals are honorable. So no American is capable of doing dishonorable things, and to criticize an American is to criticize what it means to be an American."

It's virtue by proxy. Virtue by faith. The idea that faith immunizes you from error and criticism; that faith deflects criticism off of you and onto the ideals you have faith in--regardless of whether your behavior actually reflects those ideals.

I'm talking in circles. I guess that's appropriate, given the kind of illogic we're up against.

[Teresa Nielsen Hayden]

NABA defense. Got it. It's like that joke that ends, "We've established what you are; now we're just haggling over the price."