Dark places

Jane Mayer's meticulously researched New Yorker report, "The Black Sites: A rare look inside the CIA's secret interrogation program" sent me back to hilzoy's earlier Obsidian Wings post on those Black Sites. Hilzoy's conclusion provides a good introduction to Mayer's longer report:

Whenever I write a post like this, someone pops up in comments to ask why I am so concerned about the fate of terrorists. In many cases, I don't have to engage with this question: many of the people we have held and tortured are innocent. In the case of the program described in this report, however, I would assume that many, though not all, were terrorists. So it's worth saying explicitly that this is not, for me, just about feeling badly for the people we have detained and abused. Sometimes I feel very badly for them, especially in the case of those who are, as best I can tell, completely innocent; but feeling badly for them is not essential. Because there's another motivation at work, namely: concern for my country, and the desire that it be the best country it can be.

There are some things we, as individuals, should not do to other people. Often, we will also sympathize with those people, and that sympathy might prevent us from, say, torturing or raping them. Sometimes we feel no sympathy, however -- the other person might be a person only a saint could sympathize with, like Jeffrey Dahmer. If our only reason for not torturing or raping people was sympathy, then when faced with such a person, we might have no reason not to do whatever we liked to him or her. But sympathy is not our only reason for not torturing and raping people. There's also self-respect: the thought that whatever someone else might choose to be like, and even if that person has chosen to be Jeffrey Dahmer, there are certain things that I will not choose to do, because I do not want to be the sort of person who does them. ...

I do not have a lot of sympathy for Osama bin Laden. But that fact has precisely nothing to do with my thinking that there are certain things I simply do not want my country to do, even to him.

Jane Mayer pulls together everything that can be learned about the off-the-record, off-the-books, classified detention and interrogation sites the Central Intelligence Agency has been operating around the world. She cites the European reports on the prisons, interviews former CIA and Defense officials and the lawyers of former Black Site detainees now held in Guantanamo Bay.

Mayer also cites Khaled el-Masri, "the German car salesman whom the CIA captured in 2003 and dispatched to Afghanistan, based on erroneous intelligence; he was released in 2004. ... Germany has confirmed that he has no connections to terrorism." Masri's eyewitness account informs Mayer's examination of the Black Sites with his direct, firsthand knowledge from inside the cells, but she doesn't dwell on his case as an innocent man detained and tortured by mistake. Mayer, like hilzoy, realizes that Masri's case would be a way of not engaging the question. No one would argue that the CIA's secret interrogation program is just, wise, moral, appropriate or productive in the case of this tragically abused car salesman. The real question is whether or not the program is any of those things in the case of the truly guilty -- the terrorists who planned and carried out the murder of civilians in New York, Washington, London, Madrid and Bali, and who may be planning more murderous attacks elsewhere. That is the question Mayer wants to engage directly, so rather than deal with an innocent like Masri, she focuses on the case of the worst man she can find -- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaida strategist who boasts that he orchestrated the 9/11 attacks "from A to Z."

Let me step back for a moment to point out that the subtitle of Mayer's report is accurate, but somewhat misleading. The "secret interrogation program" is the CIA's in that the agency operates the program. The interrogations and the torture methods she catalogues are conducted by CIA agents. But the conception, initiative and orders for this program did not originate with the agency. This isn't some shadowy rogue mission. It is official Bush administration policy.

This policy arose following the 9/11 attacks. A "former CIA officer involved in fighting terrorism" said that in the wake of those attacks:

... the pressure from the White House, in particular from Vice President Dick Cheney, was intense: "They were pushing us: 'Get information! Do not let us get hit again!'"

That was, of course, absolutely what the White House should have been saying in the aftermath of 9/11. Anything else would have been a gross dereliction of duty -- a fundamental failure to do it's job. It is also, of course, what the White House should have been saying on Aug. 6, 2001, when President Bush received a briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." (Again, we can't know if a vigorous response to that briefing might have prevented or disrupted the 9/11 attacks, but Bush's irresponsible non-response had no chance of doing so.)

The appropriately high-pressure, but inappropriately vague nature of the CIA's marching orders -- "Get information!" -- led to a rapid start in a bad direction:

In the scramble, [the former CIA official] said, he searched the CIA’s archives, to see what interrogation techniques had worked in the past. He was particularly impressed with the Phoenix Program, from the Vietnam War. Critics, including military historians, have described it as a program of state-sanctioned torture and murder. A Pentagon-contract study found that, between 1970 and 1971, 97 percent of the Vietcong targeted by the Phoenix Program were of negligible importance. But, after Sept. 11, some CIA officials viewed the program as a useful model. A.B. Krongard, who was the executive director of the CIA from 2001 to 2004, said that the agency turned to “everyone we could, including our friends in Arab cultures,” for interrogation advice, among them those in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, all of which the State Department regularly criticizes for human-rights abuses.

The CIA also turned to a full-fledged deranged mad scientist, the psychologist James Mitchell, who was apparently eager to see his theories about "learned helplessness" applied to break down the psyche of interrogation subjects:

Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced interrogator who has known Mitchell professionally for years, said that “learned helplessness was his whole paradigm.” Mitchell, he said, “draws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle. It starts with isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners’ ability to forecast the future -- when their next meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It creates dread and dependency. It was the KGB model. But the KGB used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The KGB wasn’t after intelligence.”

"It was the KGB model."

That won't do. It won't do for all the reasons of morality and self-respect that hilzoy described. Such talk of morality strikes some as soft, or as mere finger-wagging. Any use of such "ought" language provokes the legitimate question: "Says who?" In this case, American law is who -- the KGB model of physical and psychological torture is forbidden by the Geneva Conventions, which are binding U.S. law. (And I ain't no prophet, but if one were here she would surely also have an answer to the question "Says who?".)

But this consideration of morality isn't just a matter of ethical prescriptions and prohibitions. That's the wrong way to think about it. A more helpful way of thinking about it is this: You can do anything you can do, but there are certain things you cannot do and still be a good person. I mean this in the broadest, most general sense. Apart from any religious or sectarian perspectives, apart from Mill or Kant or Rawls or any other attempt to reason out a system of right and wrong, we humans share a rough consensus about what it means to be a good person or a bad person. We could even consider this at one further step removed: There are certain things you cannot do and still be perceived as a good person -- by others or even by yourself.

Moving from the actual to the perceived seems like it might lessen the significance of this moral consideration, but this so-called "war on terror" is a matter of international politics, which makes perception a very important thing. The United States cannot adopt "the KGB model" and still be perceived as a good nation. And if we are not perceived as, in some sense, a "good" nation, then we lose the war on terror. (By choosing to adopt the KGB model, in fact, we are also in danger of also losing the Cold War retroactively.) Abandoning the moral high ground in this "war" is just as harmful as losing any other kind of high ground in any other kind of war.

But Col. Kleinman raises another crucial error with the decision to adopt the KGB model in the CIA interrogation program: It doesn't work. Or, rather, it is extremely effective, but it is only effective at doing what it was designed to do. "The KGB used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The KGB wasn’t after intelligence." The CIA is "after intelligence," but by turning to the KGB model and adopting methods designed and proven effective only for producing false confessions the CIA has rendered itself incapable of getting intelligence or, at the very least, unable to distinguish between actual intelligence and the fountain of falsehoods that these methods are, by design, guaranteed to produce.

This last point is the recurring motif that runs throughout Mayer's report. The Black Site program, she reports, has produced a great deal of information, all of it suspect. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's myriad confessions include many things that are probably true and many things that are certainly false. Back in March, Wired blogger Noah Shachtman wondered if KSM wasn't pulling a Wee-Bey -- falsely confessing to crimes he didn't commit in order to protect other criminals still at large. Mayer's report shows that the same suspicion is held even by those conducting and overseeing his interrogation:

Ultimately, however, Mohammed claimed responsibility for so many crimes that his testimony came to seem inherently dubious. In addition to confessing to the [Daniel] Pearl murder, he said that he had hatched plans to assassinate President Clinton, President Carter and Pope John Paul II. ...

When pressed, one former top agency official estimated that “90 percent of the information was unreliable.” Cables carrying Mohammed’s interrogation transcripts back to Washington reportedly were prefaced with the warning that “the detainee has been known to withhold information or deliberately mislead.”

There is an opportunity cost here as well. The CIA has spent years running these detention centers and conducting interrogations to produce this mountain of suspect, unreliable information. Would those years have been more productive had they been spent pursuing something other than the KGB model? Might there have been a more productive and effective approach to fulfilling Cheney's urgently vague command to "Get information"?

"Without more transparency," Mayer writes, "the value of the C.I.A.’s interrogation and detention program is impossible to evaluate." But she also quotes Philip Zelikow, Condoleezza Rice's former deputy, who provides the proper form of any such evaluation:

“The question would not be, Did you get information that proved useful? Instead it would be, Did you get information that could have been usefully gained only from these methods?”

Some of the information acquired from the KGB model may have proved, or may eventually prove, useful. CIA analysts may be able to locate the needles of useful intelligence from the haystacks their interrogators have produced. And some of that intelligence may, in fact, help to protect civilians in America and elsewhere from future attacks. But just as we cannot know enough about this secretive program to evaluate its effectiveness, neither does the CIA itself know enough about the methods it neglected to be able to answer Zelikow's question. Assuming that some useful intelligence is produced, is any of it information that could have been usefully gained only from the KGB model? We don't know and neither does the CIA.

What we do know is that any useful information collected at the Black Sites has come at an enormous cost. The fact that "90 percent of the information was unreliable" and the rest is suspect is a problem. But a far greater problem is that, as a consequence of embracing the KGB model, we have made ourselves suspect and unreliable. The CIA's secret interrogation program, like the lawless detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, is a major obstacle to any meaningful victory in the "war on terror."

Comments

[Jesurgislac]

"If the moon was made of green cheese, would it ever be acceptable to turn it into silver?"

Most of the British citizens and residents who were held in Guantanamo Bay have now been released. Most of them have, reportedly, at some point or other in their imprisonment, confessed to committing or planning terrorist acts, or being involved with al-Qaeda. (One young man apparently confessed to being at an al-Qaeda training camp, at a date on which video evidence could prove that he was at work in his home town of Tipton. Moazzam Begg allegedly confessed to planning an aerial bombing of the House of Commons with anthrax.) The only evidence the US could have used against the British prisoners appeared to be evidence obtained by torture: which is not considered acceptable in a British court. This is in part at least because British courts have direct experience with the unreliability of convictions obtained by torturing suspects for information.

It's impossible to say now whether the people who actually committed these terrorist acts of 32 years ago would have been caught and tried if the police hadn't decided simply to obtain confessions by torture from the prisoners they believed to be guilty, but it's certain that, once the police decided to go ahead with "beating, threatening, and forcing the suspects to sign confessions", the safety of the terrorists who actually committed the crimes was assured.

[Bugmaster]

Unfortunately, the pro-torture crowd (I know one of them personally) disagree that torturing people makes you a bad person. They think that the end justifies the means, and besides, the terrorists had it coming. Thus, again, it's sort of pointless to appeal to their morality on this issue; they don't see what they do as immoral at all.

[Pope Easier Rhino I]

What strikes me as particularly odd in all of this is the evidence supposedly gathered from these methods. Because, frankly, I don't give a rat's ass whether or not Khalid Sheikh Mohammed killed Daniel Pearl.

Okay, yes, I do, because as a society concerned with justice it is important to our legal system to catch guilty people. So if we're setting out to try Mohammed for murder (that really sounds sacrilegious), by all means, we should do it. You're not allowed to use torture to get him to confess, of course, but try him we should.

But we're not going to try him, at least not right now, because we're trying to get information from him. And so far, all the information I've heard we've gotten from him and other people we've interrogated has been confessions of guilt. Nice, and possibly useful, but all about things in the past. Most of those guys have been in prison for so long that any information they might have is likely to be out of date. And torture doesn't extract information; it extracts confessions. So who cares about confessions?

(I know, I know, all we get to hear is confessions because the rest of it is classified, but still, I'd wager they get a lot more confession-based intel than anything else with the methods they use.)

During World War II one of the most successful techniques of intelligence gathering was to put prisoners at their ease, make them feel comfortable, be friendly with them. Most of the information you get is garbage in that method too, and it all has to be analyzed. But at the end of the day, you wind up with real information, and the prisoners don't even know they've given it to you. Of course, to do that, you'd have to be buddies with terrorist scum, but if we could do it with Nazi scum... Maybe the CIA just doesn't have anyone on staff who knows Arabic?

[pharoute]

"Maybe the CIA just doesn't have anyone on staff who knows Arabic?"
They used too but they turned out to be the gay.

"Get information! Do not let us get hit again!"
Argh! The intelligence network in place pre-Sept. 11 was working! Wasn't it Richard Clarke who said "everything was flashing red; we were running around with our hair on fire" or words to the effect? (obligatory troll disclaimer: no I don't think that they KNEW knew but they certain had enough hints that sitting on your ass was not a viable option)
I never thought I would say this but I wish it had been other George Bush in office during that time.

[pharoute]

Ok so on to torture. It doesn't work! IT does not work! It does NOT work! Does it work? NO!!!
Maybe that's the wrong tactic... You remember the part in The Passion of the Christ (tm) the Roman going to town on Jesus with the whip? The part between minute four and the rest of the movie? Yeah That's you if you support torture. Am I comparing Sheik Whats-his-face with Jesus? No, who you are hitting has NOTHING to do with why torture is wrong! It's because you ARE torturing. The wrongness of torture isn't the victim; it's you are incalculably harming yourself.

[Joy]

The U.S. Government reflects my will because our government is by and for the people. I do not want these people torturing in my name. I would rather take my chances with information obtained ethically only.

[bad Jim]

I find this bit striking:

Apart from any religious or sectarian perspectives, apart from Mill or Kant or Rawls or any other attempt to reason out a system of right and wrong, we humans share a rough consensus about what it means to be a good person or a bad person.

Our host seems to be locating the basis of morality in empathy, or something innate. Which is well and good, perhaps, since anyone reading this now is a primate. If our successors turn out to be carnivores they might not find this reasoning self-evident.

[alfgifu]

On the subject of perception of the U.S.A. abroad - there's something I've noticed, as I'm one of the age group that generally came to political awareness before September 11th, whereas my youngest sister (six years younger than me) and her school year generally became politically aware a couple of years afterwards.

In my school year, once we'd started talking about these sorts of things, we debated the nature of Islamic fundamentalism quite a bit (there were several devout Muslims I knew quite well) and we shared a suspicion of the current regime in America which made us uneasy about the British government's apparent inability to say no to Bush. On the other hand, our sympathies were still very much with America and we still regarded our alliance as a good thing.

My sister's year, by contrast, speak and think of America as a brutal bully and our government as a group of fawning sycophants. Not to say that they regard America as an essentially bad country, but as a country inevitably run by evil people. A frightening place and a threat to the rest of the world.

Remember, the current British government grew up in the Cold War era, in which this country was strongly pro-American. In twenty or thirty years time the shift in attitudes will make itself felt as a lot more than teenage grumblings; we no longer trust America. It's going to take something pretty radical to change that - ending the government-sanctioned torture would make a good start. I live in London and I doubt there's anyone I know who thinks that we'll escape future terrorist attacks, but I also doubt that there are many people who are more afraid of terrorists than they are of America.

For the record, I sincerely admire much about America and hope that things don't work out like this - nor do I think we really have a leg to stand on when it comes to judging human rights abuses by other nations. Still, I'm fairly sure I'm in a minority.

[Queequeg]

The current Harper's has an article about the effect of global warming on the race to extract resources from the Arctic. The author attended a socratic debate in a Canadian classroom of mostly Canadian military people. Among other things, they debated the possibility that Canada would someday have to become a U.S. protectorate. One student observed that "the United States is no longer a democracy, at least on the federal level," and he suggested that, if it came to the point that Canada needed a protector, that it ally with the European Union instead.

I agree with you on the morality question, Fred. That's the prime argument. Anyone who finds it unconvincing is either a moral midget or a moral monster.

But what that Canadian military man said bolsters the secondary argument that aifgifu makes. From a long-term strategic standpoint, we are working against our own interests. As Fred noted, we're in danger of losing the Cold War retroactively.

[twig]

It hurt to watch the bit that addressed this in 'Children of Men' when they were on the bus in the refugee camp. The soldier was a horror and he couldn't even see it.

[R. Mildred]

If our successors turn out to be carnivores they might not find this reasoning self-evident.

Yes because pack animals do not need empathy for social cohesion, it's all about the spartan style men raping each other stuff (as always), that's the only true form of social cohesion.

The one based on fear.

because there's no one I'd want at my back, and armed in some way for a hunt, than a person who I've just had to smack repeatedly into place.

these carnivores will therefore need 360 visions and a shit load more arms than we do, at least.

So if we're setting out to try Mohammed for murder (that really sounds sacrilegious)

Hey, just think of all the "illegal" Jesuses that get deported by I.C.E.

And that really is sacrilegious.

[sophia8]

Every member of the CIA should be made to read "Camp 020: MI5 and the Nazi Spies". It's a history of the British interrogation camp run in WWll by LtCol Robin Stephens:
'Violence is taboo', wrote Stephens.... "for not only does it produce answers to please, but it lowers the standard of information" [1]. Stephens put the unprecedented successes of Camp 020 down to the rule of non-violence. "Never strike a man" wrote Stephens in instructions for interrogators. "In the first place it is an act of cowardice. In the second place, it is not intelligent. A prisoner will lie to avoid further punishment and everything he says thereafter will be based on a false premise".
Stephens' orders are supported by other contemporary records, such as the diary of Guy Liddell, a future Deputy Director-General of the Security Service. These records show that Stephens sometimes went to extraordinary lengths to outlaw physical violence at Camp 020. On one occasion in September 1940, Stephens expelled a War Office interrogator from the camp for hitting a prisoner, the double agent TATE. As Liddell noted in his diary "It is quite clear to me that we cannot have this sort of thing going on in our establishment. Apart from the moral aspect of the whole thing, I am quite convinced that these Gestapo methods do not pay in the long run". Stephens saw that the officer in question never returned to Camp 020.
From www.mi5.gov.uk

[Tonio]

I had always assumed that the true objective of any torture was to psychologically manipulate the victim and to promote fear. Perhaps the "false confessions" that the KGB sought weren't really false in the victim's mind after being broken by torture. Beyond the gross immorality of torture, does it really convince would-be opponents to give up rather than face the torture? I've heard claims that the Bush Administration's torture policy has actually encouraged the terrorists to fight harder.

[Vermic]

Would quoting Orwell be too obvious? Well, nonetheless, it seems to fit here: "The purpose of torture is torture."

[damnedyankee]

In Ian Fleming's James Bond novel "Live and Let Die", the villain dismisses torture as "messy and inconclusive", going on to state that the victim "will say anything to make the pain stop."

It has been a cause of bafflement for me that the leadership of the United States of America couldn't grasp what a FREAKIN' JAMES BOND VILLAIN understood over fifty years ago.

Or a Spanish Inquisitor stated more than 600 years ago Quaestiones sunt fallaces et inefficaces -- i.e the torture is deceptive and ineffectual.

[Rosina]

Sorry - that was me

[damnedyankee]

Well, I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition...

[Ian]

There is a method to this madness. See Phronesisaical.

"The Burmese government would torture many people in order to evaluate various individual bits of information and compare them with other bits of information/misinformation in order to build a coherent account of actual information. The torturer cannot verify one way or the other whether information is useful or not without the practice of torture being widespread. The larger the number of those tortured, the more interesting and accurate the information."

So, torture lots of people, get a big pile of false confessions, and hope that among the noise a few false confessions agree, indicating real information.

The torturer has to hope that false confessions never come to agree because of systematically leading questions asked during torture, and that no two torture victims saw the same terrorist plot in a James Bond movie.

[cjmr]

Nnnnnnnooooooobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise. Surprise and fear. Fear and surprise.

[cjmr]

Darn, too slow.

[Tonio]

DamnedYankee, perhaps the Administration really wanted to create fear and is simply using the "seeking information" argument as its public justification. Or perhaps the officials couldn't admit that motive to their own consciences and believed their own claim about seeking information.

[cjmr]

So, torture lots of people, get a big pile of false confessions, and hope that among the noise a few false confessions agree, indicating real information.

I shudder to think what the signal-to-noise ratio looks like using that technique. And how much pain both the signal and the noise represent.

[Rob]

I'm pretty sure the motive is to appear "tough on terrorism." They're looking for a popularity bump by satisfying our American style sadism. Information and fear are just bonuses.

[Drak Pope]

In America, the government tortures you. But in Soviet Russia, the... oh. Well, there goes that joke.

[Jeff]

It has been a cause of bafflement for me that the leadership of the United States of America couldn't grasp what a FREAKIN' JAMES BOND VILLAIN understood over fifty years ago.

Actually, at least 2 Bond villians. "Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die." (Ah, Goldfinger, where the "hero" is completely complicit in the death of 2 sisters.)

[bulbul]

Self-respect? Is that the real problem with torturing people? And those poor torturers, how they suffer because of what they have to do? Oh how 'it's all about us'. Oh how American. Self-fucking-respect and caring about noone else but OURSELVES, that's all that is important, isn't it? Whatever happened to fucking RIGHT and WRONG, I wonder...
You know what else I wonder? I wonder how come the Polish and the Romanians or Bulgarians let this happen. How come the Czechs let those plans land and refuel? How come the first time the Czech secret service got wind of this operation they didn't just board the fucking plane and arrest every motherfucker on board.
Oh man, I would have loved to see that: GSG9 (or some other bunch of tough guys with automatic weapons) storming each of the black sites in Poland and leading every torturing cocksucker out in handcuffs. And then, let's parade all of them to a courthouse in Brussels, Helsinki, Ljubljana or whatever where some local version of Jack McCoy would charge them with kidnapping, abuse and whatever else he could make stick and a jury or a senate of magistrates would sentence all of them to 50 years in a Belgian, Finnish or Slovenian prison. And had one of them had the gall to protest and threaten and curse, the prosecutor would stand up and yell THIS - IS - EUROPE!
I swear to God, should this ever happen, I will proudly fly the twelve stars from my window every morning for the rest of my life while singing An die Freude. Hell, I'd gladly get up each morning at six to do it.
But let's face it - it's about as likely as pigs flying. For all the talk of European anti-americanism, our governments are still kow-towing to every US administration and kissing every American ass. Consider the visa system. Consider the NATO. Hell, consider the US military bases in Europe. Talk about partnership all you want, I'll believe it the day a Finnish military base is established in Corpus Christi, Texas. The very idea of a facility of whatever type run by a foreign intelligence service on the soil of a sovereign European country is so revolting governments should have fallen, heads should have rolled, diplomats should have been asked to get the fuck out. And yet, nothing happened. I guess my question is: when does an ally stop being an ally and becomes just a fucking bully?

OK, back to lurking now.

[cjmr]

And good morning to you, too, bulbul.

[Jeff]

bulbul, good to see you, ya old sod! I hope you're doing well (if not good).

[Jeff]

I wonder how come the Polish and the Romanians or Bulgarians let this happen. How come the Czechs let those plans land and refuel?

I wonder this too. The CIA could not have run secret prisons without the complicity of European partners.

[Steve]

I guess my question is: when does an ally stop being an ally and becomes just a fucking bully?

I thought it was Billy Bob Thornton hit on Natalie.

[Steve]

I wonder how come the Polish and the Romanians or Bulgarians let this happen. How come the Czechs let those plans land and refuel?

Unfortunately, it is common for abused or oppressed people to be abusers or oppressors themselves once they have the power. Happens in family relationships, and in larger people groups as well. You'd think we'd learn from the past.

[Jesurgislac]

Bulbul: Oh man, I would have loved to see that: GSG9 (or some other bunch of tough guys with automatic weapons) storming each of the black sites in Poland and leading every torturing cocksucker out in handcuffs. And then, let's parade all of them to a courthouse in Brussels, Helsinki, Ljubljana or whatever where some local version of Jack McCoy would charge them with kidnapping, abuse and whatever else he could make stick and a jury or a senate of magistrates would sentence all of them to 50 years in a Belgian, Finnish or Slovenian prison. And had one of them had the gall to protest and threaten and curse, the prosecutor would stand up and yell THIS - IS - EUROPE!

Oh, yeah.

But, you know what happened when the Bosnian Supreme Court said to the CIA "If you can't provide evidence that these six Bosnian residents are guilty of anything, we're acquitting them" and what happened when British judges started saying to the CIA "If you can't provide evidence why you want to extradite this alleged terrorist, we're not going to let you have him"?

Right. The Bosnian government just threw up their hands and permitted the US military to kidnap the acquitted men at the court door and take them to Guantanamo Bay, and the UK government passed a bloody law that says when the US wants to extradite someone from the UK, all they have to do is prove the identity of the person they want, not show that they actually have any evidence against them.

That Bosnia gave in to the government of the country that could crush them like a teeny little bug and gives them nearly a million dollars a year in aid, I found understandable: that the UK government succumbed to the US like a collection of weak-kneed spineless no-brains little bastards and crawled to lick the feet of Uncle Sam was infuriating.

[Spalanzani]

This post dealt with much, much more than just the idea that the US can't torture people and still respect itself. Fred went through many different things that are wrong with torture, such as that it's immoral, illegal, that it doesn't actually work as a way of extracting information, and that it works against America's long-term interests. The main focus throughout was on how torture doesn't provide reliable intelligence. Granted, he did open the post with all the talk about self-respect, but that was in the form of a quote from Obsidian Wings that he said “provides a good introduction to Mayer's long report”. It's wasn't the main point of the post by any means.

[Tonio]

"I'm pretty sure the motive is to appear 'tough on terrorism.' They're looking for a popularity bump by satisfying our American style sadism. Information and fear are just bonuses."

Rob, it might seem like sadism, but I think it's really fear. If I'm right, then the appearance of "tough on terrorism" is an attempt to manipulate people's fears for political ends.

[damnedyankee]

Rob, it might seem like sadism, but I think it's really fear.

"Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." - Master Yoda

It's true regardless of the source being a gravitas-laden Muppet.

[J]

Obtuse comment from that guy hawking his America Deceived books in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 . . .

[J]

"Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." - Master Yoda

Right on damnedyankee (BTW, I'm from Southie (well, more like the South Shore) you?). I always thought that Yoda got it right where Machiavelli got it wrong.

Machiavelli, remember, said that, as a ruler, your choices are

A.) Be Loved
B.) Be Hated
C.) Be Feared

And that the best choice of all three was to be feared. Let's generalize that and assume that those are our choices as human beings, not just as Princes or even as nations. Trouble is, being Hated and being Feared are not in any way mutually exclusive. Hatred and Fear are not seperate emotions; rather, they are like Yin and Yang, each leading endlessly back into each other. People will eventually hate whatever they fear and fear whatever they hate.

Thus, the fantasy our leaders have of our enemies cowering at our feet, meekly begging for whatever scrap of mercy we might care to grant them, is exactly that: a national-scale act of collective masturbatory fantasy. Human beings simply do not act that way. I've said it before: Human beings are proud, proud, proud. If we were one-tenth the "Christian nation" we claim to be, we would understand that.

When I hear someone say, or say something to the effect of, "The only language those people understand is force" I want to ask, "Do you even know what your own term 'understand' means?" If you mean, "Better they fear us than hate us like they do now" then you are a fool. It is entirely possible--indeed, overwhelmingly likely--that people will hold both hatred and fear in their minds at the same time, each feeding off the other. You'd better believe that the hijackers of 9/11 feared America.

Oderint dum mentuant.

"Let them hate so long as they fear." This was Caligula's personal motto.

My mistake. It's actually "Oderint dum metuant."

[Bugmaster]

I thought that Machiavelli recommended that the Prince be loved, because fear was too costly to maintain, and not worth it in the long run ? I'll have to go back and re-read it.

[J]

I thought that Machiavelli recommended that the Prince be loved, because fear was too costly to maintain, and not worth it in the long run ? I'll have to go back and re-read it.

The problem with being loved, according to Machiavelli, is that then people expect you to forgive them when, say, they fail to pay you taxes or show up for military duty or whatever.

New poster here...

According to the wikipedia page for "The Prince", which I haven't read entirely but seems pretty complete :
"He also says "It is best to be both feared and loved, however, if one cannot be both it is better to be feared than loved.""

That makes sense I suppose, no one can be loved by *everyone* so you'll have enemies anyway... and you're better off if those enemies fear you.

[Rozzen]

More specifically :

"In answering the question of whether it is better to be loved than feared, Machiavelli writes, “The answer is of course, that it would be best to be both loved and feared. But since the two rarely come together, anyone compelled to choose will find greater security in being feared than in being loved.” As Machiavelli asserts, commitments made in peace are not always kept in adversity, however commitments made in fear are kept out of fear. However, a prince must ensure that he is not feared to the point of hatred, which is very possible. Above all, Machiavelli argues, do not interfere with the property of the subjects, their women, or the life of somebody without proper justification."

(that was me in the comment above)

[Rozzen]

"Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he
does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well
being feared whilst he is not hated, which will always be as long as he
abstains from the property of his citizens and subjects and from their
women. But when it is necessary for him to proceed against the life of
someone, he must do it on proper justification and for manifest cause,
but above all things he must keep his hands off the property of others,
because men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss
of their patrimony."

I just love Machiavelli, don't you ? :D

[Vermic]

And here's a quote from Faramir from The Lord of the Rings:

"I would have [Gondor] loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom. Not feared, save as men may fear the dignity of a man, old and wise."