For instance: The use of the atomic bomb. I think it's very, very difficult to justify Harry Truman's decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki in any kind of plausible just-war framework, and if that's the case then the nuclear destruction of two Japanese cities - and indeed, the tactics employed in our bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan more broadly - represents a "war crime" that makes Abu Ghraib look like a trip to Pleasure Island. (And this obviously has implications for the justice of our entire Cold War nuclear posture as well.) But in so thinking, I also have to agree with Richard Frank's argument that "it is hard to imagine anyone who could have been president at the time (a spectrum that includes FDR, Henry Wallace, William O. Douglas, Harry Truman, and Thomas Dewey) failing to authorize use of the atomic bombs" - in so small part because I find it hard to imagine myself being in Truman's shoes and deciding the matter differently, my beliefs about just-war principle notwithstanding.He then continues:
The same difficulty obtains where certain forms of torture are concerned. If I find it hard to condemn Harry Truman for incinerating tens of thousands of Japanese civilians, even though I think his decision probably violated the moral framework that should govern the conduct of war, I certainly find it hard to condemn the waterboarding of, say, a Khalid Sheikh Muhammed in the aftermath of an event like 9/11, and with more such attacks presumably in the planning stages.I think this is a bait and switch. Ross's point that he can't imagine himself doing anything different than Truman, doesn't really exonerate Truman, basically because neither Ross--nor I--would ever be president. I'd argue that a leaders are not simply supposed to be carbon-copy representatives of our emotions, but that they're supposed to see more, they are supposed to be better than. Asking ourselves what we would do, were we in Bush's shoes is likely to only prove that we'd be very mediocre presidents.
Much stronger is Ross's point that basically anyone other potential president in Truman's shoes would have done the same thing as Truman. But you simply can't make the same argument about Bush. Indeed, it's not even clear that every potential Republican president would have approved of water-boarding. I think you can fairly argue that Truman was in something of a historical--if not moral--bind. Some people will argue that Bush was also. But for the point Ross makes about Truman to be true of Bush, he would need to prove that Al Gore, and even John McCain, a torture victim himself, would have approved of water-boarding.
I'd love to see that proof.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Inflammatory apples and oranges comparisons would seem to be Douchat's speciality. Heat and smoke all out of proportion with the any light shed.
If I may, let me take issue with another part of his argument.
He doth presume too much. I don't know about you buy even with all of the supposed attacks that the Bush administration always refers to but hardly ever produces any evidence of I have yet to hear of an attack that would resemble anything like 9/11 in either size nor precision. So that line comes across to ME as if he is saying its ok to torture Muhammed not as a means to get information but as a means of punishment for 9/11. That would qualify as both a human rights violation and a war crime and thats a fact not a presumption.
And the Republican attempt to rationalize everything away continues. These assholes supported war crimes, plain and simple. For argument's sake, let's assume that Truman IS guilty of war crimes. The fact that he wasn't prosecuted doesn't make torture any LESS illegal or immoral.
By this logic, I can go out and lynch somebody because previous mobs were not prosecuted. Hell, I can even claim my acts weren't inherently wrong because my intentions were "good" and were designed to to mete out "justice".
Attention Ross: Two wrongs don't make a right. Did your mother forget to teach you this lesson when you were 3?
You all need to read the entirety of Ross's post. His main point is that he finds it difficult to condemn torture because he himself was guilty of of agreeing with it when it happened; he doesn't think that his own complicity, however, makes it morally permissible.
John McCain DID sign off on water-boarding for the CIA. He caved to pressure from the Administration to make sure that his torture bill didn't extend to them SPECIFICALLY so they could water-board.
That being said, I think Truman was in a moral bind, as well as an historical one. The reasoning behind the bombs was to basically break Japan's will. That war had already proved one of the nastiest, bloodiest exercises in warfare ever. We firebombed more than 60 cities, and still the Emperor wouldn't back down. If we had not dropped them, many more of our people and theirs would've died before it was done than those that died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The strict moral choice - in the model of a just war - would be to allow that to happen, even at the extra price; here we're talking about honor. The unjust but less costly choice was to drop the bombs. Truman chose the latter. What is right? I'm not judging his actions - I honestly have mixed feelings about it, but perhaps that is how it inevitably must be when talking about war.
I think what Ross is edging up to is this last point: that sometimes choices are morally murky and always will be, but I think that's reflective more of his own obviously mixed feelings than the truth. The fact that we have tortured before, the fact that Truman dropped the bombs - none of these things justify torture now. It is wrong and always has been. This precedent for torture deepens our shame, it does not ameliorate it.
What I find interesting about Ross's post is that the idea that torture is sometimes the ONLY viable choice is very nearly implicit. I don't know if he intended that or not, but it seems to me that it's a very pertinent piece of the moral puzzle. When there are other options with equal or better utility, like rapport building, how could one ever justify torture?
The other problem I have with Ross's argument is seems to be auggesting that future leaders are somehow destined to repeat the same mistakes.
Ross sees torture as a "kind of immorality that we cannot expect those charged with the public's safety to always and everywhere refrain from." He seems to be suggesting that because we've rationalized past sins, like the A-bomb, we should rationalize today's sins in the same manner. Abu Gahrib, Gitmo, and CIA black sites should be considered "in the context of previous moral compromises that we've found a way to live with."
Hogwash. In the context of previous moral comprises, I would rather expect our leaders to avoid making those comprimises. If we expect to evolve as a nation---as a civilization---we should aspire to do better than we did in the past---to avoid our past sins, not repeat them.
I suppose that this is Ross's demon to grapple with: that when it really mattered, his moral compass fell apart and he engaged in the kind of hateful dehumanization that has been the hallmark of the right-wing mindset since Nazi Germany. There are millions of people who were appalled, are appalled, and demand justice for not only those imprisoned in Gitmo but also the raped Constitution of the US.
I think I would raise two problems with Ross's comparison to the attacks on Japan: 1) torture has a history of failure and ineffectuality, whereas nuclear had NO history at the time and 2) the consistent, sustained and prideful use of torture as policy is miles and miles away from the use of a weapon twice and then never again.
The fact is: equivocate all you want, bloviate and speculate about Obama's non-existent "connection" to one of his political enemies Blagojevich - Republicans are solely responsible for this regime of torture and two failed wars. Just them. Nobody else. Ross should apologize for voting for Bush, apologize to the country for being weak morally, and then try to forgive himself for bringing us to this point.
I don't have time to read that piece by Frank -- it's very long and detailed. But that key part is purely speculative -- he's not quoting any of the "possible POTUS'es", he's just making assumptions about what they would have to have thought.
On the other hand, Ike himself was famously against using the A-bomb on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. He told Newsweek in 1963, "I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon." I find it hard to believe that none of those "potential Presidents" would have taken seriously the opinion of the Supreme Allied Commander who had already overseen the triumph over Nazi Germany.
And Roq, the case against nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki is (a) Japan had already started to put out feelers to the USSR about negotiating a surrender; (b) the USSR was just about to send the world's largest, nastiest tank army to Manchuria, making Japan's situation even more hopeless (and making them more likely to be okay with US occupation); and (c) the real motives had to do with intimidating the USSR and not "wasting" the enormous amounts of money put into the Manhattan Project by leaving Little Boy and Fat Man on the ground. The fact that Groves (I think it was him) had specifically requested that Hiroshima and Nagasaki be left unbombed, so that we could see exactly what kind of damage an A-bomb did on an intact city, makes (c) seem more plausible to me.
Ross is honestly trying to untangle a (for him) morally complex issue, but his argument boils down to "great men make tough decisions, we wouldn't do any better, so cast not the first stone" or something to that effect. It's nice that he's wrestling with this in public and trying to be honest about it, but this is bullshit to me.
Let's be real. No modern scholar or politician can look at any of the multiple civilian bombing campaigns of WWII and justify them in commonly accepted moral terms. Dresden? Tokyo? We have clearly and undeniably evolved our threshold for moral acceptability since 1945. It is literally unthinkable today for any serious person to argue that private restaurant owners should be allowed to bar black people from eating. Not even the most inflammatory right-wing pundits argued after 9/11 that all Muslims or Arabs-- even native-born American citizens-- should be put in concentration camps. In 1945, Japanese concentration camps and Jim Crow were the law of the land. So a) harking back to the Truman era for moral direction is pretty weak, in my opinion and b) it's really irrelevant to the discussion.
The idea of torturing KSM feels so satisfying in a "24" kind of way, but mostly it's conflating vengeance with getting practical info. Yeah, in an ideal Hollywood world, we get good info and kick a clearly deserving bad guy's ass at the same time. But again, let's be real. We don't always know who the bad guys are. We don't always know if they have information. Posing the question in such terms sets up a false dichotomy. In reality, we are talking about the mass imprisonment of goatherders and taxi drivers and some really really bad guys, and asking a bunch of young Americans to do nasty things to all of them in hopes of getting good information from some of them. Forget for a second whether or not this works (see recent post on Andrew's site by Marine interrogator). The real point is this: does our civilization stand for the arbitrary capture and punishment of all possible threats or sources of threatening information? Do we stand for giving such unlimited discretionary power to our leaders? At some point do we need to stand up and say, here is a bright line that we will not cross, here are powers we will not give to our leaders even if it means bad things might happen to us, because that's what we stand for?
John: I agree with everything you just said up until the very last part. Congressional Democrats (some, not all) signed off on a lot of these policies - the wars, torture, a long line of political appointments that proved to be disasterous in tragically measurable ways. They need to be held accountable, too.
This does not change the fact that the overwhelming burden of culpability is on Republicans, and most specifically, on the Bush Administration. It also doesn't change the fact that where there was dissent, it almost universally came from Democrats. But I think it's important to be meticulous for both moral and argument's sake. This is exactly the type of omission that Republicans like to pick up and wave around like a flag in order to distract from the heart of the issue.
that while torture may be a betrayal of American ideals, it actually isn't a betrayal of America's actual political tradition:
I think this may be one of the most important issues we have to deal with as a nation. We need an honest look at ourselves and our history, and we don't get it, more often than not. By any reasonable measure, we've been monsters over the last century, interfering in other countries with near impunity. And on those occasions when we've had our asses handed to us, we've failed to learn any important lessons from it. As long as we hold onto the mythic reality of ourselves as a "shining city on a hill," we won't be able to change our actions.
I'm really surprised at the reaction here to what I saw as a very impressive, intellectually honest piece. Ross is about as sincere and serious thinker as there is (right or left), so breaking out the "Douchat" names, glib dismissals, and Nazi comparisons is pretty weak, IMO.
Maybe all of you were wearing white hats atop high horses all along, but many (most?) of the rest of us grappled with the issues in ways similar to Douthat. I didn't agree with all of it, but the piece is as impressive piece of writing on the subject as I've read. I think you can disagree, but dismissing it is silly.
For 15 years, I've been utterly repelled by the right - by their small-minded self-righteousness, petty cruelties, their jingoism, reductionist thinking, and intellectual dishonestly.
I've been disappointed to learn that The Ascendent Left isn't any better, in a lot of ways.
Now, to address our host's point briefly: Interestingly, Truman is probably the only 20th century president who could be considered a "carbon-copy representative" of the body politic.
It turns out that the man had greatness inside, but certainly on his face, and even at his core in many ways, Truman was a regular Joe.
Rather than engage in philosophical wankery for the sake of intellectual tumescence, let us hear from a man who, faced with the very scenarios that lead us to consider torture, chose not to, and instead saved lives.
Ross is honestly trying to untangle a (for him) morally complex issue, but his argument boils down to "great men make tough decisions, we wouldn't do any better, so cast not the first stone" or something to that effect. It's nice that he's wrestling with this in public and trying to be honest about it, but this is bullshit to me.
Me too. What really angered me, though, is the way it contrasts with his previous pieces-- right below this one!-- on Planned Parenthood, where he determines that depriving women of health care is morally justified because Abortions are Always Bad and Everyone Should Know This. "The greater good" and "moral complexity" arguments only hold when Ross says they do.
Pesto: I agree with what you say, but I think proponents would ask, how many more would've died in pursuit of a negotiated surrender? *shrug* I've wrestled, as so many have, with this question and I can't say I've ever managed to come to a solid end view. Certainly, there were tacticians all around that had extremely unsavory reasons for wanting to use the bombs, but I've never gotten the impression that this was the basis upon which Truman himself decided. I could be wrong.
Two questions: the first is that what I have read about Japan's leadership at that time seems in contrast to what you say. It was not my understanding that they had much of an appetite for surrender, ever. Second, I hadn't read about Groves. Can you expand on these points, or recommend any specific reading materials that touch on these so I might educate myself? :)
Douchat is classically Jesuit in his approach to "moral wrestling". Conclusion first; all else is embellishment.
Roq -
I can see the necessity of moderating our judgements; we're all culpable in some way for the situation our country is in right now, if not because we advocated torture then because we are for the most part all rabid consumers and enablers of the credit society.
But the buck stops somewhere; for me, it stops at the feet of apologists. I think you will find that all of the apologists are Republicans. As everyone's been pointing out so eloquently: morality when face with a crisis seems a luxury, and as fallible human beings we may not uphold the kind of society we want to live in when the shit hits the fan.
But just as important as one's actions are DURING the crisis, when it's time to fess up and begin the process of healing, people fall into two distinct categories: those who realize their mistakes, grieve for their weakness and ask forgiveness of those they hurt, and those who continually make excuses for their behavior, try to justify their decisions and refuse to take responsibility for the fallout.
I'm afraid I have to - barring a few black sheep - put Dems in the former (correct and moral) category and Republicans in the latter (wrong and immoral) category.
And in the long run - I don't care about the D or the R. If we can afford to incarcerate 1 out of 10 of our black men for drug offenses, we can put a couple hundred immoral rich white people into some cement cells for endangering out Democracy.
The problem with this way of thinking is it conflates the two simultaneous but not connected sentiments of rage and fear that followed 9/11. The case for torture has been built publicly around the argument that it was necessary to prevent a subsequent terrorist attack but it seems obvious, to me at least, that the primary motivation was (and is) retributive: in the wake of 9/11 it was felt that some people simply deserved to be tortured. The correlation between torture and intelligence, which has been fairly thoroughly discredited, was primarily code for machismo and severity. Though Douthat may be right that the popular sentiment may have been concomitant to administrative action at the time (what would have been the response if pictures like those from Abu Ghraib had come out a month after 9/11?) but rather than excuse the actions of our leaders I think the situation calls for a serious discourse on the nature of popular complicity. With many on the right still refusing to admit that anything inappropriate took place, however, this doesn't seem likely.
DB: I, too, applaud Ross for at least being honest. Certainly, it takes a great deal of courage to do it so openly. I think the frustration you read derives from a variety of different things.
The first is that he still hasn't managed to alight on the "correct" answer, even in the face of so much evidence and after so much time.
The second is that he leaves out important pieces of the argument. My personal view is that this is due to his own sense of guilt, but denial starts to look like dissembling after a while.
The third is that Ross is so obviously intelligent, and this magnifies the level of sin of the first two points.
I am willing to concede that even very smart people with the very best intentions at heart did some spectacularly stupid things and endorsed some really bad ideas in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, but come now: enough is enough. It's long past an acceptable amount of time to still be wrestling with these things, especially from people with first-rate brains like Ross.
Haha, John: touche. Very good point. I think you'll see from the gist of my subsequent posts that I agree.
"Though Douthat may be right that the popular sentiment may have been concomitant to administrative action at the time (what would have been the response if pictures like those from Abu Ghraib had come out a month after 9/11?) but rather than excuse the actions of our leaders I think the situation calls for a serious discourse on the nature of popular complicity."
I don't think Ross is necessarily "excusing" the Bush administration. I think he finds himself feeling like he might have done the same thing if he were in Bush shoes, precisely because the pressure to act---to retaliate---would be overwhelming. This is what concerned me at the time---precisely that our collective anger would overwhelm rational policy, and we'd soon find ourselves in WWIII. If I had seen those Gharib pictures two weeks after 9/11, it would have scared me to death.
Roq,
I think it's virtually impossible to make an educated guess about how many would have died without the A-bombing of Japan. I'm mainly replying here to Frank's assertion that any president would have authorized dropping the Bomb, since "immoral but inevitable" is the core notion motivating Douthat's opinion on torture after 9/11. Unless Ike was misremembering or embellishing, he was certainly against it at the time, and even to the people making the decision in the summer of '45, it was hardly a foregone conclusion that we were going to drop the Bomb on Japan.
I'm not a historian, so I can't recommend any additional reading on it. I do remember reading in The Making of the Atomic Bomb that the Army took Hiroshima and Nagasaki off the target list for conventional bombing in order to keep them intact for the A-Bomb. I think it was Groves who pushed for that, but I'm not 100% certain if that's what Rhodes wrote.
Reasons to drop the bomb:
1) Only had two; if they didn't give in the war would have lasted a lot longer while they built some more.
2) Japan had fought to the last man for every inch of piece of territory it had, long after it made no military sense to continue to fight (even on bypassed islands). The only natural conclusion was that they would fight all the more for their homeland, and after civilians threw themselves off cliffs to avoid capture, I think this is a fair estimate.
Truman had two bombs to get the Japanese to surrender. He had every reason to believe that they were kinda crazy. Surrender feelers had gone out to Moscow, but Moscow didn't pass them along b/c Stalin wanted to get in on some Manchuria action, and such feelers rarely came to anything anyway. There had been numerous efforts to end the war in Europe, but it didn't happen until Soviet troops were almost knocking on Hitlers door. Not a lot of reason for hope. He had two shots at ending the war and he decided to use them to maximum effect. Arguing he shouldn't have dropped them is the height of 20/20 hindsight + needing to walk in the other guys shoes.
If you had the chance to end a war you believed would claim 1 million American lives at the cost of 200,000 enemy lives, you'd take it to. Even if they were civilians. If not, you shouldn't be President.
It's also weird that nukes get singled out as unusually horrible. You can fire bomb Tokyo all you want (which also killed a hundred thousand people and scarred many more), but get some uranium involved and its beyond the pale.
Around 33000 people died EVERY SINGLE DAY (on average) during WW2. 72 million total.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were about two-three weeks worth of casualties. The scale of death and destruction in that war is so vast and horrifying that its kind of offensive that a bunch of armchair generals sit back, not being immersed in constant death, not having to take responsibility for ordering people to their deaths, and trying to tell us that Truman was a war criminal. The bombings were horrible, no doubt, but so was everything else.
Doing what was necessary to give the bomb the best chance of ending the war early is probably the only really correct choice to make given what Truman knew at the time. We can debate whether it was truly necessary or not from here till the end of time, but you judge people on what they knew, what their intent was, not what they should have done if they had been able to sort through the fog of war and deception.
However appalling the 21st Century finds the strategic bombing of cities during WW II, the reality is that there is little significant difference between the child killed by an errant bullet in urban street fighting and the child killed by an 500-pound bomb dropped from a Lancaster or Liberator (or Ju 88) that was intended for a factory or refinery in that same city. Dead is dead, folks.
War is all hell, and civilians have always been caught in the crossfire.
However, unless someone can point to examples of US military personnel intentionally torturing German or Japanese POWs for information after their surrender, and that torture being endorsed by FDR, Stimson, Knox, Marshall, etc, the comparison does not make any sense.
Beyond that, my limited understanding of Allied intelligence operations during WW II is that the policy-makers in the UK and USA understood that torture would not yield useful information, and so interrogation techniques were designed to essentially "con" the subject into revealing information, most usefully without their knowledge, or to "turn" them into double agents.
Beating s prisoner to a pulp was not the default method, from everything I've ever read.
Other people have already touched upon important points, particularly that Truman had fewer options than Bush. (To be a necessary evil, it has to be necessary.) I would add that I question Douthat's unstated assumption that murder is inherently a worse crime than torture. To most humanitarians, killing may be justified in some circumstances, but torture is never justified. This stems partly from the idea that extreme pain can be a fate worse than death. The fact that we do not have separate words for lawful and unlawful torture akin to the killing/murder distinction shows how deeply ingrained this principle is. In a sense, Abu Ghraib was worse than Hiroshima, because it violated a clearer category of moral (and legal) sins.
* Once torture is justified by the ‘ticking bomb’ hypothetical, it will likely be used in all grave situations, such as missing children, captured soldiers, or retribution for atrocities, as the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed after 9/11 indicates.
* The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were presumably militarily useful. They were also attacks on non-combatants, and therefore acts of terrorism, which we roundly condemn in others. Perhaps we should adopt a more nuanced response to contemporary terrorism, and acknowledge that those who resort to terrorism today are not necessarily two-dimensional ‘evil-doers’.
Toxic, that's the case for dropping the Bomb -- except that I think it's been very hard to pin down exactly what estimate the military made of American casualties in the event of an invasion. I don't think there's much evidence of a consensus that it would cost 1,000,000 lives -- that's what decision-makers said after the war, in justifying a decision that horrified a good number of Americans.
And as I've said before, Ike opposed using the Bomb, and I don't think he was the only one. There actually was a serious debate about this decision at the time. Remember that the original reason to pursue the Manhattan Project was the fear that Germany would get the Bomb first. That's what sold the program to the government, and what got so many scientists on board -- "We need to beat Hitler to the Bomb." No one was on the project in order to incinerate Japanese civilians. I think it's going way too far to say that no other decision could have been made.
I think you and Ross are fundamentally making an assumption that there is a definable war here and any person in Abu Ghraib or in Guantanamo is a party to that war. Its much muddier than that. If you live in Iraq and Iraq declared war (or committed an act of war on the United States and we in return declared war...on the country) then the comparison can start to be made. Truman's decision was easy in large part because there was a definable war and the people of Japan were, whether they individually decided or not, identifyable a part of the enemy in that war.
Also, one of the less commented upon elements of Douthat's piece is the discussion of torture/torture lite. He makes the fair point that many of the techniques erroneously defined as less than torture sound more reasonable in abstraction than in practice. To my mind this again raises the necessity of a discussion of complicity: what are willing to do with the blessing of good cosmetics? Unfortunately this sort of discussion seems to be regarded in America with very deep antipathy, and the first reaction to every humiliation tends to be the search for a scapegoat. Natural enough, I suppose, but I also wonder if the conservative idea that government should have as little role as possible in the behavior of its constituents has not contributed to the idea that the people are not responsible for the misbehavior of its government.
More important, if less ethically interesting, is the obvious point that any action which we claim to be less than torture is more or less immediately available to any hostile nation in the world with our blessings.
And so, the commenters fall into Ross's neat little trap: instead of discussing the actions of the Republican administration over the last 7 years, we are discussing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Honestly, I don't give a shit about Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and why or why not we dropped those bombs - especially not in the context of urgent, relevant and contemporary issues that face us as a nation and civilization. It seems rather clear that the world's consensus on the use of nuclear weapons for war is a definite "NO WAY". Any country (including India and Pakistan) who chose to use a nuclear weapon would find itself occupied, castrated and re-educated by the rest of the world.
Can we please stop speculating on Truman's mindset in 1945 and start discussing the very real fact of Bush/Cheney's war crimes?
Watson, yeah, it was terrorism all right. And it worked. But I think most of our condemnations are targeted toward peace-time terrorism.
Toxic, I agree with everything in your post. This particularly got to me:
"If you had the chance to end a war you believed would claim 1 million American lives at the cost of 200,000 enemy lives, you'd take it to. Even if they were civilians. If not, you shouldn't be President."
War itself is a condition that creates and perpetuates mass slaughter. Taking the high road to avoid further mass slaughter even if it would end the conditions that made mass slaughter possible is a luxury afforded only to moral philosophers and theologians, not the President of the United States.
What did the Japanese do after we dropped the bombs? Surrendered, and surrendered honorably. And we worked with them in the reconstruction of their country. The dropping of the bombs caused no violent resentment within them. All of Japan's citizens were prepared to die in the service of their country, and when the surrender was announced, they all breathed a collective sigh of relief knowing their lives would be spared. Their resentment was for the Emperor and the Emperor's government, who told them that this was a war worth fighting until every Japanese citizen died, that it was well worth the sacrifice of all of their siblings, children and parents, to only have it end after Truman drops a couple of bombs that were no more destructive than the firebombings they had endured.
"I think I would raise two problems with Ross's comparison to the attacks on Japan: 1) torture has a history of failure and ineffectuality, whereas nuclear had NO history at the time and 2) the consistent, sustained and prideful use of torture as policy is miles and miles away from the use of a weapon twice and then never again."
Excellent point and pretty much takes the foundation out of his argument. Further, to look at it pragmatically, since that's the buzzword now, we only dropped two. We've made more than just about everyone and stared down a militarily aggressive enemy for decades without using more, ie, relatively responsible ownership of the most lethal weapon every contrived.
I tend not to listen to hindsight arguments against the use of the two nukes from those that have not studied Japan's Ketsu-Go (sic) and the personal writings of the navy and army commanders of that theater at that time. If you're going to go the utilitarian route and simply count the number of dead, then nukes would have been more humane than even a naval and air blockade combined with strategic bombing...which is what an invasion would have required. This also takes into account the lack of knee-jerk emotional reaction the use of nukes (gen-x'r speaking here) has now, but which didn't exist at the time.
My father told me never to hit a woman. I never thought I would until she pulled a knife on me.
There is a point at which, when you have become accustomed to making life and death decisions, you become some sort of new person. I don't think anyone might want to be Truman, nor do I think we can honestly second-guess him. But I will say this. It was suggested that an option to deploying the atomic bomb over Hiroshima was to instead target Mount Fuji instead.
When I thought about that at length, I realized the power of that metaphor. People from that day forth, forever, would be reminded of the power of the nuclear bomb. It would have been a desecration - would that have fired Japanese to have fought on? I think so. I think that if the 9/11 bombers had taken out the Brooklyn Bridge or the Statue of Liberty we Americans would have been even more rabid for revenge.
In the end we only have the fact that the bombing worked. It ended the war swiftly.
As for torture, I can only say a few things. Firstly that there is surely a thing as a fate worse than death - but waterboarding is not that thing. There is, somewhere, a survey being conducted on matters of repugnance and revulsion. It turns out that nobody has, prior to this project, taken an international survey of what sorts of horrors make people sick to their stomachs across cultures. It is called the Depravity Scale. You should participate.
I am of the opinion that the US has monsters on a leash. That we individual humans are endowed with the moral ability and sometimes the responsibility to make life and death decisions. Under certain circumstances we can punt those responsibilities to the State, and by being a nation of law we do this all the time.
We have the advantage of being completely and fully aware and responsive to our government. We live in a culture which is so exacting that we know whose car wrecked on the freeway every morning. We have people investigate $100 robberies at convenience stores, and we watch such crimes on the 6 oclock news. We know where child molesters live 10 years after the crime. In a world where genocide happens, America is pretty damned clean.
Yes we have monsters. But they are on a very tight democratic leash. Three waterboards in the entire Long War so far. That's extraordinary restraint.
I think there are two underlying issues here:
1. The obvious issue is American exceptionalism: When we commit horrible atrocities, it's because it's the only choice we have, undertaken only after profound moral wrestling and grappling. I wonder how we'd feel if the terrorists or terrorist supporters did the same kind of "profound" moral grappling and wrestling, only to conclude that they have no other choice.
2. The more significant issue may be materialism: In our moral calculus, there is nothing higher than (our) lives. There is no line that we should refrain from crossing in saving (American) lives. I wonder if a higher level of religious faith (or a different approach to faith) might change this and make certain actions unthinkable, even if it means death.
* In regard to #1 above, I shouldn't have to say this, but to state the obvious: It's evil all around. It's evil when they do it, and it's evil when we do it.
Perhaps you folks against the "outrage" of using the bomb should ask the Chinese if they would prefer a longer ww2 and thereby give Unit 731 a little longer to operate in their country; or ask the korean comfort women if a longer war would be okay. In fact, why not ask yourself if the millions and millions of japanese would be better off dead (which would have resulted with an invasion) if no bombs were dropped. Or maybe no invasion and we just keep on the blockade and firebombings so there is no food and millions starve to death.
This just in: War is horrible. But the idea that the bomb was wrong or that any us president, who has taken the presidental oath, would prefer to have another 1,000,000 dead and wounded instead of stopping the war with the two atomic bombs is just silly.
None of this justifies torture. But the political correctness and just plain lack of understanding about the end of ww2 is just staggering.
"Yes we have monsters. But they are on a very tight democratic leash. Three waterboards in the entire Long War so far. That's extraordinary restraint."
If by "leash", you mean run of the house and yard, then I agree with you. Let's continue your metaphor and see where we get...
So, a fabulous, kind and moral family has a dog that is very protective - for the purposes of this demonstration, that dog would have to be a large game or cattle dog with a wide-set jaw, 150 lbs.+
This dog was always kept on a leash. It was to protect guests and people the dog didn't know who may wander into the yard or the dog's "perceived territory". For the most part, the dog was content and gave a scary bark every now and again. The family felt safe.
One night, a burglar broke into the house and murdered and raped the mother. The dog, crate-trained, was sleeping in it's crate and couldn't protect her.
As a result, the owner of the dog decided the only way to protect himself and his family was to unleash the dog and give it free reign. The idea was that it wouldn't hurt anyone but people who deserved to be hurt - the owner trusted the dog to know the difference.
Then the problems started to happen. First - it was a neighborhood teen spray painting the fence. He only lost the use of his left hand forever after this dog, protecting its family, severed the tendons in the teen's lower arm. The owner thought: well, the teen deserved it for being in the yard. Next, it was one of his son's new friends from school; his face was disfigured and his parents sued the owner of the dog. The owner figured this kid was bad news, or the dog wouldn't have attacked. Next, the mailman had his throat ripped out by the dog while trying to deliver a registered letter.
As the owner was loaded into the police vehicle, righteous and filled with rage and hate at the injustice of being blamed for this dog's actions, he saw an ambulance rush to a nearby house, one of his daugher's best friends.
Later, the owner of the dog found out that all the other houses in the area had started to buy violent dogs to protect themselves from the murderers and rapists, and that one of them had mauled his daughter so badly she probably wouldn't survive. Sitting in his cell in the country jail, the man thought about how he had only left the dog off its leash three times.
"Can we please stop speculating on Truman's mindset in 1945 and start discussing the very real fact of Bush/Cheney's war crimes?"
Ditto. I call Threadjacking!
Doesn't the mindset of Truman underlie the original point made? And, if Truman's decision was largely influenced by the time and environment, can't we say the same thing about GWB? If so, which I feel we can, then GWB would be held to contemporary standards. That's not a value judgment, just something to keep in mind.
"I suppose that this is Ross's demon to grapple with: that when it really mattered, his moral compass fell apart and he engaged in the kind of hateful dehumanization that has been the hallmark of the right-wing mindset since Nazi Germany."
Can you, for all of us, please lay out your spectrum of left and right in regards to dehumanization? And can you then back up why you claim they are what you say they are?
here is a bright line that we will not cross, here are powers we will not give to our leaders even if it means bad things might happen to us, because that's what we stand for
In other words: freedom isn't free. If wingers actually thought about that as much as they like to say it, we'd be a lot better off, and so would the world.
To continue the threadjacking: 1 million US casualties is plausible.
Americans tend not to know that we skipped most of the fighting in WW2, which is why our casualties were, by the standards of WW2, fairly light. The Soviets took 10 million military dead and frankly they did most of the grunt work.
Invading Japan would have been bigger by orders of magnitude than anything done in the Pacific up to that point. So 1 million is a believable number to subdue 105 million people who idolized kamikaze pilots fighting for their homeland. And of course god knows how many civilian casualties.
With due respect, I don't think it's clearly threadjacking to discuss the points made not only in Coates's post, but in the original post he was commenting on.
What is clear is that you value the contemporary quandry more than the historical one. That's fine, but those of us discussing one or both of these things have not fallen into a "trap" nor have we been threadjacked - we're precisely on topic.
Cute story John. You must read a lot of Stephen King.
For the time being, I'll take sworn testimony in Congress.
"here is a bright line that we will not cross, here are powers we will not give to our leaders even if it means bad things might happen to us, because that's what we stand for"
A lot of my friends that consider themselves on the Left (capital intended...they say it that way lol) use the following for moral relativism, though that's not what they call it...they call it nuance.
It goes: "Theft is wrong or evil, but what if your family is starving? Would you then steal to feed them? Since most people would of course say yes, there's no absolutes"
I hear this all the time. In light of that argument, which I'm sure you've all heard, the above bright line would seem to falter.
In other words, are there moral absolutes or are there not? You can't nuance absolutes.
Let's see......
Left-wing pet issues:
Social Justice
Equal Rights
Equal Protection Under the Law
Environmental Protection
Fair Trade
Social Safety Nets
Gun Control
Pro-Choice
Regulation of Industry
Consumer Protection
Progressive taxation
Right-wing pet issues:
Stopping the Homosexuals
Stopping the "Socialists"
Small Government (except corporate welfare, military spending and legislating bedrooms)
Low Taxes
Free markets (except corporate welfare)
Stopping the Atheists, Secularists and Muslims
Ten Commandments displays
Stopping the Abortionists
Stopping the Environmentalists
Promoting American Exceptionalism
Advocating Torture
Advocating Pre-emptive war
Stopping the UN Assembly
The Southern Strategy
I mean, it just keeps going and going. And honestly, we can argue until we're blue in the face about whether "Stopping the Homosexuals" or "The Southern Strategy" constitute bigotry; in my mind anyone who self-identifies as right-wing has to grapple with the FACT that the right wing of this country is the wing of demagogues and haters.
But let's not conflate right and left-wing with "Democrat" or "Republican" - we all know that while they often coincide, as a rule they don't always.
"Doesn't the mindset of Truman underlie the original point made? And, if Truman's decision was largely influenced by the time and environment, can't we say the same thing about GWB? If so, which I feel we can, then GWB would be held to contemporary standards. That's not a value judgment, just something to keep in mind."
I think this is exactly what Ross is saying (if I'm reading you correctly). With respect, I disagree with both of you on this point. As I said in my first post, Ross argues Abu Gahrib, Gitmo, and CIA black sites should be considered "in the context of previous moral compromises that we've found a way to live with." I take issue with that, because as I see it in ---in the context of previous moral comprises---I would rather expect our leaders to avoid making those same compromises. This is the "contemporary standard" I apply anyhow. If we expect to evolve as a nation---as a civilization---we must learn from and avoid our past sins, not repeat them.
My point was dogs don't always do what you expect them to do, so letting them off the leash three times might get you what you want twice and exactly what you don't want the third time.
There's also the lamentable fact that the US doesn't have a monopoly on dogs.
I was also struck by the Truman/Bush rationale Ross makes that Ta-Nehisi mentioned.
But Ross seems to be reducing these horrors to mere scale, which is the wrong way of going about it, as many others have pointed out.
Mass destruction and death is why war is "high stakes," contrary to Ross' pre-election petulance. That torture happens at the individual level makes it no less repugnant -- and no less "high stakes." Even Ross' church, for which I bear little love, was finally able to recognize torture for what it was, in time.
I say, once more, the worst sin of the Bush administration was his success at keeping the American people intellectually and emotionally insulated from the concepts and consequences of war. Ross is living proof.
But I'm glad Ross is actually, finally working this out in his head. It's a welcome change from his pre-November posting, where he seemed simply unable to be critical (in any meaningful way) with either himself, McCain, or the Bush administration.
Scott: no, there are no moral absolutes. There are moral questions that so consistently fall into one category or the other, that it's intellectually dishonest not to treat them as such, however. That is the basis of the "ticking timb bomb" line of argument.
This is why we have legal absolutes.
I apologize if I was threadjacking, or if my comment led to threadjacking. I brought up Ike's objections to nuking Japan in order to undercut the premise of Douthat's argument. That is, reasonable people in positions of responsibility did, in fact, disagree over whether to drop the Bomb on Japan, and reasonable people in positions of responsibility did, in fact, disagree over whether to torture US prisoners. Douthat can try to rationalize his support for torture if he wants to sleep better at night, I suppose, but it doesn't change my view of the decision itself or the people who made it.
"If we expect to evolve as a nation---as a civilization---we must learn from and avoid our past sins, not repeat them."
Granted and I agree. This assumes, however, that the nation/civilization SURVIVES to evolve. That requires competition. Not the most pertinent point, but I think, like Atheists in Washington state, it deserves a seat at the table.
I would put forward that you're right, but that contemporary morals are built on those of the past and, short of huge social/political upheaval, we're on somewhat of a curve built on what's come before.
My point is that the leash is the guidelines for guideline interrogation which have been arrived at through not inconsiderable deliberation. The outrage over the very *existence* of the dogs has caused people to lose their minds. Just as the outrage over the very existence of GTMO as a detention camp has become an election issue despite the fact that the sort of interrogations that happen there all the time are not controversial at all.
Just as an interesting point of observation, vis a vis conservatives vs liberals, speaking for conservatives like myself, we have spent the past several years learning a great deal about how the US armed forces actually work by using this new media. It is because of that proclivity, I might boldly suggest that HERE might be the very first time any of you have actually heard from a psychiatric nurse who worked at GTMO.
Waterboarding in the context of this Long War is a red herring. But as you can see, there are people still calling our president a 'war criminal'.
Douthat's focus on the bomb may be less of a bait and switch than you suppose, but it may also be unintentionally illustrative.
It's worth noting that two biggest sticking points preventing Japanese surrender pre-August 4 were:
1) Japanese concern that we'd hang the Emperor for war crimes (by the standards of our trials in Japan, this was not an unjust solution).
2) The Japanese efforts to use the Soviets as a broker for peace... a sadly misguided strategy, as the Soviet attack would emphasize.
Of course, the bomb did little to lubricate either of these diplomatic sticking-points.
It is hard to argue, however, that it did not provide a form of closure for us.
Which raises the question whether torture provided, or was intended to provide, a similar 'closure.'
And, of course, it raises the larger question of whether the state should be in the business of providing closure.
Not sure I'm following sufficiently, Cobb. Nuking Japan brought a near immediate end to the war on all counts. Torture in this context seems to be more about extracting information to prevent something else. Torture for closure would sadistic, not a means to an end. I'm not supporting either, necessarily, just making sure I understand your semantics.
Chris Hedges prior to our invasion of Iraq wrote a blistering account of his decades as a war correspondent in War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. If one would go back and read it now, one would find that without an iota of reference to even the possibility of invasion of Iraq, his book and its examination of the human jones for warmaking was uncannily prescient about the course of events that have taken place there.
War is legitimatized mass murder. Torture--sanctioned or not--is a likely element of such behavior, and, as Hedges pointed out and the photos from Abu Ghraib illustrated, is part of its inevitable pornography.
War should, given our strategic, tactical, and technological abilities to wage it, always be a final option when all others have been exhausted. Our nation went along with the war in Iraq; we are as a nation complicit with its most inhumane effects.
Most people consider war an inevitability, and in fact, there appears to be almost no time in recorded history in which human beings have ever refrained from war making. Yet we were able as a species to by and large universally outlaw slavery. People can say this, that, or the other, but all of these relatiavistic arguments miss the heart of the matter.
Over a half century since Ghandi was assasinated, and pacifism remains more reviled on earth than making war on or simply torturing our fellow human beings.
"in my mind anyone who self-identifies as right-wing has to grapple with the FACT that the right wing of this country is the wing of demagogues and haters."
So, John, you consider yourself on the right, I take it?
There should be outrage over the existence of torture. There should be outrage over the existence of injustice, indifference and about 5000 dozen other things.
Regardless of where you fall on the question of torture morally, can we all agree that it's just a bad idea that doesn't work? That, at least, has been proven time and time again.
Why can't people who are apologizing for Bush's use of a repugnant and INEFFECTUAL tactic - indeed, his dependence on it as a lynch pin of his counter-terrorism strategy (along with a failed poorly planned war) - at the same time point out that it was just a bad decision in the first place?
But the mental gymnastics that people like Cobb must undertake to rationalize using the same torture techniques as the Gestapo (yes, even just three times) are quite impressive in their virtuosity. I guess the GOP gets to be the party of relative morality for a couple decades now.
Tony Comstock,
Exactly. I'm surprised Ross fools so many people.
It's a ridiculous conflation which should fool no one. Jesuit indeed.
Haha, Scott. The whole "you're hating bigots, so you must be a bigot... against bigots!" turnaround hasn't been fresh since my first year of college.
Try again, dude. Calling out those who perpetrate bigotry and division and holding them accountable for their views cannot rationally be compared with their hate speech.
"Yet we were able as a species to by and large universally outlaw slavery."
Is that like being by and large pregnant? I take it, though, that you assume that humans have irradicated slavery. Yeah...about as much as piracy.
Inasmuch as there's never really been a time when humans weren't warring, there's really never been a time when humans weren't owning other humans somewhere in the world. I find it abhorrent, but then, I'm a western guy...the ones who originally campaigned to try and universally remove it, but that's another segue.
By the by, war is generally held to be the physical application of political will. The goal of which, in modern arms, is to remove the enemy's ability and will to fight, in that order. The modern western military, specifically those in NATO, go to extraordinary lengths, institutionally, to reduce collateral damage. Ridiculous lengths, to one that's been under arms in the past, but that's just me.
Mental gymnastics indeed.
There's rage in combat and blinding hatred. Men do terrible things in that state. In war the rage gets indemic, it never quite goes away and men also do terrible things in that state. That's when spontaneous torture occurs, and it's little about information it's mostly about rage. But when torture is cooly approved by civil leadership in advance it moves into the realm of genocide and slavery, a crime not against persons but a crime against humanity. I demand, Never Again in in the name of my country.
Why anyone, other than Ross Douthat gives a flying rat's ass about what struggles he's having with the issue of torture is beyond me. It's like listening to Bush talk about being sad people died because of his fucked-up decisions. No one cares if Douthat is conflicted, other than Douthat and no one cares Bush is sad other than Bush.
I was just confused as you seemed to be sliding into demagogue territory.
Without too much hijacking, the most blatant, ongoing, well-documented (in terms of public and media attention) was the democratic primary between Obama and Hillary. I've not seen identity politics like that in my adult life. Are you saying that the candidates and their supports are on the right?
Sorry to be glib, but I don't consider myself to be either a demagogue or a bigot, but I do consider myself to be right of center on most things.
"Cute story John. You must read a lot of Stephen King. For the time being, I'll take sworn testimony in Congress."
Waterborading is just one of the many different kinds of torture that the US has practiced under the administration of George W. Bush.
You also have cold-cell techniques, sleep depravation, stress positions, various forms of religiously-themed degradation, plain old-fashion beatings.....the list goes on and on.
Not to mention sworn testimony doesn't always amount to much. A lot of these people should not be taken at their word.
There is one major difference I've yet to see anyone mention and my apologies if I overlooked it.
Truman made his decision with the full knowledge that the world would someday judge him by his actions. You drop a nuclear weapon on a populated city, it's not going to go unnoticed. So the choice between being condemned for incinerating tens of thousand of women and children within the blink of the eye or being condemned for extending a war that, at the very least, killed thousands more of your own citizens that necessarily surely weighed heavily on his mind.
Bush on the other hand, did what he did in secret, or tried to anyway. If his administration had it's way, very little if any of this would have ever been debated in the light of day. They were too cowardly to face the music, either of their own citizens or of history.
Actually, Scott, collatoral damage, meaning civilian casualties, in the past century, especially by western powers have been unprecedented in human history. In our own engagements from Viet Nam where we "carpet bombed" civilian populations and collatoral damage was in the hundreds of thousands if not over a million and Iraq where mild estimates are in the tens of thousands, the word "restraint" appears Orwellian.
And insofar as I know, slavery is not legally sanctioned anywhere anymore.
Nonetheless, as I say, there are few takers for pacifism in the world today; I understand that, but the ideas that civilian death in numbers that would be considered mass sociopathy outside of warfare or that torture does not occur in every war whether sanctioned or not to me are secondary.
War itself is what it is: a crime against humanity. We should resort to it only when no other options remain. In a democracy, we are responsible for what the government does in our name.
"unnecessarily, that..."
not "that necessarily..."
Note to self, do not post when getting over the flu.
Scott -
I don't know anything about you, and I don't mean to impugn your character. However, if the Clinton/Obama primary is the exemplar of demagoguery in politics to you, I would suggest you wiki "Southern Strategy", "Willie Horton", "Strom Thurmond", "Rick Santorum" to name a few examples of significantly more bald-faced bigotry in politics.
I'm sorry that you identify as right-wing and don't hold some of the same beliefs as the vast majority of the people who also identify as such.
To try and refocus this on the thread at hand: there is little more dehumanizing than torture, and there are few if any on the left who advocated torture. Those apologizing for Bush are to a man right wing. I fail to see why it's confusing or debatable that the authorization for torture falls directly into the right wing's lap.
late as usual...but anyway...
scott...so to u right wing = right of centre?? is the conservative movement that narrow in your eyes??
As a couple of posters have pointed out. the logical equivalency between what truman did, and what bush did...is non-existent. there's an argument to be made that just because US citizens in the US haven't been hit by terrorism, that constitutes "success". US citizens have been targeted by terrorism, outside of the borders. Are those victims irrelevant just because prez gwb says so? Truman did succeed in ending the war though...
Nuada also pointed very correctly that the method in which these acts where done where vastly different. Truman didn't go out the day after and say "we don't bomb city's with WMD"....but bush did, and his intentions where to do so unnoticed. All this is just Ross' justifications for his own shortcomings. It's lame, and it saddens me that even though he apparently knows it's immoral and effed up, he's still making the case for it. Why not just drop this one...is he that ideologically rigid that he doesn't even get when to fold? The moral bankrupcy of the right baffles me still.
No one cares if Douthat is conflicted, other than Douthat and no one cares Bush is sad other than Bush.
. . . said the person who read the lengthy blog post and another discussing it, a lengthy comment thread, the logged on to comment about how little he cared.
Tony Comstock, if Ross started with a conclusion and the rest is window dressing: What is his pat conclusion here? Because it sure isn't clear to me.
Bullshit.
Unmitigated, intellectually dishonest, bullshit.
Ross essentially said he is motivated to commit crimes against humanity by fear, and willing to justify conduct by any American president whom Ross believes is equally afraid.
Any president that acts out of fear, which actions put lives at risk, is unfit for the position of executive. Its an immediate disqualifier.
Ross does not anybody to co-sign his foolishness. He is more than comfortable firing off missives from the comfort of his hidden, subterranean bunker.
So he should simply profess the party line as of today, sy?
I don't care that he's wrong. I'm interested that he admits how he got there. Because not everybody is as pure of heart as you fellows. Especially not in October 2001. I, for one, am interested in his journey, becuase I think it's representative.
Yeah, I thought we were going to far in '02, but I was in the minority. I'm interested to learn how others are catching up and changing their thinking. I find that much more useful and intersting than calling "bullshit" as I pat myself on the back.
Yeah, I thought we were going to far in '02, but I was in the minority. I'm interested to learn how others are catching up and changing their thinking. I find that much more useful and intersting than calling "bullshit" as I pat myself on the back.
Right, now you'll just pat an asshat like Douthat on the back for taking 6 years to wonder if submitting fellow human beings to unimaginable pain and discomfort is such a bad thing after all.
I'm the sure the dead and dismembered Iraqis are waiting with bated breath for Douthat and the rest of the war porn asswipes to catch up with the rest of humanity as well. It's so very interesting to watch.
Scott and others re moral absolutism vs. relativism:
Our society is largely defined by the things we think are unspeakable. You don't need to subscribe to Kant to agree that no serious American believes that we should flog adulterers or sell children into labor or castrate homosexuals or enslave black people or even lock up citizens indefinitely without a right to trial by jury. These are bright lines in our culture that define us.
There is a question as to what point torture joins this list. If we're going to do a moral calculus, we should answer these questions explicitly:
-How many innocent people is it okay to torture before we torture a bad guy?
-How many people is it okay to torture with no success before we get critical and otherwise unobtainable information that saves 1 American life?
-How many deaths are acceptable due to torture in US custody?
-How many American service people should be commanded to torture strangers on our behalf?
-How much of this activity should be cordoned off into a squalid, hidden corner so the rest of us don't have to wrestle with the reality of the society we condone? Specifically, who gets to decide how and when and whom to torture? How and when and why should there be an accounting of such activities?
In my mind, you don't have to be a pacifist, an idealist, or a leftist to say: screw this. America stands for an ideal of liberty and freedom, and that means we don't take our cues from Syria or Sudan on torture anymore than we do on adultery, child labor, slavery, or treatment of homosexuals. There are bright lines that we can identify and have identified, and we won't cross them.
Stop projecting DB, your slip is showing.
Fear did not justify W's green-lighting of torture in 2002. Asshat's catharsis today does not make him, or his efforts on W's behalf, any more honorable.
Slam dunk critique... Ross's post bothered me also, but I didn't have time to ferret out quite why this morning..
I'm so glad that this website has a database.
This is what Truman had to say about dropping the bomb.
The White House
December 16, 1946
Dear Dr. Compton:—
Your statement in the Atlantic Monthly is a fair analysis of the situation except that the final decision had to be made by the President, and was made after a complete survey of the whole situation had been made. The conclusions reached were substantially those set out in your article.
The Japanese were given fair warning, and were offered the terms which they finally accepted, well in advance of the dropping of the bomb. I imagine the bomb caused them to accept the terms.
Sincerely yours,
Harry S. Truman
I'm disturbed by Ross' post, because it indicates that someone who seems to be, in general, a decent human being can still rationalize torture as acceptable - or necessary - in some circumstances.
I can't help agreeing with him on one point, though. On an emotional level, if I were an America I probably wouldn't have had much of a problem at all with waterboarding KSM. The man killed 3000 people. I felt similarly when people were debating whether Saddam's trial was fair or a "show trial" - my response was "does anyone care? We know he murdered loads of people."
However, that doesn't mean that waterboarding him was right or moral. It means that we need hard and fast, never-violated laws to protect us from doing what we want to do in exceptional circumstances, and provide a moral brake.
What is rather astonishing to me is that so many folks here seem to take some strange pleasure in moral one-upsmanship without really bothering to see what others see. Raise your hands if you read Staishu's account. I offer this real world example of an interrogator at GTMO and his existence seems to drop off the map as irrelevant.
As for waterboarding, I am aware and I think readers here should be aware that American soldiers have it done to them when they go through SERE training, and it has been so for years. So people making the slippery slope argument don't seem to understand that US soldiers already prepare themselves for that if they fall into enemy hands. That's not theory or speculation. And there have been journalists who have undergone it as well just for the experience - most famously Christopher Hitchens.
As I said before, when we sanction killing, as we do in war, we exercise some moral authority. There are certainly fates worse than death, under which some types of torture falls, but waterboarding is not a fate worse than death. That's not a moral dodge, it is a simple acknowledgement that different people have different levels of tolerance for pain. Again, I have shown where one can partake in a process of establishing a baseline of depravity.
Most importantly, there doesn't seem to be anyone I've listened to who has made a reasonable political effort to deal with the real facts relating to Army policy. You have men like Staishu - professionals who do interrogations and monitor the health of prisoners who live by the same book that we might, through congress, modify. But where is that legislative agenda and who is following up on it? This is yet another example of Bush Derangement Syndrome without a real concrete followup. In other words, to hell with the people in the military whose responsibility this is, just amp up the rhetoric to get evil conservatives out of power, then everything will be just fine.
As much as anyone, I enjoy the back and forth of philosophical debates about what if and torture. It's always interesting to me to hear where people get their ideas. But save me from the over the top until you can point me, with this extraordinary technology we have in the new media, to markup on the committee that makes the new rules in the Army manual chapter and verse. Admit you simply don't know that much.
Here's a concrete example of the sort of story that leads me to believe that the American military is worthy of our support, given our waterboarding. I wonder if any of you have seen it. This is from Michael J. Totten who was interviewing Iraqis who had been in Abu Ghraib prison when Saddam ran it.
DIRT WARNING - THIS IS REVOLTING, EVEN FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT DAINTY.
I for one see a world of difference between this kind of state-sponsored torture and coercive interrogation. How Americans get outraged at the sort of 'torture' of waterboarding, I can understand in isolation, theoretically. But I'm not sure they understand what serious torture is.
"I think readers here should be aware that American soldiers have it done to them when they go through SERE training, and it has been so for years. So people making the slippery slope argument don't seem to understand that US soldiers already prepare themselves for that if they fall into enemy hands. That's not theory or speculation. And there have been journalists who have undergone it as well just for the experience - most famously Christopher Hitchens."
Almost makes me want to take a class in waterboarding. Seriously, because we prepare our soldiers for the evils of the world, this requires us to perpetuate the evils of the world? What does one have to do with the other?
Cobb: are we to set our lines based on a madman like Saddam? If Saddam has done worse, we can feel justified in lesser forms of torture? I think not. Most feeling human beings would set their limits far, far above what was acceptable to Saddam.
Furthermore, we are detaining people unlawfully - we have no way of knowing if these men are even guilty of anything. We're practicing extraordinary rendition and - who knows? - perhaps the governments to whom we deliver our prisoners are of a mind with Saddam. It seems likely some of them are. Now are you outraged? People in our custody have DIED via our oh-so euphemistically termed "coercive interrogation." Is that enough?
For that matter, let's unpack that term. Is coercion an acceptable method of investigation under our legal system? No, of course not. We do not condone coercion not only because it incentivizes cruelty, but because testimony under coercion is *completely unreliable*. Even the *euphemism* for torture indicates what a stupid idea it is. Does the fact that you apparently like these detainees less than the average American criminal somehow make coercion more reliable? That's ridiculous.
Torture doesn't work. There are other, far more reliable and less morally repugnant ways to get the information we seek. We've managed to beat a fast track to global ascendancy over our relatively short history without relying on this method; I don't see why it's so imperative we employ it now.
Spare me your tantrums and case studies from GTMO. We didn't give it much attention because the rest of us know propaganda when we see it. For Christ's sake, man... the account isn't even remotely reliable. You know what is reliable? More than a hundred generals, admirals and colonels who have publicly stated that torture doesn't work, have a public organization and issue joint statements on the subject. Or how about this guy:
http://www.amazon.com/How-Break-Terrorist-Interrogators-Brutality/dp/1416573151/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229573199&sr=8-1
He seems pretty credible to me. Certainly a lot more credible than some unidentified individual giving a highly sensationalized account via a website I've never heard of, an account that would seem to contradict the conclusions of these other, credible and mainstream sources. More credible, too, than an official that gives testimony to Congress about how much water-boarding we've been doing right before or after he admits that the tapes his organization took of these processes that they were ordered to preserve were somehow accidentally, and so very conveniently, destroyed.
How about the Army Field Manual - is that deserving of respect? How about the Geneva conventions? Accords struck through the hard labors of the honorable generation that fought WW2 after witnessing the atrocities of Hitler? Or George Washington, the first great American general to insist against the abuse of prisoners, the man who established that policy as part of our national identity. He seems to have had a good idea or two rattling around in his head.
We call Bush a war criminal because he is one. He has broken our laws, and he has broken international laws and treaties. We are a nation of laws, are we not? Or maybe we're a nation of laws only when it's convenient? GTMO is anathema to many of us because it flagrantly exists to flout the laws of the land we all love, the nation of laws described in the Constitution. That is why it is not within our borders. And that is disgusting.
You go on ahead and establish your 'moral base of depravity' (a contradiction in terms). The rest of us would like to try and refashion our national identity into something that not only keeps us safe, but allows us to sleep at night.
Don't talk to ME, grasshopper, about what I do or don't know about torture, its history, utility and morality. You don't know sh*t.
Ultimately, there are some acts that are like switches - once they have been committed, there is no escaping the consequences, and they cannot be undone. Like firing a gun: you cannot recall the bullet.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were such acts. The US torturing is another.
Where did the nuclear bullet lead us? 30+ years of cold war and possible annihilation. Where will the torture bullet go? We don't know. For those of us frightened by the ambivalence of Ross and petrified by the justification of the rest of you, this known unknown is the real threat.
Like a person who uses their credit card with impunity, reveling in the feeling of free money and new things, commenters like Cobb may soon feel the painful slap of high interest rates on their torture affinity. Unfortunately, the rest of us will feel that pain as well.
So...
It appears there is a moral, practical and historical argument AGAINST torturing.
But I notice that nobody is making a moral argument FOR torture (they seem to be making up reasons for its immorality being not so bad). They can't make a practical argument for it because it has been proven that most of the information received is crap. And the historical arguments don't make them look too good (i.e. you can really using the inquisition to defend a modern policy).
It's unclear to me whether you find it reasonable to respect the Army manuals and policy on interrogation or not. You merely pose a question that seems to be a non-sequitur and then head off into the wilds of WW2. If I was unclear, I suggest that the Army manual and the policy set by Congress ought to be the benchmark and that you'd find, if you did any research, that torture is not our policy - and the belief that America engages in anything approaching 'state sponsored torture' is a fantasy in search of an audience of fools.
You may choose not to respect Congressional testimony that the full extent of our waterboarding is three in five years, that is your choice, but it is also your Congress. If they don't do anything about it, telling me I don't know shit doesn't seem too efficacious either. Are you an expert at making worthless gestures, or just on a roll today?
You seem to be in that minority of screamers bound and determined to prosecute George W. Bush for crimes in courts of law, under standards of evidence that, ahem, evidently don't merit standing in America. So let me know when your procedings get on the docket, until then I'll just keep laughing.
And there have been journalists who have undergone it as well just for the experience - most famously Christopher Hitchens.
I like how you neglect the fact that Hitchens unreservedly concluded from his experience that waterboarding is torture.
And yes, those of us that view waterboarding as torture do know that it is included as part of training. We also know that such a treatment, undertaken in a controlled and observed fashion by people that have a massive investment in your well-being is different than having it done by a foreign agency, which may not place the same value on your survival. From the perspective of the waterboardee, the circumstances are not comparable. This is a pretty basic and obvious difference.
So I wasn't going to comment on this thread until I saw the question, "How about the Geneva conventions?" I am not condoning torture in any way but I would like to explain the loophole through which the Bush Administration slipped. Technically Gitmo isn't a violation of the Geneva convention. The Geneva convention covers soldiers and non-combatants. Properly speaking the Geneva conventions only apply to prisoners of war. In order to be a prisoner of war you have to be a member of another country's armed forces. The whole phrase "enemy combatant" was not just created out of whole cloth and it is this phrase that allows the holding of people at Guantanamo. The "enemy combatants" weren't covered under the Geneva convention because they weren't members of another country's armed forces. They were civilians who were fighting against U.S. forces. Nobody was sure what to do with them or how exactly they should be treated. The current practices of the administration were not an explicit violation of the Geneva Convention. Rather they evolved out of the ambiguity of what to do with captured civilians who had engaged in armed conflict. Gitmo itself is not without historical precedent either. The British did similar things to the Irish in Northern Ireland. One could say that such actions violate the spirit of the Geneva convention but to the best of my knowledge they are not explicit violations of Convention rules.
Let me say again before I get jumped on that I am not condoning anything. Just trying to explain.
How Americans get outraged at the sort of 'torture' of waterboarding, I can understand in isolation, theoretically.
It breaks human beings because they feel like they are going to die. It's one thing when it's your buddy, or supervised military training and another when it's a hostile government. Secondly, we executed people who waterboarded as a form of torture. Third, waterboarding isn't the only torture we have used. Stress positions are something that have been used as a form of torture for centuries. What do you think they used in the Tower of London? The KGB utilized sleep deprivation, cold and starvation. Sleep deprivation literally drives a person mad, and they will end up doing or saying anything for a moments rest.
The problem with the official Congressional Testimony is that sleep deprivation, stress positions, cold exposure and starvation are not considered "torture" They are "coercive interrogation techniques" I would call them torture myself, but since the people testifying have a euphemism they can tell the "truth" but still be full of BS.
Torture is not our policy. Dude, are you listening to yourself? How much more documentation do you need to show that we have tortured? You seem to be in that population of apologists that has such a narrow definition of policy as to render it meaningless. Apparently the only official "policy" is when Bush says we don't torture. All other evidence, legal documentation and yes, testimony to Congress that contradicts that statement is null.
What I don't get is why the hell you would cherry pick your evidence to such a laughable extent. Seriously, what's the motivation?
It is my Congress, and sadly, it's a 'known known' that they are far from perfect. Fortunately, they are not our overlords. We can engage in honest and free thought without getting marching orders from them. Or at least, most of us can.
I am not bound and determined to prosecute Bush yet. Congress is far too complicit to do it, and there needs to be an establishment and accumulation of evidence before something as extraordinary as bringing a sitting or former president to trial in a court of law. Let there be a commission by an independent party - with a prosecutor that has subpoena power - to find cause for such an action. If there's cause, then let him stand trial like any other American - him and his cronies. If he's done no wrong, then he and mindless defenders like you have nothing to fear.
Sorn: well noted. I mentioned the Conventions because they contain the accepted establishment views on what constitutes torture, not as a specific legal accusation.
That was unclear on my part, though, and I thank you for the opportunity to clarify.
Ouch. Since I fear TNC's wrath, let me note that I am shocked (SHOCKED) to find ad hominem attacks on this thread, and further let me state that I deplore room-on-room violence in all forms. That said, to paraphrase Chris Tucker, somebody got knocked the f*ck out, man. This is why I rarely comment-- someone else says it faster and better (but I am sometimes more polite).
I'd now urge all sides to observe a ceasefire before this degenerates further. Nothing to be gained by cheap shots.
Three more quick points:
1. Torture as I and others (including at least Roq, apparently) use it is shorthand for policies of capture, rendition, and imprisonment, as well as interrogation. The McCain-Levin report, Jane Mayer's book, and many other reputable accounts have depicted a pretty well-established torture policy beyond specific interrogation techniques.
2. My biggest takeaway from Standard Operating Procedure was that when our government gave carte blanche to a group of earnest, well-meaning 18-24 year olds to "soften up" prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the process dehumanized the jailers as much as the prisoners. This should not have been a surprise; the Stanford Prison Experiment happened in the '60s. We owe our servicemen and women much better than putting them in that sort of position. Our concerns about torture should not just be about the victims, but also about the abusers-- our folks.
3. I still think that the issue of whether or not torture works is almost immaterial. Should we torture nine innocents if the tenth might tell us something useful? If we eliminated every civil liberty in our country, we'd all be safer, but we wouldn't live in America anymore. Fundamental question: are we going to be a society that allows its government to capriciously capture, render, imprison and/or torture people based on the slimmest evidence, with no accountability or transparency? Stories like the one about the Canadian citizen we rendered to Syria based on bad information so he could be tortured should give everyone pause, regardless of ideology.
Anytime,
The whole problem with this mess isn't the torture per se. The United States usually sends people it wants to torture for information to Israel, Egypt, Pick any of your favorite countries that sanction the use of torture. That has been going on for decades. Rather the bigger problem is the lack of a definition that would prevent such occurrences from happening in the first place. Essentially we are right back at square one debating the issue of Habeas Corpus and whether or not it applies to people who don't have any specified rights under the law.
To get up on my soapbox for a minute "As Americans we like to think that history doesn't apply to us and then it bites us in the ass."
. The whole phrase "enemy combatant" was not just created out of whole cloth and it is this phrase that allows the holding of people at Guantanamo.
The Geneva Conventions does somewhat cover this. It says that they are to be treated as criminals and tried and if found guilty they can be executed. The key part is that they are supposed to be given a fair trial and not held for years and tortured. This is typically the rules under which spies are tried and executed, but it would apply to soldiers dressing as civilians and fighting. The point of the rule is to heavily discourage this behavior. It would not apply to random people non-combatants we picked up in a war zone. If we're going to pick up people like that then they need a trial. We should also treat them similarly to our own criminals, with the burden of proof on the government.
Jordan,
There's only one major problem with this. Soldiers, dressing as civilians, or spies are agents of a rival government, as such there are dedicated procedures for prosecuting them. Enemy combatants are foreign nationals picked up in a war zone fighting against opposing forces without the sanction of any government. How does one try a foreign national? Under whose rules? U.S. criminal law doesn't apply because they aren't U.S. citizens. The government can't forseeably extradite them because they haven't committed any crimes that break their home country's laws. What do we do?
Again I would like to state that none of the above posts are representative of any view on my part condoning torture. I just wanted to explain a few things and to ask about definitions. Its funny, although the letter of the laws have been kept the current administration has arguably broken itself upon the rock of principle. In spiritu virtuteque neither of which are very apparent at present.
Sorn, aren't there provisions for foreign nationals working with governments (eg mercenaries)? Why would Saudis fighting on behalf of Taliban (Afghan govt at time) be any different? Thanks for clarifications.
Sorn, Gitmo is still a violation because the Geneva Conventions say that every person picked up on the battlefield has a right to a hearing to determine his/her status. You can't declare someone an 'enemy combatant' without a hearing.
Glenn Greenwald takes Douthat down this morning, by the way.
And you cannot compare the training of US Soldiers and the little shows the military puts on for "journalists" like Hitchens to actual torture. Simulated waterboarding in a controlled environment where the subject is not onlu fully aware of his situation, but aware that he isn't actually going die, is nothing like the real thing. You might as well compare a fencing match with a back alley knife fight.
And what does it say of Hitchens's total narcissism that he had to be "waterboarded" personally before he was willing to concede that it was torture. Get the pentagon on the phone! If we drop a few cluster bombs on his neighborhood, we might get him turned around on this war just yet.
regarding Truman's use of 'The Bomb' on Japan - it's fairly easy, with what we know NOW about radiocative fallout, etc. to condemn the use of a nuclear weapon.
But remember that in those days they were testing nuclear bombs in the deserts of New Mexico and Nevada. The full horror was neither completely known nor understood. Yes, we know NOW how terrible a weapon it is, but consider the times.
We saw the firestorm at Dresden, the Blitzkrieg, Stalingrad, the Rape of Nanking, Manilla and on and on and on. In the maelstrom of such violence, of such horror and suffering, could Truman, or any man, have envisioned that stopping such barbarism would end up being even MORE horrifying and inhumane?
To compare the age-old practice of torture, with its well-known deficiencies and unproductivity, to using a weapon whose destructive scope was incomprehensible...well, that's not even close to being intellectually honest.
Let's clear something up right now.
Barack Obama is President of the United States because he is a supremely pragmatic politician. That means one thing: if he is told that he has to have Jihadist Fanatic X waterboarded in order to find out where the tactical nuclear weapon is buried so he can save Buffalo, he will do it.
Even if liberal bloggers scream all day long about waterboarding.
Keeping hundreds of thousands of registered voters alive is much more important than being able to look at yourself in the mirror. Obama knows this. But you voted for him AND gave him your money.
It's important not to confuse what we know now--and what we have decided now--with what we knew and would have decided in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. We now know that the "ticking time bomb" situation essentially never arises. And we now know that such a situation didn't obtain just after 9/11. But back then most people assumed that was the situation. We now know torture is almost never effective. That wasn't clear back then. (Or rather, it was clear to experts in interrogation, but not to informed people generally speaking.) We now know that "winking" at light torture in a perceived exingency invariably leads to much worse--namely, outright torture as a matter of policy. U.S. policymakers made moral and practical mistakes. What really matters is that they doubled up on them. Very much can be forgiven as to the immediate response to 9/11--the three to six months, if you'll remember--of outright confusions and, even at the top, barely suppressed panic. (Remember the "credible report" that a Soviet suitcase nuke had been smuggled into Manhattan? I heard that rumor from people close the mayor and from people who should have been in a position to know in the Defense Department.) All of you, even those who express the most outrage, would have sinned, too. Much less can be forgiven about the hardening of torture into policy over the course of months stretching into years.
Coming late to the discussion....
Based on my study of WW2, I think that Truman's decision was right, and did save lives in the long run.
I think that Mark Bowden has it right, pretty much. I think that there are some hard men out there in al-Queda that simply aren't going to be " friended' into divulging crucial info, no matter how earnestly the ACLU believes that. The Army manual that people seem to accept as the Bible does condone the use of coercive methods 9 stress positions, etc) that would fall within many liberal's definition of torture.
Finally, I just can't summon much moral outrage at KSM being water-boarded. Folks, this guy planned the mass murder of 3000 people, some of whom burned to death or otherwise died in horrifying circumstances. As far as I'm concerned, he should be hung or executed by firing squad. That would be justice.
RE: the enemy combatant conversation
This entire debate is sickening.
I honestly can't imagine the level of rationalization that must go on in the heads of people who think its fine and dandy to keep folks locked up indefinitely with no charges. Do you think that because you wear a crucifix and have white skin you're immune to having your habeus corpus rights taken away? This is the definition of a slippery slope.
And if you are down with Gitmo you are no longer allowed to call yourself conservative. I can't think of a less conservative act than the betrayal of the reason for our country's founding.
That means one thing: if he is told that he has to have Jihadist Fanatic X waterboarded in order to find out where the tactical nuclear weapon is buried so he can save Buffalo, he will do it.
Let's continue to be pragmatic: What proof do we have that waterboarding Jihadist Fanatic X will be effective? Why wouldn't Fanatic X simply say that the bomb is at the post office, when it's actually behind the sports stadium? The fact is, when you're down to one person and a ticking time bomb, you have already failed. Jack Bauer doesn't exist and will not be able to save the day.
For what its worth Albert Einstein, whose urging helped set-up the Manhatten project, was convinced that FDR would no have used the bomb on Japan. (although he did write a second letter urging thhat the bomb never be used which was left unopened after FDR's death). I think its a strangely American perspective that suggests an inevitabilty to the use of the bomb.
In terms of Bush i think this is an even harder sell
We don't have proof that ANY method of interrogation is going to be effective. "Friendly" interrogation methods can also produce misinformation. Then there is this:
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded while being interrogated by the CIA. According to the Bush administration, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed divulged information of tremendous value during his detention. He is said to have helped point the way to the capture of Riduan Isamuddin (AKA Hambali), the Indonesian terrorist responsible for the 2002 bombings of night clubs in Bali. According to the Bush administration, he also provided information on an Al Qaeda leader in England.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding
Water-boarding, arguably, DID work to produce actionable info.
Well, I don't support the idea that dropping the bomb was morally indefensible. It is exactly as morally defensible as fighting a war is.
Declaring war means you're going to kill people, and not just soldiers. I wish more people knew this, had it condensed into their bones, because if they did, we'd have fewer wars.
I find the Allied bombing campaign in Europe less morally defensible than the A-bombs, because it did less good in ending the war quickly. Air superiority theorists love to tell us how they can win wars with air power alone, and they have been shown to be wrong every single time with one exception: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I don't think the Japanese, as they were in 1945 would have quit if we had invaded them. I think they would have taken to the hills and fought to the death. We might still be finding pockets of them. That's bad for us, and bad for them.
And so torture, like "air superiority" is a myth that doesn't work.
Furthermore, there's a difference between dropping a bomb and torturing a prisoner that I find ethically important. When you drop a bomb, the plane carrying it can, in principle, be shot down. The actors are indedpendent, and responsible for their own safety.
This is not the case for a prisoner, who has surrendered rather than fight to his or her own death. Which gives the jailkeeper some level of responsibility for the prisoner's safety. Thus torture is an abuse of position. That it may be expected from some quarters doesn't change that.
I know that I'm late to the party, but I've got to respond to Scott's argument that the "left" are being inconsistent by claiming that a) morals are relative and that b) torture is always wrong.
The claim that morals are not absolute is not the same as the claim that morals are arbitrary, and it is illustrative to use the theft example that he cites.
The reason that most people would agree that stealing a crust of bread to feed one's starving family is morally justified is not because theft is just some arbitrary moral marker; rather, it's the claim that the moral consequence of stealing food is less than the moral consequence of allowing one's family to starve to death. That's where the relativity in moral relative comes from: theft is wrong, but it's a lessor wrong when compared to the alternative of allowing one's family to die.
Now consider something like rape. Is it possible to conceive of some circumstance that would justify me raping a woman? Well, I suppose if someone were holding a bunch of children hostage and threatening their murder unless I raped a certain woman and for some reason I couldn't go the police and there were, literally, no alternatives...
But as you can see, the scenario is already hopelessly contrived. If the only way to justify a moral violation is to imagine utterly implausible circumstances then it's fairly safe to say that, in practice, that's a moral rule that shouldn't be violated even if we can imagine some outlandish hypothetical where we should violate it.
We find all the hallmarks of this when it comes to torture. There's a reason that the never-actually-observed-in-fact ticking time bomb scenario is frequently used to justify torture. It's necessary to contrive such an unlikely scenario to even hypothesize a moral consequence where failing to torture someone would be morally worse than agreeing to torture someone.
The amazing thing is not only that people don't see it as the same sort of hypothetical that could be used to justify rape or any other extreme violation of our moral norms but that they then turn around and use that implausible hypothetical rationalization to justify torture in circumstances that have absolutely nothing to do with ticking time bombs.
The supreme irony, however, is that it seems that it's proponents of moral absolutism that are the most prone to doing just that.
According to the Bush administration, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed divulged information of tremendous value during his detention
And we all know the Bush administration has never, ever deceived us in any way. Please.
sorry just another historical note (i know this is supposed to be about torture but it seems to me that the sum of the conversation is that the context of the use of these methods are key to deciding upon their morality). The Japanese were actually seriously considering surrender and were attempting to communicate this through diplomatic channels at the time of the bomb (a mis-translation of one of their announcements hastened the use of the bomb).
The reasons for bombing a Japanese city may be discussed, in the 'it was a way to end the war' fashion, but I don’t like the 'Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing' phrasing. I always separate the two cities.
The reason above can be defended for the first bomb in Hiroshima, but does it stand for Nagasaki? If a nuclear bomb was the definitive way of saying 'you have no choice but surrender', why would they need a second one?
Maybe to test a slightly improved version.
Despite what charges of thread-jacking preceded, there is in fact a strong link between torture, Truman, and the bomb.
Many Japanese officers after the war explained that they would not surrender to the Allies because
A) a cultural legacy that placed honor above defeat and death
AND
B) the experience of Japanese soldiers being tortured and killed by Chinese soldiers earlier in the war and in previous Sino-Japanese conflicts.
Since the Japanese were torturers, they expected to be tortured once captured and did not believe the American promises that they would not fall under any harm after a peaceful surrender.
Like those complaining about thread-jacking remind us: This is about Bush. And the fact that Bush has authorized the use of torture has meant the forfeiture of the moral high-ground which American legitimately lay claim to after WWII.
Amitav wrote "Sorn, aren't there provisions for foreign nationals working with governments (eg mercenaries)? Why would Saudis fighting on behalf of Taliban (Afghan govt at time) be any different? Thanks for clarifications."
In all honesty I don't know. Its a pertinent question. Conceivably, could Backwater employees captured by agents of a foreign government be tried and held the same way we hold "enemy combatants?" Sort of puts the shoe on the other foot when you look at it that way doesn't it?
To answer Persia I don't know how status is determined, and if someone is given a hearing under UCMJ to determine whether the Geneva convention applies. If it does happen the American Public probably doesn't hear about it.
Lastly John wrote:
I honestly can't imagine the level of rationalization that must go on in the heads of people who think its fine and dandy to keep folks locked up indefinitely with no charges. Do you think that because you wear a crucifix and have white skin you're immune to having your habeus corpus rights taken away? This is the definition of a slippery slope.
And if you are down with Gitmo you are no longer allowed to call yourself conservative. I can't think of a less conservative act than the betrayal of the reason for our country's founding.
I never said I was down with Gitmo, and I certainly never brought race into the matter. Someone had to explain the administration's legal reasoning behind Gitmo and explain that while the spirit of the Geneva Conventions were violated, (I only say possibly because I haven't been there and I don't presume to know everything) the letter was probably kept. The Habeas Corpus mention was meant to draw attention between the parallels at gitmo and the controversy surrounding the Charles I and the English civil war, which is from where we get the Write of Habeas Corpus in the first place. As much as it should be freedom from arbitrary arrest is not a human right, it's a civil right, and we have to remain vigilant lest it be taken away.
The notion that there is any equivalency between torture and an act of war directed against another nation aimed at breaking their will to resist or damaging them economically is surely deeply flawed. The bombing of London by the Luftwaffe or Hamburg by the British; U boat sinkings of merchantmen; or the two year siege of Leningrad in which thousands died of starvation; meet a certain crazy standard of logic. But atrocities against Jewish or Russian civilians behind the lines, or the Rape of Nanking, surely not, and they are the category into which torture falls. If you can't tell the difference what can I say.
Douthat voted for Dumbya in 2004 despite a clear knowledge that torture was an official instrument of policy in the administration. Therefore Douthat knowingly approved of torture by voting for it to continue. And he would do it again.
This latest waffle by Douthat is really disgusting and reminiscent of his past defenses of his hero Saint Reagan against charges of racism. Conservatism never fails! Therefore ANY president would have behaved just as Bush did after 9/11. Really? Would every other president have invaded Iraq? Would every other president have fucked that invasion up in spectacular fashion? Would every other president have partied with his rich pals while New Orleans was drowning?
This vapid prick of a president has done many things no other president has done. Making torture the open and notorious policy of the US is just one of them. And Douthat supported him, then and now. He's just trying to pretend otherwise to look good in public.
Hi Moe. Thought you'd fallen off the edge of the world.
Sorn says: "Hi Moe. Thought you'd fallen off the edge of the world."
Thanks for noticing, but nah. After so many months of obsessive political posting I decided to take a break after the FORCES OF EVIL got their heads kicked in.
I am truly proud of America. Now let's hope the new boss lives up to our best ideals - not the degenerate, obscene, criminal, evil ideals of the fucking Bushpig scumbags.
I'm even willing to ignore this sad Rick Warren business. For now.
There is an actual historical record of attitudes toward the A-bombing of Japan. Why base an argument on speculation, rather than on the widely known facts? General Eisenhower, not only a 'potential President,' but Truman's actual successor, as well as a military leader and strategist with some small standing, reported in his memoirs that he opposed the use of the A-Bomb. General MacArthur (incredibly) was NOT consulted prior to the bombing, but said afterwards that he thought it was a mistake. Look at the records of Stimson, Forrestal, and others on this, as well.
Also: Although the U.S. went along with Bomber Harris's anti-civilian "conventional" night bombing raids against European and Japanese cities, the preferred Army Air Force strategy was targetting of military, industrial, and logistical points.
On the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush torture: Aside from the "anti-War" opposition, there has been massive, open opposition to the policy from within the serving military as well as from retired military and other circles close to the military. Which of the '08 Presidential contenders backed them? What forced the decision on them?
Al Gore has really stepped in it this time. He could have spent the rest of his global warming career collecting money by spreading fear over events that were a centure or at least half century in the future. Oh, but that wasn't good enough for Big Al. He's now told the biggest global warming whopper of his alarmist career:
AL GORE HAS GUARANTEED THAT THE NORTHERN POLAR ICE CAP WILL BE COMPLETELY GONE IN FIVE YEARS!!!
When I heard this I assumed it was a rumor started by skeptics to make Gore look bad. It wasn't until I viewed the video that I realized what Gore had done. Gore has started a five year credibility countdown timer ticking and it's up to all of us to make sure that he is held accountable and proven to be a fraud when his dire prediction aimed at drumming up support doesn't come close to comming true.
The mainstream media isn't going to let this video see the light of day because they, unlike Al, understand the precarious position in which he has placed himself.
It is therefore up to us to spread the word about Big Al's prediction. He must be exposed for the fearmongering opportunist that he has become.
To view the video, please visit the following site and click on the picture of Big Al holding up five fingers.
http://www.hootervillegazette.com
While visiting this site, you might want to watch a preview of the film "Not Evil, Just wrong" or watch "The Great Global Warming Swindle" which is found in the video section. Happy Viewing!!!