Yesterday, the Obama administration released a number of secret memos that documented the limits of acceptable "harsh interrogation" under the Bush administration. For several years the moral absolutists, primarily on the Left, have attacked the policy of enhanced interrogation as torture and have sought to delegitimize such techniques in various ways. During the campaign Barack Obama joined in the chorus of those who depicted such techniques as torture and one of his first actions as President was to outlaw such techniques under his administration. The release of the memos has been greeted with approval by the Washington Post:
President Obama strikes a wise balance in coming to terms with the torture of terrorism suspects.
THE OBAMA administration acted courageously and wisely yesterday with its dual actions on interrogation policy. The pair of decisions -- one essentially forgiving government agents who may have committed heinous acts they were told were legal, the other signaling that such acts must never again be condoned by the United States -- struck exactly the right balance
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By repudiating the memos, the Obama administration has again seized the high ground and restored some of the honor lost over the past few years. President Obama's actions not only restore confidence that this country will not torture, but he has also strengthened the nation's moral authority in condemning these heinous acts wherever they occur.
Glenn Greenwald, predictably, doesn't think the President's actions went far enough:
I agree entirely that it is the DOJ lawyers who purported to legalize torture and the high-level Bush officials ordering it who are the prime culprits and criminals, as compared to, say, CIA agents who were proverbially just following orders and were told by the DOJ that what they were doing was legal. But leave aside the question of whether prosecutions would produce good or bad outcomes. After all, the notion that the law can and should be ignored whenever we think doing so would produce good results or would constitute good policy was the engine that drove Bush lawlessness. If, as Barack Obama proclaimed yesterday, "the United States is a nation of laws" and his "Administration will always act in accordance with those laws," isn't it the obligation of those opposing prosecution to justify that position in light of these legal mandates and long-standing principles of Western justice? How can they be reconciled?
In this, Glenn Greenwald is suggesting a much higher level of consistency than the Obama administration; once you accept his premises, that there needs to be an absolute prohibition against torture, and that harsh interrogation constitutes torture, you would need to demand a much higher degree of accountability than President Obama has offered.
Glenn Greenwald, and to a lesser extent the Washington Post and much of the rest of the liberal MSM, are civil liberties absolutists and their prescriptions threaten to undermine our civil liberties even as they profess their desire to protect them.
The President Ties His Own Hands on Terror
The point of interrogation is intelligence, not confession.
Which brings us to the next of the justifications for disclosing and thus abandoning these measures: that they don't work anyway, and that those who are subjected to them will simply make up information in order to end their ordeal. This ignorant view of how interrogations are conducted is belied by both experience and common sense. If coercive interrogation had been administered to obtain confessions, one might understand the argument. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who organized the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, among others, and who has boasted of having beheaded Daniel Pearl, could eventually have felt pressed to provide a false confession. But confessions aren't the point. Intelligence is. Interrogation is conducted by using such obvious approaches as asking questions whose correct answers are already known and only when truthful information is provided proceeding to what may not be known. Moreover, intelligence can be verified, correlated and used to get information from other detainees, and has been; none of this information is used in isolation.
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In his book "The Terror Presidency," Jack Goldsmith describes the phenomenon we are now experiencing, and its inevitable effect, referring to what he calls "cycles of timidity and aggression" that have weakened intelligence gathering in the past. Politicians pressure the intelligence community to push to the legal limit, and then cast accusations when aggressiveness goes out of style, thereby encouraging risk aversion, and then, as occurred in the wake of 9/11, criticizing the intelligence community for feckless timidity. He calls these cycles "a terrible problem for our national security." Indeed they are, and the precipitous release of these OLC opinions simply makes the problem worse.
I discussed the problems of civil liberties absolutism in an environment of asymmetric warfare and terrorism in The Suicidal Pursuit of Perfection. That post is worth revisiting. Those who demand an absolute level of moral perfection are necessarily, though inadvertently and unconsciously, demanding a self-defeating policy based on their wishful fantasy of how the world should operate versus a realistic assessment of how the world actually does operate (which notably does not include perfection in any of its incarnations.) My post is long and includes the description of part of my Analytic work with a patient who demanded the world adhere to her desires; I will not reproduce the entire post but here is a key portion:
The civil liberties absolutists ... present a more complicated scenario [than the political opportunists-SW]. They are much more like my young female patient. They insist that the world should be the way they want it to be, and further, try to force others to collude with them in imagining the world is the way they wish. If they win one victory, they need to escalate; this is the logic of the pursuit of perfection. Thus, if the administration agrees to allow lawyers to visit inmates in Guantanamo, they cannot be satisfied, but then must escalate to demanding full rights of access to the American legal system. If they ever were to become successful at getting people to agree with them, their logic insists that the West effectively disarm; we must stop all NSA intercepts, stop monitoring Mosques and other locations, and maintain the inviolability of personal privacy from any government intrusion. Because their true demands are so extreme, they can only face marginalization by pressing their agenda; further, if they truly cared about civil liberties, they would find a way to compromise because the greatest risk to civil liberties would be posed by a second attack on the scale of 9/11 or worse. [Emphasis added-SW] Were such an attack to occur, all notions of acceptable limits of governmental intrusion would be jettisoned, with the agreement of the vast majority of the American people. In either case, whether they win or lose the current argument, they ultimately must lose.
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The fact that those who cry loudest about the Bush administration abusing civil liberties (in the absence of any real evidence for specific abuses) are doomed to lose no matter what the outcome, is evidence that they are expressing, through often elegant and elaborate rationalizations, a true self-destructive wish which is hidden and unrecognized. The fact that they are willing to risk the lives of others in order to hold onto their ideological position is further evidence of the aggression that contaminates their purity of vision.
... those who refuse to compromise their extremist positions end up undermining their own cause. This is self-destruction by any name. The demand for perfect protection of civil liberties undermines the cause of civil liberties, undermines the proponents of such maximalist demands, and threatens to undermine the fundamental rights of all of us to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We must be vigilant not to allow their self destructive behavior to endanger those of us who do not share their pathology.
By making a successful attack, or attacks, more likely the civil liberties absolutists are endangering all of us and endangering our civil liberties, to boot.
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