Classic Rants

Some really classic rants on the 'sphere today, and one of my own to add.

First, Bob Wright lays out most of the major missteps of the Iraq misadventure in 42 seconds flat.

Second, Ezra points out the utterly ridiculous nature of the liberal hawks' defense of their position vis-a-vis Iraq, in 2002 and since.

And, finally, today's must-read was the New York Times' article about the ways the Bush administration conspired to allow and encourage agents of the US government to violate one of the chief precepts behind the entire concept of Western law, that of the fundamental dignity of the individual, by arguing, cajoling and, when necessary, outright lying to allow the torture of accused Al Qaeda members. The money quote, if there could be one:

Relying on a Supreme Court finding that only conduct that “shocks the conscience” was unconstitutional, the opinion found that in some circumstances not even waterboarding was necessarily cruel, inhuman or degrading, if, for example, a suspect was believed to possess crucial intelligence about a planned terrorist attack, the officials familiar with the legal finding said.

So, let me get this straight. Tying a helpless prisoner to a board, strapping a towel over their mouths, and pouring water onto the towel such as to stimulate the human body's automatic response to the feeling of drowning only counts as cruel or degrading sometimes? Only if you feel like it? It's not cool, unless you really really want to?

The whole point of a system of rules and regulations is that you can't leave decisions like this in the hands of people who can, at times, lose their sense of objectivity. It would be great if I could trust that US government agents would be so disciplined that they would only even think about doing this sort of thing to the worstest of the worst people, and only when it was completely necessary. If the CIA was made up exclusively of some sort of moral angels, who could perfectly balance the loss of human dignity with the importance of the situation, then great. Torture away!

Unfortunately the CIA, like most agencies of the US government, is full of actual human beings (I'm pretty sure that the Justice Department is filled with some sort of sub-human hybrid beings). Which means that, in the real world, if you tell people that they can torture if it's really important, then, to at least some people in positions of power, an incredible number of situations will suddenly seem really important.

I'm not even going to enter the discussion of whether torture works or not. It might. I don't care. If we're going to fight this fight by reducing ourselves to the level of people who cut the heads off of their prisoners then fuck it. I give up. If we're interested in actually winning the fight, as opposed to just killing the bad guys, then you have to go about it the right way. The smart way. For lack of a better phrase, the American way. And this shit, this is not it.