Gleanings from the blogosphere, Oct. 5

Jared at Total Depravity is thoroughly worked up about a vital issue of male - er - human rights...

I generally try to avoid getting involved in the heady realm of Norwegian politics, but an issue has arisen which has serious, far-reaching implications for fathers, our sons, and the very soul of manhood.

At Donklephant, Justin Gardner and his commenters are debating the status of waterboarding - and both sides have some pretty powerful arguments.


John Burgess at Crossroads Arabia explains why the 1973 oil embargo will never be repeated.


In case you've missed this, Patterico is doing a series of interviews with an Army mental health specialist who was treating the detainees at Guantanamo. It is absolutely fascinating. Pour yourself a cup of coffee or bookmark the first page; there's a lot of material. Hat tip to Stubborn Facts.

Technorati tags: Guantanamo, Waterboarding

Excellent commentary on the detainee bill

Finally! I feel like I've seen the light at the end of the tunnel! This is the absolute best commentary on the detainee bill and the issues surrounding it that I have seen yet. Not just commentary either, but a practical roadmap for the future. I wish Jonathan Rauch of the National Journal Group were in power. (My thanks to Pat of Stubborn Facts for drawing this article to my attention.)

In "The Right Approach to Rough Treatment," he grapples with the moral, legislative, and practical aspects of the detainee bill and offers some common sense solutions whereby virtually everybody on every side of this debate could come away reasonably satisfied. And all in a relatively short article in wonderfully clear and lucid language. A sample:

In any case, if a law bans the use of "alternative methods" even in the direst circumstances, it will succeed only in driving those methods underground. "Any president, Democrat or Republican, faced with really frightening, bone-chilling threat reports and credible claims that he can stop bad things from happening, is going to be very hard-pressed not to push his powers to the full extent of the law," says Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former official in the Bush Justice Department. Responsible law-making respects not just human rights but also human realities.

My view is worth no more than yours or anyone else's, but here it is: The law should leave room for exceptional recourse to "alternative" interrogation techniques, while making sure that their use is genuinely exceptional. On that score, both the Bush bill and the Senate alternative improved on the post-9/11 Bush regime, under which the president made up the law as he went along and no one could say boo about it; and both improved on the Supreme Court's Hamdan regime, under which almost any sort of rough interrogation, however necessary, might be judged a war crime.

Both bills, though, made the same mistake: While concerning themselves quite properly with legality, they omitted accountability.

Read the entire article, as this excerpt taken out of context doesn't really do it justice. If I were an American citizen, I would be contacting my Congressman and Senators to promote Rauch's solutions.

As a normal rule, I don't comment much on internal American affairs, for the simple reason that I'm not an American. I've made an exception for the whole question of torture for several reasons. First, the moral issues are so profound and could have such a major impact on the rest of the world in so many ways, that I felt it would be irresponsible to just look the other way. Secondly, foreign nationals, including Canadians, are directly impacted by American legislation and practices. Lacking a vote and a representative to affect the issue directly, I have to hope that my discussion of it will, in some small way, contribute to the best possible outcome.

Technorati tags: Detainee Bill, Jonathan Rauch, National Journal Group

Torture techniques specifically banned

The Washington Post is reporting that John McCain has specifically named some extreme measures that would no longer be allowed under the compromise detainee bill.

Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) named three measures that he said would no longer be allowed under a provision barring techniques that cause serious mental or physical suffering by U.S. detainees: extreme sleep deprivation, forced hypothermia and "waterboarding," which simulates drowning. He also said other "extreme measures" would be banned.

McCain's remarks were unusual because public officials involved in the lengthy public debate about U.S. interrogation practices have rarely made specific references to the CIA's actions. Instead, they have made general claims about the need for rough interrogations or a desire to stop abusive behavior.

"It's clear we have to have the high moral ground," said McCain, a former POW tortured by prison guards in Vietnam, on CBS's "Face the Nation." "I am confident that some of the abuses that were reportedly committed in the past will be prohibited in the future."

McCain spoke after officials of Human Rights Watch and others pressed him to spell out ways in which the controversial draft legislation would constrain the CIA's actions. The bill, introduced in the Senate on Friday, does not mention specific interrogation methods, causing some experts to say it would leave room for abuses. President Bush endorsed the bill after CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said it meets his agency's needs.

McCain, Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and their staffs were heavily involved in drafting the bill's language, so McCain's reading of it may carry weight in any court battle over its meaning. Aides said he did not clear his remarks with the Bush administration in advance, and spokesmen for the CIA and the White House declined to say yesterday whether they accept McCain's conclusions.

Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters takes umbrage at the fact that McCain made this information public.

What kind of damage could this do? Islamists who watch American media will note the exceptions McCain listed and tell their operatives that they will not need to prepare for waterboarding and can prepare for less rigorous techniques. While it isn't quite the same thing as telling them all of the approved techniques, it gives another edge to the Islamists -- an edge we didn't need to give them.

Serious and responsible people would understand this. Apparently, John McCain doesn't qualify as either.

Sorry Ed, I have to disagree. (Boy, I bet that will keep him awake all night...) I don't think it's a mistake at all to let detainees, future detainees, the American public and the rest of the world to know that the US will not stoop that low. Or will no longer stoop that low. Quite apart from the moral ramifications, which are considerable, it will generate respect for the US, as opposed to disgusted fear. In the long run, it will go a lot further.

Technorati tags: John McCain

Truly frightening

I am depressed. And this is why.

The McCain-Graham-Warner proposal concerning military commissions was, from the beginning, an awful bill that was quite radical in its own right. As but one example, the senators' proposal strips all detainees in American custody of the right of habeas corpus, meaning that detainees are denied the right to challenge in court either the validity of their detention (e.g., by proving that they are not terrorists) or the legality of their treatment (e.g., by demonstrating that they have been tortured).

This denial-of-judicial-access provision means, as Yale law professor Jack Balkin explained, that the military can imprison, and torture, a detainee forever without ever bringing the detainee before a military commission, and the detainee has no means at all to challenge his detention or the treatment to which he is subjected. It is difficult to imagine a more radical power to vest in our government than the power to detain people (including legal residents in the U.S.) forever, and to torture them, while expressly denying a detainee all legal recourse. Yet that is exactly what the McCain-Graham-Warner proposal (and the White House's proposal) provides.

I would desperately love to hear that this is a serious distortion of the facts, that fundamental principles of justice have not been violated, and that the United States has not just taken the first great step towards becoming a police state.

Being something of a neophyte in American politics, I don't know if Glenn Greenwald is considered a loony lefty. I'm not sure it matters; I've never been overly impressed with ad hominem arguments and the mistaken impression that affixing a label trumps an argument. What I want to know from supporters of this bill is this: is this depiction accurate? Is it truly possible for an innocent to be trapped with no recourse? And if so, how can you support it? If not, please demonstrate. I would love to know that this is not actually reality. Because this kind of reality is truly frightening.

[Update] The Washington Post is also not impressed.

The bad news is that Mr. Bush, as he made clear yesterday, intends to continue using the CIA to secretly detain and abuse certain terrorist suspects. He will do so by issuing his own interpretation of the Geneva Conventions in an executive order and by relying on questionable Justice Department opinions that authorize such practices as exposing prisoners to hypothermia and prolonged sleep deprivation. Under the compromise agreed to yesterday, Congress would recognize his authority to take these steps and prevent prisoners from appealing them to U.S. courts. The bill would also immunize CIA personnel from prosecution for all but the most serious abuses and protect those who in the past violated U.S. law against war crimes.

[[Update]] Do read the comment thread. There's a good, constructive discussion going on.

Technorati tags: Detainee Bill

Christian Arguments Against Torture

That bastion of left-wing ideology, the magazine Christianity Today (founded by Billy Graham), came out in February in no uncertain terms against the legitimizing of torture in the war against terrorism. The article "5 Reasons Torture is Always Wrong" is available online, as well as a longer version on the website of the author, David Gushee.

In the article, Gushee lays out the moral problem, and the question of the definition of torture. He dismisses the idea that 9/11 justifies a modification of the long-standing American opposition to torture and outlines his five reasons, which I shall recap briefly here.

1. Torture violates the dignity of the human being.

2. Torture mistreats the vulnerable and violates the demands of justice.

3. Authorizing torture trusts government too much.

4. Torture dehumanizes the torturer.

5. Torture erodes the character of the nation that tortures.

And his conclusion:

We are tempted to follow the logic of a July 11, 2005, Time magazine cover story that said, "In the war on terrorism, the personal dignity of a fanatic trained for mass murder may be an inevitable casualty."

Yet we are queasy enough about this "inevitable casualty" that we do not want to call torture what it is. We do not want to expose our policies, our prisons, or our prisoners to public view. We deny that we are torturing, or we deny that our prisoners are really prisoners. When pushed against the wall, we remind one another how evil the enemy is. We give every evidence of the kind of self-deception that is characteristic of a descent into sin.

It is past time for evangelical Christians to remind our government and our society of perennial moral values, which also happen to be international and domestic laws. As Christians, we care about moral values, and we vote on the basis of such values. We care deeply about human-rights violations around the world. Now it is time to raise our voice and say an unequivocal no to torture, a practice that has no place in our society and violates our most cherished moral convictions.

I would urge any religious person (or non-religious person, for that matter) who thinks there is a justification for torture to read this article carefully. It is vitally important that we as Christians do not fall prey to moral seduction and betray Biblical standards.

Further Christian arguments against torture can be found in the post Truth About Torture on Ochuk's Blog, in which he summarizes and links to a Christian symposium on ethics that addressed the issue of torture.

Technorati tags: David Gushee

Defending the indefensible

I normally rather enjoy Thomas Sowell's columns when I happen to come across them. Not today. Torture is indefensible, but he defends it. Glenn Greenwald has done a thorough and excellent job of tearing his arguments to pieces, so I won't run through them all. I will add this though. When you start using torture in the name of defending yourself against terrorism, you have stopped fighting terrorists. You have joined them.

Technorati tags: Thomas Sowell