Clout

Apparently people are reading this thing after all...so it would seem given that the author of a far-flung post I criticized yesterday responded very quickly.

So, was I too quick to lump him in with the torture-apologists? Maybe. If one wants to know the fact of the matter about the use of torture by US forces, and the involvement of the administration in said practices, the source to consult is Marty Lederman's contributions to Balkinization. Here's the executive summary: Something like a couple dozen prisoners have died in US custody, and many more were raped, and many more still were subjected to "forced enemas, infliction of cigarette burns, and binding detainees hand and foot and leaving them in urine and feces for 18-24 hours." Everyone is free to call these sorts of things by whatever name they wish to, but I think I know what the correct term is. Furthermore, far from being isolated incidents, we now have reams of documentary evidence supporting what seemed obvious from the moment news of the Abu Ghraib atrocities broke: These kinds of abuses almost never take place in isolation, and far from resulting merely from lack of administration oversight, were in part caused by surreptitious but unmistakable sanction of torture by high tofficials within the administration.

The responses from the administration's defenders tend to come in two varieties. One is a kind of epistemic cognitive dissonance, a simple denial of the objective truth. It's often accompanied by or else implies on its own the notion that the oppressive elite media have cooked all this up, that the facts aren't really real, or some such (you've undoubtedly heard it already). The amusing thing to me about this thread of defense is its underlying anti-realism, its denial of the possibility of there being an objective truth apart from the unconscious bias that goes along with being human, its denial of a world of reality behind the world of appearances. Who're the post-modernists now?

The other response is the kind of language game involved in the dispute over calling something "coercive interrogation" instead of "torture." There's a famous illustration of the difference between use and mention that comes out of one of Abraham Lincoln's arguments to a jury in his early days as a litigator. If you called tails "legs," he asked them, "how many legs would a donkey have?" The answer, of course, is four. Changing the referent of the term "legs" doesn't change the number of legs on a donkey. In the language in which "legs" refers to both legs and tails, the answer to the question "how many legs does a donkey have?" would be "five," but that's indicative of nothing more than that words are (mostly) arbitrary conventions. If the word "two" meant five in some language, then in that language, the sentence "two plus two equals ten" would be correct. But two plus two still equals four, and five plus five still equals ten.

The point is that playing terminological games doesn't change the world. To paraphrase Lincoln, if you called torture "coercive interrogation" and outlawed the word "torture," sodomizing prisoners with flashlights would still be torture. However, there is a practical consequence of such a move, which is the only reason to make it in the first place. Namely, people who would never condone "torture" are okay with "coercive interrogation," since the mental associations with each are different even though they refer to the same thing, i.e. torture.

In other words, what I'm saying is that people who have a moral compass and maintain principles deeper than maximizing the advantage of a political party or a politician ought to be fucking careful with the way they use language. Is it true that there are leftists would cry bloody murder at absolutely anything the Bush administration does? Sure. And while I haven't personally seen cases of people on the left claiming that the use of Israeli flags amounts to torture, I wouldn't be terribly suprised if I did see it. But there's an issue of moral priority here. I don't think I'd even know how to engage with someone who felt greater outrage at a careless accusation by some lunatic at the Democratic Underground than at the Attorney General-designate's role as an enabler of torture. These cases aren't even close. And I'd suggest, further, that whatever the appropriate term is for interrogation methods that clearly fall short of torture, it's not "coercive interrogation." That's already been picked up by the torture apologists and spoiled; using it innocently only makes easier the task of those who want to use the term specifically in order to whitewash horrific abuses of power, of ethics, and of the public's trust.