Letters to the Editor

• on reflection...

  [Read the article: Responsibility for the last seven years]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  I think I get it now.

  I take Glenn's point concerning the remarks by Meaghan McArdle that are being discussed- that she was implicitly indulging in apologism for the Bush administration's proposed official policy changes on torture policy. I've revised my opinion due to my reflecting on the wider context for her comments, and the era in which she wrote them.

  I still haven't changed my personal philosophical stance on the "torture option"- i.e., I think anyone employing such tactics should be held subject to criminal prosecution for their acts, but I can't guarantee that I as a jury member would convict someone being tried as a torturer- if it could be proven that the results provided information that made the crucial difference that directly warded off an impending terrorist attack.

  The act of mulling over the associated hypothetical situations that lead me to that caveat- or equivocation- is an abstract mental exercise, and I have no problem admitting that. I've pondered similarly uncomfortable unthinkables before.

  In actuality, anyone offering such a defense of their acts would find me a very skeptical audience.

  I reiterate my vehement opposition to writing a torture exception into any official U.S. government policy.

  When Meaghan McArdle wrote her comments in 2003, however, she was obviously prompted by the Bush administration's pronouncements that they were intent on that very goal- codifying exemptions for acts of torture into law, and impunity for torturers as long as they belonged to selected agencies of the Executive Branch, with no basis beyond the appeal to loyalty- "trust us."

  What the Bush administration was proposing in 2002 and 2003- and continues to propose, in 2008- is no abstract hypothesis. They really want an official framework to grant pre-emptive impunity to official USG torturers, as law of the land and legal precedent, henceforth.

  Given that fact: for McArdle to offer a commentary about those proposals without forcefully, directly, and specifically condemning them- choosing instead to indulge in vague hypothetical tale-spinning- amounts to nothing more than apologism.

  Very cleverly worded, I'll give you that- I initially focussed on a couple of statements whose interpretation left a lot to the reader's conjecture, reading them in such a way as to find myself in agreement with them, in a general theoretical sense.

  With all due respect to Rob Mac- I'm of the mind that he may have been similarly misled.

  The wider context- McArdle's refusal to confront the actual concrete implications of the "torture debate" prompted by the Bush policy initiatives- gives her actual intent away.

  Also telling is the era when they were written- 2003, the high water mark of the Bush administration.

  In 2003, I was getting into heated arguments- both on-line and face-to-face- with people who supported the Bush policy line, lock, stock, and barrel; people who were convinced that unless the official line were swallowed uncritically, the sky would fall. I didn't give them an inch.

  As I mentioned, the Bush proposals to legitimate torture are not hypothetical. As a matter of fact, to this day the current stance of the Bush administration is to treat them as enacted policy, wherever and whenever they're allowed to get away with it. I could have granted the Bush locksteppers a theoretical point of philosophical agreement- the considered moral-relativist view I outlined above, which I held even then.

  But as a practical matter, expressing that view to my adversaries would only have undercut my grave objections to Bush's proposals in their eyes. When it comes to starting down the slippery slope to tyrannical savagery by writing torture exceptions into law, I have no interest in arguing hypotheticals.

  I had even less interest in arguing hypotheticals about those "policy initiatives" in 2002 or 2003. It felt most imperative back then to take a stand and be clear about the actual implications of legalizing torture, rather than contributing fantasies about what might happen in hypothetical cases where someone refrained from using it.

  But with a very few exceptions, in 2003 I found it very difficult to find kindred voices in the American media, expressing their explicit condemnations.

  Now I remember; it all comes back to me- the pundits and reporters and media mouthpieces and "opinion leaders" were, by and large, doing the exact same thing in their commentaries that Meaghan McArdle was doing in her column: talking up hypothetical "ticking time bomb" scenarios as if they were eventual inevitabilities- while remaining silent about the inescapable consequences of ceding such such monstrous powers of impunity to the State, and the inescapable moral abandonment that would be reified and certified by the official legalization of torture.

  Nowadays, it's a lot more de rigeur for the pundits and reporters and media mouthpieces and "opinion leaders" to be anti-torture. And to pretend that they always were.

  Which was your point in the first place, Glenn...apologies.

  Permalink Friday, April 11, 2008 06:48 PM