US Senate: Torture Ain't So Bad
The following was submitted by Michael Cifone, a UMD philosopher as well as a lecturer on gay studies. He is commenting on the confirmation of Michael Mukasey as Attorney General of the United States.
I can't believe that this Mukasey guy has been confirmed after claiming that waterboarding isn't "illegal", despite the technique being denounced as a human rights violation (a denouncement that can be traced back at least to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that came on 10 December 1948, following the travesties of genocide prior to and during WWII). It seems, as author Naomi Klein suggests, that the very concept of a human right is being eroded, slowly. It was the height of Enlightenment thinking that this concept emerged, and was held sacrosanct in the minds of these thinkers. It has only slowly become respected in the laws of modern democracies (it took how long to finally get the Civil Rights act of 1964 in the US?. Now, we're seeing a dramatic and deeply saddening erosion of our Enlightenment roots. What can be done when the Democratic party is complicit in this?
Click here to watch Naomi Klein's interview with Amy Goodman (Democracy Now) on "waterboarding" (and the privatization of disaster relief).
Note from NewGay Ben: In fairness, I think Mukasey said "may or may not be torture" and that he would need to study the matter. This, of course, brings into question whether he is competent to be AG, being that he seemingly knows less about waterboarding than a bunch of snot-nosed bloggers.
1 comment:
If I might expand on my brief comments.
What really bothers me, ultimately, is that we can have a top official for the *Justice* Department (or should I write 'Justice' Department, lest we miss the Orwellian sad irony here) claiming that there is a *doubt* as to whether or not waterboarding counts as torture. As investigative journalist Amy Goodman (of www.democracynow.org) implies in an interview this Monday morning (7 Nov.) with a survivor of the tactic: if waterboarding doesn't count as torture, then nothing does. Goodman's interviewee, famed journalist and supporter of the Algerian cause to oust the French during the 1950's and 1960's, Henri Alleg points out that his experience was one of coming to the very brink of death. Waterboarding is a method of torture -- and it is frightfully clear that it *is* torture, according to Alleg -- where the victim is bound, their head wrapped in a cloth (sometimes with a sponge tied around the mouth and nose area), placed on an incline board as water soaks the cloth, thus slowly drowning a person. Indeed, this is the point: drowning a person without them fully submerged in water (we could call it a "controlled drowning"). Need we ask what counts as torture when the fear of imminent death is induced in a human being? What else is torture when death itself becomes a real, though controlled, possibility?
But what is so very deeply troubling here is that there is a question at all about this tactic, that we're so seemingly unsure about torture that we quibble over its definition.
Yes, to be fair to the recently confirmed head of the Justice Department (let us not forget that it is a department in the beleaguered *Executive* branch of our Federal Government) Michael Mukasey: he said that *if* waterboarding is torture, then it would be illegal. Just illegal? What about the moral issue? Is torture morally justifiable -- this is the deeper question. I think that most in the Justice Department, and I would hazard a guess, most of you reading this or most of America in general, have the moral intuition that it's perfectly justified (or justifiable) *provided that* useful and important information (that is, necessary for the maintenance of our "national security") can be extracted from torture victims. That is, the ends justify the means.
But this concise retort, as much of the cowboy ethics popular in media-saturated, commodity-addicted American culture, is too simplistic to hold any real intellectual merit. For this "ends-means" calculus is often not applied well. Henri Alleg, for example, was a journalist with sympathies for, and friends in the resistance against, the Algerian cause to oust French occupation forces (at least, that's how most Algerians would have conceived it. The reader is directed to the infamous film "The Battle for Algiers", and to the work of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre on the matter). Mr. Alleg was tortured for the information he had concerning the whereabouts of his sympathizer-friends. He didn't divulge that information, and so the French occupation "para-troopers" tortured him for it (he never caved in).
The United States of American, like France itself, is rooted in Enlightenment thought (you could even call it an experimental testing ground for that thought). Some of our greatest notions that we are supposed to hold as sacrosanct come from the philosophical work of this period -- principles such as the inherent value of human persons, and the idea that human persons, by virtue of their humanity, have certain inviolable rights (and we can look no further than our Constitution and its many important Amendments, to see some of these rights *enumerated*, and hence made into the Law of the Land), to name two of the most fundamental. How could it be that in the Seat of Power, there is any uncertainty that a well-known torture technique even counts as torture? Have those in power become *that* disconnected from the evidence of the senses, or the evidence recounted by other human beings' senses? How can torture become a "legal" matter? Of course, if we can cook the books on the very notion of what does, or does not, count as torture, and can rule out the first-person evidence that might be brought to bear on the issue (Henri Alleg's horrifying descriptions of his encounters with death as he was "waterboarded"), then "legality" becomes an empty issue, a chimerical dragon whose strings are happily manipulated adventitiously. The legal dragon being immune to admonition or moral outrage, it is an empty shell, a moral zombie.
The Enlightenment tradition produced some of our clearest ethical notions, notions divorced (for good or ill) from religious authority or tradition, an exercise in freedom from "the tyranny of custom" (20th cent. British philosopher Bertrand Russell's words, I believe). For these thinkers, it's our capacity for reason (critical thought, analytical scrutiny), for self-reflection and hence profound existential autonomy, that is essential to our humanity and from this (at least in the mind of 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant) flows our worth and dignity and the rights we all possess (irrespective of the fortunes or misfortunes that happen to arise during our lifetime).
This of course isn't simple enough for the cowboy logic of modern America; it certainly would be pearls before swine in the DoJ.
--MCC
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