Merged Senate Report on CIA Torture Program

Upchurch said:
I did. It's rubbish. If not an appeal to our emotions, then appeal to the emotions of other people more directly involved.

If you like, I can clarify it as an appeal to the emotions of authority.
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I live in Europe and have very close family friends who are French so that gives some spurious authority on this subject compared to Americans.

I also think that there are several other European posters arguing similar positions to mine (and yours). I think this spurious authority should be sufficient for any American who accepts such reasoning.

I am also old enough to recall the IRA bombing campaigns and thre were several miscarriages of justice due to coercive police interrogation techniques. This meant that the guilty people escaped and the reputation of British justice suffered when the story came out.

It is foolish to want these mistakes repeated.
 
sunmaster14 said:
Perhaps you should read the full post you're responding to. I explained my reasoning right in that post. One reason is that distance from an atrocity, without similar atrocities occurring in the interim leads to hindsight bias. The fact that we haven't suffered a terrorist attack of comparable magnitude means that we feel that inaction was justified. On top of that, many of the things that happen behind the scenes to prevent terrorist attacks go unappreciated.

Another point is that time heals all wounds. The sense of loss and fear and anger diminishes with time. It is why, I suppose, I felt zero satisfaction from Osama bin Laden's death, but if it had happened in the weeks or months after 9/11, I would have felt that an important measure of justice had been achieved. For a similar reason, I barely feel any anger towards KSM, but I feel immense anger towards those who perpetrated the attacks in Paris. This is not an irrational emotion, by the way, it is an evolved one. I have no doubt that there is an important prehistoric survival advantage in allowing time to deaden one's emotions, although perhaps it doesn't work as well in a modern world.
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You seem to be suggesting that the people most recently overwhelmed by fear and anger are going to be able to make more rational and considered decisions about the use of torture.

I don't think it works like that.
 
quadraginta said:
You seem to be suggesting that the people most recently overwhelmed by fear and anger are going to be able to make more rational and considered decisions about the use of torture.
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Well, that was not really my original intent, although I am actually prepared to defend that suggestion a little bit. My main point in all of these discussions, and I believe I have been very consistent about this, is to defend the people who used or authorized torture in the aftermath of 9/11, not to advocate for the use of torture itself. In fact, I think even the waterboarding of KSM was not morally justified at the time, although I believe reasonable people who lacked information that we have now, might have thought it was. My argument is that the people who broke the law, by authorizing or perpetrating torture at that time, were most likely normal, moral people who were trying, to the best of their ability, to do their duty to protect US citizens from further attacks, and that it does no good to vilify or punish those people. For the most part, I think the vilification is partisan politics dressed up as moral piety.

I don't think it works like that.
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Well, my argument along those lines is that terrorism works by making people afraid. Random deaths caused by terrorism has a far greater destabilizing impact on society than random deaths caused by accidents or natural disasters. With time, our understanding of that fear fades. I suppose you might say that with time, our view becomes more rational because we can focus on the statistical risk of death or injury or property damage due to terrorism and put it in context, which is all that matters, but I think that is not all that matters. The fear is a big part of it.

I am reminded actually of the DC sniper attacks 2002. I had many friends who lived in the area at the time, and they were genuinely afraid to drive to a gas station or a supermarket and get out of their cars. This was an entire metropolitan area of millions of people, where civilization was severely disrupted by a two guys, a rifle, and a car with a hole in the trunk.

The problem with the purely dispassionate way of looking at things is that you might end up discounting human nature too much.
 
sunmaster14 said:
My argument is that the people who broke the law, by authorizing or perpetrating torture at that time, were most likely normal, moral people who were trying, to the best of their ability, to do their duty to protect US citizens from further attacks, and that it does no good to vilify or punish those people.
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How are those people not villains?

To borrow a line, everyone is the hero of their own story. Even the worse people in history never saw themselves as "the bad guy". Oh, maybe they did some bad things, but it is always because circumstances or other people pushed them into a position where they had to do what they had to do.

How is that any different from the sentiment what you describe? The terrorists think of themselves as fighting against a great evil, after all. What makes the people you are defending any different?


sunmaster14 said:
For the most part, I think the vilification is partisan politics dressed up as moral piety.
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You only think that because the partisan politics you favor is the hero of your story. What a twist would it be if your ideological bad guys turned out to have been right about this?
 
Upchurch said:
How are those people not villains?

To borrow a line, everyone is the hero of their own story. Even the worse people in history never saw themselves as "the bad guy". Oh, maybe they did some bad things, but it is always because circumstances or other people pushed them into a position where they had to do what they had to do.

How is that any different from the sentiment what you describe? The terrorists think of themselves as fighting against a great evil, after all. What makes the people you are defending any different?
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It's funny you say this, just an hour or so ago a Maoist FB friend wrote a post defending Stalin on very similar grounds. According to his argument, Stalin made a lot of mistakes and blunders, but all that pales in comparison to his achievements in turning the USSR into a global superpower.
 
Upchurch said:
How are those people not villains?

To borrow a line, everyone is the hero of their own story. Even the worse people in history never saw themselves as "the bad guy". Oh, maybe they did some bad things, but it is always because circumstances or other people pushed them into a position where they had to do what they had to do.

How is that any different from the sentiment what you describe? The terrorists think of themselves as fighting against a great evil, after all. What makes the people you are defending any different?
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Well, for starters, they're on my side. Also, as William F. Buckley, observed decades ago:

To say that the CIA and the KGB engage in similar practices is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around.
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You only think that because the partisan politics you favor is the hero of your story. What a twist would it be if your ideological bad guys turned out to have been right about this?
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No, actually I think Obama has broken the law (both international and US) in his drone war, but I would not support prosecuting him or anybody else in his administration. The attack on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan was absolutely horrific. No doubt the perpetrators could be charged with negligent homicide at a minimum, possibly even 2nd-degree murder for showing depraved indifference to human life. By the chain of authority, Obama is responsible as well, or at least some very senior people just below him. Regardless, I would not support prosecutions for that tragedy.
 
Upchurch said:
How are those people not villains?

To borrow a line, everyone is the hero of their own story. Even the worse people in history never saw themselves as "the bad guy". Oh, maybe they did some bad things, but it is always because circumstances or other people pushed them into a position where they had to do what they had to do.

How is that any different from the sentiment what you describe? The terrorists think of themselves as fighting against a great evil, after all. What makes the people you are defending any different?
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Exactly. Even Hitler was utterly convinced that most of the world was controlled by an incredibly powerful Jewish conspiracy (so powerful it was responsible for the war of aggression he himself had started) and that removal of Jewry by any means necessary was the only way for him, his people and society to survive.
 
Upchurch said:
You only think that because the partisan politics you favor is the hero of your story. What a twist would it be if your ideological bad guys turned out to have been right about this?
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Damn those liberals adding the Bill of Rights to the US Constitution.

"It will probably make it worse, but I think it's worth violating the principles our society was founded on in order to protect our values"
 
sunmaster14 said:
Well, for starters, they're on my side. Also, as William F. Buckley, observed decades ago:







No, actually I think Obama has broken the law (both international and US) in his drone war, but I would not support prosecuting him or anybody else in his administration. The attack on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan was absolutely horrific. No doubt the perpetrators could be charged with negligent homicide at a minimum, possibly even 2nd-degree murder for showing depraved indifference to human life. By the chain of authority, Obama is responsible as well, or at least some very senior people just below him. Regardless, I would not support prosecutions for that tragedy.
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Are you actually serious?

If so, then you really do not make much sense.

You say that torture should not be done,
but then you go to great lengths to show how morality on some sort ambiguous continuum, and
then you say that those who did torture should not be prosecuted for preforming torture.

And now you are bitching about Obama using drones.

This is starting to sound like that thread where you started off bitching about a movie that you did not see,
then you bitched about a positive press account of this movie,
then you bitched about how liberals supported Dan Rather,
and then you finally saw the movie where you stated how much you liked the movie.

This thread is sounding like same Mobius Strip logic.
 
Crossbow said:
Are you actually serious?

If so, then you really do not make much sense.

You say that torture should not be done,
but then you go to great lengths to show how morality on some sort ambiguous continuum, and
then you say that those who did torture should not be prosecuted for preforming torture.

And now you are bitching about Obama using drones.

This is starting to sound like that thread where you started off bitching about a movie that you did not see,
then you bitched about a positive press account of this movie,
then you bitched about how liberals supported Dan Rather,
and then you finally saw the movie where you stated how much you liked the movie.

This thread is sounding like same Mobius Strip logic.
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I'm sure his worldview and norms are perfectly internally consistent, somewhere on a very small and lonely island in a vast, vast ocean.
 
TubbaBlubba said:
I'm sure his worldview and norms are perfectly internally consistent, somewhere on a very small and lonely island in a vast, vast ocean.
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Thanks much. I am sure that you are quite correct and the exchange that I have been following is shaping up to be just one of the many appropriate examples for the validitation of my tag line.
 
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