and as Martha Stewart says, that’s a good thing,” he brays on his Web site. “Yesiree, I say, BOMBS AWAY! Rockets red glare. We are all WHITE WITH FOAM!” I don’t know about you, but I laughed till my ribs hurt.
Professional moviemaker and amateur paranoid Oliver Stone saw the terrorist attacks as the fault of the Republican Party. “Does anybody make a connection between the 2000 election and the events of Sept. 11?” he asked at a recent panel discussion in New York, which I take to mean that the terrorists were bitter that Al Gore didn’t win.
Stone searched hard and found something good to say about Osama bin Laden and Co.: “The new world order is about order and control. This attack was pure chaos, and chaos is energy. All great changes have come from people or events that were initially misunderstood, and seemed frightening, like madmen.”
Does it seem odd to you that Oliver Stone would feel affinity with madmen? Me neither.
Fortunately, you can find plenty of left-of-center commentators who prefer their country and its ideals over those of the enemy. At the New York forum, writer Christopher Hitchens lambasted Stone as a “moral idiot, as well as an intellectual idiot.” The attack, he said, was “state-supported mass murder, using civilians as missiles.”
The Nation magazine, perhaps the best-known organ of leftist thought, published a column by Katha Pollitt on why she refused to let her daughter decorate their living-room window with an American flag — which Mom regards as a symbol of “jingoism and vengeance and war.” (The daughter retorts that the flag “means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism.” Where does she get such ideas?)
But many other Nation contributors have taken a sharply different view from Pollitt’s. Writing in the latest issue, Princeton professor Richard Falk agrees with those who fault the U.S. as an imperialist power, but says that critique is “dangerously inappropriate in addressing the challenge posed by the massive crime against humanity committed on Sept. 11.” The American role in world affairs, he argues, “cannot be addressed so long as this movement of global terrorism is at large and prepared to carry on with its demonic work.”
Nation columnist Eric Alterman has no charity toward those who feel no patriotism at a time like this. Some of them, he says, “really do hate their country. These leftists find nothing to admire in its magnificent Constitution; its fitful history of struggle toward greater freedom for women, minorities and other historically oppressed groups; and its values, however imperfectly or hypocritically manifested in everyday life.” For Alterman, “patriotism requires no apologies.”
Those who feel differently — who can’t take their own country’s side when it is under attack by murderous foreign theocrats — should find themselves disgraced and ignored long after this struggle is over. In wartime, as leftists like Alterman understand, stupidity is not forgivable.
Should we use torture to stop terrorism?
Thursday, November 1, 2001
It’s the sort of question that, way back in spring semester, would have made for a good late-night bull session in a college dorm room: If an atomic bomb were about to be detonated in Manhattan, would police be justified in torturing the terrorist who planted it to learn its location and save the city? But today, the debates are starting up in the higher reaches of the federal government. And this time, the answers really matter.
Last week, The Washington Post reported great frustration in the FBI and Justice Department over the stubborn silence of four suspected terrorists arrested after Sept. 11, including one who wanted lessons in steering a commercial aircraft but had no interest in taking off or landing. Unless they can administer truth serum or torture, law enforcement officials fear, they may never get information about planned attacks that still are in the works. American lives could therefore be lost.
The question posed above is easy to answer. No one could possibly justify sacrificing millions of lives to spare a murderous psychopath a brief spell of intense pain, which he can end by his own choice. When the threat is so gigantic and the solution so simple, we are all in the camp of the Shakespeare character who said, “There is no virtue like necessity.”
This indulgence of reality requires no great rethinking of fundamental principles. Rules that suffice for normal circumstances often have to be suspended for emergencies. We have laws against burglary and theft, and for good reason: Society couldn’t function if homes and property had no protection. But if a starving plane-crash victim stranded in the wild broke into a locked cabin to get food, he wouldn’t be sent to prison.
The complications of the torture issue arise once you move from the extreme hypothetical case to the messiness and uncertainty of the real world. Almost everyone would agree it’s permissible to use forcible interrogation methods to prevent nuclear holocaust. But it’s impossible to write a law that restricts the use of torture to cases where 1) a considerable number of lives are in peril, and 2) police are sure they have a guilty party who can provide the information needed to avert the catastrophe. The brutal techniques are therefore likely to spread.
We know that from experience. Most states that employ torture do it pretty much anytime it suits their law enforcement purposes. And Israel, the rare government to attempt to impose clear standards and limits on the use of coercion, found that the exception threatened to swallow the rule.
With an eye to the “ticking bomb” scenario, Israel authorized the use of “moderate physical pressure” to persuade suspected terrorists to talk — including shaking them, covering their heads with foul-smelling hoods, putting them in cold showers, depriving them of sleep for days on end, forcing them to crouch in awkward positions, and the like. These were needed, the government said, because of the chronic threat of Palestinian attacks on civilian and military targets. And, besides, they weren’t really torture.
But this option quickly expanded beyond the cases where it might be excused. An Israeli human-rights group that successfully challenged these methods in court said that 85 percent of Arabs arrested each year by the General Security Service — including many never charged with a crime — were subjected to such abuse. That works out to thousands of victims over the years.
Israel found its carefully controlled approach escaping control in two ways. First, the brutal techniques were soon used in routine cases, not just extreme ones. Second, “moderate” pressure sometimes became immoderate: An estimated 10 detainees died from their mistreatment.
The problem is not with Israel but with human nature. To a man with a hammer, said Mark Twain, everything looks like a nail. Give police and security agents in any country a tool and they’ll want to use it, and even overuse it. If the government were to torture the suspects arrested after Sept. 11, it might find they don’t know anything important.
There are, of course, other options for inducing cooperation from suspected lawbreakers, including carrots (light sentences, money, relocation with a new identity) and sticks (long sentences, extradition to countries known for harsh punishments). That strategy has worked on other terrorists, like the one caught trying to sneak explosives into the U.S. for a millennium attack.
So it would not be wise to formally authorize the use of torture to combat terrorism. And what if the cops someday have to try it to save New York City from a nuclear blast? I trust they’ll do what they have to do, and forgiveness will follow.
Is John Walker a failure of liberalism?
Sunday, December 16, 2001
He’s an ordinary suburban kid who was dissatisfied with the anything-goes culture of
