Because the usual suspects (aka. our own governments) will use this as an excuse for more domestic surveillance and to fund the police state more.
This is the ACTUAL effect on most ordinary westerners lives. Your odds of being killed by an “Islamic Terrorist” are very low if you live in the West (infinitesimal). But the freedom you will lose will be real freedom.
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And we’ve documented that torture creates more terrorists. Indeed, Salon notes:
Among the most notable victims of torture was Sayeed Qutb, the founding father of modern political jihadism. His 1964 book, “Milestones,” describes a journey towards radicalization that included rape and torture, sometimes with dogs, in an Egyptian prison. He left jail burning with the determination to wage transnational jihad to destroy these regimes and their backers, calling for war against all those who used these methods against Muslims
***
“Milestones” remains one of the Arab world’s most influential books. Indeed, it was the lodestar of Al Qaeda leaders like Ayman Al-Zawahiri (who was also tortured in Egyptian jails) and the late Osama Bin Laden.
In other words, it was torture which drove the founder of modern jihad to terrorism in the first place.
The article goes on to list a variety of other, very important people, radicalized by torture.
I mean, if I were thrown in prison, tortured and raped, and got out, you can damn well bet when I got out I’d want the order that did that to me destroyed.
I will note also that drone warfare/assassination warfare does the same thing. It is very rare that assassination programs do anything but bring more radical leaders to the fore. The only prominent exception I can think of is the probable assassination of Arafat.
According to the American people, torture is justified, and it works.
Every demographic has at least a plurality for torture: men and women, young and old, white and non-white.
The only good finding is that a plurality of Democrats believe torture was not justified, though, within the margin of error, they do believe it was helpful.
Before Bush, most Americans were against torture. The endless drumbeat of propaganda and the need to justify what America does (America is good, therefore America does not do evil), has had its effect.
I will make an ethical judgment: people think torture is justified are bad people. Depraved people. A society where a majority thinks it is justified is a depraved culture. (And remember, 51% think it was justified, but 20% don’t have an opinion. Only about a third of Americans are opposed.)
There are two arguments against torture.
The first is ethical: torture is evil and should not be engaged in. (This is, for the record, my personal view.)
The second is pragmatic: torture doesn’t work, or does more harm than good.
These are separate arguments: you may believe that torture works, but is too evil to use. You may believe that it’s not evil, but ineffective.
Contrariwise, you may believe that torture is bad, but that the potential good outweighs the potential bad. You may even, as many people do, believe that torture is something some people deserve (just as rape, according to Clarence Thomas, is part of the punishment of prison.)
Ethical arguments are rarely conclusive: they must start from unprovable axioms. If someone disagrees with the axioms, it does not matter how tight the logic is, you cannot come to agreement. It is for this reason that some argue the need for a God—an ultimate authority who lays down axioms.
I am of the school which believes that there are certain things we should never do to other people. Death, to me, is not the worst thing that can happen to someone—go into a burn ward and ask the people with large body burns if they want to live or die, and understand that odds are you’d be no different.
Torture does horrible things not just to those who are tortured, but to those who torture. There is often a pleasure in hurting or humiliating other people. Those who pretend otherwise are deluding themselves, most likely because they don’t want to admit that such evil lurks in their psyche.
If you torture, you become a torturer. This is also why I do not laugh at rapists being raped: whoever did it is now a rapist too.
The counter-argument is simple enough: we do bad things all the time if we think the good outweighs the bad. If a few people’s suffering creates more good (for other people) than their suffering, we should allow it.
This is the dark side of utilitarianism: the greater good can lead to horrible actions. Yet our entire society is based around such compromises: from industrial agriculture, the use of plastic, widespread automobile adoption; CO2 emissions and pollution caused by activities we value more highly than the widespread harm they cause.
So why make torture different?
If you don’t make torture different: if you don’t red line it, then you are reduced to the pragmatic arguments: does it work, what is the ratio of good to harm, and so on.
The world is a better place if we simply red-line some behaviour. Thou shall not torture, thou shall not rape, thou shall not use nukes, thou shall use jacketed bullets instead of soft bullets, thou shall treat prisoners of war with decency, thou shall not shit in thy neighbours air so they get sick and their kids have asthma.
Red-lining certain types of behavior creates a better world.
The pragmatic ethical problem is “but if I don’t do it, others will.”
If I don’t torture, those who torture have an advantage. If I don’t rape, those who rape have advantage (what?) If I don’t pollute, those who do, have an advantage.
The pragmatic ethical response is “if I do do bad things there are more bad things in the world.”
If America doesn’t have prison rape and doesn’t torture, there is less torture (and a huge amount) less rape.
This is a unilateral action that the US (or any other country which tortures) can take to make the world and their country a better place.
At some point the world only becomes better when we say “no, I’m not going to do evil whether or not I perceive an advantage to it.”
Now a strong argument can be made that treating people better is an advantage, and there are many ways in which you can deny an advantage to those who are evil (generally by refusing to compete with them on their terms.) That’s another article, so I won’t go into it here.
But I will say the following: personally, I hold torture apologists in the same sort of contempt I hold rape apologists and those who make rape threats. Such people are worse than animals, and are a large part of why the world has so much suffering. Their arguments from pragmatics are vile and self-serving. The line must be drawn somewhere, but no matter where you draw the line, torture is over it. If you torture, or support torture, you’re evil.
That we have to have this discussion is amazing to me. Torture should be the sort of action which people are ashamed of. If they support it, if they’ve done it, they should be trying to conceal it, knowing all decent men and women will have nothing to do with them if their vileness is discovered.
That this is not the case is the saddest thing about American torture.
Just a few quick points:
We knew it was happening over 10 years ago. We knew then that it didn’t work in the sense of providing reliable information, and we knew then that the cost of torture in terms of damage to America’s reputation would be huge (and reputation does matter.)
As Bmaz points out at Empty Wheel, a great number of crimes were committed, and not just by the CIA, but by government officials, and they knew at the time torture was illegal. There’s no chance of them being prosecuted now, but we can hope that some of them will face a court in the future. Times do change, and those who must protect them to protect themselves will not always be in power.
One day it would be nice to see Bush in the dock. Cheney, unfortunately, will probably die before then.
Prime Minister Harper pretty much confirmed it:
‘Our laws and police powers need to be strengthened’
Yup. Never let a crisis go to waste. I’m very sad that MPs and their staff were scared, and I’m sadder that a soldier lost his life. But one attack does not justify increasing the police state. However, if Harper wants it done, it will be done, a Canadian Prime Minister with a majority might is very close to a dictator, and in practical terms only the Supreme Court can check him.
Freedom in the West, such as it was, was nice while it lasted.
I’ve stayed out of the Manning and Snowden imbroglio because most of what needs to be said is being said by other people.
However there is one issue that is not being made clear enough, but which under-girds all the arguments about their acts: the role of government.
Think of there as being two main ways to view government:
1) Government exists to rule over the people. The people may have some say in who their rulers are, but once those rulers exist, they make the rules and the people obey. Government in this view is an independent entity to whom subjects owe their obedience. Government knows best, and we should do what government tells us to.
2) Government is an instrument acting on behalf of the people. Its position is similar to being a trustee—it is a relationship in which the public gives the government certain powers and resources, and expects the government to act on behalf of the people. Government, in this view, is a solution to the collective action problem. How do we act together for the benefit of everyone?
If we are ruled by government, we do not have a defacto right to know what government is doing. Government knows best, we don’t have all the information, and we should go about our lives, obeying the laws and those who are in positions of power over us.
Imagine that you have a trustee, whom you have given money and the right to make rules to, in order that they might take care of certain of your affairs. In order to be sure that they are taking care of your affairs, and not their own, or someone else’s who once the money and power is in their hands, is bribing or browbeating them, you must know what actions they are taking.
Transparency, in a democratic system, is predicated on the idea that citizens are the ultimate repository of legitimacy and that citizens have a responsibility and a right to know what is being done on their behalf. Citizens cannot execute their responsibilities, including voting, volunteering, running for office and supporting primary candidates, if they do not know what government is actually doing.
Thus, in a democracy, the government must be transparent on virtually everything. Short of actual military secrets, of which there are startlingly few (major deployments are obvious, and often announced), and very specific details like the actual identity of spies, plus personal information not relevant to job performance of government employees, there is almost nothing the government does which should not be available to the public.
Government works for the population. It is the servant of the people. You cannot supervise your employee, you cannot discipline or fire or even properly reward your employee, if you do not know what your employee is doing with your money and the power you have given your employee.
It is now necessary to talk about the relation of citizens to the government. The government works for citizens, citizens do not work for the government. It is not a symmetrical relationship. Because government works for the people, the people have the right to know what the government does. Because the people, with the exception of some officials, do not exist to serve the needs of the government, the government does not have a right to know what the people are doing. Transparency is required by the government, so that its masters, the people, can supervise it. Again, transparency is not required of the people, except in very specific ways (for example, how much money they made) because they are not in a trustee relationship with the government: it is not their duty to act on behalf of the government.
Every time someone says, “well, if Snowden/Assange/Greenwald/Welsh/ believes in transparency, they should release on their personal emails”, it is a misunderstanding of the relationship between government and the people. Individuals do not owe government transparency, government owes people transparency because government works for people and has power and money only because it is granted that power by the People.
Now, you can use this argument in support of spying on all the people. The argument is as follows: “the people have given us the responsibility to protect them, and we believe the only way to protect them is to know everything they do online and as much of what they do offline as possible. They have given us that grant of authority, and we are using it.”
I am willing to admit that the people could give their government that grant of authority. However, to do so they would have to know that that is what was being done and most people did not know that pre-Snowden. There would also have to be an election in which “spy on everyone” was the main issue, and there was a party to vote for which was against it. And, prima-facie, one would expect to at least see polls which showed that citizens wanted to be spied on all the time.
I believe that if such a grant was made, effective democracy would still end (if it hasn’t in many Western countries already). Once people know they are being spied on 24/7 they change how they behave, and those who have access to that information can easily manipulate them, both overtly through blackmail and covertly by knowing what makes them tick (the exact contents of everything you search online, every email you send, every text you send and every phone call you make, plus in many cities the possibility of a fair bit of tracking of where you go physically each day). Information, in this case, is power. Once they know how you tick, it’s not hard to figure out how to present information and incentives in such a way that you do what they want.
In this case government becomes the master, the people the servants. To give full, free democratic consent for a surveillance society, is to sign the death warrant to the type of democracy which is “for the people, by the people”. Something may remain, it may have elections, it may be called democracy and have all the forms, but it will not be democracy in the essentials. There are other ways to lose effective democracy, like allowing money to buy the system, of course, and in some countries it appears that has occurred, but the surveillance state is additive (or perhaps multiplicative.)
In the Gilded Age, it was widely recognized that the “Trusts” (that Ages equivalent of our great megacorporations) controlled government. Eventually Americans were able to undo that. But conditions were different then, there was no surveillance society, and there was still a very vibrant culture of civic association.
If we believe that government serves the people, then we must be way of any government that either doesn’t wish to tell the people what it is doing on their behalf, or which believes it has a right to know everything its people do.
The final argument is the safety argument, the “we need a surveillance society to be safe from bad men.” I don’t believe this argument, and others have dealt with it, so for the time being, I will simply end with words from Benjamin Franklin:
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
And though Franklin didn’t say it, I agree that those who who believe that those give up liberty for safety will lose both liberty and safety—and deserve neither.
Maybe the backwards data shows rapists getting longer sentences than hackers, but I doubt that’ll be the case in 10 years, just as for a long time we thought America had the most social mobility in the West, when that hasn’t been true for a couple decades, at least.
If convicted of hacking-related crimes, Lostutter could face up to 10 years behind bars—far more than the one- and two-year sentences doled out to the Steubenville rapists.
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