Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Civil Liberties Page 5 of 8

The Ethics of Torture 101

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On December 10, 2014

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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.

The CIA Torture Report

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On December 9, 2014

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Just a few quick points:

  • It seems HQ wanted more torture than those in the field did, and would insist;
  • Torture,  Stirling Newberry once told me, is about sending information “we torture”, not getting it;
  • But really, torture can provide any info you want, like that Saddam has WMD;
  • It is interesting that the report is so negative.  Maybe the CIA screwed up by spying on Congress and getting caught?

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.

 

The Attack In Ottawa will be used to justify losing more rights

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On October 23, 2014

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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.

Snowden, Manning and the role of government secrecy

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On August 2, 2013

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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.

Yeah, rape < Hacking to out rapists

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On June 7, 2013

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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.

This is your justice system. This is what they think of women.  Remember, Prosecutors have discretion, even in the face of bad laws.  Let’s see what this prosecutor does.  Lostutter is the hacker who outed the Steubenville rapists.

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.

 

Heckling Mrs. Obama is entirely productive

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On June 6, 2013

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Yes, yes it is.  You get things from our elites by making their personal lives miserable. Hammer them everywhere they go.  This has been particularly true of gay protestors, who have received support from Obama, to the extent they have, by cutting donations till they got it, and by heckling him.

Why should Obama, or any politician, or any oligarch, give you anything if you can’t hurt them, or help them, and won’t make not hurting them, or helping them, conditional on them doing what you want?  You think you can reason ethically with them?

Amazing, just amazing.

Is it possible to be stupider than Gloria Feldt, Former Head of Planned Parenthood?

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On January 26, 2012

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Ms. Feldt:

Where have you been these last three years, Mr. President? Welcome back.

He was doing what he believed in.  Now it’s an election year, and he’s pandering.  You, Ms. Feldt, are exactly why women are losing their abortion rights.  With leaders like you and Obama who needs enemies?

(h/t Americablog)

When Medicare is destroyed is only a matter of when

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On April 5, 2011

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Folks, this won’t pass this year, but a version of it will pass:

That plan would transform Medicare from a government insurance program to one in which seniors would chose from private, federally subsidized coverage. Americans 55 and older would stay in the current system.

Remember, Obama’s health care reform was essentially the Republican plan from the 90s.  The Republicans, whom everyone was sneering at for running crazies, have put in place a team of hard right ideologues, who have moved DC significantly to the right even of where it was.  At some point they will pass this, because they want it badly, and the Democrats have no alternative vision other than “right wing, but not as right wing”, which goes nowhere.

I’ve said this before: get out.  If you can’t get out, get your kids out.  This is not going to end well.  Obama has institutionalized Bush rather than rolling him back, and in some areas, such as civil liberties and unilateral Presidential war powers, has actually moved further to the right than Bush was.  It is not impossible that this will get better in the next couple decades (as 5 year old Ian once argued, almost nothing is impossible), but it is unlikely.  Americans spent the last 35 years spending their retirement, their children’s retirement and running infrastructure and capital into the ground, and they were good with that.  Every effort to repeal Prop 13, for example, failed miserably.  America is the culture of the free lunch, what Americans don’t realize is that they’re the free lunch.

That doesn’t mean the US couldn’t fix its problems, in theory, but the point is that socially and politically, the US does not want to fix its problems.  It wants to continue to make them worse.  Yes, a majority of Americans may prefer different policies on some issues, but they aren’t willing to MAKE it happen or to actually pay for it (see Prop 13 above).  They aren’t willing to die for it, and at this point, that’s what it would take because your elites see no reason not take everything you have and turn you into slaves in all but name.  You will be debt slaves, who own almost nothing, not your house, not your phone, not your car, not your books.  Anything which can be rented to you, rather than than sold, will be.

Welcome to the Repo culture.  Everything you have, everything you are, can be taken away from you, and you are nothing but a series of revenue streams to your lords and masters.  Fail to pay, and you won’t even be allowed to be a debt and wage slave, you’ll be in a cardboard box or a debtor’s prison.

Modern Americans are mostly descended from people who didn’t say “this pisshole country is worth fighting for”, they’re descended from people who said “screw this, I’m outta here”.  Emulate them and leave, if you can’t leave do the other thing they were willing to do: prepare for a revolution and be willing to die in it.

Or accept your fate as slaves.

Your choice.

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