It's interesting (and disheartening) that the US attitude towards torture turned over the years since 9/11 from widespread opposition to widespread indifference. It wasn't like 9/11 happened and everyone threw away their moral center, it was a gradual erosion of opposition and normalization of torture.

I don't know about that, I detect an enthusiasm for it in some quarters that makes me feel sick to my stomach. Actually the whole thing makes me feel sick and outrageously, furiously angry. Kudos to Katharine and everyone else involved in this report.

I think 1 is way too passive. There was a huge public campaign to erode opposition and normalize criminal behavior. Based largely on disinformation, which was intentionally spread, and the suppression of known facts under bad faith classification.

1 3

I don't think this is right. There has never been a consensus against torture in ticking bomb (or other extreme) scenarios as shown by numerous depictions in pre 2001 popular entertainment (like the first Dirty Harry movie for example). 2001 just made such scenarios more salient.

I don't think this is right. There has never been a consensus against torture in ticking bomb (or other extreme) scenarios as shown by numerous depictions in pre 2001 popular entertainment (like the first Dirty Harry movie for example).

The thing is such "extreme scenarios" only happen in Dirty Harry movies (and 24). People don't approve of torture in order to address such situations, they bring up these hypothetical situations in order to justify torture.

4. A large part of the campaign I referred to in 3 was defining ticking time bomb scenarios down to the point where it's ok to torture a person to find out if there is a ticking time bomb. It's especially easy to do if you can get folks to accept that (a) that which has long be recognized as torture really isn't and (b) whatever consensus there may have been doesn't apply to *those* people.

5

The thing is such "extreme scenarios" only happen in Dirty Harry movies (and 24). People don't approve of torture in order to address such situations, they bring up these hypothetical situations in order to justify torture.

911 made people less confident that "extreme scenarios" never happen.

911 made people less confident that "extreme scenarios" never happen.

But there's no evidence that 911 was anything like a "we could stop the bomb going off if only that dreamy Kiefer Sutherland were allowed to torture this guy!" scenario.

(Katherine, if you're around, what's your first take on the ATS opinion today? I like the Breyer approach a lot better, and can't see any good reason for Kennedy not to have concurred with it, rather than with the Roberts opinion.)

Thanks LB. The website is www.detaineetaskforce.org. I think it's a little slow due to heavy traffic.

I had the heaviest involvement chapters 3, 6, 7, 10, and the appendices. 3 is on Iraq, 6 is on the involvement of medical personnel (including hunger strikes), 7 is the "ticking time bomb"/efficacy meshugas, and 10 is on the Obama administration. Not to diminish the rest of the report. Ch. 1 is on Guantanamo and has a really interesting interview with a former ICRC rep, Ch. 2 is on Afghanistan & includes some interviews on those awful Bagram homicides, Ch. 4 is on the legal stuff, Ch. 5 is on rendition & black sites, Ch. 8 contains a lot from detainee interviews, Ch. 9 on "recidivism" from GTMO, 11 is on role of Congress.

Our co-chair is Asa Hutchinson, better known for being the NRA school safety task force guy & a GOP candidate for governor of Arkansas. Bipartisanship!

8 is irrelevant - it's certainly the propaganda that was promoted.

People don't approve of torture in order to address such situations, they bring up these hypothetical situations in order to justify torture.

The same sort of hypothetical extreme situations are evoked to justify the need for assault weapons in the home:

An assault weapon in the hands of a young woman defending her babies in her home becomes a defense weapon. And the peace of mind that a woman has as she's facing three, four, five violent attackers, intruders in her home, with her children screaming in the background, the peace of mind that she has knowing that she has a scary-looking gun gives her more courage when she's fighting hardened, violent criminals.

Yes. That happens all the time. Not an exaggeration at all.

10: Ah, I tried that but kept getting error messages.

9: bad, bad news. I preferred Breyer's argument too; haven't really had time or inclination to really dive in though.

Torture at Guantanamo is a weird issue for me, because I largely wasn't reading blogs yet, and I really didn't give the issue as much importance as it was due. I had a sort of general cynicism that "oh, we've probably always been doing this sort of thing. We're shitheads. What's new?"

I was actually surprised to find out how horrified well-informed people were, and had to rewrite my historical assumptions about whether or not this kind of thing happened all the time.

There has never been a consensus against torture in ticking bomb (or other extreme) scenarios as shown by numerous depictions in pre 2001 popular entertainment (like the first Dirty Harry movie for example).

I think the rise of vengence porn movies in the 70s really did do a lot to glorify the sadistic treatment of "bad guys."

I'm happy to lay a share of the blame for Gitmo at the feet of Dirty Harry, the Death Wish movies, and Frank Miller's Batman.

I also blame Frank Miller for my failure to close italics.

Fascist twerp.

More directly relevant to the topic of torture than my last comment, has there been any discussion here of the Dick Cheney documentary that Showtime has been showing lately?

We made the Onion! I am grinning.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/nonpartisan-review-concludes-us-engaged-in-torture,32080/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=standard-post:quote:default

and had to rewrite my historical assumptions about whether or not this kind of thing happened all the time.

I figured it did happen all the time, back during the Vietnam War and earlier. Or was there some kind of morality that made the wholesale slaughter of civilian populations okay, but put torture beyond the pale?

20 was basically my thinking too, and I have no idea. I just extrapolated based on how appalled very smart people were by the idea that we were willing to torture prisoners.

18: It's remarkable how strongly he still believes in everything he did. No self doubt, no introspection, just an ironclad conviction of his own rightness.

For those who haven't seen it - it's worth a watch.

There has never been a consensus against torture in ticking bomb (or other extreme) scenarios as shown by numerous depictions in pre 2001 popular entertainment (like the first Dirty Harry movie for example).

Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause... for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country." - George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775

We weren't always as sick and perverted a country as we are now. Of course, I'm sure no 'extreme' situations threatening the future of the country occurred during the Revolutionary War.

Speaking of perverted, 'Zero Dark Thirty' is a pornographic advertisement for torture and an evil movie.

We weren't always as sick and perverted a country as we are now.

This seems silly. I think we behaved badly for the first two hundred years as well as the last few.

24: It's not just behaving badly, I think that's much too abstract a view of morality. Obviously there was human slavery when Washington was speaking, and slavery is evil, just as torture is. Capital punishment was also accepted (as Washington's quote shows). But torture is particularly perverted and sadistic. Someone could be a slaveowner because they were born into and participated in an evil system. But if they savagely beat, tortured, and humiliated their slaves we would correctly judge them as particularly depraved. Washington's quote shows that at least at the time key leaders had a clear moral compass on this issue. The ban on cruel and unusual punishment in the Constitution also relates to this. There is a sadism in popular culture now that I think is sick.

Further to 24:
After the battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879, eleven British soldiers were awarded the Victoria Cross - the highest award for gallantry in battle. Which battle in US history saw the highest number of Medals of Honor awarded?

a) Gettysburg, 1863
b) The Wilderness, 1864
c) Belleau Wood, 1918
d) Normandy, 1944
e) Iwo Jima, 1945
f) the Massacre at Wounded Knee, 1890

20: One supposes that this sort of thing took place. The Bush/Cheney innovation was to make torture a matter of explicit public policy. We used to at least pretend to be the good guys, and I think that pretense has a significant effect on behavior. When the NYT and its ilk characterize torture as "harsh" - not even "brutal," mind you - that's a real change, and it matters.

I was fascinated by the NYT story a few years back that said that Obama had forbidden harsh treatment of prisoners. This was false, of course - interrogators could still talk smack about detainees' mommas, deprive them of amenities and do other harsh things. What Obama actually banned was torture, but the NYT was so tied to its euphemism that it couldn't discuss the issue at all.

I don't buy 25. The more-or-less wholesale massacre of Native Americans fell into that spectrum how exactly?

But if they savagely beat, tortured, and humiliated their slaves we would correctly judge them as particularly depraved

This seems to be suggesting that most slaveowners did not beat, torture or humiliate their slaves, and that seems like a wobbly assumption to make.

It was an accepted ideal that the US doesn't torture. We may not have always lived up to it but now the ideal itself seems to have been discarded.

One supposes that this sort of thing took place. The Bush/Cheney innovation was to make torture a matter of explicit public policy. We used to at least pretend to be the good guys, and I think that pretense has a significant effect on behavior. When the NYT and its ilk characterize torture as "harsh" - not even "brutal," mind you - that's a real change, and it matters.

Exactly this. I wouldn't have been shocked by any story about our military or the CIA actually doing anything at all (well, I'm shockable depending on gruesome details, but not in the sense of 'we don't do that sort of thing') to a prisoner in a prior war, so long as it was treated by the perpetrators as a violation of law that had to be covered up. What freaked me out about our post 9-11 actions was what we were willing to claim was legitimate. And like pf, I believe that claiming something as legitimate has a significant effect on how much of it is likely to happen.

Pwned by politicalfootball, and he said it better.

It's the high-level authorization & the direct involvement of U.S. personnel that's different. But I'm not going to say that massacring civilians, slavery, rape etc. are better than torture--it's just that some norms have gotten stronger and others have weakened.

It was an accepted ideal that the US doesn't torture. We may not have always lived up to it but now the ideal itself seems to have been discarded.

Not just an ideal, but a treaty obligation, domestic law and constitutional principle. All of which have been discarded, explicitly or implicitly.

sadism in popular culture now

I do not want to dilute Dick Cheney's evil, or the widespread attitudes that led to recreational torture at Abu Ghraib. I'm glad the report was written, and hope it will be widely read.

But I don't think this is new. Treatment of American Indians was unimaginably brutal in the 1860s.

It was an accepted ideal that the US doesn't torture. We may not have always lived up to it but now the ideal itself seems to have been discarded.

Maybe this was my blind spot. Somehow I had the ideal intact with respect to warrantless wire-tapping - ie I knew we hadn't lived up to our ideal, but I was shocked when it was casually legalized. But I didn't have the ideal intact with respect to torture. (Specifically torture of foreign detainees. I put everything foreign-policy related into a big unethical mushpot of torture/death/suffering.)

(Like, I had/have a more intact ideal that we don't torture citizens. I just didn't think it was ever the case that we pretended not to torture foreign detainees.

I'm sort of retroactively putting words to what was general impressions at the time.)

I do agree that a real change occurred, under my radar, of the nature that you all are describing.

However, I also think my vague impressions were part of why certain groups of people who should have been outraged were more complacent.

Treatment of American Indians was unimaginably brutal in the 1860s.

We are assured that it was the Christian thing to do

37 is weird to me. I wonder if I missed a Vietnam-related level of cynicism or something.

I mean, I read a million and a half spy novels in the 80's because Dad left a trail of them in his wake wherever he went, and there was all sorts of US bad behavior in them, but it was always clearly not okay.

There was something I saw a couple of months ago that for pretty much the entire history of human rights discourse, including among its pioneers, it has been completely normal to view restrictively the group of people who have natural rights, even if the group so viewed was broader than in the past. So Washington probably wasn't at all thinking about Native Americans, but it was still an ideal that could be extended.

Wasn't there a lot of outrage at waterboarding in the Philippines in the 1900s?

28: probably somewhere around the same place that killing two million Vietnamese fell in with the civil rights victories in the 1960s.

29: there were definitely differences in treatment that were recognized as such. Washington seems to have been one of the better ones.

Like, I had/have a more intact ideal that we don't torture citizens.

And this I've jumped up and down about before, but this distinction (which all sorts of people make, I'm the weirdo here) freaks me out unspeakably. The rules on this sort of thing are all about how you treat enemies, not your own people. The idea that someone has no protections because they're an enemy is really disturbing to me.

My experience was that after the revelations of torture came out, it was pointed out that most of this stuff happens to normal prisoners in normal US prisons all the time, so, you know, it's all hopeless.

so long as it was treated by the perpetrators as a violation of law that had to be covered up. What freaked me out about our post 9-11 actions was what we were willing to claim was legitimate.

By way of contrast, embarrassment over the the torture of prisoners resulted in the commutation of death sentences for the perpetrators of the most notorious war crime against U.S. forces in the European theater of WWII.

I mean, I read a million and a half spy novels in the 80's because Dad left a trail of them in his wake wherever he went, and there was all sorts of US bad behavior in them, but it was always clearly not okay.

However, it paved the way for it being okay. Since you get the message that the CIA et al. are always doing bad things but have to pretend they aren't ... as we enter the Information Age where you can't cover things up anymore, they can no longer pretend they think these are bad things to do.

Katherine and LB's point that Guantanamo is a betrayal of an ideal by the people resposnsible for it is probably the way to look at this. I understand intellectually that ideals are powerful. But that resonates a lot less for me than the shambolic homemade violence photographed for fun at Abu Ghraib.

I blame A Few Good Men. Not that I've ever seen it, I've just seen the clip of the "You want me on that wall, you need me on that wall" speech.

47: I firmly believe that the one leads to the other. If the higher-ups can torture prisoners for information, they're the sort of thing that it's okay to torture, so doing it for fun is no biggie.

There has never been a consensus against torture in ticking bomb (or other extreme) scenarios

Even if we concede that the ethically optimal quantum of torture is non-zero (which I do not), it still doesn't follow that torture should ever be legally permissible. You want the people weighing whether this truly is a ticking time bomb scenario to make that determination full in the knowledge that they can and will go to jail for it. If they're right, and they save NYC from nuclear destruction, surely a Presidential pardon will be in the offing.

The twin apologists for imperialistic atrocities, Rudyard Kipling and Aaron Sorkin.

There's widespread recognition today that what was done to Natives -- at Sand Creek, for example -- is completely beyond the pale for civilized people. Ditto waterboarding in the Philippines.

And indeed, as noted in 34 above, this has been a subject of increasing legal protection -- the Geneva Conventions were an improvement on the Hague Convention, etc. It's not just a rejection of longstanding legal principle (going back to the decades long struggle to impose the rule of law on the Stuarts), but a swimming against the modern tide. And pervasive dishonesty used to sell it. (There's a smart guy who says that a good policy doesn't need a bunch of lies to justify it.)

To come back to JBS, though, I don't think it's a good idea to overstate non-elite consensus. Not on evolution, any item of the Bill of Rights (except the Second Amendment), laws of war, the nature of reality generally.

I mean, I read a million and a half spy novels in the 80's because Dad left a trail of them in his wake wherever he went, and there was all sorts of US bad behavior in them, but it was always clearly not okay.

As I've mentioned before, "Clear and Present Danger" is an excellent example of this. http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_11865.html#1400240

48 -- Watch the movie! The climax isn't Nicholson saying "you want me on that wall," it 'you're going to jail, you son of a bitch.'

Torture was more or less routine in US police departments through at least the 1940s, with only the most obviously coerced and false confessions creating legal problems for the state. Prisons had whipping posts and severe forms of physical punishment through the early 20th Century; Sing Sing in New York famously had a water torture machine. The treatment of uniformed foreign military is generally not a reliable guide to attitudes towards torture in the US.

*not to mention that literally thousands of US citizens are right now routinely subjected to torture and rape as bad or worse than that at Guantanamo or Bagram -- but due to more or less officially sanctioned violence from other prisoners, not (for the most part) from guards.

48, 54: There probably isn't a better illustration of just how crazy this country has gone than the fact that Jack Nicholson's character has gone from the villain to the hero.

55: Right, isn't that what 'the third degree' is? Police torture?

The right has always supported torture, but refrained from explicitly arguing for this because of a very real sense that it was not considered an acceptable opinion by serious people. After 9/11 the serious people were revealed as cowards who realized they didn't have as much principled opposition to torture as they'd thought; they had just never realized that they too could be targets.

55 -- And while the legal remedies available to domestic prisoners who are subject to such things are not exactly robust, they exist. On paper, at least.

We used to want to be the kind of country Justice Black meant when he wrote, in Chambers v. Florida,

We are not impressed by the argument that law enforcement methods such as those under review are necessary to uphold our laws.* The Constitution proscribes such lawless means irrespective of the end. And this argument flouts the basic principle that all people must stand on an equality before the bar of justice in every American court. Today, as in ages past, we are not without tragic proof that the exalted power of some governments to punish manufactured crime dictatorially is the handmaid of tyranny. Under our constitutional system, courts stand against any winds that blow as havens of refuge for those who might otherwise suffer because they are helpless, weak, outnumbered, or because they are nonconforming victims of prejudice and public excitement. Due process of law, preserved for all by our Constitution, commands that no such practice as that disclosed by this record shall send any accused to his death. No higher duty, no more solemn responsibility, rests upon this Court than that of translating into living law and maintaining this constitutional shield deliberately planned and inscribed for the benefit of every human being subject to our Constitution -- of whatever race, creed or persuasion.

* The police practices here examined are to some degree widespread throughout our country. See Report of Comm. on Lawless Enforcement of the Law (Amer. Bar Ass'n) 1 Amer.Journ. of Pol.Sci., 575; Note 43 H.L.R. 617; IV National Commission On Law Observance And Enforcement, supra, Ch. 2, § 4. Yet our national record for crime detection and criminal law enforcement compares poorly with that of Great Britain, where secret interrogation of an accused or suspect is not tolerated. See Report of Comm. on Lawless Enforcement of the Law, supra, 588; 43 H.L.R., supra, 618. It has even been suggested that the use of the "third degree" has lowered the esteem in which administration of justice is held by the public, and has engendered an attitude of hostility to and unwillingness to cooperate with the police on the part of many people. See IV National Commission, etc., supra, p. 190. And, after scholarly investigation, the conclusion has been reached "that such methods, aside from their brutality, tend in the long run to defeat their own purpose; they encourage inefficiency on the part of the police."

55: the torture we did post-2001 seems a lot worse than 1940s police departments (although it might have been comparable to 1940s prisons, I don't know). It had some similarities to 1940s Russian interrogation techniques under Stalin. I do agree that the acceptance of inhumane practices in modern prisons, and the vast expansion of incarceration since the 1940s, has been a factor in normalizing this behavior.

60: For some reason, this brought a non-Nero Wolfe Rex Stout novel to mind, where the heroine is subjected to extended sleep deprivation in a police interrogation. (Can't remember the name, but weird book. Tragic Cherokee hero, alienated from his culture, lots of fashion design, an astronomically designed sundial/stonehengy kind of tomb, and a plotline depending on the excitingly new technological development of disposable tissues).

Was effective torture in prisons (whether by authorities or by other prisoners) popularly accepted as part of the punishment in, say, the first half of the 20th century? I'm genuinely curious.

Was it a Tecumseh Fox book?

There probably isn't a better illustration of just how crazy this country has gone than the fact that Jack Nicholson's character has gone from the villain to the hero.

Sadly, I think people started quoting Jack Nicholson's final speech approvingly more or less right off the bat.

Sort of like Gordon Gekko with "greed is good".

Although to be fair to JBS, there probably hasn't been a consensus in Florida that it's uncivilized to beat a confession out of a black man accused of a "most dastardly and atrocious crime . . .[that] naturally aroused great and well justified public indignation." (As the Florida Supreme Court described it.)

There's a tension in this discussion between, on the one hand, the purely inhumane immorality of such things as massacre of native Americans, and the torture of prisoners (these things seem equally reprehensible) -- and on the other hand, the difference between them, having to do with the rule of law. Torture, and cruel and unusual punishment, are unacceptable by rule of law.

Various references upthread to our ideals sit strangely for me: I keep wanting to insist that torture is wrong *even if* it weren't prohibited by law.

Sorry, I'm still trying to formulate this in a coherent manner.

63: No, Cramer's the only familiar character, but the plucky fashion designer who loves the millionaire playboy tragic Cherokee dude does more solving than anyone else. Cramer's the one subjecting her to sleep deprivation, but we're not supposed to hold it against him.

Yeah I dunno, the facts of Brown v Mississippi were extreme and prompted the Supreme Court to act, but still a conviction based on the most egregious conceivable torture was upheld by state trial and supreme courts. And note that the decision was notable as one of the first times there was federal judicial intervention on the issue, not because judicial rejections of torture-based confessions were routine.

(Or 25 to 40 black men, one of whom might have been the perp. http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0309_0227_ZO.html)

And this I've jumped up and down about before, but this distinction (which all sorts of people make, I'm the weirdo here) freaks me out unspeakably. The rules on this sort of thing are all about how you treat enemies, not your own people. The idea that someone has no protections because they're an enemy is really disturbing to me.

I never said I thought it was an ethical distinction. I just thought it was a widely held distinction.

For early 20th century policing, the key document is the Wickersham Report of 1931 which found widespread torture and brutality throughout departments. I can't find a link that works to a copy.

I keep wanting to insist that torture is wrong *even if* it weren't prohibited by law.

Sure -- where torture isn't illegal, that's diagnostic of the law being bad.

I'm not sure exactly why I have this reaction to law-of-war and torture issues, because generally I'm really not idealistic about how great our laws are. But a large part of what winds me up about these issues is that a large part of what we've done since 9-11 has been changing a system of law that was fairly laudable on these issues, even if imperfectly enforced, to one that's horrible. And what I hold against Obama is that he's done very very little to roll that back.

70: You're right that it's widely held; I'm not calling you a bad person for thinking that there was a serious distinction there. It just seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of what the law of war is for, to think that it wouldn't apply to people that we're at war with.

68 -- Right. The complaint isn't that the highest officials sanctioned illegal torture in the 1850s, 1902, 1936, or 1940. They did so in the 21st century, lying about it all the while, and the victims have no recourse at all. Beyond suppression of evidence, but that only means something if they're bringing you to trial.

What kind of asshole reads Brown and Chambers, says oh well, that's what we traditionally do, and argues for the torture of black prisoners by the police? An asshole beyond the pale, that's who.

70 -- Only among people looking to make excuses. It's as valid as using race to sanction state violence (and, since we're talking about brown people, not entirely irrelevant here).

I'm put in mind of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I'm off for a bit now, so I can't look further. I seem to recall that the U.S. fairly recently declined to sign off on some revision of the declaration: something to do with women, or with dedication to equalization of nations?

74 -- sure, of course I agree. I just take issue with the idea that Americans didn't torture people until Dick Cheney came along. That's too pat an answer. As in so many other areas, the actions of conservatives are designed to obviate all the progress various egalitarian reform movements made in the 20th century and return us to a world in which hierarchies at all levels are preserved through coercion and violence. Torture isn't just an incidental aspect of 9/11 or some radical innovation of Cheney and friends -- tolerance for torture in the name of preserving hierarchy is part and parcel of the conservative-libertarian movement in this country generally, and needs to be seen in its domestic context and history.

See ch. 3 for discussion of how authorized torture led to unauthorized torture at Abu Ghraib.

77 - Sure, we tortured people, but Cheney & Co. decided to drop all pretense of plausible deniability and elevate torture to the status of official policy of the United States of America. Of course, it was wrapped in legalese so that anything the U.S. did was, by definition, not "torture" but rather Enhanced Interrogation Techniques™.

Further to 76, I believe what the US has so far declined to ratify is the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Under "Reservations" stated by members:

United States - Amnesty International writes that "The United States signed the Covenant in 1979 under the Carter administration but is not fully bound by it until it is ratified. For political reasons, the Carter administration did not push for the necessary review of the Covenant by the Senate, which must give its 'advice and consent' before the US can ratify a treaty. The Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations took the view that economic, social, and cultural rights were not really rights but merely desirable social goals and therefore should not be the object of binding treaties. The Clinton Administration did not deny the nature of these rights but did not find it politically expedient to engage in a battle with Congress over the Covenant. The George W. Bush administration followed in line with the view of the previous Bush administration."[56] The Obama Administration stated "The Administration does not seek action at this time" on the Covenant.[57] The Heritage Foundation, a critical conservative think tank, argues that signing it would obligate the introduction of policies that it opposes such as universal health care.[58]

That doesn't have much to do with torture, though it does have to do with the US's apparent preference for incarcerating or otherwise disenfranchising people.

I just take issue with the idea that Americans didn't torture people until Dick Cheney came along.

Which is what nobody is saying. As one astute observer said in comment 27, and others have echoed, it's the normalization that's the problem.

What we need is to develop some sort of concept for the agenda-setting function performed by politicians, the media and regular citizens. Such a concept would help us reflect on the way that behaviors that were once considered abhorrent have now become publicly accepted. It's too bad there's no catchy phrase for that phenomenon.

81 was me, of course.

It's too bad there's no catchy phrase for that phenomenon.

Something about how things can be openly seen now -- they're overt and visible, as if through glass. Overt on window?

Wait, the "Overton Window" now means preparing classified legal memoranda to preemptively immunize torture from prosecution in the face of laws banning torture? I'm confused.

Defining deviance down.

If anything, things like the Yoo memo and the conscious decision by Bush and Cheney to become explicit torturers was necessary because torture is now less normalized -- both as a formal matter of law and as a matter of public attitude -- than it was in the not-very-distant past. The statutory prohibition on torture in the US Code was, I think, enacted in 1994 to implement a treaty the US acceded to in the 1980s, and while I certainly think it was unconstitutional to torture prior to that date the fact that the torture-banning statute was enacted so late is significant. The Bush people had to be explicit about acknowledging torture as OK, without using that word (both in terms of their nonsensical lawyering, which they tried to keep secret, and in their public statements) because of formal legal prohibitions and otherwise. None of these concerns were applicable in, e.g., our war in the Philippines.

Yeah, but there's also Fenton and Blackstone and all that. I think much of the evolution you are describing with respect to torture is actually an ebbing of racism.

I object to the slandering of Dirty Harry, who had a legit ticking time bomb type scenario and whose opposition to vigilantism was the entire plot of Magnum Force.

is actually an ebbing of racism

Maybe that's right -- as I tried to say in 77, the concepts are all linked.

26 gets it right. Also, slaveowners routinely tortured their slaves, men and women alike, and the various Indian wars were often, though not always, an excuse to practice torture on a massive scale.

Oh look, it's 29.

Reading on, the repeated pwning is a kind of torture.

Oh, I forgot to mention that the prosecutor in Brown v. Mississippi -- that is, the guy who argued that it was just fine for the state to convict based on nothing more than confessions obtained by literally whipping the defendants until they said they'd committed the crime -- was John C. Stennis, US Senator until 1989, and namesake of this ship commissioned in 1995.

My current torture is sitting in my idiot doctor's waiting room with FM radio and a kvetchy old lady who keeps telling the people who brought her she wants to leave and hates waiting. Me too, old kvetch, me too. It looks like I should get in there 1-1.5 hours after my appointment. My doctor is an idiot. If he weren't so free and easy with the rx pad, I would have found another doctor years ago.

The current song is "Urgent." Or I guess that's what it's called. That's pretty much its only lyric.

It's by a band called Foreigner. Try some Blue Oyster Cult for an antidote, or J Giels Band's excellent hit Centerfold. Think of the artwork of Patrick Nagel.

I'm not feigning ignorance of the song. I remember it, just not much about it, on account of it is awful.

Now "Jesse's Girl" and the old lady just said "if I don't get my hair done I'm gonna kill myself."

Oh, Sally was just listening to some recent person covering Jesse's Girl in an acoustic kind of way, which I found very strange.

I would like to hear Cathy Berberian cover it as an 18th century Italian art song.

That's one roulade she can't sing, Smearcase.

"Jessie's Girl" is awesome and I will cut anyone who says otherwise.

"Jessie's Girl" is awesome and I will cut anyone who says otherwise.

Obligatory Penny Arcarde

Am I the only person who always catches myself singing "how I wish that I was Jesse's Girl?" (or were, when I'm feelin' subjectivey)

or J Giels Band's excellent hit Centerfold

Fun times: sing the guitar hook for this, followed by the main theme of Peter and the Wolf, followed by the Smurfs theme song.

104: No, not at all.

Further to 106: I know you and I have discussed this, but the hoohole is particularly big today.

26: Was Victoria cross because Prince Albert was in a can?

40

I mean, I read a million and a half spy novels in the 80's because Dad left a trail of them in his wake wherever he went, and there was all sorts of US bad behavior in them, but it was always clearly not okay.

What does "clearly not okay" mean here? For example James Bond had a license to kill which isn't okay in general but was depicted as okay for a select few.

The Matt Helm spy novels similarly depict torture (mostly just alluded to) as effective for obtaining information and okay in extreme circumstances.

88

I object to the slandering of Dirty Harry, who had a legit ticking time bomb type scenario ...

Actually it wasn't entirely legit as the girl was already dead.

Haven't read the comments yet, but I wanted to congratulate Katherine for working on this. I read as much as I could last night, and discussed it with my students in class today.

I'm just going to fight through the pwnage here.

But if they savagely beat, tortured, and humiliated their slaves we would correctly judge them as particularly depraved

everybody savagely beat, tortured and humiliated their slaves. if they didn't do it themselves because they had a weak stomach, they had someone else do it. everybody. it's perfectly sensible to talk about high ideals, and about progress made in the struggle against racism and brutality by the police forces and armed forces overseas. but it's really doing everyone a disservice to pretend that there was such a thing as "slavery" that wasn't "savage beating, torture, humiliation, and rape." that's just the thing that slavery was. psychological domination is only going to get you so far in holding tens and hundreds of thousands of people captive but not behind bars and not killing you in your sleep. it ain't going to get you all the way to chattel slavery, anyway.

this is somewhat irrelevant though, and thanks katherine for keeping up the good fight.