I think that it's 80% PR, playing to the Republican base. It can't be intelligence-gathering any more, and it can't even be justice.

PR, plus standard bureaucratic inertia, where SOP becomes its own justification.

PR, plus standard bureaucratic inertia

All covered with a sadism reduction sauce.

SOP--don't forget CYA. These people are in blood, stepped in so far, that should they wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er.

I.e.--these inmates are witnesses to crimes--crimes of torture and worse. The administration basically has to snuff these witnesses, or they'll go to jail.

Snuff them or render them incapable of testifying.

(and, jesus, to be reduced to caring about professional football).

Regardless of what we think they did (that is, there are certainly people in Guantanamo who were in Al Qaeda training camps, and who fired weapons at Americans.

Somewhat tangential and not directed at LB, this, developed into an argument by the government, always bugs the hell out of me. Usually it runs something like this: 'they're not innocent, they FIRED AT AMERICANS.' To which I feel alone in thinking that firing at Americans is a perfectly sensible response when Americans invade your country. Isn't that what people do when invaded? Fight back?

We're acting like every Tom, Dick, and Hamid has bin Laden's cell phone number, and is a conspirator, but it seems to me that a non-negligible percentage of Gitmo prisoners are there because their country ended up at war and they were fighting in it. We normally recognize this with soldiers (hence POW treatment rules); this shouldn't be that hard.

We seem to be systematically ill-treating our prisoners in a way that doesn't make any legitimate sense.

Punishment as a sort of communal catharsis? It'd explain the overkill.

and, jesus, to be reduced to caring about professional football

Somebody call Homeland Security on this America-hater right now.

Seriously. Real patriots debate the BCS.

I think Emerson's actually right with 1, it's a political policy: the point is that these people have already been convicted in the public's mind (they're "terrorists"), and being tough on terrorists is seen as a good thing. Putting Democrats in a position where to do something about this they have to whine, weakly, "ohh but you're being mean to the terrorists... not protecting their dignity", etc. lets Republicans paint Democrats as weak on terror, more concerned about making sure the terrorists are nice and comfortable than about protecting Americans. (And come on, it's not like we "torture" them, don't be silly. Torture is pulling out fingernails and cutting off tongues.)

The parenthetical in 8 was supposed to be a right-wing apologist talking, not me.

The BCS is fucking bullshit. I really don't understand. Drop the season to 10 games, and preserve the various bowls as early round games in a 16 team playoff system. Who could possibly be opposed to this?

You're overlooking the likelihood that Padilla knows how to build a dirty bomb using only his tears and the Tribune sports page, LB.

1: Agreed with an addition. At this point, from the administration's perspective, what can we do with these folks? We can't try them in criminal courts based on evidence gleaned from illegal interrogation methods. We can't just release them -- if they didn't hate America before, they sure as hell do now. And just think about all the horrible (true) stories they'd spread in the press (foreign and domestic) about their detentions!

I don't think any of that means that we should keep doing what's being done in Gitmo. But from their perspective, there appears to be no possible endgame -- except (to illustrate kb's point at #3) an "accidental" fire at Guantanamo Bay which causes all of these troublesome people to expire.

What a clusterfuck.

To which I feel alone in thinking that firing at Americans is a perfectly sensible response when Americans invade your country. Isn't that what people do when invaded? Fight back?

4: The irony of the party of the former Confederacy arguing otherwise is not commented on enough, I feel.

Padilla, Gitmo and Abu G. are simply the Ledeen Doctrine writ small, smacking some poor bastard around makes certain classes of people feel better about our Manliness. There is no real thought or logic at the heart of it, just the desire to Be Badass, as though that were enough.

A good example of the CYA principle at work in detainee treatment is the case of Khaled El-Masri. El Masri was picked up by the CIA, tortured and then released without charges. His attempts to sue the government have been dismissed because the "seek to prove something that is a state secret." It sounds a lot like the state secret here is just "we tortured someone for no good reason."

The BCS is, indeed, fucking bullshit. Auburn must feel fantastic about Florida getting Auburn's rightful SEC makeup call.

are we going to look back, a few centuries from now, and find it incomprehensible that we could switch this easily between serious concern about our nation's moral health and snark about football?

Is this what it's like when your empire is crumbling, but hey the chariot races in the Colosseum are awesome and if you're not part of the Green chariot team you're a total loser?

Another interesting case is Omar Khadr, who not only fired at American soldiers, he actually killed one, and is now being tortured at Gitmo. The twist is that Khadr is a minor. He was fifteen years old when US soldiers entered the compound where is family was staying.

The Khadr case is a wonderful illustration of Emerson's point in 1. Any time anyone hints that torturing a child might be wrong, right wingers trot out the family of the soldier he killed and get everyone's blood lust up. Michelle Malkin is especially fond of this.

I think the only open question a this point is which is more irrational: the BCS or our adminstration's policies on detainee treatment? It's a tough call.

Another manifestation of the same problem: the no-fly list. No one gets off it -- there is no procedure to take someone off it. You can have a letter from the FBI Director acknowledging you're just someone with the same name, and the most it will help you is by disheartening your processors.

I think it's different from standard bureaucratic inertia. Bureaucracies at least have procedures you can try to follow. This is a determined refusal by the government to allow anybody to prove them wrong (no-fly list or habeas corpus).

When Padilla gets out, he should be given a couple million in reparations. The therapy bills would go into the hundreds of thousands.

20--
and season tickets can set you back, too.

Therapy, whatever. The man's life is nothing now but a future case history on how the Bill of Rights was suspended, yet again. A generation or two will invoke Padilla as a benchmark of American shame, and then at some point the political wind will shift and some Michelle Malkin clone will make big bucks arguing that not only was Padilla's treatment necessary, but the nation should do it again.

Hi there,

Well, I think we overlook one big explanation--we have created a military/police system where the cops and the soldiers think hurting people is fun. Or it's amusement in a dull situation. Or it's stress relief. Or it's a way to pass along some of the shit that they have to go through. Or it makes a hard job seem meaningful--"hey, we're torturing the bad guys and achieving something!" I don't think there's neccessarily some kind of secret order being passed around--"Subject Padilla to sensory deprivation and fill his cell with noxious gases"--this is the kind of thing that some bright officer or bored little gang of buddies comes up with. Remember the people who beat you up in high school?

People at the top don't have to give those kinds of orders--after all, giving orders leaves records that might, conceivably, make trouble. All they have to do is put helpless prisoners in the hands of a gang of thugs, maybe oppress the thugs a little so they're upset, and voila--torture!

I think we overlook one big explanation

See comment #2. And I think you're spot on.

I guess, but that doesn't really explain the flipped-out 'security' measures, like blindfolding Padilla and shackling the Gitmo prisoners. Those are policies, not individual abuses.

24--

maybe he thought you were referring to a sauce aimed at reducing the amount of sadism.

The more they're treated like they're dangerous, the more dangerous they seem. Which justifies the extreme measures. Which... &c., &c.

Given that our post-9/11 national security policies are based around These Guys Are Dangerous, Really, Trust Me, it makes a lot of sense.

25: I think a lot of sadists would get a kick out of using that kind of equipment. It is like military bondage play, only without the safe words.

In a review in the NYRB a couple of years ago, Edmund Morgan recounted how the British and Hessians readily slaughtered trapped and wounded American soldiers during the Revolutionary War, and continued,

"Washington did not countenance this kind of warfare. All wars beget atrocities, but as Fischer emphasizes, Washington 'often reminded his men that they were an army of liberty and freedom, and the rights for which they were fighting should extend even to their enemies.' He did his best to see to it that his prisoners of war were treated more humanely than the Americans, who suffered starvation and disease in British prison ships. To the officer he placed in charge of 211 prisoners taken at Princeton he gave orders to 'treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British army in their Treatment of our unfortunate brethren.' After the war, over three thousand Hessian soldiers elected to remain in a country where they enjoyed rights denied them at home."

Such are the perils of a pre-9/11 mindset.

a sauce aimed at reducing the amount of sadism.

That's pre-9/11 thinking, bitzer.

There's a cinematic element to it, too. A lot of movie depictions of interrogation involve elaborate, weird confinement devices. I'm thinking of Silence of the Lambs, or the nasty neck shackle used on a Cylon prisoner in the recent episode where the humans contemplated genocide.

Whoa.

in 31 "episode" should be "Battlestar episode"

my first thought was "Tommy".

(You see, kids, many years ago, before you were born, there was a popular musical group that called itself "The Who". I know, funny old name, isn't it? Well, they tried to write what they called a "rock opera"--well, by "rock" they were referring to what we called back then "rock and roll"--and the story was....)

The more they're treated like they're dangerous, the more dangerous they seem. Which justifies the extreme measures. Which... &c., &c.

I think this is exactly it. And they're treated as dangerous in the first place because we have to justify to ourselves that fact that they're being held without trial or charge.

More Padilla pictures here.

"Bureaucratic" might be the wrong word, because we are transiioning between a bureaucracy with relentless procedures and something more lawless which, howver, shares the relentlessness and self-assurance of bureaucracy.

I'm reluctant to credit this to individual motivateions, though. Certainly in a system like this the natural sadists will rise to the top, and latent sadists will find their true selves, but I don't think of the low level individuals as causal.

I mostly agree with the post but have a few quibbles. There are at least two more reasons for harsh treatment, deterrence and conversion (or reeducation or brainwashing). But they mostly don't seem to apply here either.

Also I don't think punishment for bad behavior in detention should require a formal trial. But again this does not explain most of the ill treatment.

Finally I don't think this is the result of a calculated plan to terrorize. A calculated plan to humiliate is more plausible (although irrational) but I think the most likely explanation is that this is just more routine Bush administration blundering and incompetence.

38--
"this is just more routine Bush administration blundering and incompetence."

RICE: First of all, we don't send prisoners off to be tortured, Fafnir. We just transport prisoners to countries where torture happens to be legal and where they happen to end up getting tortured.
FB: Well that explains everything then! It's all just a wacky misunderstanding, like that episode a Three's Company where Jack sends Janet off to Uzbekistan to get boiled alive by the secret police.
RICE: I'd also like to point out that whenever we send a prisoner to a country that routinely tortures prisoners, that country promises us NOT to torture them.
FB: And then they get tortured anyway!
RICE: Yes, they do! It's very strange.
FB: Over and over again, every time! That's gotta be so frustrating.
RICE: Oh it is, it is.
FB: So the first time you kidnap a prisoner an send him to Saudi Arabia you're like "don't torture this guy" an they're all "we totally won't" an then they go an torture him an you're all "ooh Saudi Arabia I told you not to torture him!" an they're all "oh we're sorry, we promise next time" an then you go "well you better" an you send em the next guy an they torture him too an you go "oh man Saudi Arabia you did it AGAIN!"

god I miss fafblog.

"I can't come up with a motivation for it that doesn't make us a terrorist state."

Well, the snarky but true answer to this dilemma, is, of course, that the US is a terrorist state.*

* With us Brits as willing helpers ...

Honestly, the link in 17, by the end of the article I was hoping the kid would die.

You mean "hoping he would die" to put him outta his misery, or because you hate him so?

14 (and 39/38) - I can even understand the rationale for claiming that what we do to a prisoner is a state secret. If we had (or, better yet, if Canada had) an amazing Interrogrator 3000 ray that could pull out your most dastardly terroristical secret unless you were thinking thoughts about the color yellow, I would want terrorists to keep having colorless green ideas. But can one of the lawyers here explain to me why judges haven't been able to get information in a closed court? Or appoint a special master with the appropriate security clearance to do a finding of facts? Because it's transparently obvious to even the casual observer that the state secret we're protecting in the El-Masri case is that we had a foreign intelligence service tortured the fuck out of a German citizen for the crime of going out of town after having a fight with his wife, which he compounded by having a funny name. It's a travesty, it makes the state privileges stuff a travesty, and if I were a German I'd be even more infuriated about it than I am as an American.

You really can't blunder your way into torture. It's clear enough that intent is there at more than one level, that nobody is surprised at what's happening and no one misunderstands what's being done, and that there's no possibility that the people at the top are unaware of what's going on.

Management manages. Saying that loud and clear can get you labelled a conspiracy theorist these days, though less so now than ten years ago. And there's nothing at all unusual about an organization knowingly and deliberately doing things that it won't admit publicly. That isn't exactly the case here, I don't think, but saying that organizations are trying to decieve the public, which they routinely do, often gets you labelled a conspiracy theorist too.

The cliche "Never explain by conspiracy which can as easily be explained by incompetence" never was that smart, and by now it's really dumb and should be retired.

"if I were a German I'd be even more infuriated about it than I am as an American."

I've said repeatedly that I think the EU nations ought to withdraw all judicial cooperation from the US. Any country that extra-judicially kidnaps people and tortures them or passes them to a third party for torture is a country with whom all judicial cooperation should be severed.

But it's never going to fucking happen.

"The cliche "Never explain by conspiracy [what] can as easily be explained by incompetence" never was that smart"

sure--but the cliché wasn't put into circulation just through inadvertence, incompetence, or stupidity.

It was spread intentionally. As part of the conspiracy!

31: Yes, cinematic. Why are those guards wearing badass helmets with visors? So unnecessary, so Hollywood. Action movies are the current state of our political imagination.

Snarkout, are you related to the Snarkout Boys at all?

John Emerson: It's not that the people at the lower levels are causal, like "Hey, there'd be no torture except that we have these bad proles down here", it's that we have bad proles in order to have torture. Not in a conscious, conspiracy-theory way, but in the sense that it's the most convenient thing if people-who-could-change-things let systems exist or create systems that brutalize the people who go through them.

44.---I also believe that the organizations responsible here are trying to deceive the lower-levels who have to carry out their policies and bear legal liability for (at least part of) it. If Rob Helpy-Chalk is correct about the cinematic aspect of the detention accessories, that theatricality is aimed not at the public--who sees very little of this stuff--but at the guards and interrogators. These are the people who are regularly trotted out to testify to the ultimate dangerousness of the detainees.

I'm suddenly reminded of the Muslim chaplain at GITMO who was initially charged with, what was it? treason, and later was dishonorably discharged under a charge of adultery.

45 - Except as in the case of Italy, where they apparently cooperated with us. People are getting indicted for that one, I think, although it's not an entirely analogous situation (the kidnappee wasn't the victim of mistaken identity, nor was he an Italian citizen), and part of the reason people are going down is as part of the de-Berlusconi-zation of the Italian intelligence services.

re: 50

Yeah, there has been co-operation. Particularly in eastern europe, but also in the UK, Italy, and other places. But there shouldn't be, dammit.

49: Not exactly deceive the lower levels, but create an atmosphere of danger and bad-assery for all concerned, including for those who make the rules and policies (and design the costumes). They're trying to convince themselves, it looks like.

42: Is that a serious question?

Hoping he would die because the situation he's in is literally unbearable. If I were him, I would prefer death.

Point taken; circulation of power and all that.

53 -- That's what I figured -- when I read you saying you hoped he would die I did a double-take, it took a minute to figure out what you probably meant, so I was just looking for confirmation.

44

"You really can't blunder your way into torture. ..."

Sure you can. You can have erroneous beliefs about its value in obtaining information and act on those beliefs.

Padilla really represents some (if not the majority) of the right's views of how criminals should be treated. No Miranda warnings, no attorney, no exclusionary rule and cruel and unusual punishment. The only new thing is the lack of a trial, which wouldn't be much of a trial anyway under their preferred rules so they have dispensed with it.

Every now and then you see an editor at Red State or some other conservative site lamenting the power of the state. But here they are, cheering on the state when it exercises that power to almost its fullest extent, stopping short only of summary execution (which, of course, some are calling for). When you look closer, it turns out their laments about the power of the state are limited (mostly) to how much taxes they are paying.

For far, far too many Republicans, one doesn't have to scratch deeply at all to reach the fascism underneath. What that party has transformed into over the past few decades is a frightening beast indeed.

Finally I don't think this is the result of a calculated plan to terrorize. A calculated plan to humiliate is more plausible (although irrational) but I think the most likely explanation is that this is just more routine Bush administration blundering and incompetence.

Come on. You don't accidentally adopt KGB techniques and implement them in your prison. It's not like slipping in the bath.

Nicely put post.

It really is shameful.

56: That's like saying you can blunder your way into bank robbery or rape. There are plenty of stupid people involved, but the decisionmakers and a lot of the people lower down know what they're doing. Plenty of stupid people rape and rob banks, but they're stupid criminals, not blunderers.

59 see 39

61 I don't think the decision makers have any idea what they are doing. Do you think the Bush administration has ended up in some place it wanted to be (even stipulating that they are all evil).

I don't think they wanted the torture to become public. There's your incompetence. But I find it pretty hard to believe that such a systemic method of interrogation wasn't endorsed explicitly as a 'way to get info that won't leave bruises', and wouldn't be technically torture.

But that's somewhat besides the point, given that even if they thought it would just lead to people breaking down into sunshine and puppies, they're still responsible for it. Negligence and incompetence can only excuse so much.

Do you think the Bush administration has ended up in some place it wanted to be

I dunno, James. They've been awfully damn consistent about this sort of thing.

56: No, James. That isn't `blundering'. That is choosing to implement torture. And, in this case, choosing to try and hide it because you know it won't be acceptable to a lot of your constituents.

You can certainly claim they made a hash of it, but the intent was clearly there. Incompetence isn't any sort of an excuse.

On the one hand, I can see what James is saying, though. I doubt Bush entered office in 2001 with implementing torture as government policy anywhere on his priority sheet. The war didn't go the way they thought it would, every single one of their rationales for invading proved illusory, and they turned frantic trying to find any goddamn thing that would somehow justify it retroactively. By whatever means they could muster.

Doesn't make them any less evil, just evil and stupid.

Yeah. The thing about not blaming the administration for it, is that it would be easy (not politicially costless, but easy) to stop it, and people have been complaining for years now. If, given the option, you don't actively choose not to engage in torture, you choose to engage in torture.

Having posited 67, I do believe that it has morphed into a "You can't tell us what to do" principle. They know full well they aren't getting anything useful from torture. Now they're just doing it to show that they can.

67: sure, you don't expect they were sitting around in 2000 thinking: wow, how can we get to torture some guys, that would be so cool.

On the other hand, though, it isn't any sort of excuse at all. They chose to go there.

Claiming otherwise is like saying: honest, i didn't mean to shoot that kid in the head, i was just running around my neighborhood firing my gun at random. ...

... and then acting all surprised that people hold you responsible.

Now they're just doing it to show that they can.

Or they let the cat out of the bag by endorsing it and now that they might think they better of it it's too late and the troops on the ground do it anyway (not that I think they've thought the better of it).

Also, there seems to be a need to think of themselves as sitting around being "serious" and making the "tough choices" with somber mind and heavy heart for "the good of the country." When in reality they're just a bunch of whiny brats who wet their pants on 9/11 and must be protected from the "bad people."

64

"I don't think they wanted the torture to become public. "

If they didn't want it to become public then it can't be part of a calculated plan to terrorize can it?

Plus, you know, there was that whole Gonzales redefining torture thing, and then Gonzales becoming AG, and then the whole suppressing the Abu Ghraib pictures thing, and

I think the question here isn't, "did they really *mean* to torture?" but rather, "do people really *mean* it when they argue otherwise?"

72: Perhaps. Unless the intent is that it doesn't become (pracitcally) public in the US, but does elsewhere, which is plausible.

73: B- *lots* of people still argue that they didn't actually torture anyone. And if they maybe perhaps did accidently torture one or two people just a little bit, it was completely unauthorized and against administration policy. (Although it was nevertheless okay because the victim was a terrorist and therefore he obviously deserved it, and suggesting otherwise is unpatriotic).

Yes. In 73, I was implying that those people are either intellectually dishonest (lying) or willfully ignorant (unworthy of serious consideration*).

*Which unfortunately doesn't mean that their ignorant assertions don't need to be countered.

I mean, damn. Here I'm *trying* to be insulting, and whoosh.

Although it was nevertheless okay because the victim was a terrorist and therefore he obviously deserved it, and suggesting otherwise is unpatriotic

and makes you objectively pro-terrorist.

76/77: well, okay, except I think a lot of people really do believe this. I don't think it's all dishonesty. Willful ignorance? I dunno, maybe; that's a hard charge to prove.

72: Oh, haha, you caught me. Except I hadn't said anything about terrorizing!! Watch out for those strawmen, they burn like hell.

Now, it's entirely possible to think that someone wanted to put in place a calculated plan to extract information and wanted to make sure it wasn't called torture, and then hoped it would not become public and might have done things like prevent legal and humanitarian access to the camps where people were held, and then once it was public tried to backpedal. But that doesn't get you to the whole thing being an accident brought about by incompetence; that means they just failed in their attempts to get everyone to believe it wasn't torture. Not the same thing.

72, 80: Not really a strawman -- that was me in the original post saying that the point of the way we treat prisoners was to terrorize. I'm not certain that it's true -- 72 makes a good point -- but it makes more sense than anything else I can come up with.

79: Given that the evidence demonstrating intent is pretty well-established, anyone who argues that the intent thing wasn't intentional has to be considered ignorant. If they're going to argue it in (ahem) a forum like this one, we have to assume that that ignorance is willful.

Or maybe we don't have to, but I'm going to.

80

It was the original post that said "... It is hard not to speculate that the real purpose is to terrorize: for our prisons to be an image of the terrible things that the US can do to you if it chooses. I'm not so much horrified by our treatment of prisoners because I'm unaware that worse things happen all over the world every day, but by the fact that I can't come up with a motivation for it that doesn't make us a terrorist state."

I doubt the motivation is in fact to terrorize. It seems you agree so why are we arguing?

63: The Bush team has blundered many times, but torture was not a blunder. Torture was deliberate provocation, part of a long string of administration acts and statements which sent a message to the world that the US doesn't care what anyone else thinks. Not every single event that became public was meant to become public, but a lot of the intentionally-public acts were as bad as the secret ones.

The Bush people are evil the way other evil people are evil. People talk as though it's ridiculous to say so. Evil is not a trait only found among non-Americans.

If you define "torture" as just the cheesiest and most embarassing episodes at Abu Ghraib, that was a blunder. But "torture" isn't just that: it's Padilla, and Guantanamo, and extraordinary rendition, and secret prisons in Afghanistan, and the redefinition of torture by Gonzales, and the declared intention of ignoring the Geneva accords.

81 I think the original motivation for harsh treatment was clearly to obtain information. It was incompetently executed (as shown by the number of prisoners accidentally killed). I think this was due to general Bush administration ineptitude plus lack of supervision caused by the desire of higher ups to preserve deniability. I believe conditions for prisoners have improved over time but a complete reversal would require the adminstration to acknowledge error.

I'm inclined to agree with James in 85. I think we'd find that in 2002-3, part of the plan was indeed to get gobs of useful information from prisoners who'd be loaded up with stuff the generals could use, and that this information would be extracted by dramatically tough means because that's exciting and cool.

It's worth noting how much of this is related to standard operating procedures in high-security prisons, particularly the privatized for-profit ones. And of course those are also connected to the private security firms who seem to be contributing a lot ot the stupid-atrocity tally in Iraq too. They've always aimed for everything they could get away with, and this was an opportunity to get away with more.

"Incompetence" seems to be the centrist establishment version of "Society Is To Blame".

People do seem to jump through hoops to avoid either, 'they (the government/Republicans/military/whatever) are bad bastards' or 'we (the collective/the USA/whatever) are bad bastards'.

A. I recall reading somewhere that an essential element of the dirty bomb plot involved Padilla swinging uranium around in a bucket, as a substitute for a centrifuge. I wouldn't call that serious.

B. The guards always ask, when we're brought to the interview cell, whether we want our clients' hands unshackled. I always say yes, and they always do it. I can imagine that there are some situations where the reasonable answer would be no: prisoners with severe cases of PTSD (or whatever), lawyers who are smaller, etc. The guards don't ask about the ankle chain.

C. I've no doubt that there are some people who are nursing ever-growing grudges, but in my experience, prisoners have gone through the various stages of grieving, and now just want to go home and get on with their lives.

D. I think abuse was pretty closely tied to information gathering -- and you can imagine how frustrating it would be if you're asking questions of a guy you've been lead to believe is come kind of big deal terrorist, and all he tells you is that he was a shepherd. Must be that advanced training in resisting interrogation. Can't be that he's a shepherd, because that would call the whole thing into question.

I think the original motivation for harsh treatment was clearly to obtain information. It was incompetently executed (as shown by the number of prisoners accidentally killed). I think this was due to general Bush administration ineptitude plus lack of supervision caused by the desire of higher ups to preserve deniability. I believe conditions for prisoners have improved over time but a complete reversal would require the adminstration to acknowledge error.

That seems to be true, in that I doubt anyone who was making decision had the intention *just* to hurt prisoners. But to put all the torture down to ineptitude seems to obscure the problem. The problem isn't just that some prisoners were accidentally killed; it's that there's been a whole system designed to torture people while maintaining deniability. That's what can't be put down to mere incompetence.

Chasing incompetence is a red herring. If I back out of my driveway and hit my neighbor's tomato plants, I can excuse myself by explaining that I wasn't paying attention and I didn't mean to. That excuse doesn't work if I hit his toddler. There's a limit to what incompetence can excuse.

I don't think our disagreement is much, except that you seem to think that ineptitude and lack of supervision are exculpatory.

Tim Pritchard has a piece in today's NY Times that ably extends the incompetence back further in time than the standard narrative has it going. Pretty obvious stuff if you've been paying attention; but I like his polemic.

Shorter 91, without the syntactic infelicities: "I liked Tim Pritchard's essay over here."

Pritchard: "there is a limit to what armor and technology can do against a people with faith and who fight because they feel their country has been violated."

Why in God's name wasn't this obvious to every single person in the Pentagon going into the war? Isn't this the screaming lesson of Viet Nam? What the hell do they study at the Army War College? Rambo movies?

Isn't this the screaming lesson of Viet Nam?

Don't you pay attention? The screaming lesson of Viet Nam is we will succeed unless we quit.

90

"I don't think our disagreement is much, except that you seem to think that ineptitude and lack of supervision are exculpatory."

Not really, I am inclined to the "it was worse than a crime it was a mistake" point of view.

But you'd be cool with seeing them in the dock at The Hague anyway, right? Pour encourager les autres and all that?

96

No, I don't believe in international law (at least as applied to Americans).

97: It's that last bit that makes it boneheaded.

Yeah, only non-Americans can be evil.

I think the original motivation for harsh treatment was clearly to obtain information.

See 82. There's no excuse for having thought that, and there were people saying that at the time..

Not to mention that arguing about what the administration intended is effectively exculpatory. No matter what one intends by doing so.

99: I think the implication of 97 isn't that Americans can't be evil; it's that Americans aren't part of the international community.

Equally dumb, but for a different reason.

98 99 I see myself as a citizen of the United States not of the world. I have nothing against the rest of the world but I don't grant them any authority over me or the United States.

100 So what do you think the original motivation was?

103: It's a weak position, in my opinion, but at least defensible; fine --- so you try them in an American court, not the Hague. It's the exceptional clause that makes 97 boneheaded.

I don't care. They violated the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions and did so deliberately. Why they did it is between them and their gods, Whether those gods be ideology, power, or ignorance is of no consequence to me, and worrying about it should take exactly no time away from condemning them for it.

105 In 97 I just meant if other nations choose to subject themselves to some international authority that is their business but that the United States has not and should not do so.

104: I don't get it, and that's a large part of what bothers me. What I said in the post about 'random schmucks' and the sort of intelligence that stales quickly is stuff that I'm confident of -- that most of the people we're holding are people who it's insane to be doing any sort of coercive interrogation on, because there's no good reason to think they know much of anything interesting at all. But for some reason we're still doing it. I don't know why.

108 Momentum. Torture advocates, like advocates of any other policy, are reluctant to admit error and lose face. So they come up with increasingly strained rationals for continuing bad policy. And of course there is little critical examination since the administration isn't interested, outsiders don't have access to the data and the public doesn't care.

James, a lot of people get enormous satisfaction from torture, including a big part of the Republican base. A lot of people support torture and denial of habeus corpus just because it angers liberals. Others do because it satisfies vengeful fealings, power fantasies, or religious manias.

My guess is that all three groups are represented in government, but that almost everyone realizes that torture etc. makes the base happy.

The incompetence theory doesn't fly. None of those people believe that there's a problem to solve or to worry about. Torture has worked for them, and they want to continue.

110 Of course there is a problem, when people start flying planes into skyscrapers you have a problem.