Obama Falls into the Few Bad Apples Trap

First, a brief reminder of how the Bush administration handled the crime of torture.  Let’s call it “the few bad apples excuse.”

Yesterday, Wednesday, April 13, 2009 was a sad day for the Obama administration.  The President decided to reverse his administration’s pledge to release photographs of acts of torture committed by Americans, photos that could be used as further evidence of how widespread state sanctioned torture had been under Bush.  But it was not his decision to hold back the photos that was patently reprehensible.  Obama argued that the release of the photographs could endanger our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and whether one agrees with this assessment or not, it has to be taken seriously.  What is not acceptable, and what is not worthy of this president, is to suggest that those who committed these acts were only a small number of individuals.  Once again this places the onus on those who actually carried out the acts as opposed to the leaders who ordered and sanctioned them.  In other words, Obama used a version of the “bad apples excuse” to support his decision, which is just what the Bush administration did when the photos of Abu Ghraib first appeared

The New York Times reported on the president’s press conference announcing his decision in an article, “Obama Moves to Bar Release of Detainee Abuse Photos.” Two excerpts:

“The publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals,” Mr. Obama told reporters on the South Lawn. “In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.” (emphasis added)

The article then went on to quote a spokesman from the A.C.L.U.

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the A.C.L.U., said the decision to fight the release of the photos was a mistake. He said officials had described them as “worse than Abu Ghraib” and said their volume, more than 2,000 images, showed that “it is no longer tenable to blame abuse on a few bad apples. These were policies set at the highest level.”

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It’s not clear what Obama’s tactics are here.  He is well aware of the previous administration’s culpability.  Perhaps he has decided that keeping his hands clean and letting Congress handle the torture investigation is the path of least resistance, one that will allow him to pursue more important matters.  But this maneuver doesn’t require him to assert the few bad apples excuse.  The question is why he decided to make this specious argument.  And he made it on the very same day that he said the following during commencement at Arizona State.

“In recent years, in many ways, we’ve become enamored with our own success, lulled into complacency by our own achievements,” he said, citing the economic crisis. “We started taking shortcuts. We started living on credit, instead of building up savings. We saw businesses focus more on rebranding and repackaging than innovating and developing new ideas that improve our lives.”  New York Times, May 13, 2009,  “Work Is Never Done, Obama Tells Class”

Read these words and think about Obama’s actions yesterday.  Read these words and think about some of the “shortcuts” that he has been taking.  (See Andrew Sullivan’s article, “The Fierce Urgency Of Whenever,” on Obama’s backsliding on the treatment of gays.)  Read these words and think about the Obama brand.  And ask, who is Barack Obama really speaking about when he speaks about repackaging?  Rhetorical flourishes are not going to provide him with cover if there is too great a disjunction between his words, his other words, and his deeds.

Yes, Obama cannot be expected to remake the U.S. in a 100 days.  The question is whether there is a misguided expediency at work, one in which the shortest path is assumed to be established lines in the sand.

We cannot let this slogan become merely a slogan.   As per Obama’s request, we will remind him, hound him, when his rudder may need some work.

Obama, Spock, and Star Trek: Take Two

Well, just when you think that you have carved out a niche for yourself, it seems that the whole planet has moved in.  In June 2008 I posted a blog,” Obama, Spock, and the New Star Trek Nation,” in which I drew a connection between Spock and Obama, and I also discussed how the times might be right (once again) for Star Trek’s positive utopian vision.  I even quoted from Shatner’s (Captain Kirk’s) book, Up Till Now, about how the fans had saved the original Star Trek.

“As a result of this campaign, NBC received, trumpets blare here, more than 1,000,000 letters urging the network not to cancel the show….[It was not cancelled] Perhaps more important the people who wrote the letters suddenly had an emotional attachment to a television program unlike any viewers ever before. They had actually influenced a network’s programming decision. They had ownership. Star Trek really had become their show. This marked the beginning of the most unusual relationship between viewers and a TV series in history.”

I compared this sense of ownership to what many of Obama’s supporters were experiencing due to their involvement in his campaign.  In any case, I/we now have to deal with this:

It seems that sometime last year a toy company, a one Jailbreak Toys, starting selling Obama action figures.   Is nothing sacred?  Or perhaps this is how we express what we most admire in America, we turn them into action toys.

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UPDATE, May 10.  It turns out the the Jailbreak Toys does make action figures, including ones of Obama, but those of Obama and Biden (above) were from an event held in NYC in which artists created action figures.  The photo, which I thought had come from the company, can be found at iPhoneSavior.

The American Dream: A Change?

A poll recently done for the New York Times and CBS News on the state of the American Dream has some interesting results.  It appears that more Americans believe that they have achieved the American Dream today (44%) than they did four years ago (32%).  The results may seem strange given the depth of the recession.   However, it appears that for a substantial number of Americans the way in which the Dream is understood has undergone a revision.  There is now less emphasis on financial security.  The New York Times article excerpted below is worth a read, although the examples given in the article are open to alternative interpretations.

What Happens to the American Dream in a Recession? (excerpt)

The Times and CBS News asked this same open-ended question four years ago and again last month: “What does the phrase ‘The American dream’ mean to you?”

Four years ago, 19 percent of those surveyed supplied answers that related to financial security and a steady job, and 20 percent gave answers that related to freedom and opportunity.

Now, fewer people are pegging their dream to material success and more are pegging it to abstract values. Those citing financial security dropped to 11 percent, and those citing freedom and opportunity expanded to 27 percent.

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Delacroix’s Lady Liberty leading consumers and investors who say, enough is enough.

Obama: Conservative, Liberal, or Ruthless Pragmatist?

The young Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the young John Dewey, Obama at Harvard Law

…..

There it was in black and white, splashed across five columns of last Sunday’s (May, 3, 2009) New York Times, “As a Professor, a Pragmatist About the Supreme Court.” Standing above the headline is Obama, facing a law school class at the University of Chicago, hands spread wide across his desk, with the words, Bush, Gore and Voting clearly visible on the white board behind him.  In terms of a nominee to the Court, the article warns that we should not expect, “a larger-than-life liberal to counter the conservative pyrotechniques of Antonin Scalia, but a careful pragmatist with a limited view of the role of courts.”  Its author, Jodi Cantor, appears determined to help reinforce a developing consensus: Obama is not your standard liberal.  And perhaps even more frightening for principled liberals (and conservatives) are Obama’s words in The New York Times Magazine, “I mean, the truth is that what I’ve been constantly searching for is a ruthless pragmatism when it comes to economic policy”  (May 3, 2009, emphasis added).

The poverty of American discourse about politics–oh, let’s say back to the 1960’s or maybe since the 1930’s–is becoming increasingly transparent with every passing attempt to squeeze Obama’s views into one of the currently accepted categories: conservative, liberal, or moderate.  Of course when these fail, we can always hurl an epithet: pragmatist.  There is more than one reason that we have slid into this set of boxes, not least of which is that constituencies believe that they are served by them.  But Obama and friends are here to tell us that the party is over.  His decision about a Supreme Court nominee will provide further clues as to why the festivities are coming to an end, and I want to return to this topic shortly. First, some general comments about the state or our political reference points.

Obama has appeared mysterious and unpredictable in part because we have become used to an unforgiving dichotomy in popular political discourse. On the one hand, liberals, in their quest to help transform the world for the better, are viewed by conservatives as a-historical and unwilling to accept the lessons of the past.  On the other hand, while conservatives view themselves as guardians of the past,  who understand that change cannot simply come from above, liberals see them as having buried their heads, like the proverbial Ostrich, in the sands of what has been.

Are these caricatures?   Of course, but not entirely.  Liberals have often spoken as if law and policy could trump custom and habit.   Instead of arguing that law and policy can help to ameliorate egregious states, while acknowledging that the work of change is going to require political activity on the ground, Washington liberals (for lack of a better label) have at times been top down folks.  And conservatives have at times certainly sounded as if every program to remedy inequities somehow violates the gods of history.  (Yes, of course this is a gloss, but bear with me, it will do for the purposes at hand.)

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that many liberals haven’t been sufficiently historically minded.  Conservatives, on the other hand, no longer present a coherent political philosophy.  Traditional conservatives, those who emphasize the power of the past and obligations to preserve traditions, have become a modest wing of the conservative party, that is, the Republican Party.  The term conservative has been co-opted in the past few decades to stand for a set of values that is anything but historical, namely, religious or quasi-religious values that claim to be God given, beyond the narrative of human history.  I refer here to the presence of the religious right in Republican circles.  Hence, the deep divisions you are seeing in conservative land between ideologues and religious right on the one hand, and historicists, for example, David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan, on the other.

Obama is a historicist, a progressive, and a pragmatist.  Wait, you say.  How is this possible?  A pragmatist cares little for the past.  He or she cares about consequences, which can be altered by our current decisions.  Didn’t Obama affirm that he is searching for a “ruthless pragmatism?”  How can one be a historicist and a (ruthless) pragmatist?  But this question, as I have argued elsewhere, is due to a confusion between philosophical pragmatism and the pragmatism of the used-car salesman or legislator, whose goal is to cut a deal.  Sometimes Obama uses the term in this fashion.  But there is a coherent philosophical and political position that can join these seeming opposites (historicism and progressivism) together, and this is often what Obama means by pragmatism.

If political discourse wasn’t so distorted by ideological glosses of the right and left, and the MSM, we would be able to see that our categories have left us in a muddle, unable to comprehend perfectly plausible alternatives to the familiar.   For example, philosophical pragmatism has been consistently respectful of habit and custom.   This is why pragmatists have not been revolutionaries but ameliorationists or gradualists.  Habit, as William James said, is the great flywheel of society.  In addition, like many traditional conservatives, pragmatists have emphasized the importance of the social.  To change society, customs must change.  For pragmatists, for example, John Dewey and Obama, this does not mean that we are merely passive recipients of what has been handed to us by history.  We are not merely recipients because we have the capacity to ask how society can be improved and then to examine, with the help of science, the possible ramifications of the actions that we might take to foster improvement.  However, as fallibilists we acknowledge that we do not know with certainty what the outcomes of our actions are going to be.  We must be prepared to engage in trial and error.  We must be willing to see what works.  We place our faith on a bet, that is, cooperative and intelligent investigation of the natural and social worlds can yield insights into how to go about transforming the world, which by definition is a world that has been shaped by customs and habits.  And attempts at change must take  the latter into consideration.

Returning to the Court and the Times article, Jodi Cantor deserves credit for highlighting important points about Obama’s position on a nominee.  But she appears to have little knowledge of the larger context within which Obama is working.  Here are some of her key claims.

Former students and colleagues describe Mr. Obama as a minimalist (skeptical of court-led efforts at social change) and a structuralist (interested in how the law metes out power in society). And more than anything else, he is a pragmatist who urged those around him to be more keenly attuned to the real-life impact of decisions. This may be his distinguishing quality as a legal thinker: an unwillingness to deal in abstraction, a constant desire to know how court decisions affect people’s lives.

Yes, as a philosophical pragmatism, Obama would be more concerned with the “real-life impact of decisions,” and he would show a concern for how decisions affect people’s lives.  So too would traditional liberals.  Further,

And he asked constant questions about consequences of laws: What would happen if a mother’s welfare grant did not increase with the birth of additional children? As a state legislator, how much could he be influenced by a donor’s contribution?

This too is the mark of a pragmatist, as well as many liberals.  What then separates Obama from the traditional liberal?

Though Mr. Obama rarely spoke of his own views, students say they sensed his disdain for formalism, the idea — often espoused by Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas, but sometimes by liberals as well — that law can be decided independent of the political and social context in which it is applied. To make his point, Mr. Obama, then a state senator, took students with him to Springfield, Ill., the capital, to watch hearings and see him hash out legislation.

This passage recognizes Obama’s sensitivity to political and social context, which he shares with traditional conservatives.  But as in many articles about Obama’s views, the reader walks away with the impression that Obama has cobbled together a bunch of personally appealing views that are best understood as revolving around his pragmatic temperament, as opposed to the fact that there is actually a well-developed philosophical tradition that orients his arguments.  For an example of how clueless the author of the Times article appears to be about this, consider this invocation of Judge Richard Posner’s name.

Mr. Obama often expressed concern that “democracy could be dangerous,” Mr. Stone said, that the majority can be “unempathetic — that’s a word that Barack has used — about the concerns of outsiders and minorities.”

But when a student asked Mr. Obama to name the circuit judge he would most like to argue in front of, he named Richard Posner, a conservative. Judge Posner was smart enough to know when you were right, Mr. Obama told the class.

Why Posner?  Surely there are other judges who are smart enough to know when a lawyer is right.  Posner’s economic views and values are in many respects close to the right wing of the Republican Party.  Obama may not be a traditional liberal, but surely he isn’t a conservative of this sort.  Why not recommend arguing before a more progressive judge who knows when you are right?  The fact is that Posner is an avowed pragmatist.  (Yes, there can be conservative ones.  Pragmatism provides a scaffolding for a host of values, as well as some non-negotiables, such as fallibilism.) The nature of Posner’s pragmatism has been debated by those interested in this school of thought, but there is little question that Posner thinks of himself in these terms and defends his decisions by appealing to pragmatic considerations.  In spite of Obama’s comments, no doubt the reason that he would like to argue a case in front of Posner is because he has a good sense of the kinds of arguments that would appeal to Posner as a (philosophical or legal) pragmatist.

Unlike virtually all of the presidents of the second half of the 20th century, Obama is well tutored in matters of law.  While I am not prepared to say here just who has most influenced Obama in his study of law, he certainly seems to be hovering in the ambit of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., whose orientation to the common law is informed by pragmatism.  So let me end this already too long blog with a quotation from a recent book on Holmes, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Legal Theory, and Judicial Restraint, by Frederic R. Kellogg.  As you read Kellogg’s words about Holmes, consider the claims about Obama in the New York Times piece and the kind of Supreme Court judge that he is seeking.  And then consider just how big a playing field Obama is planning to open for our amusement and edification.

Yet there are broad aspects of [Holmes] that remain relevant, in particular the ideas of common law method as case-specific inquiry, of the tentative and experimental nature of legal thinking and common law rule making, of the skepticism of abstraction, and of the importance of and respect for community practice and participation in the court-room law making process.  These ideas may sound unrealistic in light of current legal culture, but Holmes offered them as part of the Anglo-American legal tradition. They contribute to the particular image or ideal of a judge that may yet be valuable and worth preserving, especially given the extreme politicization of judicial selection that prevails at the federal level. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 19, emphasis added)

Harsh Techniques (torture) to be used to Combat Swine Flu

April 26, 2009.  The United States declared a public health emergency today.   Although it appears that no one has died or become seriously ill in the U.S. from a new strain of the swine flu, health officials are taking no chances.  All of the traditional measures to combat epidemics have been set in motion.   Funds will be made available for anti-viral drugs, and time-tested and effective methods for tracking and preventing the spread of disease will be utilized.  The CDC (Center for Disease Control) is reassuring the public, citing its decades of experience in handling epidemics and its recent preparation for pandemics.

However, former Vice President Cheney, through a spokesman, is calling on the CDC to avoid thinking within the box in deciding on measures to halt this attack on our nation.  “We can’t afford not to act with every means available to us,” said his spokesman.   Inside the CDC there is mounting pressure to consult with agents from the CIA to examine how harsh interrogation techniques might be of service.  With fear mounting and pressure growing, expert legal advice is being sought in order to provide the proper “legal cover” for actions that international agreements have outlawed as torture.

“Look,” said a representative from the former VP’s office, “you gotta do what you gotta do.  There are swine out there who, or I should say, that are dangerous.  We need to know what, where, and when.”   The plan seems to be to find the pigs that are harboring the terrorist virus, and apply harsh techniques, torture if you will, in order force them to provide operational intelligence.

There has been some concern that the swine won’t talk.  But everyone should know that swine are among the most intelligent animals, according to experts in covert intelligence.   A spokesperson for the CDC insists that with proper guidance, waterboarding a pig is possible, and it will get the animal to talk, and talk fast.  (He then handed this reporter a copy of Animal Farm.)

Questioned about violating the rights of these animals, a Cheney spokesman said, “What’s the difference?  Whether it’s a human animal or an animal animal.  If it attacks you, or if you believe that it might possibly attack, you go after it.”  There was little response to a question directed to Cheney himself  (as he was walking his dog) by one reporter, “What about all of the innocent pigs, for example, the three little ones, that were just minding their business, trying to build lives for themselves?”  Cheney did say that if we could apply harsh techniques to the virus itself, we would.  But since we don’t have the technical means to do so, as many of the swine as possible gotta be boarded.

Asked to comment, The White House declined, claiming that as an inanimate object it had little to say.   Although a spokesman for the President did say that if the tactics were forward-looking enough, and did not constitute a threat to his domestic agenda, he might be able to get his team behind the CDC.  In any case, no CDC employee will be prosecuted for actions deemed acceptable by agency lawyers.

A spokesperson for the Humane Society claimed to be too upset to return this reporter’s call.

Recession Swindles Explained

We have all wondered how the financial wizards down on Wall Street managed to help tank the economy.  No doubt creative accounting played a substantial role.   This clip will explain to you, in a straightforward and easily accessible fashion, just how simple creative accounting can be.

College: Class Still Matters in America

America, land of opportunity, where hard work and merit determines who gets ahead.   A nation where a good education, the gateway to success, is available to all.

Not so fast, I’m afraid.   America is actually losing ground in providing access to college.   And disparities in income are responsible.   How bad is the situation?  It seems that, “bright and focused kids from poor families are going to college at the same rate as unfocused or low-scoring kids from families much better off.” This quotation is from a recent piece by Andrew Delbanco, “The Universities in Trouble,” in The New York Review of Books.  It’s worth a read.  Here is an excerpt.

But the public–private partnership that did much to democratize American higher education has been coming apart. In 1976, federal Pell grants for low-income students covered 72 percent of the average cost of attending a four-year state institution; by 2003, Pell grants covered only 38 percent of the cost. Meanwhile, financial aid administered by the states is being allocated more and more on the basis of “merit” rather than need—meaning that scholarships are going increasingly to high-achieving students from high-income families, leaving deserving students from low-income families without the means to pay for college.

In 2002, a federal advisory committee issued a report, aptly entitled “Empty Promises,” which estimated that “more than 400,000 students nationally from families with incomes below $50,000″ met the standards of college admission “and yet were unable to enroll in a four-year college because of financial barriers. More than 160,000 of these students did not attend any college because of these barriers, not even a two-year institution.” Two years later one leading authority pointed out that “the college-going rates of the highest-socioeconomic-status students with the lowest achievement levels is the same level as the poorest students with the highest achievement levels.”[1] In short, bright and focused kids from poor families are going to college at the same rate as unfocused or low-scoring kids from families much better off.

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1. Donald E. Heller quoted in Paul Attewell and Davd E. Lavin, Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations? (Russell Sage Foundation, 2007), p. 199; Donald E. Heller, “A Bold Proposal: Increasing College Access Without Spending More Money,” Crosstalk, Fall 2004; and Brian K. Fitzgerald and Jennifer A. Delaney, “Educational Opportunity in America,” Condition of Access: Higher Education for Lower Income Students, edited by Donald E. Heller (ACE/Praeger, 2002).

Night Owls Unite: You have Nothing to lose but your Sleepiness

Owl look alike, Owl, and Twain

Benjamin Franklin famously declared, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”  Yet it appears that Mark Twain was on target in challenging Franklin’s maxim with George Washington’s response, “I don’t see it.”

Empirical study has confirmed that there is no inherent benefit in being an early riser.  As a matter of fact, night owls, those whose circadian clocks are set so that they are more alert later in the day, are penalized by a folk wisdom (Franklin’s) that is simply false.  This is a more serious issue than you might think.   Imagine, and I am speaking here to you “early risers,” if you were forced by the expectations of friends, bosses, and colleagues to rise by, say, 1:00 AM day after day.   So that to get a good night’s rest, you would have to fall asleep (and stay asleep) by 5:00 in the afternoon.  This parallels what is asked of night owls, that is, to fall asleep and wake up hours before their bodies are ready.  This at minimum leads night owls to work at less than their optimum (and in some leads to an unending battle with sleep deprivation).

Leon Kreitzman does an excellent job summarizing research and insight into differences in sleep patterns in today’s New York Times.   As a night owl, I want to thank him for his efforts.   Here is an excerpt.

“Guest Column: Larks, Owls and Hummingbirds”

This evening/morningness is less a matter of choice than of genetics. Being bright-eyed and raring to go first thing in the morning is not just a case of how much sleep someone has had, nor is it a reflection of willpower. Genes may largely determine it.

It might be envy on my part, but those early-rising larks I have known have often seemed to my bleary early-morning eye to adopt a smug moral superiority based on Benjamin Franklin’s maxim, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” But there is no basis for Franklin’s claim. Catharine Gale and Christopher Martyn of Southampton University followed up a 1973 survey that had included data on sleeping habits. More than 20 years later they found no evidence among the survivors that following Franklin’s advice was associated with any health, socioeconomic or cognitive advantage.

If anything, owls were wealthier than larks, though there was no difference in their health or wisdom. Gale and Martyn wryly offer the thought that “it seems that owls need not worry that their way of life carries adverse consequences. However, those who cite Franklin’s maxim to encourage their children to go to bed early may wish to consider whether their practice is entirely ethical.”

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UPDATE, May 7th, 2009   I recently read about a study that suggested those who slept in the day were more likely to develop a condition that preceded hardening of the arteries.  However, as far as I could tell, the study did not make any distinction between night owls and those who are forced to work at night, but who are actually day people.  If I can locate the research, I will post it.

Why Did We Torture? The answer now seems to be: “Ignorance”

The last two posts on UP@NIGHT have addressed the issue of torture.  Today we learn, according to a New York Times article, that incompetence and ignorance led the Bush administration down the path of torture.  The article is a must read.  There is an excerpt below.  I will say that it raises as many questions as it answers; for example. how could the moral imagination and understanding of our leaders be so impoverished that they were prepared simply to heed the words of so-called experts, without asking probing questions and paying attention to what could be called common sense?  (I mean, certain actions seem like torture….it doesn’t take a rocket scientist.)  Or how about, are the proposed “harsh” methods really as reliable as other methods?  (Opinions from different camps were called for.  But instead the advice our leaders wanted to hear, “we’ll get quick results,” was all that was needed to give the green light.)

Of course further investigation may reveal that they were not as ignorant as this article suggests.  Time will tell.

In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use (excerpt)

By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI
Published: April 21, 2009
WASHINGTON — The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Cheney and Torture (or how the ex-VP fails Ethics 101)

The New York Times reports the following comments by Cheney in reaction to Obama’s release of the Bush administration memos defending acts of torture:

As the debate escalated, Mr. Cheney weighed in, saying that if the country is to judge the methods used in the interrogations, it should have information about what was obtained from the tough tactics.

“I find it a little bit disturbing” that “they didn’t put out the memos that showed the success of the effort,” Mr. Cheney said on Fox News. “There are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity.”  ”Pressure Grows to Investigate Interrogations,”  April 20, 2009,

Leaving aside the fact that experts in the field have consistently challenged the utility of torture, leaving aside the fact that we could have gotten more information through alternative methods of interrogation, and leaving aside the fact that by torturing prisoners we increase the chances that our own soldiers will be tortured, what Cheney’s comments reveal is the poverty of the ethical imagination of the Bush administration.

Yes, there are good arguments to be made for taking into consideration consequences in judging whether acts are ethical.  There is a whole philosophical tradition built around this notion, Utilitarianism.  However, the idea that we can justify torture based on “the success” of the method, which presumably means the successful gathering of intelligence, is precisely what every declaration of human rights, including the Geneva Convention, repudiates.  (As does every form of sophisticated Utilitarianism.)

Imagine if I said, let’s rape prisoners in order to get the information that we need.  No decent human being would tolerate this as a legitimate means of gathering information.  Rape is a basic violation of the dignity and integrity of another human being.   It’s horrific to think that governments might write legal briefs defending rape on the grounds that it produced information that they needed.  Yet, how different is torture from rape?  It too is a basic violation of the dignity and integrity of another human being.  If one thinks about what the act of torture does to another human being (and what it does to the torturer), it can be viewed as a form of rape, just as rape can be understood as a form of torture.  Nevertheless, the Bush administration’s lawyers wrote legal opinions defending acts that time and again have been labeled torture.

So, here is my suggestion in response to Cheney.  When he says, “There are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity,” replace the last part of the sentence, “There are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of raping human beings.” Now, tell me whether anyone who is even moderately ethical, or anyone who wants to defend the ideals for which this country stands, would be willing to utter such a sentence?  But this is in fact a sentence that follows from Cheney’s crude consequentialism.

Cheney is a clever but hopelessly thoughtless man, who was part of a thoughtless administration.  He still doesn’t understand how much damage he did to this country in his efforts to protect us.   (And let’s not forget, his methods aren’t even good ones in terms of protecting the country.)

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UPDATE, April 22:  Former FBI supervisory agent discusses recent claims about the effectiveness of torture.

“My Tortured Decision” (excerpt)

By ALI SOUFAN,  April 22, 2009, The New York Times

FOR seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding. I have spoken only in closed government hearings, as these matters were classified. But the release last week of four Justice Department memos on interrogations allows me to shed light on the story, and on some of the lessons to be learned.

One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use.

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence….