Obama 1, Pelosi 0

And so we have before us the Pelosi waterboarding kerfuffle (which I am dubbing "Prevari-gate" because "Watergate" was already taken).

Who wins if Nancy Pelosi is weakened politically?

Barack Obama. Pelosi will give him whatever he wants, without so much as a whimper.

Note that CIA Director Leon Panetta has come down on the side of the Bush CIA on this one. He wouldn't do that without White House approval. They want Pelosi out of there.

So who wins if Pelosi resigns?

Barack Obama. Obama will have his pick for Speaker, which would probably be long-time Rahm Emanuel ally House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.

House Republicans, agitating against Pelosi because they don't like her very much, are going to give Obama just the Speaker he wants.

In the long run, it will all work out, because Obama-Hoyer-Reid triumvirate will ultimately bring about electoral defeat. But not before they screw the country up in some very bad ways.

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Gibbs: We Have Ways of Making You Talk

Via Ace, we have Obama spokesdroid Robert Gibbs admitting that waterboarding worked, but who knows what else would have worked?

In the category of things that work, there are two obvious categories: mean and nice. There is no logical room between them.

The mean things are being roundly criticized as Stuff We Wouldn't Do To Save LA. If there are mean things that are not as mean as those we used, how do we know that they would have been effective? And being effective, would that not signify that they were too mean?

The "nice" category is also properly bisected by "costs something" and "costs nothing".

The things that are nice and cost nothing, I trust we've already tried. Oh, we haven't? You've had 100 days. Put up or shut up. The only possible explanation, then, is that this category of things that cost nothing and are nice takes longer than 100 days to produce results. I posit that there are terrorists targeting the United States with action plans taking less than 100 days to implement.

The things that cost us something can be summarized as bargaining with terrorists.

So the official position of the Obama Adminstruation is that it's better to bargain with terrorists than to waterboard them.

Just so we're clear.


P.S.: Gibbs is now tacitly admitting that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to these prisoners. Otherwise, we would not be able to question them at all.

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Torture, again? Yawn.

The Washington Post is aghast that the President should assert the power, in time of war, not to allow the use of torture to defend us against foreign enemies. They point to a declassied memo, the text of which they may or may not have in full, justifying such methods as do not "shock the conscience".

There's a problem with that, of course, in that consciences differ.

But neither was the author of the memo writing a tutorial.

No sane person likes torture. No patriot wants to see his country defeated. So if we can avoid techniques which "shock the conscience", as the memo insists we must, we can avoid both torture and defeat.

And that is everyone's goal.

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Senator McCain on Foreign Policy

John McCain gave a foreign policy speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, and now that I've read it, I still don't know whether to be elated or dismayed. I don't know whether Senator McCain believes everything he says, or merely couches things in language he knows will please his opponents. But I do know that people govern how they campaign, generally if not in the specifics.

The biggest problem I have with Senator McCain is that in using his opponent's language, he implicitly accepts their positions. What to do about captured terrorist suspects:

America must be a model citizen if we want others to look to us as a model. How we behave at home affects how we are perceived abroad. We must fight the terrorists and at the same time defend the rights that are the foundation of our society. We can’t torture or treat inhumanely suspected terrorists we have captured. I believe we should close Guantanamo and work with our allies to forge a new international understanding on the disposition of dangerous detainees under our control.

We can't turn lead into gold, grind up children to feed to cats, or yell fire in a crowded theater, either.

Lacking legality is among the many reasons we don't do those things.

By saying that it's wrong, McCain implies that we do it. He gives cover to our foes, and encourages the conspiracy-loving, coverup-seeking, America-hating moonbats at home.

I was very pleased to read this, however:

For decades in the greater Middle East, we had a strategy of relying on autocrats to provide order and stability. We relied on the Shah of Iran, the autocratic rulers of Egypt, the generals of Pakistan, the Saudi royal family, and even, for a time, on Saddam Hussein. In the late 1970s that strategy began to unravel. The Shah was overthrown by the radical Islamic revolution that now rules in Tehran. The ensuing ferment in the Muslim world produced increasing instability. The autocrats clamped down with ever greater repression, while also surreptitiously aiding Islamic radicalism abroad in the hopes that they would not become its victims. It was a toxic and explosive mixture. The oppression of the autocrats blended with the radical Islamists’ dogmatic theology to produce a perfect storm of intolerance and hatred.

We can no longer delude ourselves that relying on these out-dated autocracies is the safest bet. They no longer provide lasting stability, only the illusion of it. We must not act rashly or demand change overnight. But neither can we pretend the status quo is sustainable, stable, or in our interests. Change is occurring whether we want it or not. The only question for us is whether we shape this change in ways that benefit humanity or let our enemies seize it for their hateful purposes. We must help expand the power and reach of freedom, using all our many strengths as a free people. This is not just idealism. It is the truest kind of realism. It is the democracies of the world that will provide the pillars upon which we can and must build an enduring peace.

One of the central failings of our Cold War era policy was its reliance on stable autocrats like the Shah of Iran and Pinochet of Chile. This blind acceptance of stability over ideals was wrong then, demonstrating a lack of confidence in the rightness and power of liberty, and it's wrong now. While we can accept the allegiance of autocrats, we must not curry their favor over that of thei oppressed peoples.

Senator McCain indicated that he's a Global Warming Believer, and that depresses me.

He stopped just short of calling for an American Union, but on the positive side he fully endorsed free trade, at least in this hemisphere. At no time did he call for tariffs, which give me hope that he's a free trader on some level.

As I said, I feel better about it now that I've read it, except for the Gitmo and Global Warming stuff. Unfortunately, I suspect he really believes his own rhetoric there.

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President Remains Commander in Chief

President Bush wielded the power of the veto pen over the bill that would have limited the CIA to using the same interrogation techniques used by Army interrogators.

This was a courageous and correct veto on the part of President Bush, but not just for the reasons he gave.

(Redstate.com reader rbdwiggins gives the text, linked above for the President's veto of H.R. 2082, the "Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008." This is cross-posted there.)

Those interested can follow here for the text of the bill itself, thomas.gov being notorious for URL-shifting.]

The future adults at the Talking Points Memo (w/t) are apopleptic, crying "Impeach! Impeach!" -- or perhaps it was just once, as it's hard to tell in that echo chamber.

The President was clear in his reasons for the veto:

The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror -- the CIA program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives. This program has produced critical intelligence that has helped us prevent a number of attacks. The program helped us stop a plot to strike a U.S. Marine camp in Djibouti, a planned attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi, a plot to hijack a passenger plane and fly it into Library Tower in Los Angeles, and a plot to crash passenger planes into Heathrow Airport or buildings in downtown London. And it has helped us understand al Qaida's structure and financing and communications and logistics. Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that al Qaida and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland.

The main reason this program has been effective is that it allows the CIA to use specialized interrogation procedures to question a small number of the most dangerous terrorists under careful supervision. The bill Congress sent me would deprive the CIA of the authority to use these safe and lawful techniques. Instead, it would restrict the CIA's range of acceptable interrogation methods to those provided in the Army Field Manual. The procedures in this manual were designed for use by soldiers questioning lawful combatants captured on the battlefield. They were not intended for intelligence professionals trained to question hardened terrorists.

On has to wonder: if the CIA is limited to the same techniques as the Army, would there be any need for the CIA to interrogate? And once the front-line soldiers and officers interrogate an enemy combatant, having published our interrogation techniques in the Army Field Manual the enemy combatant would know what to expect and be ready for it, even if the CIA's questioners were more hightly skilled.

From a pure political calculation, some on the right who oppose non-standard interrogation (NSI) will be disheartened by this news. But they are missing a key point: this veto gives John McCain distance from President Bush, which he can exploit with independent voters, on an issue which is probably not as important to the war on terror as it's made out to be.

Because whether or not we use NSI or even full-on torture on detainees is not as important in the overall fight against them as is keeping our playbook hidden from the enemy. This bill would have exposed our methods to our foes, and if only for that reason deserved a veto.

But in the event that some madman was ready to explode a nuclear bomb in a major U.S. city, would we want to keep that information a secret? Or would we rather use every technique known to man to stop it?

Obviously we don't use non-standard interrogation on every detainee; that's why it's non-standard. But like our own nuclear arsenal, these techniques should be available to us, in all their horror.

Congressional Democrats know these things, but are shamefully demagoguing them just to score partisan political points.

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How Far Will We Go?

My recent post (In Case You've Forgotten) demanded defeating and utterly discrediting Islamofascism, ending with

The questions of how far we go to defeat them, and with which of our own ideals we will temporarily part to do so, I leave to another day.

I suppose it is a bit of an open question whether we need to temporarily set aside any of our ideals. Things temporarily set aside have a way of becoming lost, of course.

But in an odd twist on the ad hominem buteo gallus argument, what sacrifice will those of us not on the front lines make to preserve our own liberties? Who will demand, despite all reason and human history, both freedom and peace without the sacrifice of blood in their pursuit?

Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein wrote "You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. But don't ever count on having both at once." Conversely, as Franklin is quoted, "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety". But how do we decide whether a liberty is essential or the safety temporary? In an age in which transnational jihadists and hyperthyroidal governments may use instant global telecommunications and the infrastructure of civilization against one another and us, how can we know whether the freedom we seek from the latter will compromise the peace we desire from the former?

In short, how far will we go to defeat Islamofascism?

Many say that there is no peace without freedom and justice, that an occupied or enslaved people is not at peace. But Heinlein and I use "peace" in its classical meaning, as the absence of war. A conquered people is at peace, having surrendered their essential liberties to an invader. And it is this conquered peace which the Islamofascists desire -- over us.

In I Know My Rights, we saw that there are many kinds of rights, but those rights are at once layers of protection for and mere shadows of more fundamental ideals. For instance, the right to travel, assemble, and speak are both practical requirements needed to ensure our ability to control our own governance and a necessary consequence of the ideal of personal sovereignty: we own ourselves. No person should own another, and if a group can control where a person comes and goes or says when he gets there, the group would have effective ownership of the individual.

I do not mean to imply that the rights of travel, assembly or speech are limited solely to issues of sovereignty, nor that sovereignty can be maintained by their exercise alone. Ideals are in the end dependent on the maintenance and defense of all rights. American ideals include

• Personal Sovereignty - we own ourselves, and not each other
  
• The Golden Rule - Treat others as you would have them treat you
• Nondescrimination - neither the government, nor increasingly an individual, should discriminate between individuals based on their group membership
• Majority rule - this one smacks the other ideals around
• The Rule of Law
• Honor in War
  
• There are many others, but I have to move on.
  

But rights are not the ideals they shadow, and it may be possible to emphasize some of the layers of protection over others for a time. Rather than be foolishly consistent and insist on winning all battles, a wise general knows that sometimes losing a battle can win a war.

We find the use of nuclear weapons repugnant, because it violates our ideal of Honor in War -- civilians should be excluded from military threat. Yet we know that the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the end of the Second World War in the Pacific. It was an example of a terrible cost to be paid, stepping back from pursuit of some of our ideals in order to defeat a threat to all of them.

Similarly, if a child has been abducted or a bomb threat issued, we either grudgingly or willingly consent to a search of our vehicle, home, or person. Some might stand on principle and refuse to be searched without reading a bench warrant, and to them my only comment would be "consistent fool". Yet at some point the Amber Alerts and Terror Threat Levels may elicit the measured response to the baying of an imaginary wolf.

Ideals are as much or more a part of culture as art, language, or religion. Americans, for instance, have an innate cultural insistence on freedom generally and to our cherished liberties specifically. In fact, I would go so far as to define culture as a shared set of ideals. I don't think it's trading too much in ambiguity to say then that if a culture is a group with shared ideals, preserving the culture will necessitate preserving the ideals.

While charges of theocracy and dictatorship abound, the real and perhaps more ominous trend in the last several decades is toward populism and rule by opinion poll - the tyranny of the majority. It is therefore counterintuitive that our elected officials would take a break from their prostrated supplication to refuse pursuit of cultural ideals held by even the slimmest majority. And if an ideal is not held by the majority, is it our ideal?

So there is a line to draw somewhere between the situation on one hand in which we are sure the threat is real enough and the rights we are surrendering will come back to us, and on the other that the threat is too ephemeral to fear and the rights to fragile to lose. Heinlein's peace and Franklin's security require the citizen to be vigilant against his own government, but just as mindful of the threat posed by outsiders. There is in the end no magic formula for deciding when liberty should be ceded, except that we do it only when we must, and as little as we can. Let the soldier not doubt that he is defending a free country.

But that free country has enemies, and those enemies need to be treated as such. We must not delude ourselves into thinking that those who do not share our ideals mean us no harm. They do mean us harm, and when we find measures to defeat them which impinge only theoretically on our liberty, we should ignore the theory and destroy the enemy.

When conditions return to their natural order, we may then stand on our shared ideals and demand either our liberty, or the head of him who dares violate it.

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Oh, the Humanity

(WARNING: This may be too graphic for some. Be so advised, and I apologize in advance to those who are overcome with horror.)

As the transcript (pdf) of his Combatant Status Tribunal shows, Khalid Sheikh Muhammed alleged acolyte Mr. Mahjid (or Majid) Khan is one tough cookie. To have endured the treatment to which he has thus far been subjected and still be alive is enough, but to selflessly stand up for the rights of conspirators in mass murder and jihad sympathizers everywhere to receive name-brand personal care products is truly the stuff of legend.

Some Facts How They Are Mentally Torturing Us:

They them self use the best kind of stuff but they give us cheap branded, unscented deodorant soap to wash ourselves with. Also, same goes for shampoo, toothpaste, and deodorant, etc.

This camp gives us only twelve to fourteen pages of newsletter only once a week. Most of the stuff is crap; only few pages are worth of reading it.

In main rec no weight lifting machine, no toilet, no sink, no hoops, and even balls them self have little air in them; they hardly bounce.

In the end of January 2007, they brought us a big fan which makes noise, which makes more noise than produce air in main hall. It drives us crazy. They have since turned the fan off and I have been move to A19 on 6 April 2007. The fan itself is still there.

They know how we feel about family members. They intentionally make our ICRC mails delay - very, very delay in so call censorship issues.

We only get one our of communal rec and only one hour of main rec per day, 2 books per week, and that's it. No mind stimulations, no solitary games, no DVD players, no entertainment, and you know how small and cozy our cells are in size. It has been seven months like this, no improvement.

[REDACTED] So please, before making any decision on me, please read this report of torture and then think yourself if these people can go that far how hard it is for them to make something up, [REDACTED] I affirm these are my word and the truth as I know it.

(w/t Redstate)

We don't know, for security reasons, what is in the redacted part. Perhaps his pajamas were only imitation silk, or his lemonade had too much pulp.

These are serious charges. He is charging the United States Government with treating someone who is not covered by the Geneva Conventions as if he were.

And that would be wrong.

(Again, I apologize for the unsettling material. Truth will out, you know.)

However, on reading the rest of the transcript, another thing becomes clear. Mahjid Khan may not be guilty of anything more than being a Muslim from Pakistan. And forging immigration papers. And being an incessant whiner. With a casual acquaintance with the truth.

And without seeing the classified evidence against him, it is hard to call him an enemy combatant. As he says, he didn't threaten to blow himself up to kill the President of Pakistan, and besides, he didn't actually do it yet.

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When Torture is Good

From the desk of Jane Galt, comes this:

I'd rather be waterboarded than put in the general population of a high security prison. It is entirely possible that life at Guantanamo is more bearable than life at San Quentin, and no, that is not a defense of Guantanamo.

She goes on to add, as she must, that torture is bad and wrong.

But is it? Or is there a time when torture is in season?

Imagine a time in the near future when we have invented a weapon so powerful that it could cause the Sun to nova, destroying our planet. Perhaps it's a scheme to divert a moon-sized object into collision course with the Earth, to satisfy the apocalyptic vision of a brilliant but misunderstood Muslim postal worker. Undoubtedly, any means necessary to save the human race, including the torture of one unhappy camper, would be acceptable.

Suppose, then, there were a nuclear bomb ticking away in the middle of a major metropolis -- or the town where your family reunion is being held. The fellow who planted it turns himself in to police in the next town over the horizon, believing that a jail will be a lot safer for him than anywhere else in a few hours.

If torturing that one fellow will save the lives and secure the liberty of millions (and of your family), would it be OK? To me, there's not much question that it would.

So if it were a conventional bomb, like the one Timothy McVeigh exploded outside the Oklahoma City Federal Building, would it have been acceptable to torture the bomber to stop that bombing?

We could continue the slippery slope down to the life, or injury, of one person, or even to some injury to property or the environment. While we would find torture acceptable to prevent some circumstance, there is a line below which we would not. Somewhere between racial annihilation and spitting on the sidewalk we would say no, it's unacceptable to torture to prevent that crime, but perhaps not a spree of such crimes.

But why is that? We believe that torture is wrong because of an emotional and philosophical reaction against it, but that emotion comes from several different directions.

First, torture is associated with the evil tyrants of history and malevolent prison guards, who have used it to punish as much or more than to gain information. We, the enlightened, don't want to be like them, and that ideal manifests itself in an emotional response: torture is bad.

Torture is inflicting pain on someone who can't fight back, an activity which repulses normal people. We are generally much happier taking a paternal or pastoral attitude toward prisoners. Even if we must treat them harshly, we don't want to treat them cruelly.

But probably the best reason to avoid torture is that torturees lie. People will say anything to make the pain stop even for a moment. The torturer often wants to hear a particular answer, and the torturee can sometimes figure out what to say. Torture is properly seen therefore as an unreliable means of gathering information.

So back to our imminent disasters. Why is torture acceptable to avert them, and how do we know where to draw the line? There are several principles we can see.

1. Time pressure: there's a deadline which will pass without torture
2. Balance: harm to the torturee will prevent greater harm to others
   
3. Specificity: the question is known, but the answer is not
   
4. Verifiable: the information needed can be quickly verified (or refuted) without torture
   

Torture is only acceptable when we must act quickly to obtain specific answers which can be checked without resort to torture, but cannot be obtained otherwise. If you disagree, you are welcome to your integrity, but I am not willing to accept the consequences of preserving your clear conscience.

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