I’d appreciate it if Freddie deBoer would cite some of the unnamed ‘liberals’ who ‘want to be forced to support torture’ and take the stupid ticking time bomb hypothetical seriously
Now, I'll list some of them (with links!) below, and please trust me: this post will be a work in progress. I will certainly update it when I have a chance. But let's start at the very top, shall we? Liberal crush object Barack Obama is in charge of, among other things, our intelligence services. Our intelligence services have repeatedly been alleged to have committed torture. Obama is also Commander in Chief to those in the military. And the military tortured Bradley Manning, during Obama's administration, and certainly with Obama's full knowledge and support. If Obama wanted the torture of Bradley Manning to stop, he would have stopped it. That's not intellectual or moral support for torture, it's direct complicity in torture.
How about another liberal favorite, Bill Clinton?
Look, if the president needed an option, there’s all sorts of things they can do.Let’s take the best case, OK.You picked up someone you know is the No. 2 aide to Osama bin Laden. And you know they have an operation planned for the United States or some European capital in the next three days. And you know this guy knows it. Right, that’s the clearest example. And you think you can only get it out of this guy by shooting him full of some drugs or water-boarding him or otherwise working him over. If they really believed that that scenario is likely to occur, let them come forward with an alternate proposal.Also at the top, you have Attorney General Eric Holder:
We have a system of laws here where nobody should be above the law, and you don’t need blanket advance approval for blanket torture. They can draw a statute much more narrowly, which would permit the president to make a finding in a case like I just outlined.
"One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located; under the Geneva Convention that you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people.It seems to me that given the way in which they have conducted themselves, however, that they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war. If, for instance, Mohamed Atta had survived the attack on the World Trade Center, would we now be calling him a prisoner of war? I think not. Should Zacarias Moussaoui be called a prisoner of war? Again, I think not.”Does this amount to support for torture? I'll let you be the judge. Or perhaps we can look to liberal Democrat Chuck Schumer.
How about in the media? Prominent self-identified liberal Jonathan Alter:
We can’t legalize physical torture; it’s contrary to American values. But even as we continue to speak out against human-rights abuses around the world, we need to keep an open mind about certain measures to fight terrorism, like court-sanctioned psychological interrogation. And we’ll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that’s hypocritical. Nobody said this was going to be pretty
In the article, Alter discusses noted liberal lawyer Alan Dershowitz:
For more than 20 years Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz has argued to the Israelis that this is terribly unfair to the members of the security services. In a forthcoming book, “Shouting Fire,” he makes the case for what he calls a “torture warrant,” where judges would balance competing claims and make the call, as they do in issuing search warrants. Dershowitz says that as long as the fruits of such interrogation are used for investigation, not to convict the detainee (a violation of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination), it could be constitutional here, too. “I’m not in favor of torture, but if you’re going to have it, it should damn well have court approval,” Dershowitz says.It gets better, with Alter. From an article in the New York Times on the subject:
Mr. Alter said he was surprised that his column did not provoke a big flood of e-mail messages or letters. And perhaps even more surprising, he said, was that he had been approached by "people who might be described as being on the left whispering, 'I agree with you.'"
Corey Robin helpfully posts in the comments at LGM:
Michael Walzer’s “Dirty Hands” argument is the classic case of taking the ticking time bomb hypothetical seriously, and it has generated an entire cottage industry in ethics, and of course it supports the use of torture. In 2004, Sandy Levinson edited a volume with OUP on torture, and he reprinted Walzer’s essay with Walzer’s consent (Walzer hasn’t, to my knowledge, walked back from that position; if anything, he’s amplified it in his book of essays on war, Arguing About War). Levinson also endorsed the position of supporting torture in the instance of the ticking time bomb, as did Oren Gross, Miriam Gur-Arye, and several others in that volume. The only one who came out categorically against torture — and the ticking time bomb scenario — were Henry Schue (and even he got squishy toward the end) and Elaine Scarry. Steven Lukes has written a piece where he takes the ticking time bomb seriously. I don’t know these fields of ethics or legal ethics that well, but I suspect these are just the tip of the iceberg.But I talked about liberals wanting to be forced into a position of accepting torture. What does that look like? Here's Fred Kaplan in 2004:
I do not mean to advocate torture. I mean only to suggest that it's time to start wrestling with those moral and legal dilemmas, to face them straightforwardly. If al-Qaida strikes the United States again, our leaders—whoever they are—will be tempted to resort to torture as a method of getting vital intelligence quickly, and we or they or someone should have mapped out crucial distinctions ahead of time: What is acceptable, what isn't; who should engage in it, who shouldn't; for what purposes is it legitimate, for what purposes isn't it; or whether we should decide, after an honest appraisal of its costs and benefits, that the whole business of torture—however you define it—is irredeemably beyond the pale.
This is my point exactly. Kaplan here wants us to believe that he'd much rather not be talking about the possibility of torture-- indeed, he doesn't mean to advocate torture-- but he wants us to be clear about what we do before we torture. He leaves the door open to be forced to conclude, well, we have no choice, which is what liberals always want. Is this specific enough for you, Scott?
Without endorsing it without reservation, let me point you to an argument by David Luban of the Georgetown University Law Center. He apparently thought that liberal support for torture was enough of a thing to publish an article about it in the Virginia Law Review. And he made my own argument before me, in 2005:
Without endorsing it without reservation, let me point you to an argument by David Luban of the Georgetown University Law Center. He apparently thought that liberal support for torture was enough of a thing to publish an article about it in the Virginia Law Review. And he made my own argument before me, in 2005:
more importantly, the liberal rationale for torture as intelligence gathering in gravely dangerous situations transforms and rationalizes the motivation for torture. Now, for the first time, it becomes possible to think of torture as a last resort of men and women who are profoundly reluctant to torture. And in that way, liberals can for the first time think of torture dissociated from cruelty-torture authorized and administered by decent human beings who abhor what circumstances force them to do. Torture to gather intelligence and save lives seems almost heroic. For the first time, we can think of kindly torturers rather than tyrants.
But maybe Scott Lemieux's right and I just made the whole thing up.
Now, perhaps Lemieux will claim that the people I've named aren't really liberals, in which case he should sell that argument to a textbook publisher for a section on "No True Scotsman." (I've left out self-identified liberal Sam Harris, for one, on the theory that Lemieux would object; he says specifically that he does not want to be known as pro-torture but will support it when push comes to shove.) But if he'd like to pick and choose which liberals actually represent American liberalism, cool, I'll have that argument.
If Scott Lemieux is an intellectually honest person, he'll link to this piece and admit that, in fact, many liberals and progressives have advocated torture. If he isn't, he won't. Honestly, I think he must have figured I wouldn't bother to check; finding these people is that easy. Or perhaps he simply knew that he could play to his commenters and not face any forceful response.
Now, perhaps Lemieux will claim that the people I've named aren't really liberals, in which case he should sell that argument to a textbook publisher for a section on "No True Scotsman." (I've left out self-identified liberal Sam Harris, for one, on the theory that Lemieux would object; he says specifically that he does not want to be known as pro-torture but will support it when push comes to shove.) But if he'd like to pick and choose which liberals actually represent American liberalism, cool, I'll have that argument.
If Scott Lemieux is an intellectually honest person, he'll link to this piece and admit that, in fact, many liberals and progressives have advocated torture. If he isn't, he won't. Honestly, I think he must have figured I wouldn't bother to check; finding these people is that easy. Or perhaps he simply knew that he could play to his commenters and not face any forceful response.
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