Tell me how much of this you've heard in the last few weeks:
-- The police are "over-militarized' racist assassins who bully and murder citizens for no particular reason, except perhaps that they're black or act disrespectfully.
-- The armed forces (except for Bowe Bergdahl and Bradley Manning) are rapists and thugs. They sexually harass, abuse and brutalize whomever they want -- and that's just in this country.
-- Most recently, the personnel in the CIA are torturers who do it for fun, then lie about it to Congress.
If you've been living outside a cave, you've head all of it, over and over. And some, though hardly all, of the people you've heard it from are country's "leaders."
Q: What do the targets of this acid have in common?
A: The police, the military, and the intelligence services are the people who protect us when the Holier-Than-Thou crowd goes clueless.
Q: What happens when you pour acid on the people who protect you?
A: Ummm.......well...................
Decency evolves: So you don't have a problem with the CIAs actions discussed in the Senate Intelligence Committee Report?
Not a good week to be a white male, fraternity alum and army veteran. I am sure I am guilty of something by association according to some. I guess I should just await my punishment.
Don't worry, you won't have to wait long. I've already reported you to the Re-education Committee. I hear they're thinking of sentencing you to a three-hour dinner with Joe Biden. And, no, don't start in on me with this Eighth Amendment stuff. Some people deserve severe treatment, no matter what.
May God have mercy on your soul. And your ears.
Decency evolves: Senator McCain's speech in praise of the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee was evocative and stirring and I think he knows something about both torture and why the U.S. Government was wrong to engage in it. Perhaps you disagree.
McCain's courage is beyond anything I could do, and to say that I respect him is an understatement. Courageous people can make errors, however -- indeed, it happens all the time -- and I think McCain is making an error here. Some of the reasons I think so are explained in the WSJ piece Kent link here: http://www.wsj.com/articles/cia-interrogations-saved-lives-1418142644
In the meantime, I'd be interested if you think the weeks of drumbeat, acid, one-sided criticism we have seen about the police, the armed services, and now the CIA can continue without having an effect on their morale. And if it has such an effect -- if it chips away at their resolve and their determination to undertake the dangerous duties of protection with which they are charged -- what does that mean for the rest of us?
I haven't read the CIA report, but as a general rule I don't have a real problem with "enhanced interrogation" if it is necessary to obtain time-sensitive intelligence. This isn't really all that controversial - pretty much every intelligence / internal security agency in the world operates that way whether they admit it or not.
Regarding Bill's comment about morale, I think those subject to the spurious criticisms stated in the post should remember a famous quote by Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. A reporter informed Trudeau that in on the Nixon tapes, Richard Nixon had called Trudeau a nasty name, and Trudeau's response:
"I've been called worse by better people."
Decency evolves: How high should CIA morale be if it's agents engaged in torture that produced no actionable intelligence and lied about it to Congress? And if their morale is low as a consequence, is it the Senate's fault for revealing these awful actions, or the CIAs for engaging in them in the first place?
As for the Wall Street Journal's editorial, quoted by Kent and cited by you, what post hoc explanation from CIA agents is going to justify the following actions documented by official CIA documents (to name just a few): forcing detainees with broken feet to stand in stress position for hours; engaging in repeated simulated drownings of detainees nearly to the point of death; or, administering medically unnecessary rectal nutrition and hydration to detainees for the expressed purpose of altering their behavior?
As for you Matthew, you really don't have a problem with this? The North Vietnamese tortured American pilots who flew planes that dropped bombs on North Vietnamese villages and cities. If they did so to extract information designed to prevent or respond to future bombings, were they morally justified? I don't think so, but I have a hard time distinguishing that from torturing detainees for similar reasons.
No torture for thee but not for me seems morally senseless to me, which is why I think Senator McCain was absolutely not mistaken.
You take no responsibility for protecting the country, but have only bile for those who do. I decline to join the hectoring. You wanted to lynch Darren Wilson based on a pack of lies (hands up, shot in the back, etc.), but, having failed in that enterprise, now use the latest news to attack someone else who stands in harm's way.
The Senate report is actually a Democratic hatchet job, put out by Feinstein to cover her backside, and before the opposition takes over.
Would you quote me any passage in which you contemporaneously criticized the North Vietnamese for torture? That I would love to see, but I strongly suspect you did no such thing. Instead -- let me guess! -- your view was that it was Amerika's fault for waging war.
But then it's ALWAYS Amerika's fault, not so?
The question you posed was whether we shouldn't be concerned that the CIA's morale would be dampened by the revelation that agents engaged in torture. My response was that torturers always claim to have good reasons, but that torture is wrong, always wrong. Unlike Senator McCain, who recognizes the truth of that observation from the most bitter personal experience, you seem vexed by that viewpoint.
As Kevin Drum recently observed, "Torture is not a hard concept . . . . Either you think that state-sanctioned torture of prisoners is beyond the pale for a civilized country or you don't. No cavils. No resorts to textual parsing. And no exceptions for 'we were scared.' This isn't a gray area. You can choose to stand with history's torturers or you can choose to stand with human decency. Pick a side."
You can choose to stand with Jihadists who blow up American children or you can choose to stand with their opponents. Pick a side.
I don't accept that premise. Condemning and foregoing torture isn't standing with the Jihadists and the fact that you aren't accepting the premise that it should be condemned doesn't make you more patriotic than someone who takes a contrary position.
It is possible to be quite effective in fighting Al Qaeda while eschewing torture and quite ineffective in doing so while embracing it. Bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora during the Bush Administration notwithstanding Dick Cheney's enthusiasm for the dark side and taking the gloves off. Bin Laden was killed during the Obama Administration despite the fact that it eschewed torture from the beginning.