Clive Davis

ULTIMATE WEAPON?

Had an amicable e-mail exchange late last night with Englishman in New York. He wasn't convinced by what I'd said earlier about torture and interrogation. I don't have particularly sophisticated views on this, but as I told him, one of the best things I'd read on the subject was the Atlantic interview with Black Hawk Down author, Mark Bowden:

...This is a realm where a certain amount of two-facedness is called for, unfortunately. I believe that it would be wrong to license all coercion, but by the same token, I believe that it would wrong not to practice it in certain cases.

I've linked to it before, but that's no reason not to plug it again.

MORE ROOT CAUSES?

Robert Kagan, wise as ever, has a a few questions about that leaked National Intelligence Estimate suggesting the war in Iraq has stirred up jihadism around the globe:

There were no quotations from the NIE itself, so all we have are journalists' characterizations of anonymous comments by government officials, whose motives and reliability we can't judge, about intelligence assessments whose logic and argument, as well as factual basis, we have no way of knowing or gauging.

For what it's worth, I don't find it hard to believe that the insurgency - as opposed to the invasion itself - has been a recruiting sergeant. After all, the post-war mess leaves America looking weak and indecisive. But Kagan asks the right question, surely:

There is, in addition to all this, a question of context. What should we do if we believe certain actions might inspire some people to become potential terrorists? Should we always refrain from taking those actions, or are there cases in which we may want to act anyway? We have pretty good reason to believe, for instance, that the Persian Gulf War in 1991, and the continuing presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia after the war, was a big factor in the evolution of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. We are pretty sure that American support of the Afghan mujaheddin against the Soviet occupation forces in the late 1970s and early '80s also contributed to the growth of Islamic terrorism.

Knowing this, would we now say that we made a mistake in each of those cases? Would an NIE argue that we would be safer today if we had not helped drive the Soviets from Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein from Kuwait? The argument in both cases would be at least as sound as the argument about the most recent Iraq war.

[Via RealClearPolitics]

UPDATE: The NY Times has more on the details published with George Bush's blessing.

TORTUOUS

I can't say I've been following every twist and turn of the interrogation debate. The reason being that it seems obvious, to me anyway, that there are going to be extremely rare occasions when things such as waterboarding, repulsive though they are, will be morally justified. And, yes, on reflection, I'd say waterboarding - one of those laddish euphemisms we like to throw around - does qualify as a form of torture. (As does the use of intensely loud music. I know other people wouldn't agree on that.) Do I feel confident that people can be trusted to use techniques like that in the right circumstances a hundred per cent of the time? No. Which is what troubles me most of all.

What a relief,then, to find that the moderate, non-partisan Jonathan Rauch is willing to acknowledge the shades of grey. Torture should be legally off-limits, he says, but the deal struck in Congress faces up to realities:

[G]eneral agreement exists that the central purpose of a detention and interrogation system is to prevent terrorism, not to prevent torture. That point may sound trivial, but it is not: Many human-rights advocates believe that the foremost responsibility of any detention system is to treat detainees humanely. On Capitol Hill, both parties reject that view. In its way, this is a seminal decision...

To use coercive interrogation as part of everyday intelligence-gathering would certainly be unacceptable. Even the occasional and careful use of rough methods risks tarnishing America's image and diminishing the country's power to lead by example. On the other hand, if making a Qaeda leader stand naked, depriving him of sleep, or flashing bright lights at him could prevent a major terrorist attack, it would seem immoral to put those methods off-limits, and perverse to call them war crimes. Surely the rights of potential terrorism victims count no less than the rights of detainees...

The law should leave room for exceptional recourse to "alternative" interrogation techniques, while making sure that their use is genuinely exceptional. ...If the need to water-board a senior Qaeda operative is compelling, the president should be willing to make a finding that tells the Intelligence committees what the government needs to do and why. If the committees object, chances are the public would, too.

HIS DAY IN COURT

So, assuming the reports of Bin Laden's death are premature, we still have to work out what to do with him if and when he's captured. Lawrence Wright - author of the Al Qaeda study, The Looming Tower - comes up with some novel ideas:

We should, instead, offer him to the authorities in Kenya, where, on Aug. 7, 1998, a Qaeda suicide bomber murdered 213 people in the attack on the American Embassy. More than 150 people were blinded by flying glass in the attack — most of them Africans who were in or near the embassy... Let Mr. bin Laden sit in a courtroom in Nairobi and explain to those blind Africans that he was aiming only at an icon of American power.

Then take him to Tanzania, where on the same August morning Al Qaeda hit another American Embassy, killing 11 people, most of them Muslims. The terrorists excused the murder of their co-religionists by saying that the bombing took place on a Friday, when good Muslims should have been in a mosque. That would be an excellent venue to pose the question of what Islam really stands for.

... By treating him as a criminal defendant instead of a enemy combatant, we could underline the differences between a civil society and the Taliban-like rule he seeks to impose on Muslim countries and eventually the entire world.

Mr. bin Laden could go on to many other venues to answer for his crimes — Istanbul, Casablanca, Madrid, London, Islamabad — but in my opinion there is an obvious last stop on his tour of justice: his homeland, Saudi Arabia, where hundreds of his countrymen and expatriate workers have died at the hands of Al Qaeda. There he would be tried in a Shariah court, the only law he would ever recognize.

If he were found guilty, he would be taken to a park in the middle of downtown Riyadh known as "Chop Chop Square." There, the executioner would greet him with his long, heavy sword at his side.

Interesting, but having seen Saddam's trial descend into farce, wouldn't it be the same story all over again?

RULES OF WAR, 21ST CENTURY STYLE

Hoover fellow Peter Berkowitz applauds a new book on terrorism and US civil liberties by Richard Posner, co-author of arguably the most high-minded blog on the planet:

Posner admonishes those libertarians who would brook no trade-offs in civil liberties, in exchange for heightened security measures, for missing the larger picture. Nothing, he points out, is more sure to bring about a severe restriction of civil liberties in America than the backlash following the failure to prevent another 9/11, or worse.

As for interrogation techniques, here's the key passage from Berkowitz's review. Sorry for the long quote, but it's worth reading:

Setting aside for the moment America's international law obligations under the Convention against Torture, Posner points out that the Constitution, which regulates the gathering of evidence, interrogations, trials, and punishments in criminal cases, has very little to say about the acquisition of information from terrorists for the purpose of preventing death and destruction.

The currently applicable constitutional rule is that methods of interrogation that "shock the conscience" are unlawful. But, as Posner points out, this test is sensitive to context: "What shocks the conscience depends on circumstances. In life-and-death circumstances the use of even highly coercive methods of interrogation is unlikely to shock the conscience of most people, even thoughtful and humane ones."

Yet not all highly coercive methods of interrogation rise to the level of torture, which, according to the Convention against Torture, is defined as the infliction of severe physical or mental suffering. Nevertheless, Posner is convinced that "torture is warranted to avert a greater evil." But warranted is not the same as constitutional or lawful.

Even though he believes that many consciences would not be shocked by the decision to shove knives under a person's fingernails to obtain knowledge about the location of a nuclear weapon set to explode in a few hours in Washington, Posner concludes that it would be unwise to hold that the Constitution permits torture. In cases of emergency, where torture is warranted but not constitutional, Posner the pragmatist prefers "to trust public officers to perceive and act on a moral duty that is higher than their legal duty." This approach regards torture as a form of morally and politically justified civil disobedience.

I don't enjoy saying I agree with that, but I do.

IMAGERY

             

Look at this picture, and what do you see? Richard Woodward, in the Wall Street Journal, follows up the curious story of the 9/11 shot taken by German photographer Thomas Hoepker. A parable for our times... Columnist Frank Rich assumed - understandably, you might think -  that the New Yorkers in the foreground were simply being callous. A couple of them have now responded. As for Hoepker, Woodward gives this harsh assessment:

He has Photoshopped it in his mind so that it now belongs neatly in a more contemporary storyline of this nation's culpability for world unease. The German press has reproduced the photograph widely and seems to have read it, as Mr. Rich did, to upbraid Americans for their hedonism and short memories.

CHUMPS AT HARVARD?

Amir Taheri admires ex-president Khatami's mastery of the art of doublespeak:

He used a vocabulary carefully designed to hoodwink the Americans without angering his fellow Khomeinists back home. The trick was reinforced by the fact that he often said one thing in Persian, while the interpreter said something else in English for the benefit of the Harvard audience.

For example, Khatami would speak of "khoshunat", which means "roughness," but the interpreter would translate it into "violence" or even "terror." Thus, the Harvard audience would think that Khatami admits that there may be terrorism in the realm of Islam - while back in Tehran, he would appear talking only about "roughness" and "coercion."...

He spoke a great deal about the need for dialogue, tolerance and understanding. But he made no mention of the fact that he had closed down 150 Iranian newspapers, imprisoned scores of journalists and unleashed his Hezbollah hounds to crush the student revolts against his regime. His "dialogue of civilizations" had not been extended to thousands of Iranian workers bullied, beaten, murdered or forced out of their jobs simply because they had gone on strike

[Via RealClearPolitics]

DAVE, ABROAD

The Times has a problem with that David Cameron speech:

He ... presents himself as avowedly Atlanticist, saying that anti-Americanism represents "intellectual and moral surrender". So far, so good. But to drive home his point, Mr Cameron resorts to a dash of chattering-class populism. "I am a liberal conservative rather than a neoconservative," he says. This "libcon" positioning is calculated to appeal to those who believe that Washington’s "neocons" are responsible for every ill of the past five years.

The term neoconservatism is used promiscuously and, more often than not, ignorantly, as a catchphrase for chaos. Its tenets — emphasising the importance of democracy and the projection of US power to that end — did indeed provide much of the intellectual underpinning of Washington and London’s response to the post-9/11 world. There are arguments against such a world view. But there is a difference between a policy and execution of that policy, and to heap every shortcoming at the door of neocons is to misunderstand and exaggerate their influence... Mr Cameron is clearly grappling with foreign policy, but there is a significant chunk of his own party that is more Little Englander than liberal conservative.

FIVE YEARS

I took this photo one Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1994, a few blocks from the apartment I was sharing in the East Village. I never got tired of the ghostly look of the World Trade Centre seen from a distance. (Like a lot of people, I suspect, early evening was my favourite time for looking south.) The idea that those towers could disappear never remotely crossed my mind, even though it was just a year after the first bomb attack.

There was a comedy festival in New York some weeks before I snapped the picture. One event involved going on an open-top bus tour of Manhattan hosted by an ancient survivor of the Bilko show (the blonde private - I can't remember his name). At one point our bus passed the foot of the towers. Construction workers were still patching things up. We were too busy being amused by the comic's wisecracks about nothing in particular to pay attention to the scaffolding. I mean, who would ever be stupid enough to try to destroy such a huge building?

UPDATE: Belgravia Dispatch revisits a memorial site entitled Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs.

MORE: Christopher Hitchens warns against indulging in too much introspection:

"We" - and our allies  - simply have to become more ruthless and more experienced. An unspoken advantage of the current awful strife in Iraq and Afghanistan is that it is training tens of thousands of our young officers and soldiers to fight on the worst imaginable terrain, and gradually to learn how to confront, infiltrate, "turn", isolate and kill the worst imaginable enemy. These are faculties that we shall be needing in the future. It is a shame that we have to expend our talent in this way, but it was far worse five years and one day ago, when the enemy knew that there was a war in progress, and was giggling at how easy the attacks would be, and "we" did not even know that hostilities had commenced.

BULLIES?

Driving into London on Friday night, I tuned into Any Questions in time to hear the discussion about torture and terrorism. Emphatic condemnations from all four panellists: there can never, under any circumstances, be a case for using torture. Which is an absolutely respectable position, of course. What irked me was that no one bothered to address any kind of hypothetical, "ticking bomb" circumstances. (Have they ever heard of Alan Dershowitz?) I feel morally obtuse and horrible all round for saying this, but I do think there are extreme situations where torture might be justified. Later that night, after I got home again, the Fox News panel addressed the same subject. A more nuanced debate, I thought: Charles Krauthammer and Fred Barnes putting the pro-case, Nina Easton laying out the valid fears about abuse of power. It felt slightly more like the real world to me.

More on the murky grey areas from Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden. I've linked to this piece before.

MORE: A glimpse inside the machine... From today's NYT report on the interrogation of Al Qaeda operative, Abu Zubaydah:

At times, Mr. Zubaydah, still weak from his wounds, was stripped and placed in a cell without a bunk or blankets. He stood or lay on the bare floor, sometimes with air-conditioning adjusted so that, one official said, Mr. Zubaydah seemed to turn blue. At other times, the interrogators piped in deafening blasts of music by groups like the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

We now know that Zubaydah wasn't as senior or influential as first thought. Does that make his treatment immoral? Unfortunately, I don't think so.