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Monday, January 10, 2005

Come For The Incompetence, Stay For The Corruption

In the ongoing Attorney General confirmation hearings for Alberto Gonzales, the "grilling" he's gotten from Democratic stalwarts like Pat "Go fuck yourself" Leahy has centered around the celebrated torture memos. What's interesting about these memoranda is not only the effort made to circumvent longstanding Geneva Convention practice by deriding it as quaint, or invoking some sub-point about non-uniformed combatants, but that Gonzales actually asked the Justice Dept. to find a way to allow Bush to have the power to decree the right to these coercive techniques.

And then, of course, not to say anything about it. Because if there's one thing this administration stands for, it's acting like it doesn't owe anyone an explanation.

For now, let's regard these arguments as essentially academic. We at Hammer of the Blogs like to regard ourselves as utilitarian, pragmatic, hard-nosed when required. But we still like puppies and kitties and long walks on the beach before....let's just say we have a balance between idealism and pragmatism that works for us and leave it at that, m'kay?

Now, the utilitarian part of this is that most of these coercive techniques have not "worked" -- that is, they have not elicited the copious quantities of hard intel that we'd hoped for. How do I know this? Well, for one, the recent reports on the abuse cited at Guantanamo resulted in nothing more than protests of disgust from the FBI and CIA operatives -- not exactly the Janeane Garofalo Fan Club -- as well as the subsequent (and ongoing) release of dozens of prisoners from Guantanamo. (The same exodus occurred from Abu Ghraib after that scandal broke public.)

There's no secret as to how the military works. These are, to paraphrase Orwell, rough men standing guard so the rest of us can sleep soundly. They are, after all the jargon and red tape get cut through, pragmatic. If valuable intel had been extracted by these techniques (many of which, I should point out, I don't consider torture per se) they'd have said so, at least in the usual opaque "I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you" terms.

If someone wants to make the argument that tragedies were prevented and lives were saved by forcing naked hooded Iraqi men into piles, or to simulate (we hope) fellatio on one another in order to break them by sexual humiliation, all the while with that grinning troll Lynndie England leering and pointing at them, then let's hear it. But it's been eight months since Abu Ghraib, and several months since the first Guantanamo allegations, and not one person has come forth and said, "Yeah, but you know what that guy gave up from that sort of treatment?". No one, not even the already-convicted service personnel, has made that claim.

And that's because torture has limited utility as a reliable info-gathering tactic, but also because the incidents in question were more centered around humiliation and cruelty. For every retired anonymous SEAL or Green Beret who claims that he got some bad guys to talk by slapping them around, or killing one guy and scaring the others into talking, there's another that'll tell you that he had no trouble getting people to talk just by sitting them down, giving them a burger and a smoke, and letting them talk. So anyone who issues a blanket endorsement of torture "working" is talking out their ass; they cannot possibly account for a reliable cross-section of cultures, interrogation techniques, particular insurgent organizations, etc. What works on a Tamil Tiger may fall flat on an IRA guy.

So the question really becomes "what are we willing to do". And here is my point about Gonzales (finally): most Americans will say, when asked this question, "whatever it takes". There are simply certain crimes that are considered bad enough that pretty much anything goes, sex crimes and crimes against children or the elderly being the more obvious examples. Do you really care if a suspected child molester gets slapped around a bit, in the quest for enough concrete evidence to make the charges stick? You might; most people don't.

Terrorism has fallen into the same basic category. We've seen too many people get their heads sawed off on videotape over the last year. It's an emotional reaction to an issue that needs to be resolved in a more utilitarian fashion, but that's human nature for you. Bottom line -- Americans are less concerned about Gonzales' endorsement of torture than the Democrats seem to think they should be. For better or worse (and ultimately, I do believe it's for the worse), that's the way it stands.

What all this means is that ultimately, the torture question will probably be resolved by enumerating allowable means; i.e., blaring Pat Benatar at 120dB may be acceptable, while hog-tying them for 24 hours and letting them shit themselves -- eh, not so much. Rendition may turn out to be a bigger issue as well, if Americans are forced to consider the ramifications of sending someone who has had zero due process off to Pakistan, where they'll run a power drill into his shin until he's ready to confess to killing Abraham Lincoln.

If the Democrats really want to have a shot at knocking Gonzales off the confirmation track (and if you think about it, they might not -- if Gonzales is Bush's best choice, just imagine Plan B), they should harp on the issue of competence. As I've said before, this is the guy who wanted to hand over the Homeland Security keys to a mobbed-up thug moron like Bernie Kerik. Perhaps Gonzales can explain Bernie's two mistresses and his Ground Zero love pad to Reverend Jim (Dobson) and the sainted "values voters". What he can't possibly explain is why he failed to do even basic due diligence on what is arguably the most important Cabinet position in the near future.

(I have another theory on the "why" of that final question, but this post has gone on much further than I'd anticipated, so we'll hit that theory later.)

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