Once again I'm shocked but not at all surprised by the ingenuity Christopher Hitchens puts into his disingenuousness. This time the subject at issue is torture by Uncle Sam's willing executioners, and in Hitch's view the biggest lesson we need to learn is that the fault and blame lie with the Central Intelligence Agency. It's all laid out in his April 27 Slate piece Yet Another CIA Failure: What the torture revelations tell us about the culture of Langley.
Hitch begins his column with a piece of revealing information about himself. "Moral smugness reigns," he declares, before going on to mock his local Episcopal church for displaying a sign saying "Torture is Wrong."
Then he inserts a double-quarter-pounder whopper heavy on the onions. Actually, it's a long division exercise designed to dilute any complicity that Bushie, Cheney, Condie, Rummie and company might conceivably bear for ordering thousands of people's lives destroyed through torture to the point where they are no more guilty than the average Joe or Jane.
When torture was actually being practiced, it was in order to slake an unspoken demand from everyone from Congress and the public and the 9/11 commission that swift results be obtained, that no more "warnings" be overlooked, that we all feel more "safe." Only a very few people were consistently against using "harsh methods," let alone making use of the information that such methods might (or might not) have produced.
No, Christopher, torture — and as far as we know it is still actually being practiced today — in the G.W. Bush administration years was undertaken by torturers on the orders of their superiors. The guys who did the waterboarding and the raping and the electric shock treatment and burning of the nipples and genitals with lighted cigarettes and the insertion of bamboo under the fingernails and the hanging of people suspended in midair by the arms for days on end, etc., did this under orders from above. If you are not prepared to condemn and call for the prosecution of the people at the top of the ziggurat but instead ignore them and deflect attention away from their alleged offenses, then you are not actually against torture but are, on the contrary, a supporter of torture and quite possibly an accessory after the fact to its practice and a perverter of the course of justice into the plea bargain.
In such a cacophonously verbal culture as that of the mainstream United States, it is hard to see how an unspoken demand can be recognized, yet alone slaked. But in any case, it is not the Government's business or duty to slake unspoken demands, particularly when such demands are for illegal or immoral activity. The Government is charged with governing and protecting the nation while upholding the law and the Constitution. It isn't even allowed by law to order the burning of witches, the bludgeoning to death of abortion doctors or the hanging of uppity Negroes, let alone the hanging, drawing and quartering of bankers and stockbrokers, although an unspoken demand for all of the above wouldn't be too difficult to stoke up with a suitable media campaign. Indeed, this is precisely how the Rwandan Holocaust of close to a million poor souls was affected within the space of a few short weeks in 1994, to take just one recent example. So why blame the Rwandan leadership that presided over the slaughter, if, like the Bushies, they were only following public opinion?
I look down on Americans as much as the next foreigner, but I don't hold them in anywhere near the sort of contempt that Hitch does. Of the 300 million or so people who comprise the US public, one wonders how many of them Hitch actually asked before declaring "only a very few" of them to have been "consistently against using 'harsh methods'?" Of the several dozen Americans with whom I am in fairly frequent personal contact, all several dozen of them were and still are consistently against using "harsh methods". Of course, I don't hang out with the likes of William Kristol, Alan Dershowitz, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin or even Pam Atlas, so I admit my sampling could be less than fully representative.
After using basic arithmetic to convict the entire US population, apart from the very few, of complicity in torture, Hitch moves on to moral calculus:
The absolute amount of torture in the world was also very much reduced by the removal of the Taliban and the Baath Party from power in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This claim cannot be verified as we cannot know how much torture the Talibanies and the Baathists would have engaged in had they remained in power. We can assume that both groups are still practicing torture although they are out of power, and that the "War on Terror " itself has resulted the practice of torture by groups on all sides. Also, the absolute amount of torture in the world has always been much greater than the absolute amount of torture practiced by the Talibanies and Baathists, and this absolute amount of torture may well have increased significantly for reasons unconnected with Iraq and Afghanistan. So there is absolutely no basis for claiming an absolute decline in the absolute amount of torture — absolutely not.
Lastly, Hitch rehashes his version of the Abu Ghraib "bad apple" theory, accomplishing a mathematical feat involving differentiation of motive, integration of character assassination and dividing aesthetic sensibility by zero. After all, some of those poses were genuinely artistic:
After all, in the case of Abu Ghraib, it was not even seriously argued that the gross maltreatment of our Iraqi detainees was motivated by a search for information. The foul images from that jail were of recreational and pornographic torture, undertaken by bored amateur sadists and third-raters.
However, as the Washington Post had it on June 17, 2008:
The Bush administration has long held that overly-aggressive interrogation methods used on detainees in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay were the work of a few "bad apples." Now, an investigation being conducted by the Senate Armed Services Committee has revealed that William Haynes II, General Counsel for the U.S. Department of Defense, sought the advice of military psychologists within a Pentagon agency to design the interrogation techniques. The Committee's findings add to mounting evidence that the detainees' torture resulted from decisions made at the highest levels of government, particularly within the office of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.
While the column under discussion represents yet another triumph of contrarian limbo dancing, Hitch's attempts to deflect blame and fudge issues are far from cute. Oh, this is precisely the sort of behavior that must have been extremely cute when as a child he employed it to escape parental or headmasterly punishment for various misdemeanors, back when he could still disguise a smirk as a smile. But just look where his subsequent career of crafty deception has lead him: To a prominent perch, not among the defenders of torture per se, as that would obviously be beneath his dignity, but among the defenders of the architects of torture, where a entirely different morality prevails.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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