Catholic and Enjoying It!
Some conservatives, eager to bask in some “Me too” reflected glory while diminishing Obama as much as possible (cuz, you know, this is all about a Triumph for the American People, not about politicians jockeying for power), are trying to figure out strategies for achieving this.
The two front runners appear to be “Portray Obama as a hapless boob dominated by Leon Panetta” coupled with “Yeah! Torture! We thought of that!“
This attempt at compensation for the fact that the Bush Administration made extremely clear that they had lost interest in bin Laden within six months of 9/11:
…is yet more evidence that torture is as much a Core Value of the Thing that Used to Be Conservatism as Abortion is of the Thing that Used to be Liberalism. Of course, the normal doubletalk is in full force. So it’s not torture, but it’s so unbearable that terrorist sing like canaries and even exsxpress gratitude because they feel themselves freed from guilt (according to torture apologist Marc Theissen) due to being unable to bear the, you know, torture.
Now, the fact remains, of course, that torture is, according to the Church, intrinsically immoral, whether it results in something good or not, just as shooting you mother in the head is intrinsically immoral even if you do wind up with a considerable inheritance and freedom from prosecution in Rio. Good ends don’t justify evil means.
That said, I’m not sold that the case has really been made that torture saved the day here.
Prisoners in American custody told stories of a trusted courier. When the Americans ran the man’s pseudonym past two top-level detainees — the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed; and Al Qaeda’s operational chief, Abu Faraj al-Libi — the men claimed never to have heard his name. That raised suspicions among interrogators that the two detainees were lying and that the courier probably was an important figure.
My italics. So in torturing these two men, interrogators got nothing of substance. In fact, it was only by assuming that these men were lying under torture that the investigation continued. It was subsequently, during normal interrogations that KSM gave us a central clue:
Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.
To repeat: in the one instance we now clearly know about, the CIA is telling us that torture gave them lies. Which they were. Only when traditional interrogation was used did we get the actual names of the couriers. Marcy Wheeler looks at the current data set:
We can conclude that either KSM shielded the courier’s identity entirely until close to 2007, or he told his interrogators that there was a courier who might be protecting bin Laden early in his detention but they were never able to force him to give the courier’s true name or his location, at least not until three or four years after the waterboarding of KSM ended. That’s either a sign of the rank incompetence of KSM’s interrogators (that is, that they missed the significance of a courier protecting OBL), or a sign he was able to withstand whatever treatment they used with him.
Follow up here. Jane Mayer's thoughts. Brian Beutler focuses on the flaws in the AP story torture apologists latched onto. Meanwhile, Rumsfeld himself has denied that torture played any role in finding bin Laden:
“It is true that some information that came from normal interrogation approaches at Guantanamo did lead to information that was beneficial in this instance. But it was not harsh treatment and it was not waterboarding.”
What really broke the case? From the NYT:
Operation Cannonball, a [2005] bureaucratic reshuffling … placed more C.I.A. case officers on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan. With more agents in the field, the C.I.A. finally got the courier’s family name. With that, they turned to one of their greatest investigative tools — the National Security Agency began intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages between the man’s family and anyone inside Pakistan. From there they got his full name. Last July, Pakistani agents working for the C.I.A. spotted him driving his vehicle near Peshawar.
Old-fashioned, painstaking, labor-intensive intelligence work. The American way. We never needed to stoop to bin Laden’s standards to get bin Laden. We needed merely to follow our long-tested humane procedures.
To conclude: the only “evidence” we have that torture “worked” is that people who stand to lose a lot for being discovered as war criminal tell us, on the basis of nothing, that their war crimes a) were not war crimes and b) worked. Members of the Thing that Used to Be Conservatism accept these dubious claims without trial because this tells them what their itching ears want to hear.
In other news, the tale of bin Laden hiding behind a woman (which sounded too conveniently and mythically destructive of his manliness the moment I heard it) is now being dialed back by the White House. I was skeptical of this when I heard it, but figured I’d wait till the dust settled.
Which brings us to another point: namely, that the fact is, we don’t know what happened beyond the fact that they killed him.
Now some folk are writing to express their surprise that I have little problem with killing bin Laden. One reader sez:
I am surprised at your reaction to the reported killing.
So, there is to be no judge, jury, evidence, trial or due process in American justice? Why could he not have been extradited, charged before an international court, given a fair trial, and then receive a suitable sentence if found guilty? A sentence, by the way, which need not include the death penalty, as the Catholic catechism teaches.
The ways of violence cannot be the ways of a Christian.
I think Joan of Arc and St. Louis might disagree. I have no problem with killing an enemy (and particularly an enemy like bin Laden) in a just war. The reasonable answer to why he could not be extradited and tried is that a single member of our Armed Forces is worth a million bin Ladens. We sent our guys into a completely unknown situation in the dead of night, with the very real possibility of being killed. The mission was to get in, get bin Laden, and get out–without getting killed by who knows how many enemies with who knows how much firepower. They did that and I have no problem with that.
Now, if it turns out that bin Laden surrendered and then they summarily executed him, I think there is a problem (though I also think the problem resides ultimately with the President ordering the murder of a prisoner, not with troops going rogue). But I have no evidence that this occurred, so I assume this operation falls under the heading of “war” not “police work” and shed no tears that men who took their lives in their hands to defeat an enemy already proven to be treacherous did not deal with him politely but shot him when he (according to the White House) made a move to resist.
Of course, all this also presumes that the White House account of things is reliable, a proposition we have no reason to believe other than that we want to believe it because we want to believe that the death of bin Laden is a straightforward and morally unambiguous tale of Good triumphing over Evil. That this is manifestly part of what’s going on is evident from the fact that, last week, a significant portion of the people who are high fiving each other over bin Laden’s death and “America’s” (NOT Obama’s) triumphant victory were seriously proposing that Obama is such a cunning liar that he has, via the White House time machine, completely hidden his Kenyan Muslim identity as he plots the communist atheist Muslim downfall of America.
Now, this week, the same people who wanted to believe this farrago of craziness about Obama the Muslim atheist Kenyan commie want to believe that the Obama Administration’s account of the raid on bin Laden’s house is true and accurate in every detail, just so long as it supports their need for a narrative of Pure American Vindication Over Evil.
Again, I’m not trying to suggest I have a problem with the raid. I don’t. I’m simply pointing out that there’s something weird about calling a Obama a fiend who hates America and who lies about everything one week and then uncritically accepting the rapidly shifting accounts of the raid on Osama the next week as gospel. It suggests that much of what we “know” about this event is basically pseudoknowledge, embraced not on the basis of anything we actually know, but on the basis of what we need to feel–rather like Michael Sean Winters’ embrace of Leftist bellicosity because it suits his political and emotional needs at the moment. We on the Right need to feel that a monster has been dispatched and a painful chapter in our history is, if not closed, at least dealt with. We need to feel that justice has been done. So a significant portion of the Right whiplashes from “Obama is a cunning liar who faked his birth certificate” to “The Obama Administration is a completely reliable source of information about the death of Osama bin Laden–though credit goes to “America” and not to the President who ordered the raid. Just because.”
Something of the tormented cross-currents of ideology can be seen in this tortured pile of words from a comboxer at the Register:
The birther issue was just a smokescreen encouraged by the Obama White House to “cloud” the real issues this country so needs to address before it goes down the rat-hole completely. Now they have replaced the birther issue with the OBL killing …and now they will milk that politically speaking for all it is worth. With of course the media cooperation. Today we will have nothing on the news again (since Sunday this has been going on)with the talk being only about Obama going to GRound Zero and then all day tomorrow the media will be showing Obama at Ground Zero..and then the next day it will be all about Obama having been at Ground Zero. On and on it goes while nothing of significance is being done about or talked about e.g. the debt ceiling crisis, the gas crisis, the economic crisis, the 3 on-going wars crisis, etc etc. It is the media/White House version of “fiddling” while the Nation wastes away! Oh yes and on my computer this am we are being treated to Michelle’s visit t o a nearby school to promote the career of Beyounce…with a video of our First Lady doing the “dougie”! Of course the end of OBL IS important news! We have all heard nothing but that since Sunday. But enough already.
So it turns out that Birther Nuttery is not the responsibility of Birther Nuts, but of the cunning Obama. Meanwhile, the culmination of a ten year struggle to actually punish the man responsible for 9/11, delayed and distracted by mad nation-building wars which had nothing to do with that mission, is to be swept aside as quickly as possible lest (horrors!) credit be given to the President who actually achieved the goal.
It’s been three whole *days* of being glad that the Butcher of 9/11 has been defeated! Where are people’s priorities? Have we forgotten, in our solemn gladness that a great criminal has been punished that the *real* enemy of America is the President of the United States?
That’s crazy talk. But par for the course in our present crazy culture.
Oh! And speaking of crazy, I have been declared mentally ill! It seems that when I make flippant remarks about burying bin Laden’s remains in bacon as a warning to other Islamic nutjobs while also repudiating the notion that “God hates bin Laden and anybody else hated by a Calvinized worshipper of Mars Jesus” this is proof positive that I am insane, according to one comboxer.
Me: I don’t see a big conflict between praying for the soul of “those most in need of thy mercy” and using their mortal remains to dissuade nutjobs from turning other people into mortal remains. I don’t claim that as a virtue on my part (I think the course the US took was probably the sensible one while my flippancy is just blowing off steam). But I also don’t think my lack of tender regard for bin Laden’s corpse is a very big deal either.
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