Backing the baby up on torture

We've already gotten some letters from some very disgruntled readers re: Quentin Hardy's profile of Boalt professor and torture advocate John Yoo.

Okay, I didn't really mean to be that to be quite such a low blow -- and you all tell me if I'm way off base. But much as I'm perplexed by the fundamental argument that a little torture is the price everyone else pays for our freedom, I think the article does raise some really fascinating questions. I can't help but acknowledge that own lefty feelings about, say, gun control (namely that the term "right to bear arms" was born before automatic weapons were a twinkle in anyone's eye and is completely inappropriate in today's context) are not in principle so different from Yoo's -- that the Geneva Conventions were not written with an enemy like al-Qaeda in mind. And it would be pretty dense of me to not see that parallel.

And I also sit back and wonder about comparisons with Truman's decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the argument being that hundreds of thousands of lives were saved from a land war by forcing a quick end to the war in the Pacific. In effect that's Yoo's argument, that torture of a few will save more lives in the end. According to the article, Yoo believes that "violent interrogation...is far less violent than the killing of as many as 50,000 innocents in Iraq." (Is that a tip of the hat to political correctness? That he says innocents in Iraq?)

But when I get going thinking about torture, here's where my naive little brain gets stuck: How can one person deliberately cause pain -- extreme pain -- to another, no matter what the circumstances? And what sort of person does that? I find myself posing the question: If I had the choice between killing someone quickly and torturing them, which would I find easier to do? Killing quickly. Not that this is something I stay awake dreaming about, but all other things being equal (!), the idea of inflicting immense physical pain over on someone over the course of hours/days/weeks/years somehow bothers me more than the idea of killing them in five seconds. And that fundamental issue -- what in us, or in some people, is able to torture -- seems to me to be lost in the debate.

I found myself wondering the other night (with the utmost respect, really, I don't mean to pick on John Yoo): Would Yoo recant his beliefs if he were tortured? Could he himself inflict torture just because he believes it's an appropriate policy? Can only certain people be the bad guys, or can anyone in the right circumstances?

On that note, I leave you.

Fire away.

--Meghan aka "Pollyanna"

Comments

[Tanya Burnett]

Understand this - the radical extreme islamic community in Iran and Iraq hate all Americans. They do not care if you are democrat or republican - to them you are an infadel, a heathen, a ungodly person. This is a war not a "police action", this is a war. Even before September 11, 2001 - they had declared Jihad - that is what this is. We need to stop acting like this has to do with politics...........it has to do with religious facists. This is my final answer - I agree with John Yoo's opinion.

[Denny Ah-Tye]

Torture is inhumane. To inflict physical pain to ellicit information is barbaric. It seems with all the medical science at our disposal regarding the functioning of the brain, there must be another means to trick the brain to release stored information - even if the person does not want to give it up.

Wasn't Timothy Leary in the 60's working on the effects of LSD on the brain at Stanford in conjunction with the military looking for a more effective replacement for Sodium Pentohal?

The full circle returns...

Denny Ah-Tye '70

[Dick Newick]

Torture.
I,m listening to John Mc Cain who has experienced torture, says it is wrong and does not produce the desired results. To have had good lawyer John Yoo misguiding President Bush on that subject is a sad outrage that will cost this country dearly.
Yoo's presence on the Bolt faculty does not enhance our university's stature.
Dick Newick '48

[Gary M]

Prof. Yoo seems very naive to believe the 911 "story"-- hook, line, and sinker, and then make policy on a false foundation. Has anyone even been charged yet in the anthrax affair either, no..because all leads go directly to the White House, (Valerie Phlame outing likewise).

[Zaheer Ali]

It is ironic that the son of immigrants from South Korea, people who fought to be free of secret detentions, torture, and authoritarian regimes would then advise the country the world looks to for leadership in freedom to engage in exactly those activities.

He is not worthy of even being spit upon.

[Anthony St. John '63]

What a lot of people don’t realize is that Professor Woo is just carrying on the Boalt Hall tradition of Earl Warren who participated in the exclusion, removal and internment of approximately 120,000 innocent American citizens of Japanese descent from 1942 through 1945. In 1988 President Ronald Reagan signed legislation characterizing Warren’s crimes against Americans as acts of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

Obviously we have another failure of political leadership today, and the war hysteria that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Yoo are promoting is being used to create and perpetuate supreme executive power of the Neocon presidency and autocracy by systematically attacking and reducing American civil liberties. Yoo is just taking the HUAC attacks against American civil liberties to the next level to undermine the "Constitution of the United States of America."

The "Declaration of Independence" must not have been on Yoo’s reading list, or that of another Yale graduate Bush for that matter, because they are recreating the conditions that existed on July 4, 1776 with a whole new version of King George v.21C. People should keep a copy on their desks for constant reference to historical parallels during the next two years of Bush-Cheney’s imperial presidency.

[Brad Sherman]

Torture is always wrong. It is immoral.

[Greg Keaton]

Aside from all the moral problems with the current torture policy, there are some very practical problems:

1) There is nothing to prevent innocent people from being tortured. Prisoners are presumed guilty until proven innocent, and are not given an opportunity to prove their innocence. This is the kind of tyranny that the Constitution was supposed to prevent.

2) We could get more information by treating all prisoners with respect. If the U.S. offered a humane, positive alternative to the Middle East bloodbath, then more people with information about terrorists would be willing to become informants. But this will only happen if people trust that they will not be mistreated while in American hands.

3) John Yoo's basic argument--that torture is o.k. because the ends justify the means--is at least as old as the Spanish Inquisition. As it turned out, sticking a red-hot poker up someone's rectum is not the best way to convince them to believe in an all-loving God. Similarly, subjecting people to "stress-positions" and other euphemestically named torture practices is not the best way to bring them around to a vision of freedom and human rights.

[Joseph Hubbard]

I think that those that are really confused are the Americans that believe that the Bush administration are to blame for the anti-American rhetoric. Some Americans today refuse to acknowledge that we are on top of the food chain. No matter how we try to appear politically correct there will always be those who try to take what we have. This country did not begin as an innocent discovery of land free for the taking. It was a manipulative and violent landgrab. Now that the country has evolved into a modern melting pot, some of us have forgotten that our nation has blood on its hands that have been washed away by time. Its easy to sit back and take the high road while there are still those who lost thousands of relatives during the early formation of the U.S.. I've read numerous elaborate writings that side-step justifying how Americans today have benefitted from this past. The answers always are rooted in the past and that is where we as a nation must look before judging the actions of any administration of the present and future. Many Americans have a very good and relatively secure life and this is the main catalyst for the eloquent 'cowardly' talk. Americans want the benefits of a ruthless and bloody past but don't want to continue fighting for it. They criticize any overt actions by the federal government to get tough with terrorist. In my opinion its because we are a melting pot of many cultures and there exist some who want to appear innocent. I think that all of the clever attacks on administration would cease if our nation's defense was severely weakened. I wonder if foreign soldiers stomping on our soil will listen to our intellectual theories of peace and political correctiveness. History has taught us that this is not the chance we want to take. Stop the cowardly agenda and start being Americans. The only conspiracy theories are created by manipulators like Olliver Stone just so he can laugh all the way to the bank. Enjoy your latte in your nice home, but remember we all owe it to those who gave their life for this country to do whatever it takes to keep this nation together. We also owe it to the ones we took it from also. be cheesed all you want but please don't think you know what is best for our nation's defense against those who use a different set of rules. Your clever comments mean nothing to those men and women who defend this country so you can run your mouths just to have a purpose in life.

[Robert J. Colmar]

Law professor John Yoo is an unabashed advocate for supreme executive authority—including the power to torture and detain military prisoners without charges. DOES HE HAVE A POINT?

Does he have a point? Yes, right at the top of his head. This is utterly ridiculous.

"Supreme executive power" is called a dictatorship! Hitler had supreme executive authority. Saddam Hussein had supreme executive authority. As far as I'm concerned Yoo is Coo Coo. Kim Jon Il has supreme executive authority.

There is nothing in the world that justifies such a state for a democracy---in fact what Yoo embraces is exactly antithetical to a democracy.

Yoo appears to be a man that comes with a ready made, buit-in, predisposition for totalitarianism and then he casts about to find a reason, any reason, to embrace it. Being a summa cum laude in law is an intellectual matter but I maintain that Yoo has been driven by an irrational personal emotional matter.

In my view his is not a valid legal argument but rather a personal pathology. He found the 9/11 tragedy upon which to hang his pathological needs.
Without diminishing the tragedy, it was, after all, no different IN KIND than the original attack on the World Trade Center, no different IN KIND from the government building that was blown up by an American citizen. There was no such call for an abrupt and drastic change for dictatorship as a result of those attacks---it would have been nonsensical to any rational being---tragic as any and all of those events were in terms of the extent of damage. These were crimes, not war.

9/11 was technically a crime ---Bush decided to call it a war, a "war on terrorism" but only for his personal convenience to extend his executive powers, not for reasons of justifiable legal reasons. Bush embraced the idea because it suited his and Cheney's evil grasp for power. And the Republican Congress was derelict in turning over to the president the unilateral power, as in a fascist state, to declare war which rightly belongs to, and only to, the Congress.

A particuarly major flaw in Yoo's argument is that:

On September 11, 2001, the fires of September 11 were for him as different from theory. He concluded that our nation's most potent institutions — those at work on the battlefield and as part of the legal system-—would have to move forcefully, too. And soon he acted.

"I saw that a small group can now attack us with the violence of a nation," says Yoo, a professor at Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law since 1993. "The Geneva Convention
never recognized this kind of enemy." Soon after September 11, Yoo advised the
president of the United States that it was time to rethink the rules of war. It was time for America to think about secret detention, secret courts, and extracting
information—even if it meant through torture.

This was a premise for Yoo that was totally flawed. He reasoned that "a small group can now attack us with the violence of a nation." Wrong!. Yoo's apparent inherent prediliction for being controlled blinded him to the open questions about whether such an attack could have been pulled off in the limited way in which he chose to imagine it to have been. He decided to be naive!

Whatever you want to think about "conspriacy theories" the complexity of that 9/11 event and the ensuing remarkable long string of incompetencies,errors, and strange events that had occured on that fateful morning strongly suggests that 9/11 could not have been pulled off without help from wlling hands internel to the United States---known communications to the White House from Russia and Saudia Arabia, among others, including George Tenet, of an oncoming attack, extremely unsual NORAD delays in the immediate interception of planes just a half dozen degree off-course, WTC building No. 7, a steel-framed building with a relatively small fire that collapsed without ever being hit---the first in the history of steel-structure buildings to collapse from a fire---this was a matter not so much of aninteligence "screw-up" as it was of "stand-down". Yoo missed those critical elemnts that may have been more overriding than the terrorists' primitive plan itself which could hardly have been carried to conclusion by itself.

There are many, many, very reasonable, rational, questions that remain unanswered. Pat Roberts, the chairman of the 9/11 inquiry committee had his political reasons for his continued delay and refusal to open the second phase of the 9/11 inquiry into what role the policy makers had in handling or manipulating the inelligence before 9/11. The first part blaming intelligence is a farce!

But Yoo didn't exercise the intellectual integrity to inquire into and understand that the 9/11 episode had many more aspects than the obvious simplistic aspect and that a hasty, if not irresponsible, decision was motivated by questionable motives. Had he known that the country was not as vulnerable to terrorists acting alone as he simplistically chosen to believe his legal outcome would surely have to have been not extreme as it is.

If he had the mature curiousity necessary, he might have concluded that increased secrecy and "supreme executive power" was anathema to a democracy and the worst possible direction for the country as we now see---we are far, far, from safer than ever before because we have even more enemies than ever and Bush has illegally assumed ever increasing executive powers. And the borders remain open, inspection of airline cargos are virtually non-existent, as are the US shipping ports. Yoo's "supreme executive powers" simply haven't worked. And from seemingly the best sources on the subject, torture DOES NOT produce meaningful intelligence---it simply makes sadistic animals out of ordinary men acting as captors.

In my view Yoo chose to take a simplistic, if not half-baked, view of 9/11 and foolishly didn't take into account all the factors bearing on 9/11 and, therefore, his conclusions are simplistic, unduly harsh, and irresponsible.

Robert J. Colmar
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http://alumni.berkeley.edu/calmag/200611/hardy.asp