I tried saying some things about the report, but in the end it looked like a better idea if I did not. I think I need a little time before I can be as coherent as I’d like to be.
All the same, oy.
In 2009, the Pew Research Center found that 49 percent of the public said that “the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information” can “often” or “sometimes” be justified. This belief was held by 64 percent of Republicans, 54 percent of Independents and 36 percent of Democrats.
Including the number who say that torture can rarely be justified, 71 percent of Americans accept torture under some circumstances.
Maybe Mitch McConnell’s idiot parade is exactly the leadership we deserve.
terraformer
Wow. Just, wow.
srv
Name any TV crime show, and physical violence and torture is mainstream.
Thanks, all you 24 fans.
Patricia Kayden
How can torture be okay when common sense will tell you that if you torture someone, they’ll say anything to get it to stop? I’d admit to being the Pope to stop someone from torturing me. It’s worthless.
Valdivia
Because my field is history and politcs in other places I know that prosecution of these attorcities doesn’t come as fast as we would like. As I would like. But impunity does not last forever. These guys will have their time, you’ll see.
skerry
@srv: I never saw a single episode of 24.
I’m sick with a head cold and a cough and have been for a few days now. The fresh food in the house has been used up. I asked my 17 yr old daughter to go to the store and get some food and she came home with a single ready-to-heat beef vegetable soup. I am a failure as a mother.
Xboxershorts
Torture should never be considered official public policy.
It still wouldn’t keep it from ever happening.
There will always be those who think that a little work outside legal boundaries can always be justified.
To them, I will say, fine, go ahead. But if you’re caught, be prepared for the consequences.
And this is what they are:
The Hague.
mai naem mobile
@srv: this. And its not just “24.” You can watch Law & Order or NCIS and some of the interrogations appear illegal. I sometimes feel like I’m living in some alternate universe because theres so much I see that I feel is black and white – no gray, and yet, the pols, the MSM and Americans think its okay. Its depressing.
Kryptik, A Man Without A Country
We are a nation of cowards, who’ve been told that our cowardice is really bravery.
am
@Xboxershorts:
Exactly. If I was answering the Pew questionnaire as it’s repeated in this post, I’d consider saying it’s rarely justified. In a legitimate ticking time bomb scenario, it would be. If I was in that situation, I might myself, considering it morally justified. At the same time I would expect to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law and that would be a factor in my decision. It would certainly be worth it to spend a portion of the rest of my life in jail to save a number of innocent people. The folks that are gung-ho about torture w/ legal impunity have problems.
beltane
@skerry: Most crime shows now feature the same fascist-noir style as “24”. The Fox aesthetic is ubiquitous. Just as mainstream news programs are meant to confuse and misinform, mainstream entertainment is meant to indoctrinate. Just because many people I love watch these shows doesn’t mean I can’t recognize them for what they are.
SatanicPanic
@Patricia Kayden: the assumption is that they’ll sometimes tell the truth. Which might be true. Who knows. I mean we spank children when we want information. (by we, I mean, other people, cause I never have). The problem for me is that States also get people to admit “truths” like “the USSR is the best nation in the history of world”.
My thing is, if the ridiculous ‘ticking time bomb” scenario actually happens, then the agent may have a moral obligation to act. He’ll also have a moral obligation to go to jail. If he loves his country so much then it’s not too much to ask for him to go to jail for a while.
ETA- am beat me to it
dedc79
We’re all complicit, even those who railed against what was going on when it was going on. And I don’t just mean complicit by popular perception, I mean we are really all to blame.
We can point fingers at Bush, at Cheney, at the “lawyers” who wrote the legal “justifications”, at the individuals who performed the actual torture, and distance ourselves from this monstrous conduct, but the reality is that we the American people had a general sense of what was going on and basically said “keep doing what you’re doing, just don’t tell us about it.”
steve
Public opinion is fickle and their convictions on such things are generally fairly shallow, not deeply/intensely held.. Most people in the UK supported the death penalty when it was outlawed and now the vast majority don’t. I’d be interested in tracking support for torture over time/generational shift. I think you might even see a shift stemming from this report.
Tenar Darell
@Patricia Kayden: I don’t know. There are plenty if movies where the hero suffers terrible torture, rape, or some other horror, and survives and triumphs. But it’s like we simply cannot identify with the abject helplessness, only the triumph.
askew
@skerry:
Ha! That’s 17 year olds for you, completely oblivious.
Hope you are feeling better soon.
My new obsession is watching Christian Bale, Ridley Scott and others involved in Exodus release progressively more obnoxious statements excusing the whitewashing of their movie. Apparently, the entire movie is full of white actors for all the prominent roles, but don’t worry the slaves are still played by brown people. I hope this movie crashes and burns just as badly as the Noah movie did.
rikyrah
@skerry:
Sorry about your illness, but this made me LMAO.
You know your child.
You know that either you have a child that needs a list, or one that doesn’t.
I was the child that didn’t need the list. Both my sisters did.
JCJ
@skerry:
At least she didn’t bring home 10 packages of ramen noodles.
Big Time Dave
@srv:
Or maybe we should thank 24 fans for getting Obama elected. POTUS was an African American that first season.
The Other Chuck
You can always nudge a majority of people toward tacit support of torture if you phrase it in theoretical terms of a ticking time bomb and certain knowledge that torture is the only way to defuse it. It’s that kind of sophistry that you then build a lot of fascist narratives on, like 24 for example. Less extreme example in the same vein, witness the vilification of every single person in procedural crime dramas who says “I want a lawyer”. I mean, you know they’re guilty, the scriptwriters told you so! Given that perfect knowledge, that must mean everyone hauled in is guilty, right?
Goose-stepping toward Gomorrah…
Roger Moore
@Patricia Kayden:
The “common sense” part will get you every time. Common sense is just a way of giving a universal gloss to your existing beliefs. You think it’s common sense that torture will elicit false testimony to get it to stop. Other people think it’s common sense that torture will break down attempts to resist questioning. Until you can present facts and evidence and dramatic TV shows that support your position, your invocation of common sense will get you nowhere.
Roger Moore
@skerry:
You failed to give sufficiently detailed instructions. Tell your daughter to buy food for the family for a week and see if you get better results.
beltane
A nation that supports the police gunning down its own civilians is going to have no problem with its secret police torturing foreigners.
Roger Moore
@SatanicPanic:
In practice, I don’t think there would be any jail time. We can’t even put police on trial for gunning down innocent 12 year olds. Do you really think there would be a trial, much less a conviction, for somebody who successfully used torture to prevent a ticking time bomb from going off?
Iowa Old Lady
@Roger Moore: I’ve been buying groceries for my family for 40 years and I still have to make a list for myself. Send the daughter out for pizza or nachos. She’ll know where to go and IMHO those are always good meals
srv
@skerry:
I would have gotten you chicken soup.
Iowa Old Lady
Because I need a laugh and maybe you do too–kitten meets lizard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h14wr4pXZFk
SatanicPanic
@Roger Moore: No, not likely. But I still want it in the back of their mind that it’s a possibility.
RaflW
No. No. No.
The point of leadership is to drive our nation towards what is good, not what is base and human and profane. Leaders often fail at this, though few as spectacularly as the modern crop of Republicans.
None the less, we do not deserve the shit those people are slinging. Part of the reason these polls show such morally repugnant numbers is exactly because we’ve been electing such depraved souls.
While it may seem to be ever that way, it isn’t. We’ve done better at times as a nation and I don’t hold that it has to stay this bad.
lol
@srv:
One of the sad things about 24 is that early seasons had Jack using intimidation and deception to interrogate people but once the Iraq War was underway, the writers just started lazily having him beat it out of people or worse.
In fairness, anytime anyone not named Jack Bauer did torture – it was either the wrong person or they got catastrophically bad info from it.
Amir Khalid
@lol:
I agree.
Davis X. Machina
@RaflW: T
The point of popular, majoritiarian government is to drive it right back again.
Take the fundamental depravity of man and the points. The FDoM doesn’t always win, but it always covers the spread.
srv
The mustard has been found.
h/t reddit.
PJ
@SatanicPanic: The assumption is that if you torture someone enough, they will say whatever you want them to say. If you read some of the books on US torture in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo, it’s clear that the interrogators had no interest at getting at any sort of truth, but rather wanted detainees to admit that they were terrorists and had been complicit in various acts against US forces. Of course, most of these people being tortured had nothing to do with the Taliban or Al Qaeda, and many were pro-US (at least before their families were killed and they were tortured.) They also wanted to break detainees to use them as “assets” (i.e. double agents) against Al Qaeda, but this little plan seems to have gone nowhere as well.
Short version: torture is an end in itself, the desire to inflict gratuitous pain and suffering in order to make the torturer (and his masters) feel better about themselves.
Amir Khalid
@lol:
The “ticking time bomb” scenario is Hollywood bullshit, just like “silencers” that make gunfire all but inaudible, or the amazing marksmanship of the good guys in any TV/movie firefight. But it feeds the belief that torture is a righteous action, so it was commonly touted by torture apologists a decade ago as a justification.
schrodinger's cat
@lol: Jack Bauer was special, he even got perfect cell phone reception when he was riding on the underside of a garbage truck. Anyway 24 was fiction how stupid do you have to be to confuse fact and fiction.
ETA: 24 got more and more ridiculous as the time went on. I gave up watching in the middle of season 4, think, the one with James Cromwell, where Jack Bauer tortures his own brother.
RaflW
@Davis X. Machina: Government and leadership are not the same thing.
Every now and then we, as a country, have a window of some leadership. We’re surely needing it now, as we unpack CIA torture, as well as “Ferguson and all the race stuff.”
Amir Khalid
@schrodinger’s cat:
It was not stupidity that led so many during the George Walker Bush administration to cite the often illegal practices shown in 24 as an example, as if the show were truth rather than sensationalist fiction. It was cynicism.
lol
@schrodinger’s cat:
The macro plots were pretty great. I mean, season 2 has oil companies funding an islamic terror attack and faking evidence that middle east regimes were behind it so that the US would invade. Season 5 has a Nixon-esque Republican president funding Russian terrorists as pretext to takeover oil fields in Asia.
Roger Moore
@PJ:
Thank goodness for small favors. Somebody actually thought it was a good idea to torture people, then deliberately place them among our enemies where we would have no further control over them? Am I the only person who sees the tiny, little hole in this plan?
Mike in NC
@schrodinger’s cat: 24 was one of Dick Cheney’s favorite shows. Limbaugh’s, too.
gene108
@Valdivia:
This is America, not Chile.
There are states in this country, where the birthdays of traitors and slave owners are official state holidays.
There’s no amount of right-wing terrorism and abuse of power that will offend people here, such that those in power get prosecuted for their transgressions.
The closest we came was Watergate and Ford pardoned Nixon.
EDIT: A lot of Americans support right-wing terrorism, because they feel it supports white privilege from the terrors of a zealous socialist government. See the initial support for tax cheat Cliven Bundy by the right-wing media and their viewers. As long as the right groups are getting kicked in the head, enough Americans will cheer that nothing significant will happen.
Bobby Thomson
@Mike in NC: Don’t forget Fat Tony.
Mike E
@Roger Moore:
Baby steps…my daughter at 17 looked at family meals as a novel exercise or a birthday request, something she could pull off but not that into it. Now that she’s 19, she is quite adept at meal planning and accomplishing various recipes for some quality dishes. Maturity happens.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Roger Moore:
But it works in the comics!
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
And since this is an open thread, a report from the Panthers:
Cam Newton has two transverse process fractures in his lower back and no further internal injuries.
cckids
@JCJ:
Along with Oreos and 6 cans of Monster, 2 frozen pizzas and a quart of chocolate ice cream. I remember how teens eat when on their own.
Roger Moore
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
And it might actually work if we only pretended to torture somebody so they’d have added credibility when they tried to sign up. That would be a credible plan.
cmorenc
@Roger Moore:
Some will then bring home seven ready-to-heat soups, though they might throw in three chicken noodles along with four beef vegetables for a little variety.
sgaile-beairt
I will say, as I said back when Abu Ghraib was first in the headlines, that Americans have been true believers in torture for as long as any of us have been alive. Every other student in my college ethics class in the early 90’s accepted the ticking bomb scenario. Every. Single. One. Including the premed kids.
9/11 didn’t cause it. “24” didn’t cause it. We were torturing people with improvised electrical devices in Vietnam, and the same tactics were used by Chicago cops, in the 1960’s.
Because we have always embraced “the third degree” against the “bad guys” and we have always defined the bad guys as anybody who isn’t white and rich and able-bodied and well-connected, and we were fake-drowning people with “Chinese” water torture because they fought back when we invaded their country in 1901 and the Congressional investigations didn’t get anywhere after the Philippine War, either.
But are we going to say that what slave-owners did wasn’t torture? Our Gilded Age empire builders didn’t start it, either. The only new thing was making it a crime to talk about it, and using the USPS to enforce the censorship on the new Anti-Imperialist society’s attempts to wake up the American public — which feeds into why Twain could only publish “The War Prayer” after he was dead.
Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose…but what can we machine-ghosts do, when no one listens to Santayana’s Law?
Omnes Omnibus
As people have been saying, anyone who was paying any attention knew this was happening and should have damn well known that it was both wrong and illegal.
Xboxershorts
In other news today, a Princeton Study was published in the Journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”
yesterday that is making headlines for confirming what my wife and I knew all too well.
That abandoned oil and gas wells are a significant source of Greenhouse Gas Emissions, previously never before characterized or even considered:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/12/09/methane-greenhouse-gas-abandoned-oil-gas-wells/20104593/
My wife operates a small private non profit call SaveourstreamsPA that is working to locate and document the hundreds of thousands of Abandoned Wells that dot the Pennsylvania countryside. Most all of them, totally unknown to the state.
We were recommended to Princeton by none other than Anthony Ingraffea to assist the research team in locating the varied selection of Abandoned oil and gas wells that were used in the study referenced above by USA Today.
We are proud to have worked with Dr Mary Kang (congratulations Dr Kang!) but mostly, were are ecstatic at the attention this study is bringing to a very serious issue affecting health, property and the future of the planet.
That hole in the ground is going to be there for the life of the planet. Your plugging lasts on average, 20 years. What’s the maintenance plan?
agorabum
@srv: sure, TV, but also just about every republican, fox news, and some democrats all said for a decade that it’s all good and American as apple pie. And any one who said otherwise is a terrorist coddling traitor. And the NYTimes wouldn’t even call it torture – just enhanced interrogation. So when people hear and see that crap in real life for a decade, it sinks in.
A nation of cowards…
dmbeaster
Its worth remembering that at the time, the Bush moral cowards sent US soldiers to prison for Abu Ghraib torture, and denied any torture policy. The iconic Abu Ghraib torture pictures should be reprinted and relabeled “the work of patriots” cause that is what these cowards now claim.