On Star Trek and Torture

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I saw the new Star Trek on Thursday and loved it. I think this article short changes the movie a bit, taking it to task for a merely obligatory torture scene. In fact, I'd say any torture scene makes a political statement now; if the bad guys are torturing, the writer is saying something (Star Trek), and if the good guys are doing it (24), the writer is also making a statement. Star Trek only speaks out against torture by virtue of placing it in the arsenal of the bad guys and elevating the behavior of the good guy who resists. It's meager, but it's something. Still, when I came across this piece on an old episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I immediately remembered the episode which had a lot more to say about "enhanced interrogation techniques" than any fiction I've seen or read since (not counting re-readings of 1984). I recommend the piece, and a revisiting of the episode itself, if you have the time and means.

We Need Accountability for Torture

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Back in January, I encouraged everyone to read Tom Junod's piece from Esquire, "What the Hell Just Happened? A Look Back at the Last Eight Years". In it, he called us all to take our share of the blame for the Bush torture policies. Now, in Slate, Jacob Weisberg uses our collective guilt as a rationale for not going after criminal prosecutions of the people responsible. In his piece "All the President's Accomplices: How the country acquiesced to Bush's torture policy" he essentially argues that because we all knew the gist of what was going on, and because we allowed it (and even re-elected the people doing it), there's no point in going after the people who wrote the memos, gave the orders, or carried out the torture. After all, we would be going after more than 51% of the population, right? Instead, he says we should have a South African style truth and reconciliation commission and move on.

I completely disagree.

This is a representative democracy, not a direct one. We elect people to enact the popular will, but we also choose people who should know when to stop in those cases where the majority of people are simply wrong. The day of 9/11 I was teaching at a high school. One of the kids in the class said, "We should just nuke Baghdad." I was appalled. I convinced him that killing millions of innocent people when we didn't even know who was responsible was simply wrong. Then, when I tried to share how horrified I was by the student's reaction with another teacher, she basically agreed with him. Now we know that there were no Iraqis responsible for 9/11, but what if this teacher and this student had been expressing the popular will? Would we have caused the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis because we were reacting out of ignorance and fear?

Oh, wait, we did that.

I understand that a full blown prosecution could create a myriad of problems. It will tie up the Obama administration in accusations of partisan recrimination, and they will lose some political capital necessary to do good work. It will redirect the national focus from more pressing issues. It could create paralysis for future legal and political actors who are afraid of recriminations from future administrations. All of these are real fears. They can be minimized in some ways. The President can separate himself as much as possible from an independent prosecutor. The trials could be held slowly, deliberately, and with as little flashiness as possible, to bore the hell out of the American public so that they keep their attention focused on more immediate concerns. And as for paralyzing future leaders, that moment's hesitation might not be a bad thing at all. Reagrdless, these concerns are outweighed, at least in my mind, but a much greater danger that would come from inaction on the issue of torture.

If we don't hold anyone accountable, we will have created a nightmarish precedence: the ultimate Nuremberg defense for the most vile, evil politicians of the future. They will be able to say, in coming times of crisis, that the people were scared and wanted them to ignore any legal and moral boundary in order to be made to feel safe, so they did what they thought was right. They will look back into history and say, "Look what people have gotten away with in the past. Why should we be held to a different standard?" In fact, Weisberg does this same thing for them. He brings up examples of what he calls "American history's hall of shame," including "the Alien and Sedition Acts, Japanese internment during World War II, and the excesses of the McCarthy era." What do those have in common? Not only were they shameful, but no one was held accountable. In the American hall of shame, each shiny brass placard reads, "The perpetrators got off scott-free."

Whatever the negative consequences of criminal prosecutions for those responsible for illegal torture of detainees may be, they are outweighed by the power said prosecutions would hold in preventing future illegal and immoral acts in times of crisis. This time it's torture. The next time it could be a nuclear bomb dropped on Baghdad.

A Serious Question

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One of the newest conservative talking points I've heard from various right-wing pundits is that, despite their landslide electoral losses, this is still a "center-right country". At the same time, a fellow named Wakefield Tolbert has been carrying on something of an argument with @bdul muHib on the comments section of the post about homeschooling. I say "something of an argument" because it's very difficult to track what exactly Wakefield is talking about. I challenge someone to summarize his arguments for him into some concise, coherent form. Anyway, when challenged about the impenetrability of his writing he dismissed @bdul and myself by associating us with the "liberal chimpanzees" over at Slate.com. I will freely admit to being a liberal, and this isn't the first time my opinions have been wholly discounted for it, but in the context of this new talking point about this being a center-right country, I want to know what "liberal" means to conservatives, what conservatism means in the wake of the Bush presidency, and where this notion of center-right comes from.

This is a genuine question. Bill Bishop, in his excellent blog during the election titled "The Big Sort", explained very convincingly that we choose our politics as a consequence of our lifestyles, and, more and more, we are moving to live near people like us; hence the political and geographical polarization in our country. Bishop referenced some study that showed that conservatives are better at understanding where liberals are coming from than vice-versa. At first I frowned at that. We're liberals. We're touchy-feely. We like to understand other points of view. So how is it we can't understand our conservative neighbors as well as they understand us? But the more I thought about it, the more I had to admit that it's true, at least in my case. I just can't wrap my mind around the apparent contradictions I see coming from the conservative side, and I fail to see those same contradictions on my own side of the fence. So I'm asking for help.

To keep things relatively simple, let's see if we can even agree on definitions. Conservatives, going back to Buckley, figured out that they needed to distill their vision down to ten words. Those were:

Strong Defense
Free Markets
Lower Taxes
Smaller Government
Family Values

George Lakoff proposed these ten words as the progressive values:

Stronger America
Broad Prosperity
Better Future
Effective Government
Mutual Responsibility

I think those are both pretty decent summaries of the values upon which conservatives and liberals base their policy proposals, but I'm sure we could quibble about the wording, and I'd have no problem with that, because these small, nuance difference have huge consequences. Think this is just semantics? Think about the difference in opinion when you ask people what they think about estate taxes on the wealthy vs. death taxes on business owners. Or torture vs. enhanced interrogation techniques.

When I look at the list of values, I can see why liberals like me are so pissed off at Bush. He has not made America stronger in the world by any measure. Prosperity has grown only among the tiniest sliver at the top. Our future looks much bleaker than it did eight years ago. Our government has proven itself to be woefully incompetent on a number of fronts. And some Americans are paying very heavy tolls for all Bush's mistakes (too many have paid the ultimate price) while others have only been asked to do a bit more shopping. For a liberal, his record is dismal.

But how do conservatives see it? Bush, according to every military expert I've read, has stretched our military to the breaking point, all the while ratcheting up our need for military strength in the world, making us that much more vulnerable. His emphasis on free markets not only showed the dangers of deregulation, but then he abandoned those principles to bail out the banking industry. He lowered taxes on the wealthy, but did so while growing the federal deficit to such a degree that it's not really a tax cut but a differed tax increase on the next generation that will put every tax increase ever proposed by any other president to shame by comparison. He created the single largest bureaucracy in the history of the federal government in the form of Homeland Security, and oversaw that greatest expansion in the size of the federal government of any president. He appears to have stuck to his guns on issues of family values, but this has shown in stark relief that these family values are focused almost exclusively on limiting gay rights and protecting the unborn: Even Bush's greatest accomplishment in office, his increase in aid to Africa, is mitigated by the fact that he stipulated that none of the money could go to clinics which provided abortion or even contraception. For those of us who think decisions like these are best made between a woman, her doctor, and her God, Bush's insertion of his own agenda into women's health decisions in the third world means his definition of family values is very... focused. Add to this an elective war where as many as a million Americans and Iraqis have died, a million members of families lost in a war that didn't need to happen, and this definition of family values strikes us liberals as completely vacuous. But what do conservatives think?

And here's the thing; while the conservative talking heads keep saying this is a center-right country, on almost every issue I can think of, the polling data doesn't back them up. Most Americans believe a woman should have a right to make her own reproductive health choices. Most Americans think this war was wrong. Most Americans think the government's handling of Hurricane Katrina showed them to be inept. Most Americans think that the government should be doing more to help people suffering during this economic downturn (pro-Broad Prosperity) but are infuriated by the way it bailed out Wall Street (showing they're also pro-Free Markets, with limits). Most Americans want their government to provide more oversight of the financial sector.

Jon Stewart challenged a conservative guest on just this point (I think it was Mike Huckabee), arguing that the history of the United States has been one of slow but inexorable progress away from bigotry and aristocracy toward pluralism and inclusiveness. When conservatives say this is still a center-right country, are they just referencing our tendency to move toward social progress at a very slow pace? If so, then isn't conservatism just associating itself with every kind of prejudice and backward attitude we've had to struggle so hard to put behind us? What am I not seeing which will help me understand conservatism?

And what is it I don't see about liberalism which dictates that a conservative can apply that label to me and dismiss everything I have to say? What can a conservative see, that I can't, which would explain such antipathy toward liberalism?