Message in a bottle

There's bound a whole bunch of fascinating email sailing back and forth over the Internet cracker-barrel these days. Plenty of ripe material for an anthology of epistolary micro-political narrative. (A new genre?) I hacked the firewall router at school the other day and caught a few gems going out. Here's one of my favorites.*

>On Thursday, May 12, 2004, at 09:12 PM, Gladys Jones wrote:
>
>It is a rare instance when our liberal press allows
>much positive coverage about Iraq to appear in the news

Dear Aunt Gladys,

I am not sure that I would agree that the American press is particularly "left-wing", if that is what you meant by the "liberal". On the whole, I would say that they are pretty much centrist. Granted, they are way to the left of the current administration, but the current administration is, by any accounts "extreme right". Far to the right of, say, George Bush the elder. Closer, in fact, to the far right parties in Europe (e.g. Le Pen in France and Haidar in Austria) which Americans don't hesitate to call "fascist". Without resorting to such name-calling, the least one could say is that the neo-conservatives are just as intransigent and intolerant as their Arab "foes".

If the press is as "liberal" as you suggest, why have they not done a better job of educating the American public on the history of Islam? A consideration of the way that a once open and pluralistic tradition drifted towards fundamentalism ought to give any reader pause when considering the neo-conservative trend in America today.

In fact, as you probably have heard, the New York Times recently came under fire for having too uncritically swallowed the WMD cock and bull story, which is now widely recognized to have been deliberately fabricated to lead the American people into a war that they wouldn't otherwise have supported. The New York Times recently (NYT, May 26) published an apology for having failed in its journalistic responsibilities in this respect, but this admission was only published after a scathing article appeared in the New York Review of Books which extensively documented how the administrations (false) version was systematically given front age coverage, and the skeptics (correct) doubts about the fabrications was relegated to the obscurity of pages A10 - A17. This isn't exactly "liberal".

The New York Review of Books article is well worth reading. It documents in excruciating detail just how the wool was pulled over the eyes of the American people.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16922

Because the American people WERE duped - there is little question that the ONLY reason the public supported the war was the fear of weapons of mass destruction. This business about overthrowing a tyrannical dictator was made up afterwards. Sure, he was a tyrannical dictator, but that ISN'T why we invaded. No attempt was ever made to justify the invasion on those grounds - precisely because it would have failed. The assertions of ties between Irak and El Qaeda were also completely fabricated, as we now know. The argument that the fact that there were no WMD and no El Qaeda links doesn't matter because Saddam was such a baddie is particularly dangerous because it implicitly accepts the idea that it is OK for our leaders to lie to us to get us to do something - presumably because they know better than we do.

I think, if you read the New York Review of Book article, you will have to agree that, whatever else, it is largely based on verifiable facts. This is in conspicuous contrast to most of the arguments one hears FOR the war, which are largely filled with vague emotive allusions to values such as freedom and democracy. Freedom and democracy are important ideas, but anybody can wave them about. It is not a replacement for thoughtful argument and careful attention to the facts.

I believe that many Republicans cling to a distorted memory of what how we got into the Iraq war primarily out of loyalty to their party, out of a stubborn unwillingness to admit they were wrong, and out of a (probably justified, alas) fear that the democrats will rub this fiasco into their faces for years to come. Republicans, after, place a high value on loyalty - which is USUALLY a virtue. It just happens to have been misplaced in this particular case. Personally, I think that a better strategy for republicans would be to repudiate President Bush for not being a "real" republican, because a "real" republican would show the virtues of honesty, integrity, fiscal responsibility, among others - none of which Bush demonstrates. (Again, alas.)

I fear that you and Uncle Frank have probably concluded that I am a raving communist. Actually, I am far from it. When we were in France last year, I was considered something of a right wing fanatic, because I value entrepreneurship, small business, individual initiative, and place as much emphasis on liberty as on economic equality. Virtues, incidentally, that USED to be Republican before the Republican Party was hijacked by the wackos. As a matter of fact, I think that most American "liberals" are fairly centrist. We don't have many real leftists in America.

Ever since we were married, Janice and I have avoided talking about politics with you folks. Neither of us have ever been very political. And while I didn't always agree with everything you and Uncle Frank said about politics, I guess that it didn't bother me much because we both really love you, and because we've always been grateful for the way you folks let us stay at the summer house that first year after we were married. (Though I did sometimes feel a little uncomfortable about my status as an "honorary" Republican.) I guess I didn't really think our political differences mattered all that much because I tend to believe that democracy depends on the existence of a variety of opinions that duke it out on the "marketplace" of ideas, that there isn't "one right way" to run the country, and that, in the long run, the excesses of the Republicans and the Democrats tend to cancel each other out in their "fight for the center". What matters most to me is the continued good health of the democratic process.

But all of a sudden, politics do matter. For one thing, Bush and his gang have done their best to ensure that it isn't a real "marketplace" any more by trying to silence critics with insinuations of disloyalty and talk of aiding the enemy. And because I think the Bush is doing irreparable wrong to our country's international stature and our ability to participate in the leadership of the world. I believe that our international role should be that of a leading participant, not a domineering bully. I don't like bullies.

I worried from the start that if I expressed my opinion about Bush, that you and Uncle Frank would be angry with me. (And not without reason, having heard you talk so disdainfully about "liberals" is if they were some inferior life form.) I felt torn between a need to speak out about something that deeply matters to me, and a desire to keep the peace. I guess, finally, the desire to speak out has gotten the upper hand.

I hope you'll still be talking to me when we see each other at the picnic next weekend.

Sam

The problem with terms like "the liberal press" or "the Republican party" is that they all too easily allow us to forget that social phenomenon are created by individuals. Faced with the unbelievable complexity and yet the surprising uniformity of social processes, there is a strong temptation either to invent social "laws of nature" to explain the trends that we observe (and the existence of trends at all) or to claim that a small number of elite persons and institutions are leading society by the nose.

The interest in a collection of personal letters about the war is that they would help to show that Americans are not simply being led like sheep by a liberal press or a wacko president (depending on your perspective.) Neither are they blind automatons marching in lockstep to a deterministic drummer. Like all societies, America is made up by individuals collectively elaborating it's future possibilities. When we invent notions of destiny, or speak of imaginary social groups, it is as a form of shorthand, and as a form of persuasion, but the theoretical entities have, in and of themselves, no transcendent existence in the sense that we are accustomed (perhaps erroneously) to suppose that, say, a chair exists, independently of our perceptions of it.

It is worth keeping this fact in mind, because it would appear that our representations create our possibilities. Let us not forget that a belief in the inexorable march of history, driven by mechanical laws towards a glorious destiny, made possible one (arguably several) of the greatest tyrannies in human history.

*Actually, I just made the letter up. This is a modern form of the classic literary device known as "framing". In an earlier era, I might have claimed to have found the letter in an old book I bought from a Parisian "bouquinniste". And, by the way, the views expressed in the letter are not necessarily my own. The author strikes me as a shade too conciliatory, though that may be a necessary quality of constructive discourse. We must find common figures. We could not meet otherwise.

Tout se passe comme si...

President Bush announced his bold new plan to resolve the Abu Ghraib fiasco by razing the Baghdad prison and building a new even higher security prison in its place. The initiative was conceived by neoconservative historical analysts at the Maurras Institute in Georgetown who argue that, if only Louis XVI had acted decisively and preemptively razed the Bastille on July 13, 1789, we would still have a pro-US government in Paris today. But although the idea originated from a fairly insular and recondite group of scholars, the plan has received broad support within the Bush administration. "The plan made immediate sense to the President," commented the president's press secretary, "It underlines his determination to put this affair behind him and move on to new things."

On the domestic front, Attorney General George Ashfeld expressed increased concern over the possibility of a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil, perhaps as early as this summer. Officials are thought to particularly concerned of a possible arson attempt on the Capital Building similar to the Reichstag fire directed against the Weimar Republic in 1933. Given the risk that such an attack might take place before the November presidential election in an attempt to affect the outcome, the officials said, it may be necessary to postpone the balloting indefinitely. They also warned that, as long as the threat of a terrorist attack remains at its current level, any criticism of the administration's domestic or foreign policies is "tantamount to treachery". In a news conference this afternoon, the president's campaign advisor dismissed suggestions that the terrorist danger is being exaggerated for political reasons. "That can't be proved," he pointed out tartly.

The French have an expression, "tout se passe comme si...", which can be used as a preamble to the most elaborate paranoid speculation. The point of the phrase, which means something like "everything unfolds as if...", is to set aside momentarily the question what might be happening, under the hood, as it were, in order to concentrate on the apparent logic of the phenomenon, as it presents itself to the viewer. In fact, there is something about the expression that casts a certain amount of doubt on the whole question of whether we ever really could know the reality that we suppose to lurk behind appearances, or whether such a reality could, in any meaningful sense, be said to exist at all.

Although the two news items quoted above are, at least in part, my own invention, it is far from clear that the bits that I made up are any more fictive then the parts that I did not. To say that everything is unfolding as if President Bush is setting out to destroy what threatens to become a monument to American brutality, or that everything is unfolding as if John Ashcroft has fabricated a new security threat to the United States in order to distract attention from the debacle in Iraq and sow panic in the voting public, doesn't necessarily mean that Bush consciously articulated a plan to erase Abu Ghraib from Iraqi collective memory or that Ashcroft and Rumsfeld actually sat down and planned a coup d'état, or even that they explicitly discussed the virtues of recreating the ambiance that was so conducive to President Bush's earlier high popularity ratings. It doesn't even necessarily imply that such eventualities ever crossed anybody's conscious mind, though, of course, they equally well might have.

This is a mode of thinking about people and society that not everyone is comfortable with. Even Sigmund Freud had problems with a perspective that seemed to put religion and psychoanalysis on an equal footing (vide his discussion of Vaihinger's philosophy of "As if" in the Future of an Illusion) and fell back on a quasi-mystical materialism as a stand-in for his own personal authority on questions of psychology. It is, however, a popular way of looking at social facts among sociologists - arguably as means of avoiding having to cede terrain to the social psychologists. (At any rate, everything unfolds as if that is why they have embraced this peculiar perspective.)

Since I am self-identified as a sociologist (of sorts), with an early formative experience in literary criticism at Yale in the late 1970's (during the heyday of Derrida, de Mann, and Bloom) it is not surprising that I should gravitate to such an outlook, especially since it conveniently exempts me from anything so mundane as research, which I would be compelled to engage in if I subscribed to the delusion that Sociology is a science.

All beliefs are delusions in the sense that no theory can exhaust reality, and thus any idea always contains an ineradicable residue of falsehood which, in order to believe the idea, we must assimilate. The stronger our attachment to the idea, the greater our delusion. Some sociologists - especially marxists - argue that the beliefs that we hold are determined by the ideology of the social groups to which we belong, but this "refinement" is in no sense required (or desirable.) The philosophy of "As if", in fact, owes more to Kant, than to Marx or Hegel.

I keep my countenance,
I remain self-possessed
Except when a street piano, mechanical and tired,
Reiterates some won-out common song
With the smell of hyacinths across the garden
Recalling things that other people have desired.
Are these ideas right or wrong?

(from Portrait of a Lady, by T.S. Eliot)

The moderns realized that the jig was up for truth with a capital "T". (After World War One, particularly, how could anyone doubt it any longer?) But it bugged them. It still bugs lots of people. It is not a perspective particularly suited to fundamentalism, or jingoism, or extreme forms of anything. (Except nihilism and moral relativism, according to its detractors, who suppose that an infinite regress of turtles somehow anchors them morally.) But for those who accept the impossibility of ever thumbtacking their credo to the walls of the Universe, it is peculiarly liberating. The fact that reality is a tissue of fictions in no way implies that reality is junk, or that truth is not worth telling (any more than a poem is not worth telling) but instead that it is the most precious and delicate product of human interaction (as well as the coarsest sack cloth, in the hands of fundamentalists.)

What does all this have to do with Bush's fabulations?

When I raise my eyebrows at the convenient appearance of the terrorist threat signaled by Attorney General Ashcroft, this is not to suggest that there is no danger, nor even that the danger is imminent. The suggestion that there could be only one possible truth - and thus either the warnings are opportunistic or they are justified - ultimately derives from the belief that there can only be one correct version of reality, from which all divergent version are at best deficient copies, and at worst, Absolute Error. That such a conception of truth may have some social utility - or may have had some at one time - I do not deny. But for what kind of society? When we choose our beliefs, we are also choosing the sort of world we live in. Those who would pretend that truth is absolute are seeking, thereby, to impose their reality upon the rest of us, whether we like it or not. It suffices to listen to the glee with which they announce the "cold, hard facts" to which they would have us submit.

As a matter of fact, I doubt that Mr. Ashcroft himself knows the magnitude of the current terrorist threat any more than Mr. Rumsfeld knew anything about the so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction. Obviously, we all know that the terrorist threat remains (in fact, it is quite arguably greater than it was a year ago) and it is certainly true that we are all in mortal danger. (That goes without saying.) But I also doubt seriously that Mr. Ashcroft is any more concerned about the possible loss of human life in a terrorist attack any more than Mr. Rumsfeld cares about the Iraqi civilian casualties. Or any more than congress cared about the inevitable traffic deaths when they raised the 55 mph speed limit. "Un train peut en cacher un autre" (One train can hide another - as the signs say at French railway crossings.) Equally, one reason can hide another, or more properly, a multitude of others, any one of which might be sufficient unto itself, but not all of which can be spoken aloud - or even acknowledged consciously. The myth of intentionality is a useful judicial fiction, but it is a sociologist's dunce cap.

The fact that absolute Truth is not vouchsafed to us (unless we choose to bury our heads in it) does not, as I remarked, mean that truth is not worth telling. It simply means that no one version can ever definitively silence all others. There are truths about the current moment that will not become apparent until later. Future historians will see trends, where we see only chaos - and, no doubt, chaos, where we see trends. Eventualities will unfold that make the current moment meaningful in ways that we cannot now imagine. Other eventualities may be forestalled by the actions that we take today. The world is not an inexorable machine, or if it is, we do not necessarily experience it that way, being part of it. It seems to us that we can make a difference. That is enough for me.

If I speak out about what, for want of a better word, I call proto-totalitarianism, it is because I see the loss of liberties as a greater threat than the loss of life. My concern is that the fear caused by terrorism is that it may unleash dangerous currents in American society that will prove difficult to contain. May, in fact, already have done so.

After some hesitation, I have concluded that the best way to prevent such an eventuality, is to anticipate it. (There is a certain etymological justification for this strategy in the origins of the word "prevention" itself.) And this, despite - or perhaps because of - Mr Ashcrofts grim admonition at the Senate Judiciary Committee (November 6, 2001) that complaints about possible threats to civil liberties are tantamount to treachery:

"to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends."

( http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/011207ashcroft-text.html)

One sees already , in this remark, the germs of totalitarianism. When such a man comes before the American people with warnings of terrorists attacks, designed to " affect the outcome" of the presidential election, one would have to be historically illiterate not to be reminded of how the Nazis used the Reichtag fire to pressure President Hindenberg to sign an emergency decree suspending the rights of citizens. A decree which led, in less than a month, to Hitler's assuming complete dictatorial control of the German State.

I have no doubt that Mr. Ashcroft would take a dim view of such an "incendiary" suggestion. But I think that our country is in sore need of a talking cure, lest the unspeakable should become the inevitable.

Words Alter

In an excellent essay in yesterday's New York Times, Susan Sontag responds to a remark by Donald Rumsfeld at a recent press conference concerning the treatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison. Rumsfeld said ''My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture.'' Sontag makes the point that Rumsfeld's attempts to avoid use of the word "torture" are indefensible in light of the definitions of torture in the treaties and conventions to which the United States is a signatory.

Words alter, words add, words subtract. It was the strenuous avoidance of the word ''genocide'' while some 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda were being slaughtered, over a few weeks' time, by their Hutu neighbors 10 years ago that indicated the American government had no intention of doing anything. To refuse to call what took place in Abu Ghraib -- and what has taken place elsewhere in Iraq and in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay -- by its true name, torture, is as outrageous as the refusal to call the Rwandan genocide a genocide. Here is one of the definitions of torture contained in a convention to which the United States is a signatory: ''any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession.'' (The definition comes from the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Similar definitions have existed for some time in customary law and in treaties, starting with Article 3 -- common to the four Geneva conventions of 1949 -- and many recent human rights conventions.) The 1984 convention declares, ''No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.'' And all covenants on torture specify that it includes treatment intended to humiliate the victim, like leaving prisoners naked in cells and corridors.

(Susan Sontag, "Regarding the Torture of Others", The New York Times, Sunday, May 23, 2004)

I certainly agree with Susan Sontag that Rumsfeld's rejection of the term "torture" is a particularly unseemly example of semantic nit-picking. I would, however, submit, that offensive as such quibbling may appear, he may technically be correct in this instance. I certainly wouldn't want to appear to be coming to Donald Rumsfeld's defence on this, or on any other issue. All the same, I think that an examination of precise nature his statement's technical accuracy may be helpful to an understanding of the issues involved.

The 1984 treaty Sontag refers to in the passage above is the "Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment" to which, as Sontag quite correctly observes, the United States is a signatory. Her quotation, however, truncates the definition of torture in a misleading way. In its entirety, the definition of torture given in article 1 of the Convention, in fact, appears to provide the sort of loophole to which Rumsfeld alludes. (Whether we should, under the circumstances, be searching for loopholes is, of course, another question entirely.)
But before we examine Rumsfeld's contention in the context of the 1984 Convention, it will be helpful to examine an earlier document, upon which the 1984 definition of torture is based, namely the 1975 United Nations Declaration concerning "Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment":

Article I

1. For the purpose of this Declaration, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted by or at the instigation of a public official on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or confession, punishing him for an act he has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating him or other persons. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to, lawful sanctions to the extent consistent with the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners.

2. Torture constitutes an aggravated and deliberate form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

("The Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Being Subjected to Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1975.")

The most obvious problem with this article is that it provides not one, but two distinct definitions of torture, the first based on the circumstances and motives of mistreatment and the second on the enormity of the acts committed. It would appear that, to qualify as torture, an act must satisfy both requirements.

Observe that, according to the first definition, torture must be "intentionally inflicted by or at the instigation of a public official". An illustrative list of the sort of circumstances in which such acts might occur is provided, including punishment, intimidation, and interrogation. Trimmed of its subordinate clauses, the definition reads:

Torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering is intentionally inflicted by or at the instigation of a public official on a person (examples follow...)

Although it is quite clear that the incidents at Abu Ghraib were "intentionally inflicted" by members of the United States Armed Forces, it might be argued that since they were allegedly acting in a purely private capacity, they were not technically "public officials" and the "abuses" did not thus qualify as torture under that definition, but merely "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."

On the other hand, language elsewhere in the same Declaration strongly suggests that the distinction between torture and "other acts" is purely a question of the magnitude of the offense, and not of the official status of its instigators. For example, article 11 begins "Where it is proved that an act of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment has been committed by or at the instigation of a public official..." This appears to suggest that acts which qualify as torture but which cannot be demonstrated to have been committed at the instigation of a public official. It is unfortunate the framers of the Declaration were not more explicit in this regard in their original definition.

The language of paragraph 2 might also be criticized for failing to more explicitly indicate the meaning of the term "aggravated and deliberate." It seems apparent that the intent was to emphasize the nastiness of torture: its peculiar combination cruelty and intentionality. Unfortunately, it is not clear whether "deliberate", in this context, refers to institutional or individual intentionality. Can an act be "inadvertent" at the institutional level and "deliberate" at the individual level? If so, what constitutes "deliberate" institutional behavior? Could an act be considered simultaneously "torture'" at the individual level and simple "neglect" at the institutional level? Such a distinction threatens to remove all the moral weight of the term by completely relativising it. Nevertheless, the narrowest reading of Article 1, taken in isolation, would arguably permit the suggestion that cruelty of the sort that occurred at Abu Ghraib was not technically "torture" because it was not authorized by the officially sanctioned "rules of engagement".

Let us now return to the definition of torture in the 1984 Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, to which Sontag refers in her essay. The definition of torture in the 1984 Convention follows the general language of the 1975 Declaration, but with a few important modifications:

Article I

1. For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

2. This article is without prejudice to any international instrument or national legislation which does or may contain provisions of wider application.
("Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment", 1984)

If we try to trim the definition of torture provided here in the same way that we did for the 1975 Declaration, we run up against an apparent ambiguity that did not appear in the 1975 version of the definition. We might read the definition in either of the two following ways:

the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as... (examples follow)

or alternatively:

the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as... (examples follow) when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

Susan Sontag appars to favor the first reading when she cites the definition of torture as ''any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession.'' Tempted as we might be to embrace the first reading, I fear that it is not defensible. As we have already seen, such a reading is not supported by the explicit language of the earlier version of the definition of torture contained in the 1975 Declaration. Nor is such a reading consistent with the official French and Spanish versions of the Convention. (Based on the agreement in number of the noun phrases: "pain and suffering", "une telle douleur ou de telles souffrances", " dichos dolores o sufrimientos" in each case exactly match the corresponding terms at the beginning of the definition.)

I think that we have to accept the fact that, to constitute "torture" according to the definition of the 1984 convention, the actions must be shown to have taken place "at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity."
All the same, the 1984 Convention strengthens the definition of torture in three significant ways.

1. The addition of the clause "or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind," effectively removes the problematic (and irrelevant) question of motivation from the definition.
2. The extension of the notion of "instigation" to include "consent or acquiescence" effectively address the (no doubt common) situations of veiled or implicit incitements to torture, or tacit acceptance of existing practices. The argument that "no explicit instructions were given" no longer applies, as long as it can be shown that the acts were known and tolerated.
3. The revised definition also extends the definition of a "public official" to include any "other person acting in an official capacity". This helps to eliminate some quibbling about what constitutes a "public official" (by including, for example, a private contractor) but leaves open the ambiguity of what it means to be "acting in a public capacity".

Donald Rumsfeld's statement that "what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture" might conceivably be justified on the basis that the soldiers at Abu Ghraib were acting in a purely private capacity - and hence that their acts do not constitute "torture" - as long as it cannot be proved that they were acting under orders or at least with the consent or acquiescence of their superiors.

(We should note, in passing, a problem with such a line of reasoning: It is not clear just how high up the chain of command "consent or acquiescence " would have to go before the actors could be considered to be "acting in an official capacity". One rung in the chain of command? Several? Or do we have to demonstrate an unbroken chain of consent and acquiescence, all the way up to the Commander in Chief? The possibility of such a demonstration, incidentally, is not inconceivable.)

Whatever the conceivable attractiveness of such an argument to an administration clutching at straws to avoid the term "torture", this is clearly not Sontag's reading of Rumsfeld's comment. On the contrary, she appears to assume that his rejection of the term is based on the nature of the acts committed rather than the official capacity of the soldiers involved. In short, she interprets Rumsfeld as claiming that the acts portrayed in the photos are not sufficiently "nasty" to qualify as torture. Perhaps even that he concurs with Rush Limbaugh's judgment that this is little more than a harmless fraternity stunt gone wrong.

Unfortunately, once again, there is some reason to believe that Rumsfeld may be correct in claiming that attaching naked prisoners to leashes, smearing them with "brown substance", staking them naked like cord wood, and fording them to engage in humiliating sexual acts does not technically count as "torture", at least not according to the terms of the 1984 Convention, and for reasons that should be particularly troubling to all Americans. While it may well be, as Sontag argues, that "all covenants on torture specify that it includes treatment intended to humiliate the victim", regrettably, the United States Senate does not appear to share this perspective. Of all the signatories to the Convention, only the United States took issue with the definition of torture in Article 1 at the time of retification. Among the Senate's numerous reservations regarding the Convention, we find the following:

"II. The Senate's advice and consent is subject to the following understandings, which shall apply to the obligations of the United States under this Convention:

(1) (a) That with reference to article 1, the United States understands that, in order to constitute torture, an act must be specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering and that mental pain or suffering refers to prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from (1) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering; (2) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality; (3) the threat of imminent death; or (4) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality."

In order for "treatment intended to humiliate the victim " to be considered torture, it would appear that, in the eyes of the United States Senate at least, that it would have to be demonstrated that this treatment was "calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality." Note that it would not suffice for the treatment simple to have the effect of profoundly disrupting the senses or personality. It would have to be demonstrated to be part of a procedure calculated to achieve this purpose. Naturally, this sort of calculation is virtually impossible to establish. To all intents and purposes, the Senate has restricted the definition of torture to threats of death and the infliction of severe physical suffering. Sexual mistreatment unaccompanied by severe physical pain apparently doesn't count as torture in the eyes of the U.S. Senate, at least not if Americans are doing it.

Tempting as it is to blame the current administration for the current sorry state of affairs in Iraq, in light of the United States Senate's reservations regarding the definition of torture, it is difficult to lay the blame entirely at the feet of a small group of neo-conservative ideologues. I fear that the current madness may be more deeply rooted in the American psyche than most of us would choose to admit. And perhaps not merely in the violence and exhibitionism that Sontag so astutely analyses elsewhere in her essay. There is a second current, just as troubling, and perhaps more endemic to our governing elite: the assumption that since Americans are morally superior to the rest of the world, we should not deign to submit ourselves to the juridical impediments of the common rabble. This sanctimonious attitude has been amply demonstrated, over the years, in a variety of ways, and by a variety of administrations. The Bush administration's arrogance is merely an expression of this attitude carried to its logical, but immoral, conclusion.

The text of the treaties (conventions and Declarations) referred to in this article are available on the web site of the Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights (http://www.unhchr.ch)

We have met the enemy and he is us

So as not to take the fun out of letting the reader guess the provenance of the following two quotations, I have taken the liberty of replacing some of the words in the quotes with more generic equivalents, with care not to change the meaning in any significant way.

[The subordinate] could never be sure and was never explicitly told whose authority he was supposed to place above all others. He had to develop a kind of sixth sense to know at a given moment whom to obey and whom to disregard.

Mostly orders were "intentionally vague, and given in the expectation that their recipient would recognize the intent of the order giver, and act accordingly";[...]

"The re-examination of the command echelons has shown [...] that the [subordinate] takes it for granted that actions in which the [administration] does not wish to appear in the role of organizer are not ordered with unequivocal clarity down to the last detail. Hence he is accustomed to understand that an order may mean more than its verbal content, just as it has become more or less routine with the order giver, in the interests of the [organization] [...] not to say everything and only to intimate what he wants to achieve by the order..."

That was the first quotation. Now for the second. (Oh, and by the way, they are both from the same source.)

"The first essential step [...] is to kill the juridical person in man. This was done, on the one hand, by putting certain categories of people outside the protection of the law and forcing at the same time, through the instrument of denationalization, the [rest of the] world into recognition of lawlessness; it was done, on the other, by placing the [detention center] outside the normal penal system, and by selecting its inmates outside the normal judicial procedure in which a definite crime entails a predictable penalty."

Close, but no cigar, to all those who guessed "the editorial page of last Sunday's New York Times". In fact, both quotations come from Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism", published in 1951. (revised edition, New York: Harcourt, 1985, p. 399 and p. 447 respectively.)

In the first passage, the "administration" referred to is the Führer (Hitler) and the Reichspropagandaleiter (Goebbels). She describes how they:

• created parallel real and ostensible governments, including political, administrative, and military command structures that operated behind the facade of the official, but powerless, front institutions. In the above passage, she is speaking of a general strategy, which she illustrates with the parallel organization of the civil service, the party, the SA, and the SS.
• avoided giving direct and unequivocal orders for "sensitive" actions. The quoted portion of the passage is from an internal National Socialist Party document describing the party's strategy for organizing Kristallnacht, "without appearing as the instigator of the demonstration."

In the second passage, the "detention centers" in question are, of course, the concentration camps. Arendt describes what she calls the "first essential step on the road to total domination". The murder of the juridical person is accomplished, according to Arendt, by the systematic elimination of the civil or human rights of the victims by denying them any official legal status.

Naturally, I am aware that there is a taboo against making comparisons between the history of any fascist government and the political events in any democratic government, not to mention between the Shoah and anything else whatsoever. And yet, it seems to me regrettable that we should thus doom ourselves to the impossibility of learning anything useful from this troubling period of history. The implicit attitude behind the first of these taboos is that history could not possibly repeat itself; that democracy has somehow transcended the dangers of totalitarianism, and that even to suggest the possibility of the return of such horrors is antisocial or alarmist.

I will confess that I fear greatly for the fragility of our democratic system. And I believe that there is far greater danger in complacency than in alarmism. I see no harm in being constantly on the lookout for dangers to democracy, and great virtue in trying to recognize, address, and overcome them at the earliest opportunity.

To a country as rich, as influential, and as heavily armed, as the United States, is it likely that the greatest dangers that face us today come from without, or from within?

I hardly know you

Today's New York Times reports that a series of confidential Justice Department memoranda written in late 2001 and early 2002 outlined strategies for avoiding the possibility of U.S. officials being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated.

On Jan. 25, 2002, Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, in a memorandum to President Bush, said that the Justice Department's advice was sound and that Mr. Bush should declare the Taliban as well as Al Qaeda outside the coverage of the Geneva Conventions. That would keep American officials from being exposed to the federal War Crimes Act, a 1996 law, which, as Mr. Gonzales noted, carries the death penalty.

The Gonzales memorandum to Mr. Bush said that accepting the recommendations of the Justice Department would preserve flexibility in the global war against terrorism. "The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians," said the memorandum, obtained this week by The New York Times.
(New York Times, "Justice Memos Explained How to Skip Prisoner Rights", May 21, 2003)

It is interesting to note that already, on January 9, 2002, the Bush administration was contemplating the likelihood that "other factors" might lead to the United States performing of acts subject to the death penalty under the War Crimes Act of 1996, and taking the steps to build a legal framework to permit those acts to be carried out with impunity.

I fear that such news is unlikely to bother many Americans, many of whom would hold that "terrorists can't expect to be handled with kid gloves." It is worth noting, all the same, that taken in conjunction with the adjacent entry under the heading "terrorists" in the Dictionary of Received Ideas, namely that "they must have been guilty of something or they wouldn't have been arrested in the first place," this boils down to a willingness to torture anybody we choose. I trust that - for the moment anyway - most Americans would still find that idea troublesome. (Though I will confess that I do worry that they might not object to it so very strongly if it were judiciously rephrased.)

A line from The Sound of Music been running through my head the last few weeks. Its from the scene where Maria and Georg Von Trapp return from their honeymoon after the Anschluss with Nazi Germany to discover that Max has arranged to have the children perform at the Austrian Folk Festival. Georg looks at his old friend - who has just cheerfully announced that he has "no political principles" - and says "Sometimes I wonder, Max, if I really know you." The clear implication was that there are moments an absence of political principals is a moral failing. I have to confess that I share that sentiment at this moment.

Up until recently, I have been at pains to remind myself that, depending on how things unfolded in Iraq, I could turn out to have "been wrong about Iraq." I recognized that if everything went swimmingly, and we managed to establish an exemplary democratic government in Iraq, and all the Arab nations loved us for it, then "history" would conclude that the invasion had been justified, and thus that all those who had opposed the adventure would retrospectively be "proved" to have been wrong. I had already resolved to make a gracious apology in such a circumstance, just as I expected all those who had supported the war to do if things turned out as badly as I feared they might. This is the normal "cordial disagreement" protocol of the democratic public sphere. The basic idea is that differences of opinion are normal and natural and that a certain degree of tolerance and openness to the perspectives of others is an essential part of the democratic process. This idea is grounded, ultimately, on a faith in the judgment of history. (And on the implicit assumption that this judgment will be more or less unanimous in the long run: an assumption that effectively conflates objectivity with consensus.)

There are, however, certain circumstances when this assumption breaks down. Specifically, in circumstances where no conceivable outcome and no conceivable future unanimity would suffice to change you mind about the legitimacy of your position. For instance, there is no conceivable outcome in which supporting the Nazi's efforts to exterminate the European Jews could be seen as having been acceptable. Even if every last (surviving) member of master race wholeheartedly endorsed the new society. There are, in other words, moral limits to our obligation to tolerance and openness. Opinions about those limits are often expressed in terms of "natural law." This is why, for instance, certain crimes are considered "crimes against humanity." That is to say, they are considered to be punishable even irrespective of any legal framework erected to justify them.

Similarly, there may also be moral limits to our commitment to the protocol of cordial disagreement with our fellow citizens. Now that we have discovered that not only have American soldiers, military intelligence officers, CIA operatives, and private contractors have committed war crimes, some of which are legally punishable by death and that furthermore, the Bush administration deliberately went about setting up a legal framework in which such acts could be committed, it is understandable to feel that anyone who, knowing this, still stills supports the Bush administration is, in a sense, morally guilty of any further war crimes they may commit. (And who can doubt that they will continue to commit them?) But we musn't say this.

Tempting as it is to give way to a sense of moral outrage, we should resist the temptation to direct that anger at our fellow citizens, because, ultimately, the protocol of the democratic public sphere works whether you believe in it or not - but only as long as we continue to act as if we believe in it. That is to say, it stops working the moment we break off the project of rational dialog.

To understand why it's so important to maintain the appearance of believing in a société a responsabilité limité in this particular situation, we need to consider who supports President Bush today, and why.

Back when Bush was elected, he received roughly half the popular vote. Early in his term, he presumably benefited from the usual "goodwill" bonus and enjoyed approval ratings of around 60% during the first months of his term. Bush's approval ratings soared after September 11, not so much because of anything specific that he did, but because people felt the need for a leader and constructed one accordingly. The president's approval ratings hit an all time high during the early weeks of the Afghanistan campaign. The anthrax scare, and the lingering fear that additional terrorist attacks were imminent, contributed to the siege mentality that facilitated the passing of the Patriot Act (October 31, 2001). Shortly thereafter, Bush's ratings then started a long slow slide.



During the second half of 2002, it gradually became clear to everybody that President Bush intended to invade Iraq "no matter what." All the same, opposition to the war preparations was fairly muted in the United States. There was a distinct reluctance to speak out against the war due to a combination of the fear of social censure and the general sense of anxiety and disorientation caused by the repeated "terrorists alerts". The usual peaceniks stood around in the cold with signs, but the soccer Moms on the playground said they weren't sure, and figured we all had to "wait and see." People discussed the upcoming war in hushed voices, or didn't talk about it in public at all.

Bush's approval numbers, which had dwindled to "just" 60% during the "phony peace" perked up slightly when the fighting started in Iraq. On April 9, 2003, US Marines toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in downtown Baghdad. The same day, looting broke out in the capital. Even before we declared victory, Iraq was sliding into anarchy. A month after the "war" ended, Bush's ratings were back down to pre-war levels

Today, Bush's 42% approval ratings (Newsweek May 16, 2004) are pretty close to his 2000 popular vote minus the last minute swing voters. (A CNN/Time poll on September 8, 2000 reported Bush and Gore tied at 40%, with 20% undecided.) In other words, roughly the same number of people support Bush today as did a month before the 2000 elections - and it’s a safe bet that there's a fair amount of overlap between those populations.

We are now at the cognitive dissonance barrier. In a certain sense, the people who currently support Bush and his policies, support them because they voted for him. For Bush's approval ratings to drop much further, regular Bush supporters are going to have to start admitting that they were wrong. The question is, are they going to be willing to do that? Let's be honest, we all know how hard it is to admit that you are wrong. Furious as I am at the people who voted for Bush for getting us into the mess in the first place, I recognize that saying "I told you so" isn't going to help bring any of the errant lambs back into the fold.

(I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt by assuming that if they really knew what he stood for, they'd oppose him. The alternative is simply too chilling for words. I don't know how you can "convince" somebody that torture is bad. But any attempt to shame them into changing their minds is likely to backfire. Fortunately - so far - the public debate is over the nature of the "real" George Bush". We have every interest in keeping the discussion in this domain. If his supporters should start to ask, "What's a little torture among fiends?", then we are in a whole different world...)

In "From a Logical Point of View", Willard Van Orman Quine makes the observation that, faced with evidence that is in conflict with existing theory, we are faced with the choice of either revising our theory or rejecting the evidence. In many cases, if revising the theory would entail significant structural adjustments (a "paradigm shift" in Kuhn's terms) the easiest solution is simply to ignore the evidence. That, for the time being, appears to be the approach of most republicans.

It is not inconceivable that, despite growing evidence of evildoing and reckless incompetence of the part of the current administration, instead of a decline in Bush's approval ratings, we will see increased ideological entrenchment and mounting partisan recriminations. This would be mere business as usual for an election year except that the issues at stake - fabrication of evidence, deliberate circumvention of the provisions of the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Convention, and the War Crimes Act, torture as a standard interrogation technique, the systematic abuse and humiliation of prisoners, etc. - are not ordinary election year issues. They are not issues about which it is necessarily safe for a democracy to entertain tolerance and a cordial openness to differences of opinion.

Let's not delude ourselves by thinking that 40% is, in any sense, a "low" approval rating for President Bush. It is considerably higher than the level of support for Le Pen in France or Jeorg Haider in Austria or any other comparable far right politician in Europe. Given that the evidence that has emerged so far doesn't seem to have made any kind of dent in the support for Bush among hard-core republicans, it is starting to look like nothing would change their minds. Under the circumstances, I have to confess that I find it hard to retain my faith in the democratic public sphere.

The solution, however, is not to blame individual Republicans. But neither is this a moment to remain silent in the face of dangerous political sentiments. Those of us who reject the notion of a "limited liability society" must instead step forward and ourselves accept an increase in our own political responsibility, by speaking out publicly, taking a strong ethical position, and inviting others to join us in our opposition to the current administration, even if we feel that this sort of public political involvement is contrary to our nature. We cannot afford to be bystanders to the destruction of the American political public sphere.

Ubu Roi?

It has occurred to me on a number of occasions over the last few years that President Bush and his coterie might be tempted to declare a state of emergency and attempt a coup if it looked like they were going to lose the next election. I have even gone so far as to wonder whether they might not conceivably engineer the required emergency - or at least allow something unfortunate to occur as a pretext for a power grab. (It wouldn't be the first time such a thing had happened.) But I have never considered the danger to be so immediate that I felt compelled to look up the applicable libel laws and publish something on the subject. Nor, naturally, did I relish the thought of appearing to have gone off the deep end. And so I have allowed myself to be comforted by the reassurances of my more even-keeled friends that Bush doesn't have enough support from the army to get away with it.

(This, when you think about it, isn't the most comforting of reassurances. The few people with whom I have shared my misgivings haven’t answered "Oh, I'm sure he would never consider such a thing" but rather "I doubt that he could get away with it." This, in and of itself, tells you something.)

But it had never occurred to me, before reading the transcript of Tim Russert's interview with Secretary of State Colin Powell on Meet the Press last Sunday that the coup d'état I feared might already have occurred. (Meet the Press, Sunday, May 16, 2004)

Never having bothered to try to imagine all of the possible varieties of totalitarianism that might be compatible with democracy, I naively assumed that the most immediate danger was that of a mediocracy: a society in which the elite are constrained to exercise control of the government via an electorate controlled by the mass media. It frankly never occurred to me that we might already be living in a cryptocracy: a society in which the absence of transparency is so complete that it isn't even possible to know who is in control.

On Meet the Press, when Tim Russert started asking Colin Powell about the misleading intelligence information he was fed prior to his United Nations presentation in favor of invading Iraq, Emily Miller, his press aide, stepped in and interrupted the Secretary of State's interview by pushing the camera aside, and telling her boss, "You're off". Reading the transcript, we cannot help but wonder if this was wishful thinking or a command. (It was clearly not a simple statement of fact. He wasn't "off", and she obviously knew it. Otherwise, why would she have turned the camera away from the Secretary of State to focus on a palm tree?)

EMILY MILLER, STATE DEPARTMENT PRESS AIDE: You're off.

SECRETARY POWELL: I am not off.

EMILY MILLER, PRESS AIDE: No. They can't use it, they're editing it.

SECRETARY POWELL: He's still asking the questions.

EMILY MILLER, PRESS AIDE: He was not ...

SECRETARY POWELL: Tim, I am sorry I lost you.

MR. RUSSERT: I am right here Mr. Secretary. I would hope they would put you back on camera. I don't know who did that.

EMILY MILLER, PRESS AIDE: He was going to go for another five minutes.

SECRETARY POWELL: We've really scre...

MR. RUSSERT: I think that was one of your staff Mr. Secretary. I don't think that's appropriate.

SECRETARY POWELL: Emily, get out of the way. Bring the camera back please. (Camera returns to the interview subject) I think we're back on Tim, go ahead with your last question.

Lets be quite clear, this is very unusual behavior in a subordinate. Who does Emily work for anyway? Let's not forget that, at least according to Seymore Hersh's article in May 24 issue of The New Yorker, Bush and his cronies created a plan for torturing Arab detainees that was so secret that even it's existence was classified. In light of these revelations, it no longer seems so terribly impossible that they might not have assigned a SAP agent to trail The Secretary of State to make sure that he doesn't step out of line.

This whole admistration is about masks. About systems of loyalties so convoluted that CIA informers passing fake intelligence to our own intelligence agencies could be considered "friends", and the Secretary of State, the CIA, and the United States Army, could be considered insufficiently reliable to be trusted with the "truth". About people so fundamentally insincere and so duplicitous that the very notion of truth is meaningless.

Even the question of whether Ms. Miller is working for some shadowy organization misses the point. She doesn't ever have to have been recruited for such a group, to do their business. The group, at a certain level, doesn't even need to exist. At the operational level, SAP programs are so secret that don't officially exist. At the administrative level, some conspiracies are so secret that they don’t even need to exist. They go without saying. The best conspiracies are the ones where the collusion just happens, without anybody ever mentioning it. (A lot of white collar crime is like that.)

Even if the suggestion that Ms. Miller is a mole working for the President isn't provably, or even "objectively" true, it may still be the most economical fashion of stating the subjective facts. It is well known that while Colin Powell has, up until now, served as a public apologist for government policy while arguing against it privately, his loyalty may be reaching its limits. It would be astonishing if Colin Powell weren't being discussed by Bush loyalists, even some among Powell's own staff, as a dangerously unreliable puppet, a loose cannon. It is a common workplace game, after all, for subordinates to assuage the irritations of their own subordinate roles and seek vicarious release by adopting privately the critical attitudes of their boss's adversaries, especially when discussing him privately with their co-workers. I myself have participated in such sniping, and I don't mean to criticize it. It performs a useful function in organizational dynamics. But it is revealing of Colin Powell's institutional marginalization that one of his aides should have forgotten herself and so thoroughly mixed up her "backstage" and "front region" acts. It is also revealing of the institutional culture of the present administration. It is hard to tell whether Colin Powell is sticking out his term as Secretary of State out of some conception of loyalty or out of fear that he might be replaced by someone really dangerous. Certain comments attributed to him that have leaked to the press suggest the latter interpretation. If true, then my fears about the Bush administrations possible totalitarian tendencies suddenly start to seem less fantastic.

But what, you may be asking, is the use of speculating publicly about the possibility that the President of the United States may be capable of engineering a coup d'état? Isn't that libelous, even dangerous? (On the other hand, isn't the idea that such talk might be dangerous just the littlest bit disturbing, in and of itself? Who would have considered the suggestion that Jimmy Carter might have been contemplating a coup d'état "dangerous"? The idea is laughable.)

Let's consider what might be dangerous about it. Is it dangerous because I might get arrested and thrown into one of our new holding tanks for enemies of the state? Dangerous because such talk might increase the likelihood of its actually coming to pass? Dangerous because that's the way crazy people talk and the next thing I know I might be found wandering around drooling and talking to myself? Dangerous because, while not actually illegal, it breaks one of the ground rules of our democratic, constitutional government? Dangerous because I might lose friends by talking that way? Dangerous because such behavior is unbefitting to a gentleman?

If true, any one of these might suffice, all by itself, as a reason for remaining silent. On the other hand, it is equally true that every one of them could be turned around and made into an argument for speaking up against the dangers and excesses of the current administration.

I suspect that we each have our own private version of Emily Miller hovering inside our head, trying to shut us up when it looks like we might say something inconvenient. It's hard to know for sure what motivates our personal Emily Millers. But in the end, we do have to decide whether we going to let her shut us up, or are we going to say, " Emily, get out of the way. Bring the camera back please." and proceed to address the difficult questions.

Of the plurality of moral worlds

We are accustomed to talk about our stands on particular moral issues such as the acceptability of torture as if they we were deducible from first moral principles in much the same way that mathematical laws can be deduced from a set of axioms. This, however, is not the way we really choose our positions on issues of morality (or math, for that matter.)

On the contrary, a good chunk of our moral thinking is traditional rather than rational. We naturally tend to absorb our positions on moral issues from our environment, and more by imitation than by indoctrination. In short, we tend to base our own moral values and positions on those we observe around us, especially people we love, respect, or whose influence has been crucial to our personal development. The moral reasoning for our choices is generally supplied after the fact to explain or justify our position, to attempt to persuade ourselves and others of its legitimacy, or to attempt to assure ourselves of the consistency of our moral positions.

Readers familiar with the work of Lawrence Kohlberg may object here that I seem believe that most of us are stalled permanently at an intermediate stage of moral development. Far from it. I am simply making the distinction between our methods of moral reasoning (which can be extremely rational and sophisticated) and the actual process by which we form our moral judgments (which is considerably less so.) Most theories of moral development (including Kohlberg's) tend to be distinctly normative. That is, they frequently reveal as much about how the researcher thinks subjects ought to reason on moral issues, than they do about how we actually form moral judgments. In fact, we tend to deceive ourselves on this very issue, constructing plausible ex post facto rationalizations to explain the moral positions that we have chosen on other, less obviously rational, grounds.

To convince yourself of this, consider how often you, or anyone you know, has changed their opinion on any moral issue an account of discovering a flaw in the reasoning they previously used to justify it. It doesn't happen. We may possibly change our opinions on the light of new facts - though we are equally likely to deny any new evidence that contradicts our preferred perspective - but we seldom change our opinions on the basis of the reasoning itself.

A good example of this is the way that supporters of the war in Iraq happily forgot that they originally justified it in terms of the need to destroy Iraq's supposed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and re-justified it, when the WMD failed to materialize, in terms of the need to save the Iraqi people from a despotic dictator. The latter might conceivably have been a reasonable justification for our intervention, but it wasn't the reason we gave at the time, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that we would have decided to invade on that pretext alone. Lately, even this subsequent justification is starting to look a little shaky in the light our manifest unpopularity with a significant chunk of the Iraqi people, and we have started to see a disturbing conflation of Arabs and terrorists - a justification which has the additional advantage of seeming to legitimate the abuse of Iraqi prisoners as a response to a "clear and present danger".

Although it is disturbing that America should have arrived at the point of having to debate the circumstances under which torture is justified, I suppose that it is, in any case, preferable to the situation a few weeks ago, where most citizens were happily content to ignore the thought that we were torturing suspected Al Qaeda terrorists as long as they - and the rest of the world - were not presented with the evidence in too graphic a form, or required to justify it publicly.

Now, at least, the question has inescapably been posed: Is torture the sort of thing that we do?

Obviously, there is enough of a taboo against torture that the immediate reaction of virtually everyone with any kind of sense of social propriety will be, of course, "no". Any attempt to deduce the answer from first principles will presumably yield the same result. But despite the near-universal agreement on this matter, we find that, in practice, the apparent unanimity is dispersed by an immediate reformulation of the question as a series of specific demands whether particular acts such as holding someone under water, depriving them of sleep, or chaining them naked in uncomfortable positions constitutes "torture" or something more benign.

While most of us know the "right" answer to the question about torture, this is not necessarily the case with the more specific formulations. Whenever we don't have an off the shelf stock response to a moral question, far from relying on our ability to think the matter through from first principles, our natural impulse is to formulate a tentative response based on analogy and precedent and then seek some form of public validation of our tentative response, before committing to it. Most of us, faced with a look of shocked disbelief, will quickly adjust our moral judgment to conform to the opinions of our peers.

In practice, few Americans are willing to go to the mat over the acceptability of "water boarding" suspected terrorists. After all, most of us don't know any suspected terrorists personally, and aren't all that troubled by the issue. This situation presents an obvious temptation to callousness and it would be easy to conclude that only principled moral reasoning could protect us from acquiescing to such doubtful practices. Unfortunately, it is far from common for the desire for rational consistency and rigorous argumentation to lead us to positions contrary to those of our peers and inconvenient to our immediate interests. Amnesty International's efforts over the years to publicize the human rights violations of various countries (including our own) have generally been greeted by the American public with apathy and indifference.

Still, most people would prefer not to admit that their moral position on torture might boil down to "well, I guess its all right with me if its all right with my friends and a couple of news commentators that I listen to." This is a disturbing fact for most people, not the least because it suggests that their choice of friends (and news commentators) may ultimately prove, given its consequences, to be a moral issue. But is it not clear by any means that this seemingly craven dependence on the opinions of others is an entirely deplorable moral failing. Given the universal human tendency towards self-deception and wishful thinking, it arguably provides an indispensable antidote to moral solipsism and, ultimately, what is perhaps the best justification for both democracy and a pluralistic society.

The value of moral reasoning lies, not in its philosophical validity, but in its communicative function. While the deductive legitimacy that we tend to ascribe to our moral reasoning is arguably purely illusory, its utility as a medium for the inter-subjective negotiation of shared moral values is unquestionable. In other words, the stories we tell ourselves about our beliefs may be mere fictions, but they provide a valuable mechanism for sharing our moral positions with others, whatever their rational validity. Moral discourse provides a useful pretext for communication regarding morality, and a context for the sharing of individual moral judgments. This communicative activity has a distinct social utility regardless of the fictive nature of its rational content.

There is nothing wrong, per se, with this admittedly somewhat contorted state of affairs. In fact, it generally functions quite admirably despite (or perhaps precisely because of) our misplaced belief in its rationality. The rational model has the advantage of being simple, easy to articulate, and consistent with the legal and constitutional fictions upon which our political system is built. However there is a substantial danger that our illusions may blind us to the perils posed by political and intellectual isolation. The example of the way President Bush and his cohorts have drifted into dangerous moral territory is a perfect example of the temptations and dangers of a narrow and exclusive ideology.

One imagines easily how this isolation might have come about, beginning with a desire to shrug off the dismal legacy of Vietnam and to see a reinvigorated America, strong and unashamed, proudly bearing the mantle of the leader of the free world - and incidentally, enjoying the rights, privileges, and advantages associated with such a position. This vision was accompanied by a growing tendency to dismiss any critiques of their vision as cowardly, unimaginative, or worse. (There is little doubt of both this aspiration, and its accompanying rejection of criticism - as a review of pre-9/11 speeches and position papers by Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, and Wolfowitz will amply demonstrate.)

This clique surrounded themselves with a group of well-financed neo-conservative and immersed themselves in the teachings of a handful of theoreticians and commentators whose primary pre-occupation was a "new world order" founded on a brutal conception of global cultural conflict and a disturbing vision of American economic and military hegemony. (Once again, there is no shortage of textual evidence of this phenomenon dating to well before September 11, 2001.) A peculiar and dangerous neo-Nietzschean morality flourished in the moral vacuum created by their voluntary self-exclusion. The attitudes of these thinkers reveal a condescending indifference, verging on contempt, for the opinions of all those who disagree with them.

Having cast off most ties with the traditional American political mainstream, this group gradually drifted into what I would characterize as proto-totalitarian moral territory, a tendency which was exacerbated (or perhaps only facilitated) by the terrorist attacks on September 11. They exploited the fear and shock in the aftermath of the attack to institute a series of policies that undermined our country's institutional safeguards for civil liberties and human rights. They successfully maneuvered congress into supporting an invasion which had only the flimsiest of connections with the threat of terrorism, and which we now know had been conceived and planned even before 9/11. And it is far from clear that they have, even now, renounced additional planned manifestations of this new muscular America.

This short résumé of the administrations "accomplishments" provides a useful illustration of the moral dangers of political and ideological isolation. An isolation illustrated perfectly by the President's cheerful admission that he merely skims the front page of the newspaper before turning to the sports section. Recall that Mr. Rumsfeld's reaction to the media attention surrounding the Abu Ghraib prison scandal was to announce that he had stopped reading the newspapers. This was arguably mere bravado, but it demonstrates a profoundly disturbing disregard for both domestic and foreign opinion. Indifference to public opinion may, in certain extreme cases, be a sign of moral courage, but it is more commonly a sign of arrogance, if not the mark of an outright sociopath.

It is said that a democratic nation has the leaders that it deserves, and it is worth considering the possibility that the moral autism of the Bush administration is symptomatic of a disease of the American body politic. Although it may seem peculiar to argue that an entire nation could be dangerously morally sequestered, this is, arguably, quite possible in a country where the majority of the citizen's receive the majority of their news and "opinions" from television (or any other mass medium). This is particularly dangerous when the various media purveyors are engaged in a competition for market share whose is logic is based on reflecting back to the market the opinions and values "in demand". This creates a feedback loop of manufactured "opinion" that is simultaneously subject to both manipulation and narcissism.

The bottom line is that, given the inter-subjective basis of our moral "reasoning", and the danger of groupthink, the best recipe for sound moral judgment is to cultivate a diverse and ethically upright "reference group". Short of the rather extreme strategy of constantly pruning our list of friends, this is best accomplished, in the area of politics, by exposing ourselves to a variety of authors, commentators, and sources of information, taking particular care to remain open to differing viewpoints, judgments, and "facts", if for no other reason, simply to keep us honest and to guard us from falling under the influence of a narrow and distorting ideology. Sound like too much work? You can do it easily on the Internet. Or pick up an international press digest at your local newsstand.

At this moment, a good fraction of the rest of the world is looking towards America and saying, "We beseech you in the bowels of God to consider the possibility that you could be wrong" but we won't hear them if we simply pick up USA Today and turn directly to the sports page.

The Baghdad Prison Experiment

The testimony of Specialist Jeremy C. Sivits reported in today's New York Times gives some frightful descriptions of abuse by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison. Common wisdom would have it that the abuse is all the more abhorrent because of the glee with which the soldiers said to have exhibited while assaulting and humiliating the prisoners.

But Specialist Sivits described a scene of twisted joviality not authorized by anyone in the chain of command and with no connection to any interrogations.

"She was laughing at the different stuff they were having the detainees do," Specialist Sivits said, describing Pfc. Lynndie R. England, another soldier charged.

(New York Times, "U.S. Soldier Paints a Scene of Eager Mayhem at Iraqi Prison", May 14, 2004)

It is significant that the pleasure the soldiers are said to have exhibited is closely tied to the assertion that the abuse was unauthorized and unconnected to any interrogations. If, as is alleged, the abuse described by Specialist Sivits was indeed purely private and gratuitous, we naturally feel the need to understand and explain it - as the participants themselves must have at the time - in terms of some alternate script that they were supposedly following.

I am not questioning whether the specific events described by Specialist Sivits did or did not happen more or less as he describes them. I do, however, find it interesting that the inclusion of details that conveniently support the application of the "twisted sadist" archetype to the participants very conveniently fits with the "few bad apples" interpretation that the administration is so eager to apply to the situation. As one of the other soldiers remarked, Specialist Sivits is testifying as part of a plea bargain with the military prosecutors. Although I have no reason to suspect that he is guilty of perjury, it would, at the same time, be surprising if were not motivated to represent the events he described in the light most attractive to the prosecutors with whom he is cooperating.

But why is it so important that the soldiers should be represented as gleefully sadistic? Because it is the only available "explanation" of their behavior - other than that they were only following orders - that is consistent with the cognitive model of individual human agency central to our moral, judicial, and political ideology. The problem here is that this fictional concepgodual as an independent moral creature, endowed by the creator with certain inalienable rights who will stand alone for before his creator on judgment day (etc.) is not a particularly accurate model of human behavior, and is one which directly contradicted by empirical social psychological research.

I do not mean, by this, to suggest that the soldiers are not guilty of the charges brought against them, or to suggest that they be found innocent. It is entirely appropriate that we should apply our judicial concepts within the courtroom. I do not see how we could do otherwise. But, on the other hand, I do not think that the (possible) event of their being found guilty should in any way reduce our assessment the responsibility of other - more highly placed - actors in this tragic drama for having created, encouraged, or permitted the culture of callousness and brutal dehumanization that underlie the behavior. It is even possible that our legal conceptions of responsibility might be extended to include knowingly creating or tolerating conditions conducive to such behavoir. The law of torts already acknowledges such varieties of responsibility.

It is undoubtedly offensive to our conception of self, and corrosive to the concept of individual responsibility, to acknowledge that ordinary people can so easily be transformed into monsters by their social and physical environment. We are all naturally inclined to tell ourselves that we, certainly, would behave differently in such situations, despite the high statistical likelihood that we are mistaken on this account. If you do not believe that humans are so malleable and suggestible, I strongly recommend that you look at the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Phillip Zimbardo, the principle investigator, relates that:

Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.

(http://www.prisonexp.org/)

We are dealing, in Iraq, with circumstances to which our conventional ideas concerning human identity and individual moral responsibility do not easily apply. This does not mean that we should dispense with them - whatever their limitations, they form the basis of our justice system and of our society - but we must not limit ourselves to these conceptions or we will never be able to think effectively about the situation we have gotten ourselves into there.

In fact, it might be argued, that our traditional atomistic models of moral agency are insufficient to for thinking effectively about a host of contemporary moral issues, but that is another story.

The sort of thing we do

The New York times revealed today that the CIA has been using "harsh" and "coercive" interrogation techniques on captured Al Qaeda operatives, including a technique known as "water boarding," in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.

Two paragraphs from the article are particularly revealing:

"These techniques were authorized by a set of secret rules for the interrogation of high-level Qaeda prisoners, none known to be housed in Iraq, that were endorsed by the Justice Department and the C.I.A. The rules were among the first adopted by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 attacks for handling detainees and may have helped establish a new understanding throughout the government that officials would have greater freedom to deal harshly with detainees.

Defenders of the operation said the methods stopped short of torture, did not violate American anti-torture statutes, and were necessary to fight a war against a nebulous enemy whose strength and intentions could only be gleaned by extracting information from often uncooperative detainees. Interrogators were trying to find out whether there might be another attack planned against the United States."

(New York Times, "Harsh C.I.A. Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogations", May 13, 2004)

The reason that it is so important to claim that the methods used stop short of torture is that:

1. Torture is illegal by U.S. law.
2. The death penalty can be applied for murder by torture.
3. The methods were explicitly authorized by the administration.
4. Standard diplomatic and political immunity does not apply in cases of crimes against humanity, including torture.

But what exactly is it that makes these techniques "not torture"? Is it that they are not quite horrible enough for that classification, or is it that we had a "really good reason" for employing them, as is implied by the remark that "Interrogators were trying to find out whether there might be another attack planned against the United States?"

Now I suspect that many Americans won't be too bothered by the thought that we might be "water boarding" Al Qaeda operatives. (How about "suspected" Al Qaeda operatives?) And therein lies the danger of a possible backlash against all the revelations that are emerging about our government's incarceration and interrogation practices in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere. It may be psychologically more economical to accept the brutality than to accept the shame. We might, in short, start saying "All right, so we tortured them. What's the big deal? They started it. They are animals. We have to protect ourselves."

Of course, there is no answer to that except that torture is not the sort of thing we do. (Or should do, in any case, since it seems that we do it.)

The cruel irony of the situation is that the very same people who love to proclaim our moral superiority to rest of the world are the same bunch that are advocating the must brutal and muscular policies. So far, the (official) spokesmen for our current policies have stopped short of suggesting that our moral superiority actually justifies our brutality, but that logic is evident in the association of ideas when they talk about the situation. Even supposedly 'objective' news reports offer that implicit justification. The excerpt from the New York Times quoted above is a case in point.

Prison Dogs

Administration officials debated whether to release publicly all the pictures in the government's possession, with many of the president's political and communications advisers advocating moving quickly to get the images out and avoid the prospect of weeks or months in which they leak out piecemeal.

But no decision was made, officials said, adding that they continued to weigh issues including the effect of any release on pending criminal inquiries and the privacy of people shown in the images, some of which, government officials said, show American soldiers having sex with one another.

(New York Times ,"President Backs His Defense Chief in Show of Unity", May 11, 2004)

Not wanting to seem less sensitive to issues of human dignity than the Bush administration, it occurs to me that I should probably add little black bars covering the eyes of the soldiers in the photo below out of sensitivity to their feelings. However, since my specific interest in the photograph is what is happening on the periphery, I decided instead simply to retouch the photo to portray the sort of scene that we supposedly believed was typical of Abu Ghraib prison before the shocking photographs shattered our precious illusions.



If, a few weeks ago, somebody had shown you the above photograph and asked you what you noticed about it, I expect you would say something like "Nothing much, except that doesn't look like the kind of dog that I would ordinarily expect to see in a prison. And the picture appears to have been retouched to remove something that the fellow in the foreground was staring at."

What you wouldn't notice is that the six people in the background aren't paying the slightest attention to what is going on in the foreground. Precisely because what is going on in the foreground was no more unusual than somebody stopping to admire a dog. You don't need any more evidence than this to conclude that, from the point of view of the nine soldiers shown in the picture, there was nothing the least bit anomalous, shocking, or unusual about what was going on in the prison corridor. It was business as usual.

Now you may argue that, by some monumental and tragic coincidence, ten rotten apples (counting the photographer) just happened, by pure coincidence, to be assigned to the same shift at Abu Ghraib prison, and that there just happened not to have been any of the upstanding young men and women who are typical of armed forces assigned to the same ward, and that this situation just happened to persist long enough for all these baddies to become so accustomed to their wrongdoing that it became a mere matter of routine.

But if chaining naked Iraqi prisoners in the prison hallways was as routine as the photo would suggest, why on earth did they bother to keep doing it? The only explanation that I can think of is that somebody told them to. It is clear, from the pictures, not only that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was routine, but that it was institutionally authorized. The soldiers depicted above don’t' look furtive. They don't appear to be worrying that their commanding officer might show up at any moment and toss them all in the brig. Not to mention the fact that if they were worried about getting caught, they certainly wouldn't have taken so many pictures. On the contrary, they give every indication that they are simply doing their jobs.

That, however, is not my point. There are, fortunately, enough dedicated and talented investigative reporters looking into the matter that I hardly need to belabor the point here. My point is the following. What strikes me is that many Americans appear to be capable of looking at the same images without, apparently, drawing anything like the same conclusions. Just as they are able to hear about the repeated Red Cross warnings on prison conditions and still believe that this all came as a tremendous surprise to the administration.

The irony of the situation is that virtually nobody in Washington believes President Bush's fairy tale about "a few rotten apples." Those who pretend to do so because it isn't socially acceptable to publicly condone torture.

Now, of course that's not necessarily the way they represent it to themselves. People who condone torture don't ordinarily use the same terminology to describe their actions as would, for instance, the Red Cross. They invent words that make it sound "reasonable". The sort of thing that hard-headed realists like them selves are morally obliged to do because of their "responsibility". From their point of view, it's just another form of "collateral damage." It is the sort of language used to justify the "Patriot Act" and the "facilities" at Guantanamo Bay.

Those who continue to support our current policy in Iraq can generally be divided into one of two camps. On the one hand, there are the "idealist" who are taken in by the presidential spin, think that we just need to clean out the rotten apples, unsully the flag, and continue with the crusade. On the other hand, there are those who find themselves obliged to express shock and indignation when the details of their "realist" approach leak out to the general public. (Including, no doubt, in many cases, their own family members. This kind of "realism" has a strong atavistic masculine component. Protecting the womenfolk frequently involves protecting them from the details of how the protection is being implemented.)

The real problem, for the "realists" - though they would never express it this way - is that torture, to be effective, has to be so damned personal. Torture can't easily be instrumentalized and proceduralized after the fashion of extermination or aerial bombardment. That's why it has to be kept secret.

I'm not sure which of these two groups - the "realists" or the "idealists"- scares me more. But that is probably irrelevant because the two groups are not really distinct. Strange and contradictory as it may seem, the two logics frequently work in tandem within a single individual. President Bush is a case in point.

For those of you who are bothered by the fact that I do not seem to make a distinction between "torture" and "our current policy in Iraq", I would observe, first of all, that available evidence suggests that torture is part and parcel of our current policy in Iraq. Rumsfeld and Bush are playing with the distinction between formal and informal policy to pretend otherwise. Plausible deniability has been a key component in the architecture of the administration's foreign policy from the beginning.

Secondly, I would suggest that so-called "R2I" interrogation techniques and our whole approach to Iraq are both motivated by the same underlying logic: a logic which views anyone who does not agree or cooperate with us as a criminal and an enemy; a logic which justifies dispensing with the conventions of international law, human rights, and civil liberties in the interests of physical and emotional security; a logic which separates the world into to warring camps of a morally superior "us" and an inhuman "them". Torture is a symptom of the Bush administration's world view, as is its current policy in Iraq.

Société à responsabilité limitée

An article in the New York Times reports that: "Virtually all the senators insisted that "99.9 percent" of American soldiers would not have behaved as those at Abu Ghraib did." Unfortunately, this assertion is not plausible. All experimental evidence from social psychology suggests precisely the contrary. This is amply demonstrated by the Zimbardo Prison Study (http://www.prisonexp.org/) and the Milgram experiments (http://www.stanleymilgram.com/).

"The tragedy of this is, it goes directly to the heart of how we hope to win the war against terror and what we're hoping to accomplish in Iraq," Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, said on "Fox News Sunday. And that is that we are morally superior to our adversaries. We don't kill women and children. We don't torture people."

(The New York Times, "Republicans Stand by Rumsfeld as Furor Over Abuse Continues", May 9, 2004)

This, once again, is also demonstrably false. We do kill women and children. We have even invented a special term for it ("collateral damage") to make it sound more palatable. And we do torture people. That is precisely what the scandal is about.

Now I entirely agree that we shouldn't do either any of these things. But we aren't going to make much progress in that direction if we can't admit the basic fact that we have, in fact, been doing them.

Apparently, we are hoping that we can somehow manage to kick the habit without actually having to admit, either to ourselves or to the rest of the world, what we have been up to. This is a little reminiscent of the alcoholic resolving to quit drinking while all the while denying that he has a problem. Experience suggests that this is not an effective strategy.

The issue of denial leads me to another question. Should it, in fact, turn out not just to be a case of a "few rotten apples" but (as I assert) a much more systematic phenomenon, is it not reasonable to expect that all those who are in denial now will step forward and publicly apologize for their (to my mind) willful blindness?

Are there not moments in history where it is no longer morally defensible, even for common citizens to take refuge behind the fiction of a société à responsabilité limitée? The Dreyfuss Affair was one such moment where every citizen was, in a sense, morally responsible for their opinion. Zola's J'accuse was an indictment, not just of the French military justice, but of the hypocrisy of French society as a whole. It is debatable whether French managed to acquit themselves satisfactorily of the indictment of hypocrisy, but, at any rate, in the controversy, they invented the modern intellectual. We may now be at another such moral crossroads. Would that we could aspire to some equivalent invention...

Perhaps that is what has driven me to go on record publicly against the Bush administration's policies: A sense that we perhaps need to invent a new variety of grass-roots accountability in the democratic process. Perhaps a willingness to take a principled and reasoned public position on such issues ought to be the (ethical) price we must pay for social respectability. A system of self-identified notables might even provide an antidote to the tyranny of the anonymous majority...

Traditionally, it has been held that anonymity enhances democracy by allowing for the possibility of anonymous dissenting votes. On the other hand, anonymity may also prove harmful by insulating voters from the need to take responsibility for their opinions. It all depends whether you see coercion or self-delusion as the greater danger. The way that the events of 9-11 sent America scurrying into a defensive posture of aggression amply demonstrates the danger of anonymous mass democracy. The existence of a political audit-trail might help put some starch back into the spineless American voter. In conjunction with a secret ballot, it might just provide an ideal combination of dissent and accountability...

Guess We'll Go Eat Worms

According to an article in today's Washington Post (Sunday, May 9, 2004; Page A01) "A recent USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll found that a majority of Iraqis want the United States to leave immediately" Now I am certainly not an advocate of direct democracy, or even necessarily believe that there is such a thing as "public opinion", but I think that you would have to admit that this tidbit is, at the least, difficult to reconcile with the image of the United States as the "liberator" of Iraq. We're starting to look more and more like an occupying power.

Curiously, not only is this (apparent) fact lost on many Americans, but the conclusion that most people draw about the current state of affairs (myself included) seems to be strongly correlated with how they voted in the last election. This is hardly surprising, but it is not easy to express why this fact does not surprise us without resorting to explanations that are severely at variance with a decent regard for human rationality, especially our own.

Now I happen to believe that in this particular case, only a Pollyanna disregard for the most basic facts of the situation could possibly lead anyone to defend the Bush administration's current policy in Iraq, and I suspect (and hope) that public opinion (or, more properly, it's industrially manipulated simulacrum) is in the process of crossing the tipping point, which is precisely what makes the present moment so interesting, from a sociological standpoint.

Arguments defending the current American policy in Iraq have reached the point of chaotic incoherence. They tend to be little more than a haphazard collection of inaccurate statements with no obvious logical progression. (How could there be?) It is the discursive equivalent of schizophrenia.

In the days and weeks that come, our country will have to choose between a difficult and painful recalibration with reality, or a dangerous headlong spiral into delusion. President Bush and his henchman, obviously, are counting on the latter eventuality. Call me an optimist, but I'm betting against them...

We knew nothing

It seems to me that the ritual exclamations of outrage and shock regarding the Abu Ghraib prison incidents are symptomatic not merely of desire to exculpate (as far as possible) the military and civilian command structure by pretending to believe that the events were the result of a "few rotten apples", but are, in the larger context of American society, a collective (and I hope futile) exercise in the denial of responsibility for what is a general proto-totalitarian turn in America today.

Lets be honest with ourselves. Not only did the entire command structure know that we were torturing prisoners as part of the interrogation technique, but so did the rest of the country (and the world, for that matter.)

Granted, we didn't know the specific modality of the "coercive interrogations", but we all knew (albeit occasionally preconsciously, if you insist) they were happening. The fact of the matter is that most Americans just didn't care - and furthermore didn't care to acknowledge (frequently even to themselves) that they didn't care. The appearance of the photographs inconveniently forced Americans to confront what they had, all along, tacitly been condoning. This revelation necessitated the massive exercise in cognitive dissonance reduction that we are engaged in today.

One of the difficulties in this avoidance reaction is that we all realize that the torture and humiliation weren't motivated exclusively by the supposed utilitarian justification of wartime interrogation, but also by a desire for revenge against the Arabs, in America's eyes, who were guilty of the dual sins of terrorism and ingratitude.

(To those who would argue that Maussian reifications as "Americans" have no actual existence - an argument that I do not fully accept, but this is not the moment for such ontological niceties - I will allow that the attribution of collective motivation is perhaps nothing more than a useful shorthand for discussing social phenomena of tremendous complexity.)

Anyone who saw the pictures of hooded arab prisioners must have realized that something deeply disagreable was going on. Future generations will wonder how anyone could plausibly pretend to have been ignorant of the abuses - just as we wonder how the germans could pretend not to have know what was happening in the concentration camps.

Oh I know, there is a difference between the Nazi atrocities and the events of Abu Ghraib, but I fear that it is a difference in magnitude, not a difference in kind.

Frisure

I have been considering cutting my hair. But I fear that by doing so I might in some way be lending support to the Bush administration's crusade in Irak. I do not accept the notion that a democratic society is a limited liability corporation. Everything that we do, everything that we say is in some way connected to everything else that is said and done around us. Anyone who has referred to ever referred to an Arab as a "towelhead" or deliberately mispronounced the word "arab" as "ay-rab" is, to some extent, responsible for the tortures and humiliations at Abu Ghraib prison. (You might call this the Virginia Woolf theory of political responsibility.) There is probably somtehing more useful that I should be doing, but for the moment, I'm keeping the pony-tail, to ward off the thought that I should have started speaking out sooner.