This post will also count as Sam Harris: Total Whacko Part III

One can look at a wingnut (and I include Harris in this category) as a comical figure, full of contradictions and hypocrisy. But what is it that drives a person to the kinds of frenzied, thoughtless activity we see these people engaged in?

Sometimes it’s simple greed, cashing a paycheck to sell out their fellow culture warriors; sometimes it’s intense self-loathing, like you see in your typical, deeply closeted gay Republicans.

In the case of torture enthusiasts like Sam Harris, however, it’s fairly obvious: fear. Pure, unadulterated, childish fear.

People like Harris live in constant, irrational terror. They’re terrified that the swarthy fellow down the street is in an Al Queda sleeper cell; they’re terrified that they’re going to wake up, ala Rip van Winkle, and find themselves living under Sharia law. They’re terrified that someday, however unlikely, however far removed from actual threat, however protected, isolated, coddled they may in fact be, that the next time the big, scary Islamist threat strikes, it will come for them.

Ooooooh. Spooky.

The reason so much attention is paid to Islamic extremism isn’t what most people think, to my mind. The obvious assumption is bigotry (which people like Harris intentionally misconstrue as ‘racism’, then defend themselves against by acknowledging that Islam isn’t a race. Strawmen are a specialty of the terror loving set).

The real reason Americans of many races, creeds, and ideologies (including neo-pagan Power of the Mind hippies like Harris) have fallen so completely off the deep end is simple: September 11th, 2001 was the first time any of them felt real Fear.

They couldn’t handle the strain.

See, unlike the people whom we subject to carpet bombing, or whose countries we invade for resources, or whose corrupt, violent governments we prop up to keep labor cheap and profits high, your average American in the intellectual class has never known real Fear. They might have been momentarily afraid, as they got into a minor car accident, or even somewhat stressed over a tough midterm or having to take out a larger student loan. They might even have struggled to make the rent once or twice in their lives. That’s fear with a lowercase f, and it’s very real.

But it’s not Fear. Fear is knowing that, at every second of every day, you face the real threat of lingering, agonizing, violent death from people and causes over which you have no control. Fear is knowing that your life is worth less than nothing, that you are an impediment to the amoral goals of a violent, godlike (relatively speaking) figure forever beyond your reach. Fear with a capital-F is the destruction of personal security, of the feeling that ‘everything will be all right’, however delusional that feeling is.

Americans by and large don’t know that fear. Many living here in this country do, of course; the homeless, the Appalachian families that have lived in crushing poverty since the Civil War, our immigrant underclass hiding from Immigration’s cruel raids designed to devastate their families.

But not people like Harris. Never them.

So on that September day when they turned on the news and saw the heart of American power (economic power, after all, our real strength) set ablaze by people who, being dead, were obviously beyond repercussion, directed by shadowy figures half a world away who were also apparently forever beyond reach, the future Torture enthusiasts were reduced to gibbering, bed-wetting hysteria.

They had to find an answer. They had to find something, anything, some tiger rock, some deity, some way to reassure themselves: I’m an American, and I’m safe.

Torture was the answer many of them settled upon. They’ve seen it in action movies, they loved it on 24, and it appeals to them for precisely the same reason they crave reasssurance that the big, bad, (incredibly statistically unlikely) Muslim threat won’t get them: fear

Terror of physical harm drives them to seek radical solutions, and their own deranged, completely uncontrollable fear ensures their belief in torture’s efficacy. Torture, they reason, is TERRIFYING. Therefore, no one could ever resist it. It must work; fear, to a wingnut, always works… because it always works *ON THEM*

This is the nexus, this is the key. Wingnuts believe that the world works the same way as their own befuddled brains. If fear can make them do anything, it can make anyone do anything.

These mouth-breathing halfwits usually resort to the most extreme of hypothetical, theoretical, fear-generating mental exercises to make their ‘point’: the so-called ‘ticking bomb’ scenario, where you have a torture suspect who conveniently knows just how to stop, say, a nuclear weapon from going off, you have the weapon, and oh, if ONLY you knew how to disarm it — and only they can tell you. This is the scenario that makes Harris types all gooey.

There’s only one problem (actually there are several but roll with me here): empirically, in the real world.. torture doesn’t work.

Let me repeat that for the simple-minded, whether Harris or Neoconservative or just Kiefer Sutherland fans: TORTURE. DOESN’T. WORK.

Experts and interrogators from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences agree that torture is counterproductive. Here, have a sample:

By contrast, it is easy to find experienced U.S. officers who argue precisely the opposite. Meet, for example, retired Air Force Col. John Rothrock, who, as a young captain, headed a combat interrogation team in Vietnam. More than once he was faced with a ticking time-bomb scenario: a captured Vietcong guerrilla who knew of plans to kill Americans. What was done in such cases was “not nice,” he says. “But we did not physically abuse them.” Rothrock used psychology, the shock of capture and of the unexpected. Once, he let a prisoner see a wounded comrade die. Yet — as he remembers saying to the “desperate and honorable officers” who wanted him to move faster — “if I take a Bunsen burner to the guy’s genitals, he’s going to tell you just about anything,” which would be pointless.

Source: Washington Post

Or listen to Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, and who was sent by the Pentagon in 2003 — long before Abu Ghraib — to assess interrogations in Iraq. Aside from its immorality and its illegality, says Herrington, torture is simply “not a good way to get information.” In his experience, nine out of 10 people can be persuaded to talk with no “stress methods” at all, let alone cruel and unusual ones. Asked whether that would be true of religiously motivated fanatics, he says that the “batting average” might be lower: “perhaps six out of ten.” And if you beat up the remaining four? “They’ll just tell you anything to get you to stop.”

Source: Ibid

So, even in your ticking time bomb scenario, torture not only doesn’t work — it’s too dangerous. The terrorist will tell you anything to get you to stop. That might be the truth, or it might be a lie. Would you really trust that disarm code your terrorist just gave you to put into the nuke?

What if it’s wrong? What if it makes the bomb go off instantly? Then the torture will stop (especially if the bomb is near, say, the terrorist).

(While we’re on the theoretical, if I was a terrorist, and they had the bomb next to me, tortuing me, I’d tell them the wrong code on PURPOSE. At least then I’d take them with me.. and who’s to say they’ll ever stop, otherwise?)

Ultimately though, hypotheticals aren’t worth as much as demonstrated facts. Let’s have some more.

In the first congressional hearing on torture since the release of Bush administration memos that provided the legal justification for torture, Soufan told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the CIA’s abusive techniques were “ineffective, slow and unreliable, and as a result harmful to our efforts to defeat al-Qaida.” According to Soufan, his own nonviolent interrogation of an al-Qaida suspect was quickly yielding valuable, actionable intelligence — until the CIA intervened.

…

Soufan, who testified at the hearing from behind a partition to hide his identity, worked on a small team of interrogators utilizing tried-and-true techniques that emphasize knowing the detainee’s language, understanding his culture, leveraging known information about a detainee, and sometimes using a bit of trickery. The method is based on rapport and is believed by experienced interrogators to result in the most reliable actionable intelligence. “It is about outwitting the detainee by using a combination of interpersonal, cognitive and emotional strategies to get the information needed,” Soufan said in written testimony, which he paraphrased on Wednesday.

…

“Within the first hour of interrogation,” Soufan said, “we gained actionable intelligence.” Soufan could not say what that information was because it remains classified. Zubaydah had been injured during his capture, and Soufan’s team arranged for medical care and continued talking to the prisoner. Within the next few days, Soufan made one of the most significant intelligence breakthroughs of the so-called war on terror. He learned from Zubaydah that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind behind the attacks on 9/11.

Then, however, a CIA interrogation team from Washington led by a contractor arrived at the secret location. Zubaydah was stripped naked and the contractor began a series of coercive, abusive interrogations, based on Cold War-era communist techniques designed to elicit false confessions. During the Korean War, for example, Chinese interrogators employed the measures to get captured American pilots to make false confessions. “The new techniques did not produce results, as Abu Zubaydah shut down and stopped talking,” Soufan explained. “After a few days of getting no information, and after repeated inquiries from D.C. asking why all of a sudden no information was being transmitted … we again were given control of the interrogation.”

As Soufan and his team resumed their interrogation, Zubaydah revealed information about Jose Padilla, the alleged “dirty bomber.”

But after that, the CIA and the contractor again took over, using what Soufan called an “untested theory” that the Cold War techniques might work for getting good information. “Again, however, the technique wasn’t working,” Soufan recalled.

Soufan’s team was brought back yet again. “We found it harder to reengage him this time, because of how the techniques had affected him,” Soufan noted. “But eventually, we succeeded.”

A third time the CIA and the contractor team took over, using increasingly brutal methods. Soufan reported what he called “borderline torture” to his superiors in Washington. In protest of the abuse, former FBI Director Robert Mueller pulled Soufan out of the location.

There you have it. Torture doesn’t work; not only that, it makes real interrogation HARDER. Torture makes you LESS safe, Harris, you bedwetter.

Source: Salon.com

So what do Torture supporters do, when confronted with this evidence? They lie.

Sigh.

Aside from not working to get the information you want, torture is the ultimate recruiting tool for NEW terrorists. Torture discourages people in custody from cooperating, it alienates much of the world, it weakens our alliances and makes our soldiers the target of retribution. All that for something that DOESN’T work.

Our policy of torture and abuse of prisoners has been Al Qaida’s number one recruiting tool, a point that Buckley does not mention and is also conspicuously absent from former CIA Director General Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s argument in the Wall Street Journal. As the senior interrogator in Iraq for a task force charged with hunting down Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former Al Qaida leader and mass murderer, I listened time and time again to captured foreign fighters cite the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as their main reason for coming to Iraq to fight. Consider that 90 percent of the suicide bombers in Iraq are these foreign fighters and you can easily conclude that we have lost hundreds, if not thousands, of American lives because of our policy of torture and abuse. But that’s only the past.

Somewhere in the world there are other young Muslims who have joined Al Qaida because we tortured and abused prisoners. These men will certainly carry out future attacks against Americans, either in Iraq, Afghanistan, or possibly even here. And that’s not to mention numerous other Muslims who support Al Qaida, either financially or in other ways, because they are outraged that the United States tortured and abused Muslim prisoners.

Source: The Daily Beast http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-04-20/torture-doesnt-work/

That’s from yet another successful interrogator, by the way; his team caught the head of Al Queda-in-Iraq.

What’s the take-away from all this?

Sam Harris hems and haws, he goes on and on about how you can’t rule out torture in ALL imaginary, fantasy-land constructions he makes in his head, therefore, torture isn’t so bad. He insists that the ticking bomb scenario is real, that nuclear terrorism is an imminent threat, and that therefore, you can’t rule it out. Harris doesn’t think it should be legal to torture people; he just thinks we should do it anyway, and that this would be ok.

Here, read this filth.

It is widely claimed that torture “does not work”—that it produces unreliable information, implicates innocent people, etc. As I argue in The End of Faith, this line of argument does not resolve the underlying ethical dilemma. Clearly, the claim that torture never works, or that it always produces bad information, is false. There are cases in which the mere threat of torture has worked. As I argue in The End of Faith, one can easily imagine situations in which even a very low probability of getting useful information through torture would seem to justify it—the looming threat of nuclear terrorism being the most obvious case. It is decidedly unhelpful that those who claim to know that torture is “always wrong” never seem to envision the circumstances in which good people would be tempted to use it.

Funny, I think I’ve just spent this entire column discussing the circumstances in which ‘good people’ would be tempted to do it. The Daily Beast article up there talks extensively about those situations, and why it’s still wrong to torture.

Harris has a constantly shifting series of goalposts. You can’t just demonstrate that torture overwhelmingly provides bad information, that it recruits far more terrorists than it could ever stop, that experienced interrogators disagree with Harris on every point. You have to prove, to satisfy Harris’ delusional fantasies, that torture is always wrong, in all areas, in all times, forever, throughout history, throughout the universe.

When he loses the argument on practicality, on ticking time bombs, on reliability of intelligence, on the fact that torture is overwhelmingly impractical, Harris has to resort to this ridiculous thought experiment. When even that seems implausible, he gets snarky and passive-aggressive.

The best case against “ticking-bomb” arguments appears in David Luban’s article, “Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb,” published in the Virginia Law Review. (I have posted a PDF here.) Luban relies on a few questionable assumptions, however. And he does not actually provide an ethical argument against torture in the ticking bomb case; he offers a pragmatic argument against our instituting a policy allowing torture in such cases. There is absolutely nothing in Luban’s argument that rules out the following law:

The Harris Law of Torture: We will never torture anyone under any circumstances unless we are certain, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the person in our custody is Osama bin Laden.

It seems to me that unless one can produce an ethical argument against torturing Osama bin Laden, one does not have an argument against the use of torture in principle. Of course, my discussion of torture in The End of Faith (and on this page) only addresses the ethics of torture, not the practical difficulties of implementing a policy based on the ethics.

From Harris’ website

I’ll take that challenge, you self-righteous prick. Ready, asshole? Here you go:

1: In order to torture someone, you must have them under your power, by definition.
2: It is always wrong to abuse someone under your power.

Given that we have the word of numerous experienced interrogators that, on the whole, torture always costs more lives than it saves and produces negative outcomes, and that you never know the outcome before you torture someone, every single decision to torture is a decision to abuse the helpless (unethical) in order to, with overwhelming likelihood, produce further unethical acts.

Committing one evil to most likely commit another? That is not ethical.

By Harris’ logic, you can’t make a ‘categorical argument’ against anything. Rape isn’t ‘always wrong’, because you might conceive a child that grows up to be the next Ghandi. Murder isn’t ‘always wrong’, because that person might someday go crazy and kill a child. Nothing is ‘always’ wrong, says Harris, if you can justify it, before or after the fact, with or without evidence, entirely in the province of your mind.

Harris has singlehanded dismissed the entire field of ethics. Bravo.

What Harris misses is that, in fact, murder, rape and torture ARE always wrong. The Greater Good still involves a Lesser Evil, and you can never wash that stain away.

Yes, in a thought experiment, you can make torture ‘right’. You can also make 1+1 = 3. Real world consequences matter. My ethical argument deals with established reality.. I’ll never try to answer all the lunatic ravings of a Harris, or a Jonah Goldberg, or a Bill O’Reilly. Their minds are cesspools of hate and fear, and there’s always another bogeyman. Adults learn to deal with fear and live in the real world.

Harris never has.

I will digress here to discuss the final point of disagreement I have with Harris. Having demonstrated that he has no core beliefs that can’t be waved away with a scary dream, having shown that he has no standard for public consistency or honesty, advocating that we torture people and lie about and see how long we can get away with it, Harris then goes for the coup de grace. He thinks you should be able to KILL PEOPLE if you think that the beliefs in their heads are *dangerous*

The following passage seems to have been selectively quoted, and misconstrued, more than any I have written:

The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.

This paragraph appears after a long discussion of the role that belief plays in governing human behavior, and it should be read in that context. Some critics have interpreted the second sentence of this passage to mean that I advocate simply killing religious people for their beliefs. Granted, I made the job of misinterpreting me easier than it might have been, but such a reading remains a frank distortion of my views. Read in context, it should be clear that I am not at all ignoring the link between belief and behavior. The fact that belief determines behavior is what makes certain beliefs so dangerous.

When one asks why it would be ethical to drop a bomb on Osama bin Laden or Ayman Al Zawahiri, the answer cannot be, “because they have killed so many people in the past.” These men haven’t, to my knowledge, killed anyone personally. However, they are likely to get a lot of innocent people killed because of what they and their followers believe about jihad, martyrdom, the ascendancy of Islam, etc. As I argued in The End of Faith, a willingness to take preventative action against a dangerous enemy is compatible with being against the death penalty (which I am). Whenever we can capture and imprison jihadists, we should. But in most cases this is impossible.

Ibid

First of all, marvel at a grown man who doesn’t understand the concept of ‘conspiracy’. A mob boss who orders a hit is completely without blame for that crime, because it’s in the past, and he didn’t do it personally!

This is marvelous reasoning, akin to that used by certainly highly observant Jews who build appliances that turn themselves on, sort of, because you can’t do ‘work’ on the Sabbath. If I don’t directly turn the dial, if it turns itself on sometime later, why, the STOVE did it.

What a maroon.

A person doesn’t have to have done anything to justify their death; Harris just said that past events are irrelevant. What’s relevant is, once again, your possible future crimes. (Though I’m unclear, if Osama didn’t directly kill anyone in the past, and therefore he’s not a threat, why is he a threat in the future? If he only continues to give orders, he’s not dangerous, right Sam?)

Here’s the key bit again:

Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people.

Ideas are so dangerous that it ‘may’ (how weaselly) be ethical to kill people, solely for believing them. Even if they haven’t done anything. Because those beliefs might, some day, somehow, motivate someone to violence… and unlike violence in torture, violence against people like Harris is wrong.

Who determines which beliefs are dangerous? Who determines whether those beliefs will lead to action?

I think we know the answer to that one… at least, in Sam Harris’ twisted little mind.

Orwell and Phillip K Dick had absolutely nothing on Sam Harris. Nothing.