In response to challenges on my last post drawing links between American torture policy abroad, and the brutal acts in Tennessee, I wrote the following email:
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When one does not condemn/tacitly consents to X immoral action, it does send a message to the world and to particular persons that X is condoned, even if that message is not intended. This is not particularly controversial. Samatha Power uses the example of genocide in Serbia to elucidate:
“Slobodan Milosevic saw that he got away with the brutal suppression of independence movements in Slovenia and Croatia and he reasoned he would pay no price for doing the same in Bosnia and Kosovo. Because so many individual perpetrators were killing for the first time and deciding daily how far they would go, the United States and its European allies missed critical opportunities to try to deter them. When they ignored genocide around the world, the Western powers were not intending to ‘green light’ the perpetrators. But because the killers told themselves they were doing the world a favor by ‘cleansing’ the ‘undesirables,’ some surely interpreted silence as consent or even support.”
The Bush administration’s simple inability to condemn torture as an absolute moral (on anything more than a blatantly superficial level) wrong works the same way. Punishing a few low-level grunts is not the same thing as providing accountability. I think the threatened veto of the anti-torture bill (and the disgusting “signing statement” that attempted to immasculate it of any potency), the stonewalling of any investigation of our torture policy writ large, and the refusal to even reprimand higher military officers who provided the green light to torture makes it difficult to argue that the US has an unequivicating anti-torture policy. In fact, the rhetoric tends much toward the opposite–when challanged on the issue of torture, the response of this administration is to remark on how evil these detainees are and how critical it is for us to take a tough stance on them. Thus, if we were to rewrite Power:
“Police officers saw that (most) American officials got away with the brutal acts of torture in Abu Gharib and Guantanamo and reasoned they themselves would pay no price for doing the same in their local enforcement actions. Because so much of the torture was justified on grounds of preserving order and combating evildoers, the United States missed critical opportunities to try to deter them. When they ignored torture within their own ranks, the US was not intending to ‘green light’ the perpetrators. But because the officers told themselves they were doing their communities a favor by ‘cleansing’ the ‘undesirables,’ some surely interpreted silence as consent or even support.”
It’s not a cause/effect thing in any narrow sense. I’m not saying that Bush flew to Tennessee to pat these men on the back, or endorsed these actions, or even privately agreed. Nor am I making any sort of claim as to whether this particular case would or wouldn’t have happened if the US took torture seriously. To use the language of strict causality is to misunderstand the issues in play and the connections I’m drawing between condoning torture in our own ranks and torture occuring in Tennessee. One does not “cause” the other. Rather, I’m saying that as we further break down the barriers between civilization and depravity, we should not be surprised when more people cross the line. And while the primary fault absolutely lies with these despicable men, I don’t think we can absolve those who were asleep at the gate of their share of the responsibility.
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People like nice straight causal chains so that everything can be [Bush’s/Clinton’s] fault. But outside very direct cases of action, the world doesn’t work that way. A complex interplay of factors is at work in all events, and it is difficult-to-impossible to isolate which variables are controlling, which ones are assisting, and which ones are just noise. I don’t draw causal links often in complex cases, and I don’t do it here, because it is impossible to substantiate such a claim with hard proof. But one doesn’t have to show causality to show linkage, and I don’t find it difficult to imagine that the push to make torture acceptable has had an effect on people–in the US and elsewhere. Nor do I find it hard to believe that if the US took the opposite stance–condemning torture by Americans as the grave moral wrong that it is and providing real punishment to those who allowed to happen (including those with power)–that people who might otherwise think that hooking a battery up to somebody’s testicles is permissible (or even praise-worthy) might have second thoughts. Somebody commented on my blog that he wished more folks got the treatment this accused drug dealer did. He’s free to his opinion, of course, but I’d like to think that if the Bush administration came out strongly against such inhumane worldviews, the amount of people who’d endorse the beating of low-level drug suspects would be sharply reduced.