Hillary Wants the Authority to Torture
Wed Apr 11, 2007 at 05:19:19 AM PDT
I missed this when it happened.
Last fall, speaking to the New York Daily News Editorial Board, Senator Clinton said she believed that the president, any president, should have the authority to torture. Invoking the infamous "ticking time bomb" scenario popularized by 24, she said the president could justifiably use torture to try to prevent an imminent attack.
Her position on this issue strikes me as reason enough to oppose her candidacy. Can't all Democrats--moderate, liberal, netroots, grassroots--agree that our nominee must have the wisdom and courage to foreswear torture?
President Bush has, of course, claimed the authority to torture. Even as he signed the McCain Amendment banning torture--which Clinton supported--he released a statement asserting the right to ignore the law. He wanted to carve out an exception, which would render the ban meanningless; a ban with an exception is no ban at all.
Yet Hillary's position is essentially the same as Bush's.
'In the event we were ever confronted with having to interrogate a detainee with knowledge of an imminent threat to millions of Americans, then the decision to depart from standard international practices must be made by the President, and the President must be held accountable,' she said. 'That very, very narrow exception within very, very limited circumstances is better than blasting a big hole in our entire law.'
It sounds reasonable enough, as all sophistry does. Let's break it down.
Most obviously: we can't know what prisoners know, or that an attack is imminent, or how many lives are threatened. In other words, Clinton's scenario is fantasical. An investigation is guesswork. Clinton would be torturing on a hunch.
"Ticking time bomb" scenarios, though a fixture in ethics classes, almost never happen in real life. The chance of having in captivity a person with information about an imminent catastophic attack is miniscule, as is the chance of torture eliciting the information. Clinton either doesn't know or doesn't care that information gained through torture is notoriously unreliable. Possibly harmful, too, because it tends to produce information that steers the investigation away from more promising leads. The Army's field manual on intelligence says torture is:
a poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say what he thinks the [human intelligence] collector wants to hear.
So Clinton wants the authority to use torture--the quintessential totalitarian act, the utter denial of another person's humanity--even though it would almost definitely not help investigations and might well hurt them. It will come as no surprise that her chief advisor holds the same view; Bill Clinton thinks presidents should be able to get warrants to torture after the fact.
If they really believe the time comes when the only way they can get a reliable piece of information is to beat it out of someone or put a drug in their body to talk it out of 'em, then they can present it to the Foreign Intelligence Court, or some other court, just under the same circumstances we do with wiretaps. Post facto...
I wonder what goverments around the world, especially fledgling democracies, would think of Bill's torture courts. This is Clintonian Third Wayism run amok: take an authoritarian beast, torture, and dress it up in a liberal clothing, a court. The Clintons will torture, yes, but they will torture better. Call it compassionate conservatism.
If, as the Clintons believe, torture works, why use it only when millions of lives are threatened? Why wouldn't the prospect of another 9-11 justify it? How many saved lives would make torture moral? Merely to ask the question is to reveal the bankruptcy of the Clinton position.
Please don't think that an unconditional opposition to torture is pie-in-the-sky liberalism. Solidiers and professional interrogators are among the most vocal opponents. The New Yorker's Jane Mayer recently spoke to Joe Navarro, a former FBI agent who interrogated more than 15,000 people, and General Patrick Finnegan, dean of West Point.
'These are very determined people, and they won’t turn just because you pull a fingernail out,' [Navarro] told me. And Finnegan argued that torturing fanatical Islamist terrorists is particularly pointless. 'They almost welcome torture,' he said. 'They expect it. They want to be martyred.” A ticking time bomb, he pointed out, would make a suspect only more unwilling to talk. 'They know if they can simply hold out several hours, all the more glory—the ticking time bomb will go off!'
And there is even larger problem: By claiming the right to torture in "very limited" circumstances, Clinton would be opening (or keeping open) the door to the torture chamber. Has she been snoozing for the last five years?
Clinton's loophole would become a noose. She might think she could resist widening her own loophole, but what would President Gingrich do, or President Guiliani? "Thanks for this power, Hillary; now I'm sure you won't mind it if I hang this possibly innocent guy by his tongue." Indeed, for the last few years our government has been torturing more or less when Dick Cheney deems it necessary.
Once you say that torture is acceptable in certain cases, it becomes accepted. From a certain persepective, that of a solider in a battle zone, the problem with using the "ticking time bomb" scenario as a baseline isn't that it never happens, it's that it always happens. American military personnel tortured (torture?) Iraqis because they believed, usually wrongly, that the detainees had information about an upcoming attack.
Let me be clear: when a country goes to war and occupies another country, torture is inevitable--it's one good reason not to go to war--and no statement or stand by an American president could prevent it. But Clinton's position--that as president, she should have the authority to torture--makes torture more likely.
We don't need another Torturer-in-Chief. She's unfit to be president.
