This evening I propose that we all celebrate the release of the torture report by doing dramatic readings of great conservative intellectuals, in the style of Conrad Veidt.
I suggest starting with some quotations from Richard Posner, though if you have some faves of your own (perhaps Dershowitz?) give them a try too. First, let's review Conrad Veidt, whose most memorable performance is as Major Strasser, in Casablanca...
Here's a quick clip of Veidt playing Strasser in his forceful and angry mode (though don't forget his many fine ominously arrogant annunciations, such as "We Germans must get used to all climates"):
And our suggested text for this evening is some quotations from Richard A Posner's 2006 work from the Oxford University Press, Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency
Or as I like to think of it, "We have to destroy the Constitution in order to save it."
I may have made a few mistakes in typing these up, but I've tried to correct them...
From p.81-82:
The value of the information sought depends in part on the menace to social welfare that has motivated the interrogation. If it is dire enough and the value of the information great enough, only a diehard civil libertarian will deny the propriety of using a high degree of coercion to elicit the information. It might be the whereabouts of a kidnapping victim, the location of a ticking time bomb, the site of a biological weapon about to be deployed, the identity of key terrorist leaders, or the details of terrorist plots. The diehard will reply that the benefits of coercion in such cases would be illusory because coercive interrogation, even to the degree implied by the (vague) word torture, never works. That is incorrect. Quite apart from the abundant evidence that torture is often an effective method of eliciting true information, which is also the common sense of the situation, methods of coercive interrogation well short of torture but more coercive than is permissible for eliciting statements used in an ordinary criminal proceeding are often effective too. It is true that some people will not give truthful information even under torture and that most people who are tortured will babble out something even if they know nothing of what the investigators want, thus sending the investigators off on wild-goose chases. But this is just to identify another cost of torture-- the many false positives that it produces. It is not to say that there never are net benefits.
From page 83:
The idea that torture is not only a cruel and ugly practice but just about the worst thing that a government can do confuses torture as a routine practice of dictators, often intended to intimidate rather than to elicit information, and as a method long used to extract false confessions to political crimes such as sorcery, with torture as an exceptional method of pissing off liberals counterterrorist interrogation.
From pp. 83-84:
Public efforts at justifying torture are doomed in the present climate of opinion, however, and public they would have to be because the U.S. government seems at present incapable of keeping a secret for long. ... It thus is unlikely that the U.S. government would authorize torture except in an extreme emergency such as a Presidential election , especially torture done by Americans in the United States or of a U.S. citizen anywhere, unless it thought it could conceal it, and it would be mistaken to think it could. (The "rendition" of foreigners captured abroad to nations that may practice torture, though a rather transparent evasion of the torture taboo, arouses less indignation.)
And from page 84:
This analysis places great weight on the exact meaning of torture. The term must not be defined so broadly that it prohibits reading books like this all methods of coercion used in an investigation; the risk to national security would be too great. Unfortunately, the word lacks a stable definition. It is like the word slavery.
I hope this all helps you sleep better tonight. See you.