One possible motive for these elaborate and highly publicized stings is that, whether or not the particular people they indict would have moved from rage to action without prompting, the steady stream of news reports will eventually force any candidate for jihad to assume that an “Al Qaeda recruiter” who approaches them is much more likely to be an FBI informant or undercover agent than a genuine operative. That’s likely to make it much harder for any real recruiters who’ve gone undetected to rope in anyone savvy enough to be truly dangerous. In a haystack of 300 million people—or even 2.5 million Muslims—the government can’t possibly be confident it will be able to identify in advance all the particular needles who are really prepared to carry out an attack, rather than simply ranting online. They may have concluded that the next best thing is to create a climate of suspicion in which such people are unwilling to risk collaborating with others. That means that the scale and destructiveness of any attacks that do occur are more likely to be limited to what a lone individual can achieve. Without the fuel of mutual encouragement or realistic hope of carrying out a really spectacular attack as a mere “lone wolf,” many of those angry young men may decide to give up and go bowling before they get around to putting their fantasies into practice. Or at any rate, such may be the FBI’s hope.

To those who were dismayed, I’ve got worse news: I think it is permissible to talk about murder and rape in amoral terms. To talk about the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and the genocides in Armenia and Cambodia in amoral terms. In fact, it is obligatory to deal with the implications of just about anything in amoral terms, because all important issues have important non-moral implications that warrant inquiry.

This is, in the abstract, a sound and important point.  As social psychologists have taken pains to point out, looking at the Holocaust only as a moral monstrosity can make it seem so alien that we fail to see the role played by ordinary people whose general behavior patterns—if not the particular horrific results—are common across cultures. But this analysis also presumably has a point—preventing similar horror in the future—which involves taking up the moral perspective again. Murray’s original post doesn’t ever really do this, and I think illustrates the weird nihilism that seems to afflict Washingtonians who grow so accustomed to strategic analysis that it crowds out other forms:

They won the election with a candidate who sounded centrist running against an exceptionally weak Republican opponent. But they’ve been in the bubble too long. They really think that the rest of America thinks as they do. Nothing but the Pauline Kael syndrome can explain the political idiocy of letting Attorney General Eric Holder go after the interrogators.

In the specific case, the actual argument to this conclusion is awfully gappy. Murray offers some data to the effect that non-Latino white educated elites have grown significantly more liberal over recent decades, while their counterparts in other classes have grown moderately more conservative. He then supposes that the other classes will share his own feeling that any criminal investigation will entail a conflict between interrogators who seem like heroes and prosecutors who look like wimps, with the general divergent trend explaining why Obama & co. don’t grok this. Now, we’ve actually got polls on this, and some show a significant majority favoring some kind of investigation—with opinion split between criminal inquiry and an independent panel—while others show a smaller majority opposing investigations. There’s certainly some evidence that the course Attorney General Holder is pursuing won’t be popular, then, but not in the wildly lopsided way Murray’s frame seems to assume.

But even if Murray were right about the optics of a prosecution, surely it’s wrong that “nothing” could explain the decision to go ahead. One wacky possibility: The attorney general believes that crimes may have been committed, and if so, those responsible should be held accountable, while the president either shares this belief or at least is reluctant to intervene for political reasons to quash an investigation. And yet a lot of analysts get awfully postmodern when they’re talking about the prospect of investigations, taking it for granted that there simply are no right answers: Any legal reasoning, however specious, simply reflects one more difference of opinion—and you can’t prosecute someone for having different opinions, right? Some conservatives, to be sure, are willing to defend the practices of the interrogators or the opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel on the merits, but others seem to step back and take the meta-view that so long as some  sufficiently politically powerful group was and is willing to mount that defense, it must fall within the realm of reasonable disagreement—and therefore outside the realm of actual legal consequences for wrongdoing. Attempts to establish any kind of real accountability are only intelligible as partisan “witch hunts.”  In this case, the insistence on an amoral perspective undermines the analysis even in purely descriptive terms, since it excludes motivational explanations of the actors’ behavior that don’t reduce to a strategic bid for political advantage. I’m pretty cynical on this front myself, but it seems a bit much to rule it out a priori.

I’ve long been fascinated with the disconnect between what pundits, politicians and various activist groups complain about and the status of interrogation techniques in the popular culture (here’s a column I did on the subject in 2005). In countless films and TV shows the good guys — not the bad guys — do things to get important information that makes all some [see update] of the harsh methods and allegedly criminal techniques in the IG report seem like an extra scoop of ice cream and a Swedish massage. In NYPD Blue, The Wire, The Unit, 24 and on and on, suspects are beaten, threatened, terrified. In some instances they are simply straight-up tortured. In movies, too, this stuff is commonplace. In Patriot Games, Harrison Ford shot a man in the kneecap to get the information he needed in a timely manner. In Rules of Engagement, Samuel L. Jackson shot a POW in the head to get another man to talk. In Guarding Tess, Nick Cage blows off a wimpy little man’s toes until he talks. In The Untouchables Sean Connery conducts a mock execution.

Now, I know I will get a lot of “it’s just a movie” or “TV shows aren’t real” email from people. At least I have every other time I’ve made this point. So let me concede a point I’ve never disputed while making one these folks don’t seem to grasp. If such practices, in the contexts depicted, were as obviously and clearly evil as many on the left claim, Hollywood could never get away with having the good guys employ them. Harrison Ford in the Tom Clancy movies would never torture wholly innocent and underserving victims for the same reasons he wouldn’t beat his kids or hurl racial epithets at black people. But given sufficient time to lay out the context and inform the viewers of the stakes, as well as Ford’s motives, the audience not only understands but applauds his actions. Of course it’s just a movie. But the movie is tapping into and reflecting the popular moral sentiments. Think of these scenes as elaborate hypothetical situations in the debate about torture and interrogation that are acted out and played before focus groups of normal Americans.

This has a certain surface plausibility, but I don’t think it holds up under scrutiny. Hollywood gets us to sympathize with and root for all sorts of protagonists who, in the real world, we would regard as moral monsters who should be in prison at the very least, and probably on death row. A quick list off the top of my head: Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega; Mr. White and Mr. Pink; the team of con artists on Hustle; Tony Soprano; Omar Little; Spike from Buffy; Jayne Cobb on Firefly; Leon the Professional; The Punisher; Wikus van de Merwe in District 9; Danny Ocean of the eponymous 12, 11, and 13; the homicidal grad students in The Last Supper. You can probably add a dozen more with a few minutes thought. We had better hope fiction isn’t a reliable guide to our moral intuitions, because with a tub of popcorn and some Milk Duds in hand, we routinely cheer thieves, thugs, and murderous sociopaths provided they’re kind to children and puppies or make a habit of mostly killing or victimizing mean people, or seem like maybe they’re sorry about that whole “lifetime of causing mayhem and suffering,” or frankly just dress stylishly and seem kind of badass. Maybe we don’t regard most of these as “good guys,” exactly, but redemption typically comes cheap, and a characters often do a face-heel turn on a dime.

Jonah’s argument gets its whiff of plausibility from the observation that there are some things a sympathetic character—and certainly not a “hero” character—really can’t do. We’ll accept the cold-blooded killer with a heart of gold or the costumed crimefighter who maims petty crooks and pisses on due process, but you won’t usually see the (white) good guy drop an N-bomb or smack his kids. Why is that? Well, why are parents often a lot more worried about cinematic sex than violence and gore? Well, probably because little Timmy is a lot more likely to have occasion to emulate James Bond’s penchant for bedhopping than his prowess with a Walther PPK. Similarly, people who use racist language or mistreat their children are “real” to us—part of our actual social worlds—in a way that hitmen, suave mobsters, and tough-guy cops who make their own rules just ain’t. So we can identify with the latter in full-bore fantasy mode, reveling in their power and freedom from constraint, without triggering our normal moral reactions—provided they don’t actually do something repugnant that we could realistically imagine ourselves or people we know doing in real life. Look, I think Batman is awesome too. This is not a reliable guide to my feelings about the Fourth Amendment.

Update: Radley Balko hits some of the same notes, and adds his bemusement that Jonah now appears to think Hollywood is reflective of authentic American values.  Meanwhile, down in the comments, Rick Russell makes the sound point that there’s a certain fictional circularity at work when we wink at the strongarm tactics of cinematic heroes: That is to say, we don’t worry quite as much about whether the good guy’s actions are morally justifiable because as omniscient viewers, we’re sure they’ve got the right baddie, and anyway they’re the good guys, so of course whatever they’re doing is justified. (Again, it’s a lot easier to fall back on the “they’re the good guy” heuristic when we’re talking about actions far removed from our practical experience or the day-to-day demands placed on our moral senses.)

That said, let me flip Radley’s ironic point and put on my conservative media scold hat for a minute here. It may actually be socially harmful that we’re now so acclimated to and comfortable with these portrayals of anti-authoritarian authority figures who don’t have any patience for rules and regulations, who don’t hold up the action with search warrant applications and Miranda warnings, because the entertainment industry has discovered that these types of law enforcement agents make for more exciting drama and more thrilling power fantasies.

CIA interrogators threatened to kill the children of one detainee at the height of the Bush administration’s war on terror and implied that another’s mother would be sexually assaulted, newly declassified documents revealed Monday as the government launched a criminal investigation into the spy agency’s “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane” practices [....] In one instance, suspect Abd al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the 2000 USS Cole bombing, was hooded and handcuffed and threatened with an unloaded gun and a power drill. The unidentified interrogator also threatened Nashiri’s mother and family, implying that they would be sexually abused in front of him, according to the report.

I suppose that’s the great anti-patriotic sin according to conservatives—feeling shame about something America’s done.  I’ve never really understood why. If it were, I don’t know, Australia that had done it, or if I didn’t expect any better of the United States, I might feel disgust, but not shame. If patriotism means that you identify with a country, believe in its ideals, and have some kind of standard of honor for the conduct of its representatives that flows from those ideals, then doesn’t it pretty much require you to feel shame in a case like this?  In any event, that’s what I feel.

I guess what especially turns my stomach here is that the idea wasn’t just to inflict mental anguish on a presumably odious man in order to extract information. It was to inflict that pain by exploiting, as a weakness, whatever flicker of nobility or love remained in an otherwise wretched soul. It was a method of torture that would have been effective only because and to the extent there was something human left in him. Maybe I’m being overly sentimental, but every cell in my body is telling me this is sick and wrong.

Addendum: The full report is, of course, worth reading—here’s the AP summary if you don’t have a few hours to spare. This image lodged in my head, but that hardly means it’s the worst thing in there. For instance:

Perhaps the most serious case involved an Afghan citizen, who had been implicated in rocket attacks on U.S. military bases. Once captured, in June of 2003, the suspect was held at a military base. “During the four days the individual was detained, an Agency independent contractor, who was a paramilitary officer, is alleged to have severely beaten the detainee with a large metal flashlight and kicked him during interrogation sessions.” The detainee died in custody. The contractor, who had not been trained or authorized to conduct interrogations, received a relatively light punishment. He did not have his contract renewed by the CIA.

Addendum II: Actually, the more I think about it, it’s hard for me to imagine that the physical suffering is any worse than holding a sincere belief that a group of soldiers are going to rape and murder your family.

Maybe some obscure event that happened fifty years ago can explain why Egyptians would want U.S. support and Iranians wouldn’t.

I realize that it’s an obscure bit of trivia for most Americans that the CIA orchestrated a coup against Mohammed Mossadeq in the ’50s. For Iranians—and I’m going out on a limb here—maybe not so much? And as a corollary: Maybe we should not be soliciting foreign policy advice from people whose cross-cultural perspective-taking faculties are so stunted that this does not occur to them.

First, this seems like a strained use of “exclusive story,” insofar as DoJ has sent representatives to the conference before, during the Bush administration—as noted in the PM article itself.  So the story is that they’re still doing so.  Second, the HLF prosecutors listed some 300 organizations as “undicted co-conspirators,” a designation that allows them to use evidence and testimony from those groups without running afoul of the ban on hearsay. ISNA complained bitterly about this at the time, and their lawyers argued that the government’s evidence of links between ISNA and HLF dated from 1991 or earlier. (Hamas, the group HLF leaders were convicted of funding, was designated as a terrorist group in 1995.) Finally, ISNA purports to be North America’s largest Muslim umbrella organization, it’s the second-largest U.S. organization (after the American Society of Muslims), and its annual conference is the hemisphere’s largest gathering of Muslims, drawing some 30,000 attendees. If that’s actually some kind of hotbed of terrorist activity, we’re well and truly screwed. In any event, it’s scarcely mysterious why DoJ might consider the conference a convenient place to do outreach to American Muslims. The group hasn’t actually been charged—let alone convicted—of any wrongdoing as far as I can tell.

The case against ISNA appears to consist of the fact that prosecutors thought it might be convenient at some point during the HLF trial to bring introduce documents or testimony from ISNA or its affiliates, because they at one point had some sort of links with a charity—formerly the country’s largest Muslim charity, by the way—found, years later, to have illegally provided funds to Hamas. I assume the Justice Department isn’t totally inept, and therefore did some sort of investigation to see if there was more to it than that, but it doesn’t look like they’ve turned up anything actionable. But on the basis of these tenuous, decades-old, second-hand links, PM and the Standard apparently want the government to break off contact with the country’s second largest group of Muslims on the grounds that they’re some kind of crypto-jihadist group. Sounds like awesome PR.

The hood over his head was meant to contribute to his sense of isolation and to mask the identity of the torturers. The noise increased in intensity; various survivors described it as the sound of an airplane engine, the sound of compressed air escaping, and the sound of helicopter blades whirring. For a solid week, the noise was absolute and unceasing, an assault of such ferocity that many of the men now recall it as the worst part of the ordeal. The men were also deprived of food and water and were not allowed to sleep. [....] The combination of tortures—the hooding, the noise bombardment, the food deprivation, the sleep deprivation, and the forced standing at the wall—later cae t be known as the “five techniques.” In combination, they induced a state of psychosis, a temporary madness with long-lasting aftereffects.

When Conroy reports that some of the survivors describe the constant noise as the “worst part” of the ordeal, bear in mind that this ordeal included regular beatings of such savagery that, upon release, the family members who came to pick them up did not recognize their faces. And it is no exaggeration to say that many of these men were, quite literally, tortured out of their minds. Many prayed for death, and at least one attempted suicide, hoping to crack his skull by leaping headfirst at an exposed pipe. One forgot who he was, and began to believe he was a farmer from Eniskillen he had once met. Another hallucinated the son who had died of spina bifida as an infant. The mental scars of the experience were apparent to Conroy when he interviewed the men decades later.

I point this out because considered individually, it’s easy to make particular torture methods sound trivial: Oh, a little dunk in the water. Oh, a cheeleading pyramid. Oh, a little diet. Don’t college students pull all-nighters?  While pundits and OLC attorneys may find it counterintuitive, though, there’s ample evidence that over time, and in the right combination, these techniques can cause as much or more suffering than “obvious” tortures that cause simple physical pain. Indeed, such techniques often break men who’ve held up under more direct methods of inflicting suffering. Without wanting to excuse the lawyers at Justice who signed off on this, I suspect that they didn’t fully understand—any better than the TV talking heads who make light of any tortue that doesn’t leave a visible scar—what exactly they were defending. Mostly, I think, because we all have a point of reference for physical pain and can at least try to imagine it magnified manyfold. We don’t really have a point of reference for what the people subjected to these techniques experience, though we may mistakenly think we do because we try to apply the same imaginative method—oh, it’s like being really tired, but, like, really really tired.  Except it’s not.

One other thing that jumped out at me:

[Former Uruguayan torturer Hugo] Garcia said that the men from the compania had not descended to the level that the Argentines had. The Argentines, he said, “were very sadistic. All we did was torture to get infomation. We never tortued to punish anyone.” [....] Torturers who feel some pangs of guilt also seem to take some refuge in the idea that someone else has done or is doing something much worse. Bruce Moore-King told me that when he administered electical torture he never attacked the genitals, as tortuers elsewhere are wont to do, and that the tortures he administered were mild compared to what was done to people who were sent to Rhodesia’s Special Branch.

Sound familiar? Keep this in mind the next time some torture apologist rattles off a list of all the really obscene things they did in Saddam’s dungeons and bristles indignantly at the “moral equivalence” implied by using the word “torture” to describe techniques we’ve employed.