A Thought I Wish I Could Get Out Of My Head

I read in TPM that Herman Cain said this in the debate tonight:

“I do not agree with torture, period,” Cain said to start the exchange. “However, I will trust the judgment of our military leaders to determine what is torture and what is not torture. That is the critical consideration.”

Asked specifically about waterboarding, Cain tipped his hand. “I don’t see it as torture,” he said. “I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique.”

 

I hear that, and I find mindself performing a thought experiment that leaves my stomach in knots.  What if someone in State College had said something like this:

“I don’t see it as molestation….I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique.”

The moral catastrophe speaks for itself, right?

That’s the problem with the failure to call things by their right name.  No one in the Penn State scandal has tried to term what happened there as anything other than the misery it was, child rape and a fundamental betrayal.  We aren’t that far gone yet.

But the repeated use — and the authorization at the highest level — of acts we hanged people for after World War II?  Those are just “enhanced techniques.”  To this day even the liberal New York Times can’t bring itself to say that inconvenient word “torture.”

That Herman Cain is no fit president is hardly news.  I just wish this particular pathology were confined to him.  It’s not.

Image:  Dieric Bouts, The Martyrdom of St. Hippolytus,1470-1475.

Did Anyone Actually See David Broder’s Body?

[This is a cross post from Balloon Juice, where it prompted quite a discussion and, this morning, this response from mistermix.  I'm going to tag back later in the day, (promises, promises) but for now, here's where all this started.  (P.S.  Sorry for not getting this up here at the same time as over at BJ, as is my usual custom.  As happenes, work intervened.]

David Broder is dead, or so they say.

I’m telling you he’s undead, and like the Jack the Ripper figure in that Star Trek episode, seems to be infecting the previously sane.

Exhibit A:

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Here’s Josh Marshall, Josh Freaking Marshall, earlier today:

As a more general matter it’s important to recognize that torture could easily have produced the key information. It just seems not to have in this case. You can be doctrinaire in opposing torture without being doctrinaire in assuming that it can’t produce any good intelligence, which would be foolish.

Here’s Senator Feinstein, speaking to the particular, as reported in Josh’s own Talking Points Memo:

“To the best of our knowledge, based on a look, none of it came as a result of harsh interrogation practices,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in a wide-ranging press conference.

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Moreover, Feinstein added, nothing about the sequence of events that culminated in Sunday’s raid vindicates the Bush-era techniques, nor their use of black sites — secret prisons, operated by the CIA.

“Absolutely not, I do not,” Feinstein said. “I happen to know a good deal about how those interrogations were conducted, and in my view nothing justifies the kind of procedures that were used.”

And as for the general claim, that “torture could easily have produced the key information,” here’s the lede to that very story, written by Brian Beutler:

More and more evidence suggests a key piece of intelligence — the first link in the chain of information that led U.S. intelligence officials to Osama bin Laden — wasn’t tortured out of its source. And, indeed, that torture actually failed to produce it.

If Marshall wants to argue that torture is a valuable tool for intelligence gather, let him make the case.  I don’t actually think he does, of course.  But his bland suggestion that it might be so reeks of both-sides-now-ism.

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Combine that with the hippy-bashing use of the word “doctrinaire” — as in hide-bound, close-minded, and inflexible — to describe the properties of opposition to torture, and you have a bit of even handed applause for the right’s conventional wisdom that Mr. Broder himself would have admired.

Marshall is better than this bit of overly fast punditry…but in some sense that’s the point.  It shows how easy it is to slip into Broderism, into the habits of sloppy thinking, or simple refusal to think, even for people who’ve made a career of bullshit detection.

Eternal vigilance, peeps.

Image:  Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime, 1808

None Dare Say Its Name: “Even the Liberal New York Times” edition.

One reason the Bush got Bin Laden meme is in with a chance is the growing chorus claiming that “enhanced interrogation” was the key to cracking the case.  (Warning:  wingnuttia at that link)

This is nonsense, of course, on at least two levels. One, well documented by lots of folks, including, repeatedly, commenters here, is that the mind-crumbling treatment of detainees being touted as the key to the case is both unnecessary for properly trained interrogators and counterproductive as well.  Oh and people, like Khalid Sheik Muhammed, the man that Cheney’s acolytes allege gave up the nickname of the courier who led US intelligence to Bin Laden’s compound, have already admitted lying to end the pain (hoocoodanode?)

The other reason this claim is nonsense is that the accumulating record of this case demonstrates that a lot of old fashioned intelligence work — and some basic policing, in fact — and not torture produced the leads that ultimately brought a Seal team to Abbottabad.  The New York Times has written a mostly impressive account of the case that reads in part like a procedural thriller.  In it, the reporters describe how the courier was first tagged:

Prisoners in American custody told stories of a trusted courier. When the Americans ran the man’s pseudonym past two top-level detainees — the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed; and Al Qaeda’s operational chief, Abu Faraj al-Libi — the men claimed never to have heard his name. That raised suspicions among interrogators that the two detainees were lying and that the courier probably was an important figure.

So KSM did not reveal the secret under torture.  Rather, he held his tongue…and this is how US intelligence closed the gap:

By 2005, many inside the C.I.A. had reached the conclusion that the Bin Laden hunt had grown cold, and the agency’s top clandestine officer ordered an overhaul of the agency’s counterterrorism operations. The result was Operation Cannonball, a bureaucratic reshuffling that placed more C.I.A. case officers on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

With more agents in the field, the C.I.A. finally got the courier’s family name. With that, they turned to one of their greatest investigative tools — the National Security Agency began intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages between the man’s family and anyone inside Pakistan. From there they got his full name.

Boots on the ground, intercepts, the slow, boring sifting through data.  Cop work.  Spy work — the real kind, not the deluded fantasies of those who think Jack Bauer actually works for the US government.

All good so far:  the usual suspects of or enamored with the Bush-Cheney crime family are wrong, lying and gaining at least a bit of traction, but mainstream media accounts are out there that give them the lie.

So what’s my beef?

This, from the same article:

As the hunt for Bin Laden continued, the spy agency was being buffeted on other fronts: the botched intelligence assessments about weapons of mass destruction leading up to the Iraq War, and the intense criticism for using waterboarding and other extreme interrogation methods that critics said amounted to torture. [Italics added]

No.

It’s not that “critics say” waterboarding is torture.

As everybody likely to read this already knows, many times over, waterboarding is torture, as defined by international law and has repeatedly been recognized as such by the U.S. in the prosecution of other nations’ war criminals.  It is also recognized as such by everyone who has experienced it.  See, e.g. Christopher Hitchens.

This has gone on too long.  I’m sick of it.  Killing Bin Laden is a significant milestone in the pursuit of the criminals who murdered US citizens in 2001 (and many others before and after, of course).  We know now that the success of that mission turned on classic approaches to investigation and the pursuit of fugitives.  That the US government tortured people for years produced one of the key victories won by  Osama Bin Laden, as discussed in John’s thread earlier today.

The inability of the newspaper of record to simply state that torture is torture helps preserve that victory.  They should know better.  Hell, they do know better.  But in that one weasely little “critics said,” the New York Times gives aid and comfort to the worst — and least competent — among us.

Image:  José Ribera, Ixion, 1632.

Chronicles of the Gutless, or When Did the GOP Become Such Cowards? Scott Brown edition

Just listened to the last debate in the MA Senate race and caught the exchanges between Scott Brown (R-Soundbite) and Martha Coakley (D).

Lots of stuff to notice — mostly that if I were a committed anti-abortion voter, I would  have no one to vote for in this election, as Scott Brown was for, against, and unsure of what he thought on the issue, especially around his proposal a couple of years back to permit hospital workers to refuse to inform rape victims of the existence of a morning-after contraceptive.  He sponsored the idea, then voted in favor of a bill requiring such information, and finally said he was for Roe v. Wade…or sort of.

I have no idea what he really thinks (and how he would vote), and I’m not sure he does either, but I do know that neither supporters nor opponents of women’s right to make their own medical decisions should have any warm and fuzzy feelings about the man right now.

I also liked the zinger that third party guy Joe Kennedy (obligatory no relation reference here) got off on Brown, noting how he’s against taxes now, but declined to support an anti-income tax measure in the run up to the last election.  I actually think that his was the right position at the time, but he sure is running as if he hopes no one remembers that moment of GOP apostasy now.

But all of that is just the secret sauce on top of what makes me think that Brown is truly in tune with the gutless heart of modern Republican “thought” (sic — ed).

That would be his stance on trying accused terrorists in civilian courts, as opposed to maintaining our version of a no-exit gulag beyond the reach of law.

He said, repeatedly, that he opposed trying such suspects in civilian court at — as he said over and over again — “taxpayer expense.”

The witlessness of that got me, of course:  these dudes aren’t a drain on the American public purse now, Mr. Brown?  You think that all those water bills and their three squares, Guantanamo style, come free?

But more deeply, when did the macho-er-than-thou “Mission Accomplished” GOP become so terrified of a handful of violent men (not to mention all those lumped in with the baddest guys who ended up there by accident, but that’s another story) that the mere thought that the rule of law might apply to their cases would send allegedly grown men and women reaching for their blankies?

That’s the rub, for me.  It has always seemed a fundamental mistake to dignify those who aim to blow up random children, women and men with the epithet “enemy” or “combatant.”

Our adversaries — at least  those who use overstuffed jockstraps as weapons — are not warriors. They are not soldiers to be dignified by any hint of equivalence with the men and women we have sent in harm’s way.  They are mere thugs, and they should be treated as such.

This isn’t mere semantics.

We have done nothing to serve the interests of al Qaeda or its kin as to acknowledge them to the world as enemies capable of inspiring fear.  What a recruiting tool, to enable some persuasive person to proclaim to young men that the world’s only superpower fears its “enemy combatants!”

Add to that the help we have given them as our leaders cowered and then masked their fear in the false bravado of torture.  Abu Ghraib was understood to be what it was: not an aberration, but an expression of the policy of the US government — driven by the fear evoked by the specter of global terror.

And now Scott Brown, with all the deep grasp of the issue that only service to Wrentham and posturing in the rump minority of the legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts can bring, comes along and tells us that torture, and indefinite detention, and the suspension of habeas corpus and all the rest remains the only way to deal with the existential threat posed by this bunch of thugs.

Maybe — if we were truly weak, if we were a  fragile, illegitimate rump state, dependent on every last dirty trick of security-apparats to push off  the throes of disintegration.

But we are not.  We are the United States of America, and if that means anything anymore, after all the broken faith of the Bush years, then it means we are capable of using the law to protect and to punish those who have earned the penalty.

Scott Brown doesn’t think so.  His 30 years of military service seem not to have endowed him with spine, or much of a sense of the Constitution he has sworn to protect.  He’d rather cower, and leave those he fears in the cells forever.

Gutless.

We need better in a Senator.  We need someone who is not afraid of shadows, one who understands that the equal application of the law is a defense against those who threaten the idea of America — and not now, nor ever, our weakness.

My Massachusetts readers:  don’t forget to vote come Tuesday, 19 January 2010.

Image:  Georgios Iakovidis, “Cold Shower,” 1898

I know it’s a serious subject, but…

This line cracks me up for all the wrong reasons:

“Music should never be used as torture,” said [Roseanne] Cash. “It’s beyond the pale. It’s hard to even think about.”

Now I like Roseanne Cash’s music, and her dad is a god to me…

…but really, if the music business does not wish to get entangled in torture, we’d never hear stuff like this. (funny bad — maybe the Geneva Conventions don’t apply)

Or this. (really, really, awful.  Warm up the courtroom at the Hague.)

Or, especially and always, this. (You know what’s on the other side of that link. Don’t go there. Just don’t.)

Torture…an unnecessary post (part 1)

I haven’t blogged about the latest round of torture talk — not the question of prosecution (I vote yes, starting now, or better,  yesterday); nor on truth commissions (yes); nor the fatuous “arguments” and deeply malign attempts to shift the terms of the debate that the GOP and  its water-carriers have advanced; nor the CIA’s attempt — aided by  lazy or evil media complicity to pre-empt the debate by asserting falsely (h/t Fallows) that Democrats as well as Republicans supported commiting war crimes/crimes against humanity;  nor the fact that any claim to American moral exceptionalism is dead, drowned out by the screams  of those tortured and murdered by American soldiers and intelligence officers, acting under orders issued by monsters in the highest places, desperate to conceal the lie at the heart of the war fought on false premises.

So many others are speaking on this across the blogosphere that it seemed unnecessary to say “me too” to posts like this, or this and dozens, really hundreds more.  It is obvious that torture is wrong, a line that nations claiming legitimacy as well as interest do not cross.  Isn’t it?

(That moral interests align with tactical goals in contemning torture as an exercise of state power will be the subject of part 2 of this post).

It is clear that murdering prisoners in custody is unacceptable, and that both those that commit such murders, and those who order and organize the practices that enable such murders are criminals, subject to investigation, trial and punishment on conviction.  Isn’t it?

It is simply a measure of a society that wishes to be understood as civilized that those who advocate, order, facilitate, encourage and/or commit acts that would make an inquisitor vomit are shunned (to invoke the memory of that terrifying religious sanction) by all those who count themselves morally responsible men and women. Isn’t it?

And yet John Yoo opines.  Jay Bybee adjudicates.  Dick Cheney waits for make-up.  George Bush, the embodiment of an unindicted — no, make that unconscious — co-conspirator, putters about his fine house in a high-rent district of Dallas.

More than a year ago I wrote of my despair at the thought of telling my son that his country tortured.  Tonight, after watching story after story percolate out of the Bush-Cheney swamp to confirm that the American torture regime was worse than I ever dreamed (those 98 –and likely more — killed in custody; a “ticking time bomb” waterboarded 183 times, in a test-to-destruction exercise that ended with a broken mind and one more datum for the torturers bible; a POW (are you listening, John McCain?) hammered to extract a false confession to support an American president’s false justification for war), I find myself wondering how I can tell my son, just turned nine, that America allows the people who committed this crime and dishonored all Americans — him, me, my wife, my goddam cat, evernyone of us — to walk in the sun, to wallow in privilege, to speak and to be listened to as if they were serious, responsible men.

We have been led by thugs enabled by weak and cowardly followers for too long.  We’ve forgotten what civil societies do; Bush and Cheney and Yoo and all the others have not been indicted.  They are, to date, innocent as far as the law extends; and we do indeed live under the Catch 22 that the rule of law is something we need desperately to uphold in the wake of these same men’s evisceration of the idea.  But there is no restriction under law to keep us from shaming those who have so deeply shamed their country.

This is why, in the end, Pelosi’s troubles may serve us all well.  She has called for an investigation — of the claims on what she knew when and everything else to do with the making of America’s torture empire.  Let’s bring it on….after all, if they’re innocent, they have nothing to fear, right?

Image:  Plate 37 from Francisco Goya’s  Los Desatres de la Guerra c. 1810.

John McCain’s reality problem: Guantanamo, State Power, and Theoretical Physics

You have to be quick to be good. Today, via Atrios, George Will (George Will!) is actually saying the right thing about John McCain’s latest, almost tragic, self negation.

The back story: The Supreme Court rules 5-4 that prisoners held by the US, on territory the US wholly controls, actually have some baseline of essential rights, in particular the right to make a habeas corpus claim, requesting a hearing (requesting! not automatically receiving) in which the government must demonstrate that it has due cause to hold the complainant, or else release him or her.

So what happened next? Joy amongst those who think the Constitution has some life in it yet, visions of the apocalypse for those who feel the rule of law is for other people.

John McCain, sadly — and I mean that — lined up with the latter, declaring the ruling “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

It is sad: I’m no John McCain fan (dog-bites-man…ed.), but he is someone who once seemed to have a sense of who he was, and now he doesn’t. On everything from torture (agin it, except when the proper Americans do it) to energy polict, (even Cheney thinks he’s gone wacky) he now seems willing to say whatever he thinks at that moment might help him out. It’s never a pretty sight to see someone turning themselves into a caricature in public.

But here McCain is worse than sad: he’s dangerous on two levels. The first is obvious, and it is the one Will nailed — with exactly the same serious of examples I was planning to provide. As he writes,

Does it rank with Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), which concocted a constitutional right, unmentioned in the document, to own slaves and held that black people have no rights that white people are bound to respect? With Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which affirmed the constitutionality of legally enforced racial segregation? With Korematsu v. United States (1944), which affirmed the wartime right to sweep American citizens of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps?

No; of course not. As Will points out, there are in fact some issues to argue here — but there is no way to say that this decision defies reason or legal basis.

Will goes on to have some fun with McCain — there’s a tone of real contempt in lines like “Did McCain’s extravagant condemnation of the court’s habeas ruling result from his reading the 126 pages of opinions and dissents?”

While I can enjoy such snark (and from such a source!) the real point of Will’s column, and the one that moves the whole incident into the realm of a blog concerned with what science can offer public life is the real risk of a McCain presidency exposed here. And it is not just that he’s revealed (once again) as a shoot from the hip reactive kind of guy (contrast his approach to this legal decision with former law professor Obama’s preparation here). Rather, it is that there is a real problem in electing Humpty Dumpty to any responsible office.

That is: the one constant across all the disciplines that call themselves science is a commitment to reality, to acknowledging the actual data that observation and experiment produce, however much they may conflict with worldview or desire. Here’s Albert Einstein, acknowledging in public, for as broad a lay audience as he could reach, explaining the significance of of the new discoveries of quantum mechanics:

There is no doubt that quantum physics explained a very rich variety of facts, achieving, for the most part, splendid agreement between theory and observation. The new quantum physics removes us still further from the old mechanical view, and a retreat to the former position seems, more than ever, unlikely….The qunatum theory again created new and essential features of our reality…”

Einstein never reconciled himself to critical aspects of the modern quantum theory; he spent three decades looking for a more general theory that would subsume it; and yet he nominated its first architects, Heisenberg and Schroedinger for the Nobel Prize, and he did not deny its obvious power or importance. He hated it, but he knew it meant something very, very significant.

Contrast that with McCain in action here. It is a fact that this decision falls within the mainstream of American jurisprudence — one may not like the outcome, and there are meaningful arguments to support that dislike, but this is a perfectly conventional bit of Constitutional reasoning. To say that this is “one of the worst” Supreme Court actions is simply to ignore example after example, fact after fact, that gives the lie to McCain’s pique.

This post is long enough. I’d just say that we’ve had enough of people asserting facts not in evidence for their own, temporary advantage. If there were a ever a single disqualifying attribute in a potential President, it is this truly anti-science willingness to ignore what they do, or should, know to be essential features of the reality we inhabit.

Image:  Jade Record, Chinese, 19th Century.  Depiction of sinners being tortured in the sixth court of hell.  Source: Wikimedia Commons.

More on Torture, McCain, Sullivan, with some help from Albert Einstein

It’s Friday, the traditional blogospheric day for ephemera (that is to say, even more evanescent stuff than usual). I know that this is supposed to be a science-y blog, and what I’m going to write below has exactly zero disciplinary rigor in it. It is a personal note, a follow up to last night’s post on Andrew Sullivan’s inability to grasp what John McCain’s torture dance implies. Feel free to move along.

I finished that post in a very quiet house, around 11:30. My wife and son were asleep; almost all the lights were out; it was just me and the keyboard.

After writing, I thought I’d make the quick dash to join my much more sensible family in horizontality. But I didn’t. Instead, I walked up and down, angrier and angrier.

Thinking about McCain’s dance, opposing torture until he didn’t brought me to the larger problem. People are buying it. Sullivan, at least temporarily, has bought it — and take a look at the first comment on the post for the implications of that kind of acquiescence in the unforgivable.

Round and round I went. My son was still asleep. At the age he is now, my America did not torture. His does. I cannot stand that fact.

As I said, this is not a political blog, though I am fascinated by what science can tell us to inform our politics and our culture. I’m not going to tell anyone for whom to vote. Figure it out for yourselves.

I’ll close with a story, a true one, something I saw when I was the downiest of cub reporters.

My first real news gig came in my first year after graduating from college. I had made my way overseas — and after 6 on the road I had come to Manila.

By odd happenstance, the local Reuters bureau needed bodies and copy so I was “hired” for bus and lunch money. Didn’t matter: I was now a foreign correspondent, with a line to the wire to damn anyone who dared say no.

I covered the usual stuff cubs get — my first phone call really was to ask for a reaction to the murder of a peace corps volunteer . (For those of you not familiar with the hazing rituals of old journalism, an awful lot of reporters got their start asking a brand new widow how she felt. How the hell do you think she felt, asshole?)

I covered a threatened jeepney strike, a coral reef conference — I even got a tour of the Coconut Palace (don’t ask) led by Imelda Marcos herself. It was great, a fabulous way to start becoming a writer.

A couple of months in, Easter rolled around and so my bureau chief sent me out to get a kind of local-color feature for the Asian wire.

Some friends invited me out to their parents’ place, a bit north of Manila. On the way there, we passed some men dressed in rags, carrying wooden crosses across the plain. On Good Friday, three of those cross bearers came to a parish church near where we were staying. One collapsed before his moment arrived. The other two laid their crosses down in the dust and heat and settled themselves into position.

Friends tied their ankles and wrists. Then a man reached for a mallet and hammered nails through each palm. Some strong guys stood the two crosses up. Those being crucified tried to stand as straight as possible to minimize the weight pulling on their arms and hands. They held the pose for a minute or two — not long — and then their friends and family lowered them down again.

I spoke to one of the two resurrected men who was wrapping gauze around his palm as we talked. He had been a member of a youth gang, he said, and he had done unspecific terrible things. He wanted to start over, and this was how he wiped his slate clean. After his moments on the cross, he was calm, satisfied. Fine: good for him. I don’t know. I haven’t seen him from that day to this – 27 years – but I hope it worked out.

I rarely recall that moment. I didn’t think about it last week, when the anniversary might have brought it to mind. But I did last night, wrestling with the anger and shame I felt at the thought of the acts my government performs in my name.

I’m not any kind of a Christian. But remembering that church yard north of Manila reminded me of the brute fact at the core of the Christian story: the man Jesus was tortured to death on his cross. He was brutalized, pierced, felt the metal tearing at his flesh, suffered the pain in his hands and legs that deepened as his own strength failed and he could no longer keep his body from pulling on the spikes through his limbs.

Good Friday came and went a week ago. Believers celebrated its joyful sequel just a few days back.

I’ll let my long-time companion, Albert Einstein have the last thought, taken from one of his very first anti-war essays, written during World War I:

“Why so many words,” he wrote, “when I can say it in one sentence, one very appropriate for a Jew: Honor your master Jesus Christ not only in words and songs but rather, foremost, by your deeds.”*

My apologies to anyone who read this far and is offended either by my presumption, or the wildly off topic nature of the post.

*Albert Einstein “My Opinion on the War,” from the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. VI, document 20.

Images: Torture Chair on display in the Torture Museum in Amsterdam. Source, Wikimedia Commons.

Lucas Cranach, “Crucifixion,” c. 1500. Source, Wikimedia Commons.

This Might Be a Good Day for Andrew Sullivan…

to stop sniffing glue — or whatever it is that impels him to write stuff like this:

I am still open to supporting McCain this fall, primarily because of character and decency. Hagee and Falwell should not be ignored; but nor should they be dispositive.

This is supposed to be a science blog. So the one point I’d like to draw out here is that Sullivan offers here a case study why training in scientific thinking matters far beyond science.

Here goes:

Sullivan has been one of the earliest and most persistent defenders of the right of gay men and women to marry. Not to form partnerships, nor gain legal protections through some contractual basis, nor even gain all the qualities of marriage but the name under the euphemism of “civil unions,” but marry.

Good for him. He’s absolutely right on this issue, in my humble opinion. (You can tell I really mean that because I committed the intertube faux pas of spelling the words all the way out.) But then what about this:

Sen. John McCain said Thursday that he supports an initiative that would change Arizona’s Constitution to ban gay marriages and deny government benefits to unmarried couples.

It gets more painful when you watch him trying to talk his way through his reasoning. Watch this:

The first thirty seconds there should put paid to any “Straight Talk” nonesense. The poor man cannot bear to confront this head on.

So: the score so far: McCain opposes what Sullivan and I agree is a basic civil right, and he does so with an incoherence that suggests an essential weakness of character.

That is: he does not on the evidence (his prior opposition to a Federal ban on gay marriage) actually hate the idea of same sex unions, but he is unwilling to follow the logic that leads him there to a position that would, most likely, kill his chances of being President. I can understand the pressure he feels must be intense — but this stand together with the at-least-partial flip-flop hardly commends McCain’s courage or the quality of his convictions.

Then there’s the issue of torture. This matters enormously to Sullivan, to his credit, and he has written passionately condemning it and all those associated with the Bush administration who have furthered the official endorsement of the practice as legitimate US policy.

John McCain, for his part, famously experienced torture as a prisoner of war. In his five and half years of captivity, he displayed reserves of courage and personal integrity that earns him an enormous reserve of respect, certainly from me.

But — as Sullivan knows — McCain has still served as the leading enabler of the policy of torture enacted under the Bush administration.

For example, having very publicly made a point of “challenging” Bush on torture with the 2005 “McCain Amendment,” the Senator then acquiesced silently to claim made in the following signing statement:

“The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.”

Which is another way of saying that this President reserves the right to torture.

McCain has since gone further with his vote to permit the CIA to waterboard and use other methods of torture first when he opposed the proposed ban in February, and then again when he supported Bush’s veto of the legislation on March 8.

McCain has stated clearly that he knows waterboarding to be torture. His former position of opposing torture by the US seems to have mutated to one of opposing it except when carried out in secret by trained pros. It is both a dumb and a morally bankrupt position, as Sullivan has himself argued in other contexts.

So has he no sense of decency, sir? What kind of character does it take to choose support for a President over conscience and bitter personal experience?

But of course, this post is not about the gap between the John McCain as the man wishes to be seen and the John McCain that is really there. It’s about Andrew Sullivan, standing in for a host of others who fail to examine that gap.

Sullivan abhors torture. McCain was tortured and has said he hates torture. Therefore, McCain stands on the side of decent men and women in actively opposing the use of torture…how could it be otherwise? Except it is.

And so, finally, to close the loop: this is why learning to think like a scientist matters beyond science.

Elsewhere I’ve trumpted the virtues of one half of the scientific approach to reality, its use of quantitative abstraction to isolate patterns and to draw inferences across disparate observations. Here’s the other half: science is empirical. It demands observation and experiment, and the gathering of reliable, testable data.

That’s what it takes to begin figuring out more or less anything, from the correct shape of the orbits of the planets (Kepler, working with Brahe’s incomparable data set), to artificial selection as an analogy to evolution by natural selection (Darwin, among the pigeon fanciers), to the causes of a mass extinction, 65 million years ago (Luis and Walter Alvarez measuring iridium abundances at the K/T boundary) and so on and on.

If you want to take Pete Townsend’s advice to heart, that is, you have to force yourself to look past what you imagine or hope might be out there, and address yourself directly to the real world of experience.

So, when you don’t want to get fooled again as Sullivan did (by his own admission) by George W. Bush, then you have to ask yourself some basic questions, including, “is my perception of John McCain (0r Barack Obama, or whoever) based on the knowable facts of his career?” Ask the same question a scientist asks when she wants to know if what she believes is so really is so.

Sullivan hasn’t, and maybe he can’t do that. He’s clearly got a lot invested in a fantasy of McCain’s tough, fair, manly good character. But it is a terrible error to let yourself believe the truth is what you so desperately wishes it were. Dreamers, fools and bankrupts rise and mostly fall on that kind of thinking. So can countries.

Bonus video:

Image: Francisco de Zurbarán, 1639. Source, Wikimedia Commons.

Words Matter: NY Times edition

warning: science free content below

Quicky post. NYTimes.com has as its lead article as I write this a piece on Bush’s veto of the anti-torture bill under this headline:

Bush’s Veto of Bill on C.I.A. Tactics Affirms His Legacy

That legacy, according to the Times?

President Bush on Saturday further cemented his legacy of fighting for strong executive powers, using his veto to shut down a Congressional effort to limit the Central Intelligence Agency’s latitude to subject terrorism suspects to harsh interrogation techniques.

Oh–that legacy. Silly me. I thought they meant the legacy that places George Bush in the cohort of moral bankrupts that include the Japanese prison camp staff convicted of war crimes for waterboarding American soldiers, sentenced to up to 25 years imprisonment by US – led courts for their offenses.

I’ll write more over the next day or two about an aspect of this story that does have at least a loose connection to a major theme of this blog, the implications of the science worldview for figuring out something of what goes on in the public square. But every now and then it’s good to just pause and recall the capacity for moral outrage.

And that’s my question: the NY Times reports on a decision by the President that says its OK for our trained professionals to torture — and they see it as a narrative of presidential power? This is a clear sign that reporters and editors alike are way too far into the bubble. You should feel — and write — from a different place. Try outrage. Anger. Shame.

Please, just once, remember why y’all set out to be newspaper people.

Image: Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, “Capricho no. 51,” 1799. Source: Wikimedia Commons.