Former Bush adviser Karl Rove
(Source: Rove.com)
IF YOU’RE ANYTHING LIKE me, you are frequently frustrated by interviews with prominent public figures that fail to ask the right questions. I found myself feeling this way yet again while watching an interview that BBC correspondent Kirsty Wark conducted with former Bush adviser Karl Rove on her “Newsnight” program yesterday. (You can watch the interview HERE.) Rove came on the show to tout his new memoir, Courage and Consequence.
When the discussion got around to the use of waterboarding against terror suspects, Rove merely spouted the same talking points we’ve been hearing over and over again since 9/11. Rove told Wark that waterboarding “isn’t torture” and that he was “proud that we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists and gave us valuable information that allowed us to foil plots such as flying aeroplanes into Heathrow and into London, bringing down aircraft over the Pacific, flying an airplane into the tallest building in Los Angeles and other plots. […] Yes, I'm proud that we kept the world safer than it was, by the use of these techniques. They're appropriate, they're in conformity with our international requirements and with US law.”
Wark did a decent job and the interview is damning enough as it is. Still, I would have liked her to go just a little bit farther and ask Mr. Rove the following three questions:
1) Mr. Rove, if you are certain that waterboarding and the other coercive measures your administration employed on so-called enemy combatants are “in conformity with our international requirements and with US law,” would you be comfortable seeing them being performed on American nationals – both military personnel and civilians – captured by enemy forces abroad?
2) If such procedures are both useful and harmless, would you like to see them introduced as standard procedure in routine law enforcement activities in the United States as a whole?
3) If you are thoroughly convinced that waterboarding is an “appropriate” procedure, would you be willing to demonstrate its appropriateness for us right now on live TV?
Journalist Christopher Hitchens, bless his heart, actually submitted to waterboarding on camera. Would Rove have us believe that he would react to it any differently? And if he had the same reaction as Hitchens - or if he would answer “no” to even one of these questions - then what the hell is he talking about in this interview?
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Thanks. I thought they were pretty obvious. We've already heard the other questions - and the same answers - repeatedly for the past eight and a half years
R
I'll skip the part about the "subordinate nations." Regarding torture in extreme situations, this has been debated by legal minds for generations and the outcome has been that this sort of thing is despicable, specifically illegal, and nearly impossible to control once the taboos have been liften, not to mention that it is counterproductive in a whole range of ways. Note that Rove doesn't even address these issues, but hides behind a cloak of legality and "appropriateness." Hence my (obviously utopian) interview session intended to smoke out his real views.
"a majority of the American public secretly, and not so secretly, supports extreme measures against ethnically identifiable foreigners or non-Americans (Islamo-terrorists). Shades of Freud, and the dark underside of the collective psyche...."
That's precisely why we have laws, Caracalla!
1. YES...Especially if it means they STOP cutting off heads in lieu of waterboarding.
2. NO... It is illogical to equate routine law enforcement with acts of terrorism designed to kill us dead as dead can be. Please put on your thinking cap.
3. YES... I think if Carl felt it would do any good he would submit to your request to be waterboarded. What concerns me most is that you want to see something that YOU perceive as torture perpetrated on another human being.
Believe me, I took no pleasure at all in watching Hitchens' ordeal, nor would I in watching Rove go through it. I merely want him to stop pretending that what he has advocated is humane when it so clearly is not.
Regarding your #1: This is just changing the subject. The original question remains.
Regarding your #2: How about in cases of serial killers, compulsive child abusers, school assassins etc.? If, as Rove suggests, waterboarding can provide us with quick results, why not use it in on these people too?
Thanks, this is precisely the discussion I wanted to get going. So let me go on record as saying that NO, I am opposed to trashing the constitution and our traditional, hard-fought ban on torture and other unusual punishments in exchange for highly dubious short-term benefits. Would anyone else like to weigh in?
But policymakers aren't having an ethical, philosophical debate. What they're really asking is whether waterboarding falls under the U.S. legal code's definition of torture--in other words, whether or not it's illegal. There is also significant debate over the degree to which military officials are regulated by less narrowly-written international laws prohibiting the use of torture.The Bush administration argued that enemy combatants are neither prisoners of war nor civilians, but rather fall into an intermediate category of unlawful combatants.Each of the three branches of government can address the legality of waterboarding in a different way.
The Obama administration officially banned waterboarding in January 2009--but this represents a temporary solution, since the leadership of the executive branch changes.Congress can revise the relevant statutes to specifically classify waterboarding as a form of torture, given either a two-thirds legislative majority or a presidential signature. The Supreme Court can interpret existing anti-torture laws in such a manner as to include waterboarding. The Eighth Amendment, which applies only to U.S. citizens and residents, is probably not applicable.
So as it stands now waterboarding IS illegal, however not unconstitutional when applied to "enemy combatants on foreign soil"
It is my opinion that it should be classified not torture as I feel it does not meet the definition of torture as defined under US law.
Under 18 USC Section 2340A, torture is defined as "[an] act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control."
those are big words right now- I'll take Jesse Ventura's words, and reputation, over yours, "Give me 5 minutes and I'll have anyone confessing to anything!" Never mind that regardless of some legal fantasy the fact is the Golden Rule is in play during international conflict; at least on its public face. Leave the spying to spies, and as for your talk on torture- to coin a phrase "ditto" leave that to the intellectually honest.
The words I take- Greenspan (war largely about oil); Paulson (we were scared to death McCain would win); and, when it comes to torture I go with the Gov/Navy Seal over you, or, over anyone else ... last word by "Da Body" !!! yeah, like you would argue with him.
Although I appreciate YOUR invitation to do battle with Jesse Ventura I am quite confident that you do not speak for him.
It is amazing that your argument against torture involves implying physical violence should determine the outcome of the torture debate. Can I assume if I were big enough and bad enough to pummel Mr. Ventura you would be inclined to side with me?
Rated.
It is a mystery that the US gave the world the formidable Internet that makes the planet grow together, but then intensified front lines and summoned up a "clash of civilizations" fantasy that transforms the minds into fortresses of "us vs. them" weltanschauung.
As Paul Krugman points out, when you represent a minority in society but want to seize power, you have to create a temporary majority of belief based on highly emotional issues.
This in turn requires the build-up of a common ennemy that you need to dehumanize. Torture and the justification thereof is less a symptom than an essential part of that process of dehumanization and of separating lives into two categories: those that need to be protected at any cost and those whose suffering and loss is acceptable, innocent or not. Which is quite frightening, regarding the once valued founding principle that "all men are born equal".