Asymmetrical Information

http://www.nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200406140831.asp

more on this topic

Actually, Americans have almost eliminated the chance of a natural disaster killing thousands, or even hundreds. California has built earthquake resistant buildings until their biggest quakes are unlikely to kill more than a dozen people. Floods, hurricanes, and wild fire are only dangerous to the stubborn fools that won't evacuate, and we rescue most of those.

The only natural disaster we haven't tamed by spending money on sturdier construction, evacuation, and rescue is volcanos. Many of Seattle's suburbs are on the slopes of an active volcano, but the chance of this one blowing in any one decade is pretty slim, and it will more likely emit a lava flow that burns down tens of thousands of homes but kills few to no people than a choking cloud or ash fall like Pompeii. Also, there's Hawaii where all the land is volcanic and lava flows are common - but rather tame.

Ya know, I think Biden said it best when he said the reason we are supposed to abide by the Geneva Convention is not because we don't want to torture people, but because we don't want our guys to be tortured.

I agree with you, Klienman's logic in this post is somewhat flawed, a car accident is a great deal different than a terrorist attack...but only to the survivors. The victims are still dead either way.

Regardless, I don't feel there is ever a justification for torture, as it is well known that torture is an ineffective method of procuring information from a prisoner.

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/articles/su03/levinson.htm

On a more basic level Torture is just wrong. No matter how you slice it. Just like murder and rape are just wrong. And the idea of "getting back" doesn't make it any more right.

One problem with the whole debate is the definition of "torture" and what is okay and what is not. Personally, I want our forces to use the most effective means of getting accurate, timely information from captives. From what I've read, physically abusing, maiming, etc... is not effective.

Interrogation, though, is not a peaceful and harmonious process. I imagine that intimidation, threats, confusion, etc... are all tactics that may be used in interrogation. I don't want our military to have to mirandize prisoners of war and give them lawyers and treat them like suspects in the civil court system. If there is a drug out there that makes prisoners susceptible to suggestion and makes them more willing to talk without causing significant harm, then go for it. If taking away TV privileges works, then do that, too. Humiliation is not the same thing as putting someone on the rack or cutting off their fingers. Shaming someone is not the same as breaking their bones and joints. The "torture" debate is being derailed by an ever expanding definition of torture.

The only way I would ever tolerate torture was if it was the only possible means to get the answers and it would get accurate answers, if it was known that the subject knew the answers, and the answers would save significant lives. The first two conditions will probably never be true.

Bolie IV

Absent acquiring a nuclear weapon and a container ship, no terrorist group is going to be able to make itself competitive with, say, "non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as aspirin".

I can't argue with this logic, except to say that I for one am a tad freaked out by the possibility our terrorist enemies will acquire nuclear weapons at some point. Indeed, I'd gladly take our current situation -- a sort of low-intensity standoff with terrorists using convential explosives and terror tactics -- over the "10 minutes to Armageddon" scenario that was so scary during the Cold War -- if I could get a guarantee that our current enemies will never obtain nukes. Yeah, a destabilized Middle East and $3/gallon gasoline pretty much sucks, but I'll deal with it, knowing that the likelihood of being killed by a suicide bomber is remote.

But the thing is, throughout most of the Cold War, we could perhaps take some comfort in the notion that lots of folks on both sides realized that actually attacking with these weapons was unthinkable. I have no doubt that the Bin Ladenists would attempt to use such a weapon the moment they got their hands on one. A rather unsettling thought -- especially to denizens of places like New York City and Washington, DC (and to other cities as well; perhaps these two towns are such hardened targets now that a second tier locale may be the preferred option for AQ).

Boy do I wish we could un-invent nuclear weapons.

You know, I see what you're saying, Jane, but I don't know how it's a response to Kleiman's post. He wasn't describing how people actually respond to terrorism; he was describing a way to look at it. While we are understandably neither rational nor objective about terrorism, we should get as close as we can when trying to come up with a policy to combat it.

So your point - that people aren't perfectly rational value maximisers - is true, but not particularly important here. Of course we aren't perfectly rational value maximisers. Without getting too intimate about my own experience with terrorism, I'm not perfectly rational about it myself.

I'm also not perfectly rational about sharks; they scare the crap out of me, I don't like to swim in the ocean and I'm completely cool with shooting random passing sharks just to thin out their numbers. Does this lack of rational value maximisation tell me that any means are appropriate in my war on shark? Or are some steps -- say, pouring millions of tons of bleach in the waters of the Great Barrier Reef -- not worth the consequences, regardless of their shark-killing effectiveness?

Bolie Williams-

That's an excellent post and the reason why I have not really formed an opinion on this issue. The media has been very sloppy in reporting what "torture" was authorized by whom. The word is being thrown around without any detail of the degree of the technique.

Jay

The kind of probabilistic logic that Mark uses is a real abuse of statistics. Suppose that a disease kills 10 people out of 300 million in a given year. Can you conclude that your chance of dying from that disease in the future is 1 in 30 million per year? Of course not. You may be seeing the early stages of an epidemic that will follow an exponential growth curve.

There is every reason to believe that successful terrorism encourages more terrorism and that hence the growth curve of terrorism--in the absence of successful intervention--would show the characteristics of an epidemic, not of random events with constant probability.

Jane:

Your basic thesis seems to be that rationality, as exampled by Kleiman's analysis, is too much to ask for people reacting to a terrorist attack. But Kleiman's analysis, the similar analysis on liberal sites to which you refer, and the comments of several people on this blog and similar ones, are significant counterexamples of people acting rationally (as defined above). People do react rationally to terrorist attacks; it's just that, in this instance, you didn't.

More importantly, to the extent that you are right about the general population's reaction, we need to correct this. Our use of 9/11 as a not always reasonable justification for our later actions is exactly why people in other countries seem more fearful of us than the hated "evildoers". It's not that they necessarily think that we're bad or inclined to do wrong. It's that they recognize that we are extraordinarily powerful, and that they are not sure that we are responsible enough in our reactions that they can feel comfortable with the extent of our enormous power. (I think Fareed Zakaria made a somewhat similar point over a year ago in one of his Newsweek columns).

I don't think that anyone demands that we react in some sort of fine-function fashion - X deaths from a terrorist attack yields policy action Y. People everywhere are more sane and forgiving than that. But there are a range of acceptable reactions, and explicit torture authorized from on high is well outside that range. (So, for that matter, is the invasion of Iraq). If, ultimately, the world judges that we can't be trusted with the power differential that we know have, the world will reconfigure itself to decrease that differential. I think its absurd to believe that we will suddenly become an enemy of Europe, or some new power will rise to be a real challenge to us; I think its entirely reasonable to think that getting our way on the world stage will become much, much more expensive.

I actually disagree with you Tim; I think we should spend more money preventing deaths from crime than preventing an equivalent number of deaths from auto accidents, and I feel the same way about terrorism. In part this is irrational -- I feel that deaths from terrorism are somehow worse than deaths in an auto accident -- but ultimately it is profoundly rational. Homicide is worse than other forms of death, for society, because it breaks down trust and social order in a way that other sorts of death do not. If auto accidents are prevalent, you drive more carefully. If spousal poisonings or armed robbery are prevalent, you put less trust in your marriage or your neighbours.

Moreover, the fact that we respond this way creates a disincentive to make such attacks. If criminals knew that we'd only go after them once the deaths from homicide exceeded the number of deaths from heart disease, we'd get a lot more criminals. The fact that we pursue people even when it is expensive or inconvenient makes crime much less attractive, and similarly terrorism. Oh, Osama bin Laden might have staged 9/11 even if he hadn't (apparently) been labouring under the delusion that we'd respond the way we did in the 1990's. But I doubt that the Taliban would have sheltered him if they'd known what the price would be.

Of course, this makes overreaction possible. But at least we're overreacting when dealing with something we all understand pretty well: people. Most of the American public's overreactions have to do with things they don't understand at all, like science.

The fun thing about rational expectations is that it's a game everybody can play. Actually there are two fun things about it. The second fun thing is watching the Kliemans of this world blow a gasket when somebody else behaves rationally in a way that they don't like, which is exactly what's going on here. So what, say millions of Americans, if my chances of getting blown up in a terrorist attack are pretty low? My chances of getting arrested for one are even lower, because, you know, I don't hang out with those guys; and I really don't care what the cops do to try to get them to talk. Now: you may think that line of reasoning is immoral, and you may be right. But it's every bit as rational (that is, it accounts for expectations just as well) as the "you won't get blown up so just sit tight" line.

It's true that a massive terror attack is not the end of the world, car accidents kill far more people.
But torturing a few terrorists also isn't the end of the world. It's not even as bad as prison abuse nowadays, which affects far more people. Yet the country survives.

The argument works both ways.

What the Bush Administration approved and what the military uses to interrogate terrorists cannot be called torture. This is what was approved.

Solitary confinement
Psychological pressure
Sleep deprivation
Variations in temperature.

All of these are permissible under the Geneva Convention if the reason for its use is to gather intelligence.

I would deny a terrorist a few nights sleep if it would save the live of one child. We have learned that Saddam spread his WMD all over the world. So denying a terrorist a few nights sleep could save the lives of one million children

How can we call ourselves a civilized nation if we do not use the above interrogation techniques to save the lives of millions of Americans?

I agree with ContributorB. Jane makes a very good point but I don't think it invalidates MK's point, which is a different one.

MK is saying that the threat posed by terrorism is too low to justify torture.

Jane is saying that the perceived threat of torture is much greater than the actual threat. I agree. But that does not mean that policymakers should act on that.

From Mark Kleiman’s piece:

Taylor and others interpret Justice Jackson's dictum to mean that whenever there is an active threat that many people will die unless torture is used, the clear bars to using it created by the Constitution and international law must magically disappear.

I had a chance to actually read through the much maligned DOD memo and there seems to be a couple of problems with Kleiman’s thought on the supposedly “clear bars” created by the Constitution and international law. First when the United States ratified the 1994 Convention Against Torture, we did so with a variety of Understandings and Reservations – namely that definitions of cruel, unusual, and inhumane treatment would be as defined by our Constitution under the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments. The problem for those who want to argue that this prohibits torture under all circumstances, is that the courts have recognized a “necessity defense” in which a lesser harm (e.g. killing someone) may be permitted to prevent a greater harmer (e.g. saving two other lives) unless there is a third and less harmful alternative that is open and known to the defendant. In which case, it may not be quite so clear that torturing a terrorist suspect in order to obtain information (presumably when no other workable option is known and available) to prevent an attack would not be defensible under a “necessity defense.”

FTR: While I would not endorse everything written in the memo, I think it is good that somebody has at least asked these sorts of questions rather than taking a knee-jerk approach of “torture is always wrong” (even though we allow for life imprisonment and executions which are more severe) or “they’re terrorists and we can do whatever we want to them.” The memo actually provides some pretty good boundaries and on what the authors believe would or would not be allowed under current law. These sorts of issues aren’t going to go away and I for one am glad that someone is addressing them.

I've also read through the memo. I agree with Mark Kleiman's characterization of the legal analysis: it's awful. The necessity analysis is particularly weak. I didn't go back and check the cites, but my recollection is that it's black-letter law that necessity is not a defense to homicide. The memo writers came up with a secondary source suggesting that it should be, but there are no cases cited for the proposition.

Jane, I see your argument regarding Mark's cost-benefit analysis, but you seem to be sidestepping the real issue. Do you mean to suggest that torture is OK, or just that you disagree with one point in Mark's analysis?

There's an awful lot of whistling past the graveyard in this thread, starting with Contributor B's post, in which he says that Klieman "wasn't describing how people actually respond to terrorism; he was describing a way to look at it." That's more right than you want to admit, Contrib. What Klieman's really trying to do is Gently Guide the Unwashed Masses Towards the Correct Application of Cost-Benefit Analysis (in other words, pay attention only to the Officially Approved Tabulation of Costs and Benefits.) Forget about it, kids. The Unwashed Masses play this game every bit as well as you do. Cold rationality explains very well why they don't give a rip what happens to the Al Qaeda guys.

Joe, I think what you're saying is "who cares, it's just a bunch of foreigners." Otherwise, you'd have to confront insignificant little distinctions like Al Quaeda member vs. random Iraqi who got picked up and ended up in Abu Ghraib.

Joe, I'm not a big fan of "you won't get blown up so sit tight" logic, and neither is Kleiman (or, frankly any, one else other than some obnoxious Germans I've had the misfortune to interview). Having actually come very close to suffocating in a terrorist-induced cloud of concrete dust and spent several hours helping ferry terrorist-injured people to ambulances and spent about a year in a consuming bout of terrorist-induced clinical depression, I'm well aware of the probability and consequences of a terrorist act.

Nobody's trying to educate the unwashed masses, and I'm not sure with what authority (polls? gut feeling?) you're claiming to speak for them. I'm not even sure who the unwashed masses are. I do agree with one of Jane's later posts, that we should create disincentives for being a terrorist and sheltering them.

But the larger point in this thread is about decisions that, on a smaller scale, even your mythical unwashed masses have to make. If I wave a gun around in public, I'm less likely to get mugged. But people may also begin to worry that I'm crazy, and perhaps my business will suffer and my friends will stop having me over. If I start indiscriminately shooting people I suspect of being potential muggers, I'm likely to lose all of my customers and all of my friends.

This is why many people choose to fear muggers in their hearts, support agressively prosecuting convicted muggers with due process and yet still don't strap on a sidearm. And it's why -- though I'd like for terrorists to die slow and painful deaths, that nothing justifies what they do and that their theology is a mixture of self-adoration and Wagnerian bullshit -- it's a really bad idea for America to round up people and torture them just in case they know something about our enemies.

AAAAHHGG. I did it again. I got all maudlin and personal and self-important in a blog thread. I blame you, Jane Galt. Dammit.

Also, before anyone delights in pointing it out, cut "convicted" from line 2, graf 4.

Aggghh.

In response to David,

I don't see where your use of statistics is really any more valid then Mark's. Terrorism deaths went way down in 2002. Of course, 2001 was kind of a banner year for terrorism. I don't think anyone would argue that the September 11 attacks themselves decreased the likelihood of terrorism. The truth is that we really don't know what the future of terrorism will be. I don't think we are going to see any kind of exponential growth, as you suggest. In my opinion any trend is more likely to be linear, but that's just my opinion, and I'm not a terrorism expert.

All bets are off if terrorists get a nuclear bomb. But the best way to prevent terrorists from getting nukes isn't torturing terrorists, it's working to secure the nuclear weapons that are around, and preventing nuclear materials from going places they aren't supposed to.

I am indeed arguing a side point, as I am wont to do, not arguing in favour of torture. Sorry if that confused people.

The problem with securing all nuclear weapons is that one day one will get lost. I'm certain that nuclear weapons/materials can not be 100% perfectly contained forever. But we should try. We should also try to kill all the terrorists and spread prosperity and democracy so that there will be fewer new terrorists. This two (or three) pronged approach is probably the most likely to succeed.

Bolie IV

One problem I have with the minimization of Sept. 11th is the "Only 3000" mantra.

Is it so hard to remember that the *attempt* was to get 100-200k? That was the *plan*. Just the plan failed to work as designed, due to lots of luck on our part, lots of dedication, some selfless sacrifices, but lots of luck.

I continually see references that minimize it, as "Gee, only 3000 people". Would it have been different, if, as planned, the towers had gone down immediately, smashing into many other buildings, in a domino effect, and it *had* killed ~100,000 people?

So if we're going to factor in those sorts of "risks" lets do it with the right numbers. The sort the people gunning for us are planning for, or might happen the next time.

Comment to DavidL:
I believe that, in most (if not all) US jurisdictions, the term "justifiable homicide" is relevant and appears in "black letter" law. Self-defense is an example. It is true that certain tests must be met (e.g., proportionality, last resort, etc . . . ), and that the interpretation of these tests varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. However, this doesn't alter the fact that this is an example of a recognized necessity exception whereby homicide, which is otherwise proscribed, is legally permissible.

Yes, self-defense may be justifiable homicide, but that's a different doctrine completely. Self-defense allows the use of deadly force in response to an immediate threat of deadly force: if you point a gun at me, I may be justified in shooting and killing you. Necessity is a different and more limited doctrine, and self-defense can't be stretched as far as the torture memos stretch it.

As an economist, it is almost always easy to convert seeming irrationality into rationality, and an occupational disease that we always try to do it. You just add preferences for things like distinctions in the mode of death. Dead is dead, but is it irrational to want to die one sort of death than another? Of course not. Once you admit that, then it can well be rational to spend to avert X deaths of type A when the same amount of money could have averted 2X type B deaths.

So don't worry, Jane. You got a ways to go before the debate over stopping terrorism can be PROVEN to be irrational (though of course we all know it is.) By the way, Cass Sunstein's book, Risk and Reason, just out in paperback, has a lot of very interesting stuff to say about this problem. For a law professor.

"Necessity is a different and more limited doctrine, and self-defense can't be stretched as far as the torture memos stretch it."

Hmmm...I have a memory of the Bernie ("Subway Vigilante") Goetz trial, where the issue--in New York law--was what his mental state at the time of the attack was. The relevant phraseology, IIRC, was that deadly force was permissible if the individual believed that a felony was about to be committed. Again, IIRC, this phraseology was intended to cover a situation where third parties were involved: but nevertheless, it applied here, and went beyond a simple self-defense claim.

Be that as it may, I have absolutely no patience with the people who are hyperventilating over Abu Ghraib, who appear to find the use of torture, supposed violations of the Geneva Conventions et al. horrifying when we do it, but shruggable when other do it.

In particular, I find it completely otherworldly to hear people suggest that if we do these things, we are "lowering the bar". Compared to what? To our troops being mutilated and dragged through the streets of Mogadishu? To Israeli soldiers being literally torn limb from limb, and then the perps gleefully waving their bloodstained hands in the air? To Daniel Pearl and Richard Berg having their throats cut on videotape?

Get a grip, fellas: we are in a war to the knife. Yes, there are rules--even in a knife fight--but frankly, I'm not ready to play Marquess of Queensberry against gutter fighters.

jonathan:

you are attempting to weasel out of your claim that "necessity is not a defence for homicide" by ignoring that the commenters were using "necessity" in lay terms. anyone involved in torturing a suspect in a terrorism case would not use necessity as laid out in legal texts. rather, they would use "self-defence of others" or other such claims as applicable as an affirmative defence. but you're just being obtuse

as for more interesting US jurisdictions on justifiable homicide (examples where the bar is set rather low, legitimately), Texas is notably lenient on justifiable homicide. There's the famous case of the exchange student walking into the wrong house at halloween and getting shot by the homeowner. Don't mess with texas, and definitely don't tresspass. Many, if not most, states will not charge (and if charged, juries will not convict) you for killing someone engaged in or fleeing from a felony at your house, place of business, or a place that you are hired to manage/secure. So you should look elsewhere for your examples!

As for torture analysis: there's the whole point that success engenders emulation. So the more passive we are, the more terrorists will try to hit us. Also, killing someone for no good reason is rather worse than torturing them. But torture is not defined by the ACLU. Torture is the third degree, hot pokers, the rack, eating excrement, etc.

Most of Abu Grhaib was not torture, just humiliation that shouldn't have been photographed.

It'd be nice to see more options than pro/con torture. Third Geneva states that POWs who fail to answer questions may not be subjected to: "unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind." Is that really the standard we should apply to Al Qaeda operatives? And if so, why? There's no rational interpretation of the Geneva Conventions that would allow Al Qaeda to claim POW status, so why do they even enter the conversation?

The only applicable treaty to interrogation of Al Qaeda suspects is the treaty against torture. It sets the threshold at "severe pain and suffering." The measures approved by the interrogation guidelines (as Jake stated above) don't appear to meet that level, and are arguably legal. They also look about right to me. Am I pro torture?

as for more interesting US jurisdictions on justifiable homicide (examples where the bar is set rather low, legitimately), Texas is notably lenient on justifiable homicide. There's the famous case of the exchange student walking into the wrong house at halloween and getting shot by the homeowner. Don't mess with texas, and definitely don't tresspass.

That happened in Baton Rouge, Louisiana not Texas and the owner (Rodney Peairs) ordered the intruder (Yoshihiro Hattori) to “freeze” and only fired when the intruder (not speaking English) continued to move towards him and his wife. Which is no doubt why it took the jury less than three hours to acquit him of a manslaughter charge. The parents of the intruder however did prevail in a civil suit in the amount of $653,000.

Why do so many assume that the threat posed by terrorism is, statistically speaking, minimal? Certainly we shouldn't draw that conclusion from the fact that "only" 3,000 people died in the 9-11 attacks.

We are living in an age when nuclear and other WMD are soon to become, or in some cases perhaps already have become, mere commodities to be sold or gifted to terrorists. It is not hard to imagine N. Korea or Pakistan (assuming a regime change) selling or gifting to terrorists WMD that would be capable of killing hundreds of thousands or possibly millions in a single attack. Iraq may have transported WMD out of the country before the start of the war. Iran and its mullahs may soon become a nuclear power.

In fact proliferation of WMD is apparently not even a state monopoly any more, if we can believe that Khan and his associates were operating without the authority of the Pakistan government. And a small amount of anthrax was mailed to our nation's leaders by an individual who probably acted without the support or knowlege of a state.

The terrorists moreover are a decentralized confederacy without a rigorous chain of command or an easily recognizable target to retaliate against. As such it would be reasonable to assume that the terrorists are not easily deterred. And their stated aim is to terrorize by killing as many people as possible in single mass casualty event.

The upshot is that, contrary to most of the posts here, the probability of a mass casualty event occuring within the U.S. is by no means minimal. In fact, the probability is far higher today than at any time during World War II or the Cold War, even if the expected casualties from the "unthinkable" are fewer than, say, the horrow of a nuclear exchange with the former Soviet Union.

Finally, in thinking about the statistical liklihood of a mass casualty event, we should consider the response of the U.S. after 3000 were killed in the 9-11 attacks. Afganistan and Iraq were invaded with the support of large majorities of the American public. The Patriot Act was passed essentially without opposition. A new federal department was created with millions of employees. The military budget was dramatically increased. The Democratic candidate for President now wants to increaase the size of the military by 40,000 troops.

All of this, however, is as nothing if we do have a mass casualty attack on this country by terrorists. The U.S. response would make the fire bombing of Dresden seem modest, and the Patriot Act an exemplar of civil rights.

Kate, I agree with the gist of what you said, but need to take issue with a couple of points:

Ya know, I think Biden said it best when he said the reason we are supposed to abide by the Geneva Convention is not because we don't want to torture people, but because we don't want our guys to be tortured.

Biden makes the unstated assumption that our own proper behavior would guarantee similarly proper behavior from our enemies. This might be credible if we were fighting, say, the British or the French. It is not really credible when fighting Ba'athists or al-Qaeda terrorists. They have no problem with killing a child or decapitating a reporter; do you seriously think they'd blanche before torturing an American POW?

There are many excellent arguments against the use of torture; fear of retribution from the other side is, in this case, not one of them.

On a more basic level Torture is just wrong. No matter how you slice it. Just like murder and rape are just wrong.

Perhaps, but you're inserting loaded words here. "Murder" is wrongful killing by definition, so to say it's wrong is tautological. By contrast, not all killings are wrong -- there is a lot of gray space, ranging from self-defense to various wartime scenarios to situations in medicine. In some cases, killings are perfectly justified, and someone may argue that causing a high level of disorientation, discomfort, or pain, is also justified. The question is how far you can go -- e.g., is threatening to cut off someone's limb torture, if you don't actually do it? What about less gruesome actions, like sleep deprivation or sexual humiliation? Etc. etc. And is this universal? Simply being imprisoned could be torturous for some, while other stake it in stride. If you fall back on the "torture is simply wrong" argument, all you'll end up doing is debating what is and isn't torture.

I'm somewhat surprised how (comparatively) little time in this thread has been spent analyzing why one statistical risk of death will be feared less than a second risk, even though the former risk is much higher -- another problem with Kleiman's conclusions. Succinctly put I think it hinges on how much the risk is perceived to depend on one's own choices, familiarity with the risk, and ability to respond if it is encountered. (Maybe those ARE rational but can manifest themselves in ways that appear irrational at a glance?)

For example, my risk of being murdered in cold blood may be much higher than my risk of becoming a general casualty of a terrorist attack, but many variants of how the former may occur will at least give me an opportunity to respond. Being able to grab a close-range attacker's gun and secure a groin kick are infinitely more gratifying than discovering that I and 10,000 other people who drank the water this morning are coughing up blood by mid-afternoon. Similarly, I engage in a real risk of fatality every time my car leaves the driveway but then, I choose to take the car out on the road and always have that risk present somewhere in the back of my mind. Or maybe familiarity with the risk breeds contempt, as the case may be.

As for the torture issue itself, I likewise agree with those who have pointed out the problems in the definition. The word is indeed bandied about too broadly and loosely and the sub-debate of what constitutes torture, in turn, logjams the debate well upstream of where it ought to be spawning.

Scary stuff here.

American law on justifiable homicide: If you point a gun at me or otherwise make me think you're an immediate danger to my life, I can shoot you. That's immediate as in "right now," not "I heard you're after me so I'm going to hunt you down first."

Bush Administration: If I figure out that you're trying to kill me, I can beat the hell out of your family, your neighbors, and anybody else that I think might know where you are so that I can find you and kill you first.

Jane Galt commenters: Yep, sounds about right to us.

Yuck.

DaveL: Gee, Mr Terrorist, I know you want to level Chicago, but can't we engage in some meaningful dialogue instead? Please?

RMc: Double yuk.

David H.-

Quite right. Until we toss the tortured bodies of innocent Iraqis out of police station windows and let frenzied crowds of American GIs pummel the crap out of them, I rather doubt the long term survival of Western civilization.

Clearly as the demonstrably less evil party we're fighting from a position of weakness, and only the sucessful and just tactics used by our military betters the Palestinians promise a path to victory.

RMc, that's cute but non-responsive. We're not torturing the guy who's trying to flatten Chicago, we're torturing his second cousin, his neighbor, a couple of guys who happened to be walking past his house, and maybe his 8-year-old daughter. And we don't actually know that he's trying to flatten Chicago. Come to think of it, the guy who told us he was happens to be his mortal enemy. But in that part of the world you can never be too careful, so bring on the dogs.

This tough guy crap is just nauseating. It's the foreign policy version of confiscating nail clippers in airports: it doesn't make us safer, but at least we're Doing Something. Except this time, our Doing Something is hurting people (not to mention the political and moral damage it's doing to our country's place in the world). So yes, yuck.

According to fanatically pro-war Christopher Hitchens, what's coming from Abu Ghraib should satisfy any definition of torture you could ask for. Rape and murder are included.

David L, if I were Klieman I suppose I could answer you by saying yes, a few people in a small country across the world perhaps have been mistreated. But really, what is the statistical probability of anyone in the world actually being tortured? One in a billion? One in a hundred million? One in ten million? What is the probability that a Muslim has been or will be tortured, or even an Iraqi? I'd say far less than the probability of an American being killed in an automobile accident. Probably far less even than the probability of being killed by aspirin. So why worry about it? Be happy, torture a few of them over there and join Klieman in accepting that whatever the number, it's statisticaly insignificant in the great big scheme of things. Rather like the risk of being killed in a terrorist attack, you might say.

Of course you would say this is a silly argument, and so it is.

Jane:

Given your comments (torture = wrong, Kleiman's type of analysis OK if all relevant future costs are included), I'm not sure you DO disagree with me. Do I think we should spend more to catch a murderer than to prevent a car accident? Of course, for most of the same reasons that you list. Should we give terrorists an incentive not attack us? Of course; we all understand that, and support for the war in Afghanistan is/was nearly universal, both inside and outside this country.

But that's not really the end of the discussion - we have to stop pretending that we are in "war for our survival" (a phrase that pops up on pro-war sites all the time). 9/11 didn't signal a significant threat to the survival of the country, and we should react with that understanding. We don't have to perfectly titrate our responses. But absent the dreaded Doomsday Scenario, we shouldn't be torturing for information. That we appear to be doing just that, and that we are drafting badly done legal memos that seek to justify torture, are indications that the Administration has badly misunderstood what is going on. Are we willing to trade civil liberties for safety? Sure, but not on the cheap, as we're doing right now. If Cheney doesn't think that we should have to give up SUVs, then I'm not sure why you think we should (a) give up civil liberties (Padilla), or (b) do things that we are deeply embarrassed about (torture).

I'm not sure what, of the above, you would disagree with.

Shropshire:

WTF are you talking about? Of course people do that sort of calculus all the time. If it's applied to an individual citizen or a small group of citizens, then we call it "tyranny of the majority." It's why we have the Bill of Rights. (It's also why, for the most part, people don't care about any kind of racial profiling and a host of other ills). As for non-citizens, I'd argue that the world at large needs to believe that the most dominant power is just. The world system is just more stable that way. I'm sure you don't care if the cops do random sweeps of Arabs in the US. The problem is that they might, as might other groups who suspect that the treatment of Arabs is a good proxy for how they will be treated down the line. And then they take what they believe to be appropriate actions. And the cost of our (pretty damn good) lifestyles goes up again.

David Foster:

I really don't get your take on data. You see deaths per terrorist act numbers like 14, 24, 7, 8, 3000, 5, 8, 9, 200, 13, 4, 4, 5, etc., and you see a rapidly increasing function? Why isn't (at a min.) the 3000 a clear outlier?

"The terrorists can't conquer us or overthrow our government. The worst they can do is kill some of us, and we're all going to die some day anyhow."

I think this does not take into account what a major or sustained serial attacks might actually produce -- i.e., moving our government more toward a police state (or, at the least, a substantial lessening of our existing liberties).

DaveL:

"Scary stuff here."

I agree completely. It's like channeling Travis Bickle. And I don't really understand it. I think that Americans in general, and people on this site more specifically, tend to pretty reasonable people.

Anyway, my working theory right now is that we're seeing the effect of two myths. The first is a misunderstanding of how much of a threat the Islamic terrorists represent to the US. The threat is relatively small, but the myth that people here seem to believe is that the US is about to crumble. People's fear makes them behave strangely (or normally for fearful people).

Second, I think that, at some subconscious level, a "war for our survival" plays into people's desire for a Mission, or a (to steal a neo-con term) National Greatness myth. Just as the Greatest Generation survived the Depression and then fought WWII, so now our generation does its part by going to the Gap despite our fears of terrorism (so sayeth Cheney). The unfortunate truth is that many of us have relatively safe, but relatively boring, lives. This is Exciting and Purposeful (and it has the added benefit of not requiring a draft that would expose us to risk).

(To be fair, there are lots of American families who are facing real (and to me nearly unimaginable) risks, with someone in Iraq or Afghanistan. And many (probably most) of these people support the Administration. I don't know that they aren't motivated by the same two myths, but I didn't want to lump them into a paragraph in which I was being flip).

Anyway, I think the second myth reinforces people's ability to suspend disbelief and believe the first, and the two together allow people to call for actions (Iraq, the justification of torture, Padilla) that might be understandable if we were at serious risk, but aren't under the present circumstances.

But it's just a working theory.

Jane, here's a way of seeing why the same analysis used for deaths due to natural disaster isn't applicable to this case:

Would you torture a kidnapper to save the lives of ten of his victims slowly suffocating to death in a concealed location?

Would you torture an innocent bystander if that could somehow save the lives of ten people slowly suffocating to death?

A lot of people might anser yes/no, and there's certainly no reason both questions should be answered the same way. The percieved cost of doing something bad to someone to prevent a disaster depends on how culpapble that person is in *creating* the disaster.

Thank you cj that perspective needs a wider airing.

Bill

SamAm: "Oderint dum metuant." If it was good enough for the Emperor Tiberius, it's good enough for me.

Bill, cj:

What makes you think it would take a series of attacks? Why do you think people are bothered about Padilla? He's a US citizen who has been held in isolation for two years, without counsel till recently (6th Am.), and no hearing to date to establish that he's a terrorist (6th, and I think 14th)? I don't think we're living under a police state yet, but I'm curious about the criteria used when someone brings up the possibility that Bush is saving us from that but Padilla isn't mentioned.

And you know, a police state isn't the only possible response to further attacks. We could accept that life is fraught with risk and then go get whoever attacked us. IIRC, the homocide rate in 2001 (with the 9/11 victims folded in) was the same as in 1997, but I don't remember anyone pissing and moaning about how scary the world was in 1997.

bwub:
You turn Kleiman's statistical argument around, and you're technically right that for an Arab, or even an Iraqi specifically, the risk of being tortured by the US forces is statistically small. But understand then that you are talking about retribution and collective punishment. (At least, you didn't seem to argue that the people at the receiving end of the abuse deserved it. If you're inclined to think they did, what do you say to the ICRC's estimate that about 70-90% of the internees had no connection to even the insurgency, let alone to terrorism against the US.)

I suppose, in the end, you don't claim that America is justified in inflicting statistically proportionate damage to a broad group of people, of roughly the same ethnicity as the 9/11 perpetrators - because you do imply that the argument you make simply holds a mirror to Kleiman's. But it doesn't.

The problem with your counter-argument is not with its cost-benefit analysis, but with its advocacy of collective responsibility and punishment.

Raj,

Are you suggesting terrorist victims deserve what happens to them? Or that "collective punishment" is somehow worse than being killed by a suicide bomber? Or that a greater percentage of internees are innocent as compared to people working in the WTC?

If not, BWUB's analysis makes precisely as much sense as Kleiman's: none.

I think people are being very blind when tabulating the cost of terrorism.

The main cost of a nuclear terrorist attack on NYC is not simply the 100,000 dead -- millions die every year in this country -- but the destruction of our global economic system via a decade-long, worldwide depression that almost certainly would kill millions of poor in the third world and impoverish just about everyone in a huge economic depression.

Fearing this is not irrational, it is in fact an extremely likely scenario and it is why Bush was willing to risk his presidency in Iraq.

1. One fundamental problem with torture is that it often doesn't work. Apply enough pressure, and they'll tell you what you wanted to hear, whether or not it is true.

2. "Would you torture a kidnapper to save the lives of ten of his victims slowly suffocating to death in a concealed location?" Yes, but I wouldn't torture a suspected kidnapper who may have left his victims suffocating to death. In the real world, these things are usually uncertain, especially when you've got a close time limit.

Or more to the point, I wouldn't torture a suspected terrorist because I suspect he knows something about other terrorists who are going to hijack an airplane. I'd arm those passengers who passed a background check.

On my radio show this morning, I interviewd a gentleman who had written a dreadful novel called "Homeland", about a Future America where the people had traded their Cherished Liberties for a shoebox of old baseball cards and John Ashcroft's bloody boot imprint bestrides the nation. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Obviously, you don't care for Bush's handling of the War on Terrorism. What would you do instead?

Him: We need to follow the example of FDR, not the paranoia of Richard Nixon.

Me: I understand that, but what, specifically, should be done about terrorism?

Him: The Patriot Act is trampling on people's human rights; we need to stop that.

Me: Fine, but what would you do? How would you fight the terrorists without impinging on human rights?

Him: We need to follow the constitution.

Me: And do what, exactly?

Him (pause): We need to follow FDR, not Nixon.

At which point I give up, and put a large dent in my desk by banging it with my forehead.

Look. No one wants to see innocent people roughed up (or worse) because they might be a terrorist, or might know somebody who is. But, dammit, we're talking about an opponent who killed three thousand of us, and would dearly love to kill all of us. They know no law. They respect nothing but death. Very Nasty People, they are, and they don't wear ID badges. The threat is ill-defined, but very real.

It's a war, folks. Nasty, bloody, unfair and second-guessed. Innocent people are gonna die...indeed, many have died already. We don't want to be the kind of nation who (very occasionally) uses torture to protect our people...but how the hell else do we do it? I ask this question all the time, and nobody ever has a concrete answer outside of "Dump Bush and his cabal of right-wing crazies." Not very helpful.

This tough guy crap is just nauseating.

Yeah, kinda. But that's the world we're living in now, and Tough Guys are needed when you're facing a foe that wants you dead. Sorry to wake you. Flip over your calendar; it's the twelfth, not the tenth.

OK, tough guy, if this is just Hard-Headed Realism About the Threats We Face, where's the evidence that torture has produced any useful intelligence? Given the political hits the administration is taking, isn't it pretty obvious that if there were success stories, we'd be hearing them? In fact, people who are serious about effective interrogations seem to think that torture DOESN'T work particularly well. The plain truth is that these folks appear to have disgraced themselves and our country pretty much for nothing.

What you're engaging in isn't realism, it's bluster and bullying. Grow up.

"In fact, people who are serious about effective interrogations seem to think that torture DOESN'T work particularly well. "

And how, exactly, would they know?

"The plain truth is that these folks appear to have disgraced themselves and our country pretty much for nothing."

If you're talking about the knuckleheads at Abu Ghraib, you're undoubtedly right. However, if you're trying to extrapolate that to providing Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, et al, with all the rights due a POW--including perfectly hands-off interrogations--I disagree.

The bottom line is that Islamic militants are rewriting the law of war for a simple reason: because if they play by the rules, they'll lose. The result is a conflict in which combatants hide among civilians, sham surrender, and generally act to increase civilian casualties on both sides. We can either reward that effort, by treating their fighters as honorable opponents that follow the Geneva Conventions--or provide a disincentive by treating them like the war criminals they are.

What you're engaging in isn't realism, it's bluster and bullying. Grow up.

You grow up, asswipe. Don't you remember 9/11? It was in all the papers.

And your solution to terrorism would be...an angrily worded letter to the Times? Warm hugs? Begging and pleading? Stop sending our women to school?

People like you will not be treated well by history. Pathetic.

No, the people who will be treated badly by history are those who are so eager to throw its lessons away because this time the threat is different. Like the Americans who locked up all those sneaky Jap sabateurs during WWII. And the good Germans whose way of life was threatened by Bolsheviks and Jews. And the Bush Administration, and you.

This may shock and amaze you, but it's actually possible to aggressively pursue terrorists without engaging in wholesale torture. What's pathetic is building strawmen instead of actually trying to justify your position.

This may shock and amaze you, but it's actually possible to aggressively pursue terrorists without engaging in wholesale torture.

What shocks and amazes me is your inability to answer a simple question: How. Would. You. Deal. With. Terrorism?

You can't answer, of course, because you have no answer...besides "oust Bush and his merry band of thieves! Bushitler! Halliburton! Quagmire! Pieces of eight! Squawk...whistle!"

When your idea of an answer to that question is "torture everybody in sight," I don't see the point in discussing it further. Enjoy your strawmen!

DaveL said:

When your idea of an answer to that question is "torture everybody in sight,"

Nice try, but I didn't even come close to saying anything like that. Try reading what I wrote. For once.

Cecil Turner said:

The bottom line is that Islamic militants are rewriting the law of war for a simple reason: because if they play by the rules, they'll lose. The result is a conflict in which combatants hide among civilians, sham surrender, and generally act to increase civilian casualties on both sides. We can either reward that effort, by treating their fighters as honorable opponents that follow the Geneva Conventions--or provide a disincentive by treating them like the war criminals they are.

Bingo. The terrorists are not honourable people, fighting for their cause: they are murderous thugs who must be stopped before they kill some more of us. No, that doesn't mean "torture everybody in sight" (geez...check your meds lately, Dave?); it means "find these people and stop them." If that means busting a few heads, so be it. No, it's not fair. But what else can you do? What?

DaveL whined:

I don't see the point in discussing it further.

You haven't discussed it at all...why start now?

Next!

I really don't get your take on data. You see deaths per terrorist act numbers like 14, 24, 7, 8, 3000, 5, 8, 9, 200, 13, 4, 4, 5, etc., and you see a rapidly increasing function? Why isn't (at a min.) the 3000 a clear outlier?

If I had my head so far buried in a soup turreen filled with statistics and numbers that I lost the ability to extrapolate broader pictures, then yes, I might consider a 3000 in that series to be an outlier.

In the real world, however, I see a "per act" number that could have been an unprecedented one or two orders of magnitude larger, and sense a change in the wind. There are differing schools of thought on what to do with the sails of course, but to actually treat 9/11 like an outlier would be self-delusional.

Cecil:
Are you suggesting terrorist victims deserve what happens to them?

No, I did not suggest that. Saying that the victims of atrocity X didn't deserve it does not even remotely suggest that the victims of atrocity Y deserved it.

Or that "collective punishment" is somehow worse than being killed by a suicide bomber?

I simply don't agree that we have an either/or situation between being victims of terrorism and engaging in collective punishment. And one of the biggest lessons of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, or any of the several festering ethnic conflicts in the world, is that it's worse than an either/or choice - the two reinforce each other, creating a vicious cycle. Before you conclude that I am advocating appeasement, I'm not - all I'm saying is that collective punishment only makes things worse. We should be aggressive in pursuing and punishing the perpetrators but not their uncle/cousin/anyone-who-wears-a-turban - if not for ethical reasons, for practical ones.

Or that a greater percentage of internees are innocent as compared to people working in the WTC?

See my answer to your first question. In case I haven't already made this clear, I do NOT believe that the victims of 9/11, or terrorism in general, deserve it. In fact, I think the defining characteristic of terrorism is that it inflicts harm on innocent bystanders with the aim of influencing the decisions of its intended audience. In this respect, terrorism is a form of collective punishment. (For the record, my use of the word "punishment" does not in any way suggest that terrorism is justified. It simply means that its perpetrators think of it as punishment.)

On a more general note, Cecil, imputing non sequiturs to an argument you want to refute may be an effective polemical device, but doesn't contribute much to the discourse.

Raj,

"imputing non sequiturs to an argument you want to refute may be an effective polemical device, but doesn't contribute much to the discourse."

No sale. Bwub made a perfectly sound reductio argument to demonstrate Kleiman's fallacy--and you claimed it wasn't a mirror because of "its advocacy of collective responsibility and punishment." You could have chosen the "two wrongs don't make a right" approach, but instead challenged bwub's logic with a faulty argument--adding nothing to the discourse.

There are several perfectly appropriate arguments for ensuring US responses to terrorism are sharply focused. None of which require defending Kleiman's ridiculous statistical analysis.

RMc:

Of course it's a f****** war. No one's arguing that it's not a war. I'm not. DaveL isn't, either. Anyone who believes that this can be solved with love and dialogue and conferences checked out of the debate long ago. They certainly don't read this blog, so if you want to shout "It's a war" and feel good about yourself, go find yourself a hippie.

The argument is not whether it's a war or not, and it's not even whether or not we should conduct ourselves morally in this war when our enemy is not. The argument is what actions, in this war, are going to produce a net loss of terrorists, the people who want to kill us.

1. Hunting terrorists down and killing them decreases their numbers. Good. Maybe kick 'em in the nuts or make 'em get undressed and roll around with each other before they expire. Great.

2. Indiscriminately torturing a lot of people who aren't terrorists creates more terrorists. Bad. More people who want to kill us. Maybe more than we've already killed.

This is a dynamic that even Donald Rumsfeld has recognized. There are a lot of people in this thread having a perfectly rational conversation about how best to kill more terrorists than we create and then there is you, RMc, with this little loveliness:

You grow up, asswipe. Don't you remember 9/11? It was in all the papers.

Ah, yes, 9/11. Changes everything. Makes every tactic clever. The magical balm you can spread on your shit to produce strategic gold. I remember 9/11, RMc. It was at my office.

The argument is not whether it's a war or not, and it's not even whether or not we should conduct ourselves morally in this war when our enemy is not. The argument is what actions, in this war, are going to produce a net loss of terrorists, the people who want to kill us.

Isn't this the exact argument I've been making? (And it was Dave, not I, who turned this thread nasty. Again, nice try.)

I remember 9/11, RMc. It was at my office.

OK, since you seem determined to grab the moral high ground here, I'll ask you: how do we fight this war without occasionally slapping around the "wrong" people? How do we tell a terrorist from some surly-looking guy with a grudge and a five o' clock shadow? What do want us to do? (Hint: "String up Wolfowitz by his thumbs" is not a valid answer.)

Anony-mouse:

So you look at the number series and "sense a change in the wind." What is that, you're secret X-man power? Or are you just talking out of your a**? Let's take a look.

First, if it really was a "change in the wind," we might expect to see numbers on the 9/11 scale after it. You know, to reflect "the change." But we really don't. This might be a result of the Homeland Security offices remarkable efforts (I doubt it - google "Nathaniel Heatwole"), so maybe this doesn't help.

But at least the numbers before 9/11 (and the establishment of the Homeland Security office) are small. That's in keeping with your theory. But what about the first WTC terrorist attempt? Weren't those guys trying to bring down both towers? That would seem to indicate that terrorists wanted large scale US deaths even then. So the "change in the wind" theory seems a little weak. Unless the "change" is really a result of the terrorists' new found access to a revolutionary new technology - boxcutters.

Alternate theory: they have long wanted to kill a lot of us, it just turns out to be more difficult (and expensive) than thought. It probably doesn't make you feel safer, but I'm really not sure what would.

No Tim, I don't normally talk out of my fundament because of the awful impact of methane on global warming. I'm just that kind of big-hearted sorta rodent, ya know? Anyway, if you're done gratifying your desire to make derogatory anatomical references, back to constructive dialog. The point was that the circumstance surrounding the 3000 (i.e., this "broader picture" thing) show it clearly as more than just luck, therefore to treat it as an outlier is disingenuous.

Sure, they wanted the towers before, but NOW they figured out how to get them. It's one thing to sneak a van filled with explosives into a weakly-guarded underground parking garage, or attempt to shut down bridges and tunnels with fertilizer bombs; it involves an entirely superior category of skill and expertise to cooridnate and engineer 9/11 (which succeeded in part because of the astonishing attention to detail, such as selecting planes with a maximum fuel payload -- e.g. a lightly-loaded aircraft might not have sustained a high-temperature blaze long enough to soften the towers' crossbeams).

Now take the current world order, which makes it possible that future attacks could involve weapons capable of much worse, and combine it with the sort of planning that made 9/11 a 3000-casualty 'success' story (with the potential to have been at least 30-50 times greater). See where this going?

OK, let's spin that out. There's a country with an active nuclear program, probable nuclear weapons, great dislike of the U.S., and a long track record of selling weapons to anyone who will buy. We're currently ignoring that country (mostly) while we try to get our act together in Iraq. Last I heard, port security was still having a hard time getting taken seriously, too. In your view, are the administration's current policies the best--or even a reasonably coherent--approach to preventing future mass-casualty attacks?

DaveL:

The DPRK has to send any contraband out by ship. It's also surrounded by nations with no interest of helping them proliferate, and has no real relationship with Islamic terror groups.

Of the five near East/Mideast terror sponsors, three have (had) a confirmed WMD capability: Iran, Iraq, Syria. Pick the one in the middle, and you have an army on the borders of the other two. (And, coincidentally, have US forces on both sides of the "most active" terror sponsor for five years in a row, that's currently not cooperating with IAEA inspectors.) Even if Iraq hadn't been flouting 17 UN resolutions on WMD and sponsoring terrorists, it'd have been a reasonable strategic objective.

And yet North Korea seems to manage to sell missiles and missile technology all over the Middle East. We might catch them if they tried to export nuclear weapons, but are you willing to bet cities on that?

I don't disagree with the idea that Iraq was a problem. If I believed that the administration went into Iraq as part of a coherent, well-thought-out strategy for dealing with problem regimes in that part of the world, I'd be a lot more supportive. But they burned through my willingness to give them the benefit of the doubt some time ago.

My point in bringing up North Korea is not to suggest that there's some easy solution there that the administration is ignoring. It's that North Korea poses the same sort of problem Iraq did, only worse. It's a problem regime against which we don't have a whole lot of good options, it's working on nukes, and its proliferation and terrorism track record is pretty ugly. But we've devoted a tremendous amount of blood and treasure to changing the regime in Iraq while basically ignoring North Korea. It's true that Iraq was a threat, but it does not follow that it was the highest-priority threat, nor that tying up such a large portion of our military strength there was the best way to protect us from future mass-casualty terrorist attacks.

Anony-mouse:

The "talking out of your *ss" bit was probably unfair to you, as was the general tone. It's just that nothing frustrates me more than seemingly sane and reasonable people taking crazy positions. Pat can safely be ignored; you shouldn't be.

As to the likelihood of further attacks of greater power - I'd say chances are still pretty slim. OBL has admitted that the plan worked much better than they had anticipated (though obviously they hoped for even more). Biological attacks don't work that well (the anthrax killed seven), and neither do chemical attacks (the sarin in Japan killed five).

Nukes are obviously extremely dangerous, but for that very reason are unlikely to be used here. They are so powerful that they have better uses (making a deal in the ME with anyone you want - say the Sauds, or blowing up Tel Aviv, for example).

None of the above would do anything to the US but increase our willingness to respond as brutally as necessary, and the world's willingness to approve of it. If this wasn't clear on 9/11, it was by 9/13 (look at the widespread support for our actions in Afghanistan). As a result, I would bet that most of the players in the ME have an interest in preventing a large scale attack on the US, and pass us what information they get.

As for the technical skill involved in planning the attack - the basics could have been dreamed up in a single dorm room at Cal Tech over a bong-filled weekend. Boxcutters - social engineering depending on people's belief that you are supposed to cooperate with hijackers. Toppling the WTC - already tried as an idea. Using jet fuel to melt structure - clever, but not as clever as some of their class projects, I'd bet. Once that "melt" idea is in place, maximizing the chance of success is pretty straight-forward. I think the technical skill is the easy part; actually planning out the mundane details (make sure about the timing of the plane crashes, etc.) is probably harder. (Same with making a nuclear bomb - I don't think big concept technical skill is the main obstacle to most countries getting one).

Again, it's just hard to kill a lot of people, and, as regards the US, there is little point to it (though more now, post-Iraq invasion). Should we take steps to prevent it? Of course. But we shouldn't pretend that the nation is at any serious risk to justify actions (institutional torture, not-even-preemptive war) that we would ordinarily take only at such a point.

DaveL:

"And yet North Korea seems to manage to sell missiles and missile technology all over the Middle East. "

Yes. But that's not illegal, and we really don't have any right to interdict it. The (relatively) recent Yemen shipment is instructive: once they admitted it was for them, we had to allow it. Am I willing to bet a city on our ability to catch everything? No way. But there's probably time for a diplomatic solution before imposing a blockade or nuking Pyongyang--which are the only real possible responses.

"I don't disagree with the idea that Iraq was a problem. If I believed that the administration went into Iraq as part of a coherent, well-thought-out strategy for dealing with problem regimes in that part of the world. . . "

I agree. And if I were devising a strategy, it'd look something like this:

"First, we are using every available tool to dismantle, disrupt and destroy terrorists and their organizations."

"Secondly, we are denying terrorists places of sanctuary or support."

[thirdly] ". . . sponsors of terror will be held equally accountable for the acts of terrorists . . . We will prevent the emergence of terrorist-controlled states. "

"Fourth and finally, we are denying the terrorists the ideological victories they seek by working for freedom and reform in the
broader Middle East. "
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/06/20040602.html

Is the Administration plan perfect? No. But it's a coherent strategy (that's considerably better than any alternative I've seen). And if you accept the premise that the overt Islamist terror sponsors are Iran-Iraq-Syria, the only logical strategic objective (after Afghanistan) is Iraq. There's a case to be made that the cost-benefit curve is too steep--but if the current experiment in democracy takes hold in Baghdad, I doubt history will support that argument.

Cecil, where you see a coherent strategy, I see a bunch of inept idealogues who seized on 9/11 as yet another reason to carry out their pre-existing desire to invade Iraq, and then botched it completely. I hope--truly, sincerely hope--that things eventually turn out well in Iraq, because we've paid a hell of a price and will continue to pay for a long time to come.

DaveL
"I see a bunch of inept idealogues who seized on 9/11 as yet another reason to carry out their pre-existing desire to invade Iraq, and then botched it completely. "

I would hope they had a "pre-existing desire" to change the Iraqi regime, since it had been US law since 1998:
http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1998/10/981009-in.htm
And I'm having a hard time calling a three-week invasion "botched completely."

If the Administration strategy is imperfect, at least part of the blame must rest with the "loyal opposition." Because there's been an absolute vacuum where one would expect constructive counterproposals. And although the price has certainly been high, it's only about 1/3 the cost of 9/11--at least in terms of American lives.

Don't kid yourselves that the threat of a terrorist attack causing mass casualties is gone. As bad as 9/11 was, it could easily have been much, much worse.

The fact that 9/11 killed "only" about 3,000 people is as much an accident of timing as anything else. Had the flights that hit the WTC been 30 minutes to an hour later, the impact would have have occurred later in the workday -- AFTER most/all people working in the WTC had arrived at work. There would almost certainly have been many more casualties. The relatively high impact points also acted to reduce casualties.

If I remember correctly, virtually all of the people above the impact points in the WTC towers died. The impact points were roughly 20% from the top of the towers. Estimates I've seen for the number of persons who formerly worked at the towers were in the neighborhood of 100,000. Assuming the same impact points but later during the workday and 20% absenteeism, (.80 x 100,000) x .20 = 16,000. A lower impact point could have easily yielded proportionally more deaths. I don't know for certain that a lower impact point would have been feasible - but it's certainly possible it would have been.

As for chem WMD: in general, I agree that the threat of a chem terrorist attack is not something for the average person to lose a lot of sleep over. Chem attacks can kill many under the right conditions, but they are self limiting. They are also technically fairly difficult.

Bio, on the other hand, is IMO a very different story. Small quantities of bio agents can kill literally thousands to tens fo thousands. Given the required knowledge and skills, they can be manufactured in a relatively small space using equipment having legitimate pharmaceutical uses. Moreover, manufacturing the agent may not even be required. If Alibek and others can be believed, huge stockpiles of bio agents may still exist in the former Soviet Union. Security at many former Soviet weapons sites is reportedly quite lax.

But that's not the worst. The common cold is highly contageous. So are some potential bio agents - including some that are both deadly and for which no treatment, no effective vaccine, or neither treatment nor effective vaccine exists.

IMO, the 2001 postal anthrax attacks aren't a good model of what to expect. These anthrax attacks don't seem to me to be the work of a terrorist organization. Rather, they seem to have been a perverted and deadly stunt perpetrated by an individual with an ax to grind and/or an agenda to publicize. Remember that the anthrax was sent by mail - with a WARNING NOTE OF ANTHRAX EXPOSURE in the delivery envelope. Those who became sick and/or died seem to have been infected due to cross-contamination (unintentional?) in the mail. I believe a terrorist organization using this same anthrax in an attack would have used a very different delivery method. (I'd prefer not to speculate on possible methods in a public forum.)

Moreover, anthrax - though deadly - is not generally person-to-person contageous. Use a search engine on "Dark Winter" or "Topoff" if you're interested in the possibilities when an bio agent is contageous, is not easily treatable (or is untreatable), and causes a high proportion of fatalities.

I'm not an expert in warmaking, RMc, and it doesn't sound like you are, either. When you are not an expert, the best choice you have is to look among the available experts and ask yourself who sounds more credible, who presents the most thorough argument with the most consistently verifiable facts, and who has more experience in the field being discussed.

I choose this guy and not this guy or this guy.

I choose this guy and not this guy, and this guy instead of God forbid, this guy.

You'll notice how I didn't choose this guy or this guy.

In fact, you'll notice that the experts I chose all Republicans, mostly representatives of the Bush administration. They're just not the stupid ones.

Torture? I chose to believe this guy, who should know a thing or two about it, let's see what hesays:

"Sen. John McCain, whose arms were broken by North Vietnamese torturers, could barely suppress his rage during last week's hearings. Questioning Rumsfeld, the Arizona Republican reduced the normally self-assured Pentagon chief to a helpless sputter when McCain repeatedly demanded, "Who was in charge of the interrogations?" Rumsfeld did not give him a straight answer."

Hm. Sounds like Rumsfeld really has something to be proud of here. Like he's completely convinced and forthcoming about the rightness of how he's prosecuting this war.

DaveL : you mentioned that your office is (or was) a short distance from WTC. Whereabouts do you live (is it in one of the boroughs) if you don't mind my asking. And, to anticipate your first question, no, this is not a prelude to anything juvenile -- no chest-thumping or name-calling or anything. I just want to know if you live in NYC.

That wasn't me. I live about as far from NYC as you can get and still be in the U.S. I think it was Contributor B who said he (she?) worked there.

Aach -- sorry. Contributor B, same question.

"I chose this guy and that guy, some other guys and my barber's third cousin twice removed."

Great. But

What
Would
You
Do
About
Terrorism?

I can't ask the question any clearer than that.

I didn't choose anyone's barber's cousin. I chose a United States Senator; a Marine general who was head of CentCom and a Bush Administration envoy to the Middle East; and a former head of the Joint Chiefs who is now Secretary of State. Republicans all.

I would've stayed out of Iraq. (Now, before you flame me back, read the whole post). Iraq was a dangerous place run by a madman that had little to nothing to do with the militant Muslim sects that want us dead. Our invasion there freed a lot of people, cost a lot of lives and crippled our ability - militarily, politically, in terms of intelligence gathering - to fight other much more important battles.

Fighting terrorism isn't just conducting battles (and I agree that Afghanistan was an important and necessary action). It's aggressively controlling nuclear proliferation, the real, verified nuclear proliferation that has been streaming out of Pakistan. It's confronting Saudi Arabia, which truly does have ongoing ties to terrorism, and funds it when we're not looking and sometimes when we are. It's keeping our limited Middle East language and intelligence expertise focussed on the Pakistani border, where we actually know there are bad guys who have already struck at us.

Many of these opinions aren't mine, they're Anthony Zinni's, and until you tell me you have more experience than he does I'm going to continue to rely on his judgment.

Now that we're in Iraq, of course, we have to stay there and make it work ourselves. So in that sense, you're unfortunately right. We've arrived at a perverse place where many of the dissembling, misleading intimations that the administration spread about Iraq have become true; it is a failed state that requires our presence and there are now real terrorists operating there.

But I have trouble having this discussion with you, using the pronoun "we" and hearing things like "slap some people around," when you and I are not doing the slapping. It's telling to me that the military has been incensed and resistant at every step of the breakdown in their internal safeguards against torture. It tells me that they know that torture is - in addition to being fundamentally un-American - ultimately not that effective, and that it over the long term impairs their ability to conduct war. From what I have read, war and intelligence gathering are more complex than kicking ass and slapping people around to get them to talk.

Stop me here if you're a Navy SEAL or work for the CIA.

There were whiffs that torture was happening in Guantanamo, and you're right about all of America; we didn't much care that we had set aside the Geneva Conventions because we were relatively certain that what we had there was a bunch of terrorists. I include myself there, and maybe I was wrong, but it's hard to feel bad for someone you know tried to kill you.

But the reason Abu Ghraib is a big deal, a bigger deal than what might have happened in Guantanamo, is that your great unwashed, RMc, is uneasy. We are not convinced that those people were all terrorists. We don't completely buy the administration line that what's going on in Iraq isn't an insurgency, mostly because the administration so clearly seems to be guessing and hoping that it isn't.

Are the insurgents wrong? Yes, they're pouting and chest-thumping and keeping their country from becoming a stable, sane democracy. Are there terrorists among them? Probably. Should we be torturing them all just to sort it out? No, we shouldn't.

I think the "Great Unwashed" formulation was mine, Contributor B. Also I'd like to ask : do you also live in NYC or do you just work there. Actually, I'd like to know a bit about where all of you live ,and no, before you ask, I'm not going to send goon squads to anybody's house. I know Jane lives in NYC; I'm in Colorado Springs; what about the rest of you all?

Yeah, yer right. I noticed that after I posted.

I don't live in New York any more. I moved to Germany for a year, where I was regarded as a right-winger and found myself in the uncomfortable position of defending the Bush administration against the accusations of self-righteous pacifists, and now I live in Boston. I am also not from New York; I moved there in the late nineties to seek my boomtown fortune.

Are the insurgents wrong? Yes, they're pouting and chest-thumping and keeping their country from becoming a stable, sane democracy. Are there terrorists among them? Probably. Should we be torturing them all just to sort it out? No, we shouldn't.

Obviously. But how do we get info out of them? Ask politely?

And they're not "insurgents," as the NYTimes gingerly calls them. They are traitors to their own people. They blaspheme the name of Islam. They are murderers. They are vermin, in need of extermination.

Period.

DaveL: One difference between North Korea and Iraq is that a military solution would be much more difficult in North Korea. First off, we'd either need permission from China, or have to be prepared for the possibility of millions of Chinese men being thrown in against us. With Iraq, military action by the neighbors was the least of our concern. They probably did take in some people and equipment we wanted to capture, and they are allowing terrorists to filter across the borders, but if you think that's hard to handle, try having wave after wave of men rush at you until you run out of ammo. It's what happened to our marines that got too close to the Chinese border in the 50's.

Second, there's the terrain and the people. There are mountains everywhere, which together with the rice paddies that fill most of the flat spots would often restrict our armor to narrow roads, which could be swept by heavy weapons concealed in the hills or even dug into the bedrock. Aircraft could take out those weapons, but first we've got to find them. It's fundamentally harder to conduct an air search of rocky crags with brush and trees than to search sand-dunes, and they've had 60 years to dig those emplacements and encourage vegetation to grow back and conceal them. Weather might restrict our aircraft quite often. Arab soldiers have a long history of running away at the first reverse, but Koreans can be very tough and well-disciplined soldiers. We might luck out and find that the terrible leadership up there has alienated the troops, but I fear we'll find quite a few small units that will fight hard and effectively until every man is dead. There are too many spots where 10 men can ambush and kill 50 or hold for hours against 500. Even when we clear out the last pocket of resistance, the terrain will still slow us down and give the Norks time to reqroup.

And finally, we'll have quite a lot of trouble around our bases. The commies have found far too many useful fools in South Korea.

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