Torture, With Some Thoughts on Ideology

I've not said much about the Bush torture regime, except to note that you can't really expect better from a man who thinks it's fun to feed firecrackers to frogs. I skimmed over this post by Sebastian Holsclaw at Obsidian Wings yesterday (trying madly to catch up) and then Andrew Sullivan highlighted it today.

One thing that strikes me is that there is common ground between the left and the right on certain issues. Torture should be a no-brainer for any thoughtful citizen, and the idea that we have to parse the definition of torture is one of the signal defeats of civilization by the wing-nut right. Distrust of government is, perhaps, a conservative position. My own feeling is that it should be an American position. This bit reflects my own thinking precisely:

The hypothetical has nothing to do with the discussion of whether or not we (the United States) ought to be torturing people. One of the key things that conservatives ought to remember (and which we notice all the time in liberal proposals) is that INTENTIONS DO NOT EQUAL OUTCOMES. The government is horribly incompetent at all sorts of things and we ought not abandon that insight when analyzing proposals of people who allege that they are our allies (the idea that Bush is a conservative ally is something I'd like to argue about on another day--but my short answer is that he isn't).

As with limitations on free speech, I don't trust the government to be able to fairly and nimbly navigate the rules that would be necessary to make certain that it only used a legal right to torture when it was the right choice. Sadly this is no longer a hypothetical question. In actual practice, we find that Bush's administration has tortured men who not only didn't know anything about what they were being tortured about, but weren't even affiliated with Al Qaeda.

Let me say that again. Bush's administration has tortured men who were factually innocent.

The hypothetical posed is, of course, loaded in favor of the "yes" answer -- yes it was worth it, but only because the questioner has set up the question so that no other answer is possible. Life doesn't set up questions like that, and as Sebastian points out quite clearly, we cannot rely on the judgment of one man -- a man whose judgment is plainly open to question -- to determine whether torture is "worth it." And anyone who thinks that one man is actually making that decision on a case-by-case basis is dreaming. The reality is even worse: that one man, who has little, if any moral sense, has authorized underlings to make the decision to torture "suspects" as a matter of national policy.

Got that? Torture is official American policy.

Sullivan, in a later post comments on the enthusiasm of the right for torture -- just listen to anything Rudy Giuliani has to say on the question. This is a matter of terminology again -- which are the true "conservatives"? This is one reason I will no longer admit to "conservative" positions. I do have them -- almost libertarian, in some areas, but the labeling is such that I won't put myself in the same boat as Giuliani, Bush, Romney, Dobson, Sheldon, the pope -- that whole bunch of self-serving cheap politicians who routinely play to the lowest common denominator with a script developed from misrepresentations and outright lies.

Actually, the more I think about this, the more I find myself approaching questions of ideology -- political philosophy -- from the same mindset that I use for moral questions: it's nothing so simple as a set of tribal taboos handed down from generation to generation. It's a matter of basic principles (hence the "first causes" of this blog's subtitle) applied as consistently as possible to real issues in daily life.

I may even elaborate on that as time goes by.