nobody expects the spanish inquisition, joker edition

"takes refuge in the fact that anything Mr. Cheney did wasn't as bad as incinerating millions of innocent people in a nuclear holocaust" - I see this argument in its various forms all the time regarding torture and our foreign policies on terrorism and terrorism suspects. "Well al Qaeda kidnaps people and cuts their fucking heads off." Or they actually use the drills on people instead of just threatening to do so, something like that. I haven't yet figured out how this is supposed to be a convincing argument, but it's used ALL the time. It's like they're trying to prove our moral supremacy by stating hey "well at least we're not as bad as those guys".

Maybe I'll grant that there's a margin of relativism there that matters somewhere. But it's still ignoring something: It's like the difference between someone who brutally kills and maims people for sport and someone who does so for money. The margin is pretty small. It really only matters when you sentence people for doing something illegal and dangerous to the health of society at large. When the argument we're making for our moral high ground in this fight is that "we're not as bad as they are" and not "this is how good we are" or "how great our ideals and ideas are", we're not going to be winning the moral high ground anytime soon.

More to the point, there was never any reason to abandon the moral high ground. It was like all other options were surrendered without any consideration or condition, maybe in a moment of panic, maybe just because we wanted to feel better. We went straight to being savages for...what? Supposedly so we're safer and haven't been attacked, so it must have "worked". Except now we have savages internally and war criminals who aren't being prosecuted and treated as such. I'm not technically opposed to the use of the military to combat terrorism or the use of the CIA to capture and interrogate high value targets. But brutal torture and treatment of prisoners is not America and shouldn't be. And emerging from a regime that permitted this devaluation of any basic integrity, such as a nation can have any, only reminds me just how small the line between Big Brother and an accountable democracy really is.

It occurred to me in looking over the various analogies being used to defend or justify such policies that people seem to be overlooking the actual purposes and utility of barbarity and torture. It is really about revenge, punishment and control. It has nothing at all to do with interrogation, though it does extract "confessions", some of which might even be true. One such argument being circulated is the listing of various popular culture movies and shows wherein the hero acts quickly and decisively, but viciously, upon an obvious bad guy to extract vital information and save the day. This obfuscates the problem quite well. It supposes
1) that this sort of scenario with obvious good guy-bad guy knowledge exists anywhere in the world (particularly the notion of a bad guy and their level of knowledge of operations)
2) doing such things will save lives (always)
3) The hero is unaffected by this action (sometimes the movie version touches on this...Munich for example)
4) The hero is to be lauded for it (because the ends justified the means)

Now I can possibly find some justification that the ends sometimes justify the means in some cases, so that argument isn't totally useless by itself. It's possible that in the very strict sense someone who knows with certainty that a person can save lives, like the code to a bomb or something might be justifiably assaulted if no other way can be made to quickly appeal to their self-interest. What is not clear is if that would actually do anything, ie that it would ever save the day. We have a presumption of another Hollywood fantasy that the bad guy will quickly give up when you start breaking his fingers, punching him in the face, or shooting him in the kneecaps. They may indeed in some cases. But to use one such Hollywood fantasy as a counter, in the Dark Knight there's an interrogation scene where Joker knows where the DA is and that he will be killed unless action is taken quickly to save him. He's playing a game, so after the scene is over you know full well that he's more than willing to tell Batman where he is. He spends the entire time trying to see just how far he can push Batman outside the boundaries of rules, and he gets pretty damn far. Accepting also that a vigilante crime fighter is already outside the boundaries of rules to begin with. In that one scene we can start to see that the purpose of the beatings and torture isn't to get a confession, because that was already ordained by the bizarre sense of camaraderie that the two iconic and diametrically opposed characters share by existing not quite in the boundaries of normal society. It's to satisfy our sense of rage. It offends us in some deep level that some people are monstrous to their fellow man. And in response, if we lose control of the situation and our place in it, we can risk becoming monsters ourselves.

It's a very thin line we walk when we use violence to aggressively solve problems, ie, slay dragons, as practical and perhaps even sometimes necessary as that may be. But in the case of human beings, it's not always clear to us that what we have in front of us is always a dragon worth slaying. Once we convince ourselves it is a monster and not a human being (perhaps one gone very awry), anything is possible. The reason we have laws and processes and procedures for dealing with criminals is to protect ourselves, not really from them, but from ourselves. It introduces doubt into that certainty and allows us to step back and see, if temporarily, this is still a human being. "They may have done something monstrous. But what I must do is prove to others that this is a monster and let us all take action then." Not become one myself and take matters into my own hands. As fantastic as it seems, human beings are never so transparently vile as Hollywood portrays (obviously since we are often compelled to root for villains too it's not quite that simple even in Hollywood). However people are sometimes so consumed in a sense of their own decency that nothing they do gives them pause or doubt, no matter how twisted that action may be, it can be justified because "I am a good/holy/decent/family man/et al". Maybe that's a difference in our transgressions of evil behavior, aka torture. It's still a very small comfort to me if it is.