How to be an Anti-Torture Hysteric

If even Dick Cheney approves of Obama's foreign policy team, you know the president-elect has done an unexpectedly good job on that front:

Cheney lauds Obama's national security team

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney is calling President-elect Barack Obama's national security lineup "a pretty good team."

In a wide-ranging interview with ABC News with 35 days left in the Bush administration, Cheney also again vehemently defended going to war in Iraq, said waterboarding of suspects in the war on terror was justified in some instances and opposed closing the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"I must say, I think it's a pretty good team," Cheney said of Obama's national security choices, in a segment of the interview broadcast Tuesday on "Good Morning America."

I'm with Cheney on this, and I don't know a single ardent fan of Barack Obama (or a single detractor, for that matter) who predicted that we'd end up with a national security team like the one we now have. And Obama keeps going out of his way to prove that meant it when he said he'd rise above partisanship:

Calif. evangelist to give inaugural invocation

Obama's choice of Rick Warren is an olive branch to religious conservatives

Barack Obama has selected the Rev. Rick Warren, the evangelical pastor and author of “The Purpose Driven Life,” to deliver the invocation at his inauguration, a role that positions Mr. Warren to succeed Billy Graham as the nation’s pre-eminent minister and reflects the generational changes in the evangelical Christian movement.

Some of the left are having a conniption fit over this, but some of the left are prone to that kind of reaction.

Barack Obama will soon pick his intelligence team, but we've already learned one important fact about our president-elect on this front as well. The fact we have learned is that he is not the left wing hysteric that he appeared to be on the campaign trail:

Obama faces delicate task with CIA

Caught between desire to break from Bush, alienating the agency

WASHINGTON - For two years on the presidential campaign trail, Barack Obama rallied crowds with strongly worded critiques of the Bush administration’s most controversial counterterrorism programs, from hiding terrorism suspects in secret Central Intelligence Agency jails to questioning them with methods he denounced as torture.

Now Mr. Obama must take charge of the C.I.A., in what is already proving to be one of the more treacherous patches of his transition to the White House.

Last week, John O. Brennan , a C.I.A. veteran who was widely seen as Mr. Obama’s likeliest choice to head the intelligence agency, withdrew his name from consideration after liberal critics attacked his alleged role in the agency’s detention and interrogation program.

Brennan withdrew his name, but the fact that Obama wanted to have that man lead the CIA pretty much proves that Obama fully appreciates the fact that there is a rationale debate to be had about interrogation techniques. This sets him apart from left wing hysterics who emotionally frame the issue as a debate between pro-torture vs. anti-torture advocates. The actual debate is over the harshness of interrogation techniques that should be allowed under particular circumstances. How harsh a technique should be allowed for a low-level al Qaeda operative who probably knows nothing of any importance? How harsh a technique should be allowed for a high-level al Qaeda detainee who is thought to have time-sensitive information about an impending mass-casualty attack on innocent and unsuspecting men, women and children? Adults debate that issue, and most agree that torture is not an option. Where they disagree is on the question of what constitutes torture and how harsh the interrogation technique should be (short of torture).

Popular liberal bloggers approach the issue in an entirely different way. They consider it to be self-evident that harsh interrogation techniques amount to torture (so the issue need not be further analyzed) and that such techniques are ineffective anyway. That being the case, anyone who supports the use of, say, waterboarding for a high-level al Qaeda detainee must be either wretchedly evil or colossally stupid (or, most likely, both). This level of thinking is what you often see in low-budget movies in which the bad guy is evil through and through, whereas the good guy is as pure as the driven snow.

Like the use of the death penalty for murder, what makes the issue difficult is that moral imperatives collide. If you are mainly concerned with self-aggrandizement, you'll instead frame the issue as one of good vs. evil (with you as a champion of the good, of course). People are free to do that, but, to me, it is a sign that they are fixated in an adolescent stage of development.

With regard to the death penalty, it seems immoral for the state to take the life of someone who has committed a grisly murder of a young child, but it also seems immoral not to take that life if it might deter many similar crimes in the future. To avoid that debate, many liberals simply assert that the death penalty cannot possibly deter murder. The problem is that much evidence suggests otherwise. The same attempted end-run is seen in the debate over torture. Anti-torture fanatics instinctively realize that their position is not the obviously moral one if the use of harsh interrogation stands any chance of saving many innocent lives. To avoid dealing with that possibility like an adult, they hysterically classify all harsh interrogation techniques as "torture" and then simply declare that "torture doesn't work" (and then they quote someone like John McCain as saying so, as if that settles the debate). Well, if all harsh interrogation techniques amount to torture, and if torture doesn't work anyway, then those who favor the use of waterboarding for high-level al Qaeda detainees must be wretchedly evil or colossally stupid (or both). That's how you argue on the far left.

How do anti-torture hysterics on the far left avoid answering the one key question, which is this: setting aside the issue of torture, what is the harshest interrogation technique that should be allowed for high-level al Qaeda detainees thought to have information about an impending mass-casualty attack on civilians? No anti-torture champion ever addresses that question, and the way they avoid it to say something like "I'm for what's in the Army Field Manual." But that's not a moral or ethical position. It's just a way to dodge the hard debate so that you can set yourself up as a champion of virtue (and simultaneously characterize your opponents as pathologically evil). Well, not everyone on the left is this way, I am glad to say:

But even some senior Democratic lawmakers who are vehement critics of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies seemed reluctant in recent interviews to commit the new administration to following the Army Field Manual in all cases.
...
But in an interview on Tuesday, Mrs. Feinstein indicated that extreme cases might call for flexibility. “I think that you have to use the noncoercive standard to the greatest extent possible,” she said, raising the possibility that an imminent terrorist threat might require special measures.

You don't say. And what's the principle that should followed in deciding how harsh those "special measures" should be? That's the question, and no anti-torture hysteric on the left will ever come close to touching it. The moment they do, it ruins their game (i.e., they would be doing the hard work of drawing the line instead of taking the easy way out by accusing their intellectual opponents of being morally bankrupt). So far, it seem to me that, in light of the fact that he wanted John Brennan to head the CIA, Barack Obama is not going to play this game. Time will tell.