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Kerry, you're exactly right. The "ticking bomb" torture scenario is a fairy tale. That justification for torture assumes that my government—or any government—can be as omniscient as Jack Bauer's screenwriters. How very convenient to imagine that the government would somehow know all about a plot, including when the bomb will go off and who has the code to turn it off! Why am I ever supposed to trust the rulers of any country—Russia, Iran, Morocco, or the U.S.—to know, with 100 percent certainty, that they've arrested exactly the right person?
Meanwhile, it looks like the people behind the torture memos (which did not, as Emily noted, result in information about a ticking bomb or any other plots), will be investigated—whether here or in Europe.
Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon is known for attempting to extradite Pinochet from London for trial in Madrid ... and also for presciently indicting Osama Bin Laden and 34 other al-Qaida operatives in 2003. Unlike Gitmo's torture, Garzon's indictment actually led to long prison sentences, according to the BBC, for 18 people—including one person convicted for helping to plot the 9/11 attacks.
Now Judge Garzon has given the go-ahead to a criminal investigation of the Bush administration team behind the torture memos. Reuters says that the six indicted include "William Haynes II, former general counsel for the Department of Defense; John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who wrote secret legal opinions saying President George W. Bush had the authority to circumvent the Geneva Conventions; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy; Jay Bybee, Yoo's former boss at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel; and David Addington, chief of staff and legal adviser to ex-Vice President Dick Cheney." Can Bush and Cheney be far behind?
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A friend of mine had a different take than Ann's and Meghan's on The New Yorker's article about "neuroenhancers." She worried that it perpetuated the stigma of taking these drugs for medically prescribed reasons. The article, after all, compares these drugs to cosmetic surgery and the sort of advantage gained by private tutors and mentions only college students who scam their way into prescriptions or who buy the drugs illegally, not the sort who take it to correct for a disorder.
And then there was the mention of "a middle-aged woman, a successful Philadelphia lawyer, who mentioned having to struggle a bit to come up with certain names." The author notes: "Of course, people in her position could strive to get regular exercise and plenty of intellectual stimulation...[But] maybe they want something easier than sweaty workouts and Russian novels: a pill."
Which indicates that taking Adderall is taking the easy way out. Which maybe it is for students who would prefer illegally obtained Adderall to three Red Bulls in one night (which, while legal, surely pose their own health risks) or to less partying.
Meghan, you say, "As Margaret put it, while Adderall and Ritalin were once drugs mainly used to treat ADD and ADHD, now they're ‘drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted.' "
Except that this article lets us forget that these are also drugs still used to treat very real disorders. It is too easy to read the article and forget that there are people who are prescribed Adderall because they have ADD or ADHD, who take Adderall for good reason and who are not cheating or gaining unfair advantage or just trying to relieve themselves of their technological distractions by so doing. I would have loved to hear from a college student who takes Adderall for ADD and who has been asked to sell it by classmates or who struggles against the stigma of taking it to complement the students in the article who take it to pull all-nighters.
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Yesterday, in her taxonomy of torture defenders, Dahlia linked to this MSNBC clip in which Joe Scarborough bemoans our lack of support for the clandestine operations of the Central Intelligence Agency. Con Coughlin expresses a similar concern for the blow to the agency's morale here; Ex-CIA director Michael Hayden fears the release of the memos will introduce "institutional timidity," taken to be a bad thing. Thus we learn that the CIA is crippled by its need to answer to those it ought to protect. Left to their own devices—unconstrained by the demands of accountability—the good guys, who are probably very handsome, will roam the surface of the planet dragging bad guys from their respective holes. In Scarborough's words, the CIA operates most effectively when it is told, simply: "Go out and get the job done and dammit you keep my kids safe!"
I am struck by the romanticism of this vision, this willingness to place such faith in a government agency shorn of oversight. Scarborough clearly thinks it's morally acceptable to torture terrorists. But given that no one thinks it's OK to torture innocent people, why assume that the CIA can competently distinguish agents of terror from the general population? Recent history does not instill confidence. Ancient history does not instill confidence. One simply has to believe that the agents of this particular bureaucracy will not be subject to all the incentive-distorting forces that challenge every other bureaucracy.
Joe Scarborough is not a man known for his enduring faith in the capacity of American government to solve complex social problems. And I don't know where he would have gotten his idealized vision of the CIA—those taciturn, hyperacrobatic, brilliant, do-gooder patriots—if not from the Hollywood establishment he so despises.
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Could the Bush administration lawyers who wrote the torture memos really be on the hook, as I suggested Monday (and plenty of their critics have longed for)? President Obama left that door surprisingly ajar today. From his press conference:
With respect to those who formulated those
legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the
Attorney General within the parameters of various laws, and I don't want to
prejudge that. I think that there are a host of very complicated issues
involved there.
So it's Eric Holder's call. Despite Obama's push to move forward without looking back, once you put historical evidence out there that's as disturbing as these memos are, it takes on a life of it's own. At the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates asks how we can expect the attorney general to be independent of the president since he or she is an appointee of the executive branch. It's a good question, and the difficulty Ta-Nehisi has his finger on is why we cherish the memory of Eliot Richardson, the Nixon AG who refused to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox when the president ordered him to. Richardson famously had to resign, but Obama is deliberately signaling that Holder has room to make his own decision. What happens next? I'd say all eyes are on the long-delayed report from DoJ's Office of Professional Responsibility that reportedly creams the DoJ lawyers who provided the legal rationale for torture. The Bush administration sat on it. Time for the Obama team to let the report fly.
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Ann,like you, I was fascinated by Margaret Talbot’s piece in The New Yorker about Adderall, Ritalin, Provigil and other so-called“cognitive enhancers.” My curiosity wasn’t entirely vicarious. I’ve taken bothProvigil and Adderall for precisely the reasons the overworked Harvard seniorin her piece says he takes it: to get more done. As Margaret put it, whileAdderall and Ritalin were once drugs mainly used to treat ADD and ADHD, nowthey’re “drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to becomehigher-functioning and more overcommitted.” What she so astutely gets at are thecultural implications and ramifications, noting that “every era, it seems, hasits own defining drug.” Her piece reveals, as you say, the fact that we’re notquite enamored of our own need for these stimulants, though one could have imagined a piece some yearsback that would romanticize these stimulants the way the media used toromanticize businessmen who slept less than 4 hours a night. Instead, Margaretquotes many users who point out that these drugs don’t necessarily “enhance.” Infact, in my experience—and as Joshua Foer memorably wrote about for Slate—theycan bring a certain tunnel vision with them. They do not make you more likelyto be astute. Adderall, I found, was perfect for itemizing a year’s worth ofreceipts the day before you have to file your taxes; it was not useful forwriting a piece. (This is another good essay onAdderall, from N+1.)
But I think there’s a deeper irony here. Adderall is a drug for our Information Age notbecause it actually works as a “cognitive enhancer,” it strikes me, but becauseit merely makes it possible to do what we once used to take for granted, beforeinstant-messaging technology and mobile email started to make our brains gohaywire. That is, they make it possible to ignore that blinking light on the “CrackBerry”and finish a task. Studies have actually shown that multitasking and using emailat the office all day leadsto fall in IQ larger than if you smoked a joint at work. From that perspective,Adderall isn’t an enhancer. It’s just a corrective that gets you back to normal. Only it’s not really "normal," just as drinking a VitaminWater and eating apower bar is not the same as drinking water and eating vitamin-packed fruitsand vegetables.
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In Dave Cullen’s recent Slate piece about what we learned from
Columbine, he writes that “the first lesson is really one that we have unlearned, which is that there actually isn't a distinct
psychological profile of the school killer.” Nor, I imagine, is there one for a
Craigslist killer, but that hasn’t stopped the CNN morning news anchors from
expressing repeated shock that the man who was charged on Monday with the
murder of a woman he met on Craigslist is a 22-year-old medical student. An article
in the Boston Globe today has the headline “Charges conflict with
portrait of clean-cut student,” and the attached photo gallery highlights the
issue. It’s not just that he’s a med student. It’s that he’s an attractive,
broad-shouldered med student with a big white smile and a well-pressed polo shirt. Just
as last week’s Susan Boyle clip drew attention to just how strongly we (especially
those girls in the audience!) expect our pop stars to be hyper-groomed, thin
and beautiful, the circulating photos of Philip Markoff remind us that, as
Cullen mentioned, we still expect killers to be greasy-haired, scrawny, and
perhaps trench coat-clad. Well, ugly chicks can sing. And preppy hunks can
kill.
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Tara Parker-Pope has an interview on her New York Times "Well" blog with Trisha Meili, otherwise known as the Central Park jogger. To refresh your collective cultural memories: Meili was raped and viciously assaulted in Central Park in 1989. A group of Harlem teenagers was arrested for the crime, and convicted on scant evidence, only to later be exonerated. The case was famously written about by Joan Didion in the New York Review of Books and became emblematic of a racially and socioeconomically divided New York City.
Meili discusses with Pope her decision to come out publicly as the jogger in 2003, when she wrote the memoir I Am the Central Park Jogger: A Story of Hope and Possibility:
The media keeping my anonymity is something that I do appreciate. I was
known as the Central Park jogger, and when I told my story it was my
choice. That was a degree of control that I had completely lost with
the attack and the rape. When I’d meet someone it’s not like I would
say, “Hi, I’m the Central Park jogger.” It’s kind of a conversation
stopper. I decided to share my story because I had a real sense that
sharing the story would help other people. That’s the message I’ve
gotten, that sharing has given them hope.
I found this particularly interesting because Didion's essay has a large passage about the American media convention of keeping rape accusers names out of the press, something I've written about here before. Because of this convention, according to Didion, Meili was referred to by name frequently everywhere but the mainstream media.
Everyone in the courthouse, everyone who worked for a
paper or a television station or who followed the case for whatever
professional reason, knew her name. She was referred to by name in all
court records and in all court proceedings. She was named, in the days
immediately following the attack, on local television stations. She was
also routinely named—and this was part of the difficulty, part of what
led to a damaging self-righteousness among those who did not name her
and to an equally damaging embattlement among those who did, in
Manhattan's black-owned newspapers, The Amsterdam News and The City Sun,
and she was named as well on WLIB, the Manhattan radio station owned by
a black partnership which included Percy Sutton and, until 1985 when he
transferred his stock to his son, Mayor Dinkins.
Though New York City is not the tinderbox of racial unrest that it was in the late '80s and early '90s, nor is it anywhere near as crime-ridden, reflecting on the Didion essay makes me wonder if the case would play out in the media in quite the same way if it had occurred in 2009. Would the existence of bloggers make anonymity impossible for a woman like Meili, the unhappy victim caught in such a public trial?
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