The XX Factor: What women really think.

Torture and Competence

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.

"Torture"

Emily, you are absolutely right that we've known for a while, in a vague sort of way, that terrible things happened in the CIA's "unofficial" black-hole prisons. But you are also right that the question of what, now, we are going to to do with the legacy of American-government-sanctioned torture is not fading away. On the contrary, it is growing ever sharper. Just as it usually takes awhile—sometimes a whole generation—for countries that have committed political crimes to come to terms with them, so too will it take some time for all of us to understand that the abuses of detainees that took place during the past seven years in CIA and U.S. government custody were not only immoral but illegal, that they violated both our own Constitution as well as international treaties we signed decades ago, and that the people who gave the orders to use torture on prisoners in American custody knew all of this perfectly well.  

Right now, the Obama administration—and indeed the general public—is inclined to "focus on the future," not the past, and I sense that even Congress would be made queasy by a full-scale prosecution of the torturers. But give it a few more years, and that might no longer be the case. When I read Mark Danner's essay yesterday, I suddenly thought, for the very first time: President Bush might go to jail for this. Eventually.