ethics

Over at Balkinization, Brian Tamahana has shared a moment of sickening clarity:

I had lunch today with a prominent German Constitutional scholar who was flabbergasted about something that I could not adequately explain.

He asked me how the candidate to become the top legal official of the U.S. government could say that he does not know whether water-boarding constitutes “torture” (as Judge Mukasey stated yesterday in his confirmation hearings). My colleague insisted that in Germany any person who uttered such a statement would be finished. He found it shocking that a person could say this in America and still become our Attorney General.

At first I was surprised at his genuine disbelief; and then I felt a bit ashamed that I did not also react with disbelief.

And yesterday at Slate, a piece co-written Dahlia Lithwick (whose reporting over the last year or two on the Bush Administration’s detention and interrogation practices has been consistently stellar) and Philip Carter brings another aspect of Mukasey’s craven dissembling into focus. The rub:

…Mukasey’s worst sleight-of-hand regarding waterboarding [is] his assertion Thursday that to comment about specific techniques would be irresponsible “when there are people who are using coercive techniques and who are being authorized to use coercive techniques. … And for me to say something that is going to put their careers or freedom at risk simply because I want to be congenial—I don’t think it would be responsible of me to do that.” Please. This administration has put careers at risk by muddying legal rules. If Mukasey really wanted to save careers, he would reinstate the bright-line rules that define and prohibit torture, as opposed to confusing and confounding them. By muddying these rules, we have now put generations of our own soldiers at risk should they ever be captured. It is they, and not Mukasey, who may face enemies using these very practices, shored up with our own tortured logic.

It is the oldest trick in the Bush administration’s psychological playbook to claim that we must be one serious badass nation if we are willing to do sick, unspeakable things to our enemies—even in the face of international condemnation and in violation of our own laws and ethical rules. But when those sick, unspeakable practices endanger our own soldiers, horrify our allies, and embolden our enemies, we don’t look like badasses anymore. We just look like sadists. And when those practices don’t even work, we look like stupid sadists to boot. There’s an easy fix here. Renounce torture. It was once an unremarkable proposition that the Unites States doesn’t stand for senseless sadism. What a tragedy that defending it has suddenly become a point of principle.

I think there’s still hope of cleansing our country’s reputation once we can get rid of the Bush cabal. If I didn’t think so, I’d be acting on a thought that I confess occurred to me a few times recently – something I never dreamed I’d even consider for a brief moment: emigrating.