CIA porn

A lot of the hand-wringing about the destruction of the torture tapes seems to me to miss the point. People talk about the false evidence used to arrest Jose Padilla or to condemn the accused in Guantanamo based on phony confessions produced by waterboarding. But the hue and cry about what was or wasn’t on those videos presumes that people care about fairness to individuals. I don’t see the evidence of that.

The argument in favor of torture from the beginning—and that seduced many so-called liberals who eagerly debated how many angels should be tortured on the head of pin—was that no matter who got hurt, saving innocent Americans was more important. That’s the standard retort to any claim that something is going wrong with the interrogation/secret prison/beat-em-to-a-pulp system. Are you willing to risk thousands of dead Americans by restraining us? That is, who cares if the guy's innocent? We might find a guilty one.

Obviously, most people prefer their own safety to the civil rights of others and are willing to sacrifice the historic protections from tyranny built up over centuries to make sure that no 9/11s ever happen again. I would add my own personal belief that there is a strong whiff of vengeance involved as well as people sit back and contemplate or refuse to contemplate torture because they are pissed off about what happened and want someone to pay. It works in criminal justice all the time—bring in someone and accuse them whether they did it or not—so why not in world politics?

I thought that Rumsfeld would be toast 48 hours after the Abu Ghraib photos came out, and instead he lasted for years. Why does anyone think the torture videos would have changed the debate significantly? The moral rot oozing from the centers of power here has only begun to emit its penetrating scent. We have a lot longer to wait before the stench becomes overwhelming. But that day will come, and one piece of evidence more or less won’t make all that much difference. Underneath is a collective, national crime whose poison runs far too deep.