One could easily tire of critiquing the work of Richard Cohen since it has already been established that his work is sloppy and that he’d never pass a symbolic logic course at university. But he still writes for the Washington Post and that means that his illogic is pumped into the collective hive-mind of official Washington once or twice a week. Combating that influence is one of the primary reasons for the blogosphere to exist; so, we must never tire of critiquing Mr. Cohen’s work. Today, Mr. Cohen writes a column that is ostensibly about how good it is that we are no longer torturing people, but his real point is to defend torture because it works and to argue that its prohibition will not make us safer.
I, for one, am glad we’re no longer torturing anyone, but ceasing this foul practice will not in any way make Americans safer. We prohibit torture for other reasons.
Yet the debate over torture has been infected with silly arguments about utility: whether it works or not. Of course it works — sometimes or rarely, but if a proverbial bomb is ticking, that may just be the one time it works.
I like playground analogies. If a bully threatens you with force, you will probably give him what you have. If it’s lunch money, it’s his; if it’s information, you provide it. The problem arises when you don’t have what the bully wants. If you have no cash, you can’t give him your lunch money. Maybe you’ll pull a piece of paper out of your empty wallet and tell him it can be redeemed at Wal-Mart for five bucks. If the bully wants the PIN number to your mother’s checking account and you don’t know it, you’re going to give him a made-up number. So, while force and the threat of force certainly do ‘work’, they also lead to false testimony resulting in false leads. And how do people feel about bullies? Do they do them favors? Do they willingly cooperate with them? Do they harbor secret desires for revenge? Do they form little cells to gang up and overwhelm them?
It’s really this last, psychological element, that escapes Cohen’s understanding and imagination. He makes perfectly clear that he has no internal frame for processing the motivation of the 9/11 terrorists.
But it is important to understand that abolishing torture will not make us safer. Terrorists do not give a damn about our morality, our moral authority or what one columnist called “our moral compass.” George Bush was certainly disliked in much of the world, but the Sept. 11 attacks were planned while Bill Clinton was in office, and he offended no one with the possible exception of the Christian right. Indeed, he went around the world apologizing for America’s misdeeds — slavery, in particular. No terrorist turned back as a result.
It’s almost preposterous to argue that the foreign policies of Bill Clinton didn’t offend Usama bin-Laden, the 9/11 hijackers, and their co-conspirators. Bin-Laden issued fatwas against the United States in 1996 and 1998…both years well into the Clinton administration. Here’s what bin-Laden opened with in his 1996 fatwa:
It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory. Massacres in Tajakestan, Burma, Cashmere, Assam, Philippine, Fatani, Ogadin, Somalia, Erithria, Chechnia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina took place, massacres that send shivers in the body and shake the conscience. All of this and the world watch and hear, and not only didn’t respond to these atrocities, but also with a clear conspiracy between the USA and its’ allies and under the cover of the iniquitous United Nations, the dispossessed people were even prevented from obtaining arms to defend themselves.
Why America deserved blame for events in Chechnya, Bosnia, Kashmir, and other places isn’t clear, but bin-Laden felt that Muslims were under siege and he identified the USA and Israel as the prime culprits. As the following makes clear, his main grievance was the stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia.
The people of Islam awakened and realised that they are the main target for the aggression of the Zionist-Crusaders alliance. All false claims and propaganda about “Human Rights” were hammered down and exposed by the massacres that took place against the Muslims in every part of the world.
The latest and the greatest of these aggressions, incurred by the Muslims since the death of the Prophet (ALLAH’S BLESSING AND SALUTATIONS ON HIM) is the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places -the foundation of the house of Islam, the place of the revelation, the source of the message and the place of the noble Ka’ba, the Qiblah of all Muslims- by the armies of the American Crusaders and their allies.
Until you understand that we were attacked for a reason, you can’t even begin to figure out how to reduce people’s desire to attack us again. After 9/11, the United States quietly moved its troops out of Saudi Arabia and into Qatar and other Gulf States. That made us safer. Unfortunately, other actions taken by the Bush administration more than wiped out that benefit. Note that bin-Laden mocked our dedication to human rights all the way back in 1996. Making his case for him has not made us safer or recruitment more difficult for Islamist radicals. Because Cohen doesn’t examine the motivations of terrorists, he concludes that they are killing automatons who will try to attack us regardless of what policies we have or how we are perceived to treat Muslims. But people are only motivated to kill us because they vociferously oppose our policies and consider them deeply immoral. Again, making their case for them does not make us safer. Quite the opposite.
Despite this, Cohen draws the opposite conclusion.
If Obama thinks the world will respond to his new torture policy, he is seriously misguided. Indeed, he has made things a bit easier for terrorists who now know what will not happen to them if they get caught.
Why would the world not respond positively to the news that the United States has abandoned torture? Every potential jihadi that learns of this will be influenced by it to some positive degree. It will make recruitment harder, and that means that this decision does not make things easier for terrorists. This far outweighs whatever we lose in our ability to induce terror-by-reputation in the people we capture.
Next, Mr. Cohen makes a confession.
The horror of Sept. 11 resides in me like a dormant pathogen. It took a long time before I could pass a New York fire station — the memorials still fresh — without tearing up. I vowed vengeance that day — yes, good Old Testament-style vengeance — and that ember glows within me still. I know that nothing Obama did this month about torture made America safer.
Notice that the last sentence in this paragraph has no logical connection to what precedes it. And what that means is that ‘the horror of 9/11’ resides in Cohen as a non-dormant pathogen. It infects and overwhelms his reasoning faculties. Because the crime of 9/11 so far outweighed whatever grievances that were used to justify it, Cohen, like so many others, refuses to examine those grievances as if that single act of reflection might in some way provide legitimacy to the murder of 3,000 Americans. But this is erroneous. Cohen allowed his desire to do to Muslims what a few of them had done to us to destroy his moral compass and his ability to reason. Blowing up Iraq and destroying their admittedly flawed society was seen as a proportional and just response by people like Mr. Cohen and Tom Friedman. Why? Because the Muslims that attacked us made no fine distinctions about who was responsible for their suffering, so why should we extend that favor to the Muslim community? And, if blowing apart a country that had zero responsibility for 9/11 was justified, how much more justified was it to torture people whom we believe were responsible? Do you see how this pathogen does its work?
Yet, after laying the groundwork for this shameful column, Cohen attempts to conclude on the High Road.
But as I was reading the Bush administration’s torture memos, I was also finishing Richard J. Evans’s “The Third Reich at War.” It is the last of his masterful trilogy on Nazi Germany and, like his two previous works, contains the sort of detail that assaults the eyes, overwhelms reason and instructs what we — yes, ordinary people — were capable of doing.
I know it is offensive to compare almost anyone or anything to the Nazis, but the Bush-era memos struck me as echoes from the past. Here, once again, were the squalid efforts of legal toadies to justify the unjustifiable. Here, again, was a lesson that needs constant refreshing: Before you can torture anyone, you must first torture the law. When that happens, we are all on the rack.
What’s ironic is that the rise of the Nazis was propelled by twin national traumas. The loss of World War One and the ensuing hyperinflation scarred the German people. And the Nazis blamed Jews for both events despite the fact that they had no collective responsibility for either catastrophe. There are certain similarities in how Cohen responded to 9/11. A need to blame someone and a need to exact revenge overwhelmed reason and morals in both cases and led to the needless deaths of millions (in World War Two) and hundreds of thousands (in the War on Terror). Cohen probably could never admit to himself how ‘ordinary’ he is.