Condoleeza Rice: The rationalizing, supercilious face of evil

When C. Rice retired from her life of crime, she decided to become a professor at Stanford. Unlike, say, Bush's retirement to his ranch, this position entails occasionally being confronted by young and idealistic students about her past:

Evil has many faces and this is one of them. It is a face that blandly smiles upon horrific acts and later spins an endless stream of moral justifications from whatever flimsy fiber is conveniently available. A morally whole human being, upon learning that prisoners had been subjected to controlled drowning hundreds of times due, in part, to actions that she had participated in, would acknowledge the horror, accept some kind of responsibility, express some kind of regret.

Rice does no such thing. She has entirely expunged any feelings of guilt. Any residual sense that she might have been wrong has been entirely conquered by her narcissistic need for self-justification. Observe her demeanor, and her language ("dear", "do your homework"): Not only does she feel that the student's wrong, she feels that it's vaguely unfair that people even think she did something wrong, and especially unfair that young uncredentialed whippersnappers outside the circle of power get to question her conduct.

Forget about the tortured prisoners; what about Condoleeza's suffering? Huh? It puts one in mind of an old Fafblog post.

As to the substance of her argument, it is nonsense, of course. It rests upon the twin assertions that

• since the Bush administration orders were phrased so as to authorize only interrogation techniques cleared by the Justice Department, they were ipso facto legal; and
• Chewbacca was a wookie — that is, lots of irrelevant misdirection about stuff like the uniqueness of al Qaeda (about which, in particular, A. Serwer has the best answer).

The first defense opens an infinitely large loophole in the rule of law — appoint your pet lawyers to Justice, and then trample on the law all you want! Even if you could, by some reading of the relevant legal texts, construct a legal theory that reached this conclusion, you would not want this reading to be the one that prevails in governance. To establish such a precedent would be disastrously bad as a matter of public policy. It would be much better to construct a different reading, one in which the most powerful people are actually constrained by the law.

If Rice were a dispassionate observer — if the very same quality of mind were transplanted into someone who had no personal or professional ties to the Bush administration or the conservative movement — it is hard to believe that an idea so patently bad and stupid would get past her. But self-interest and tribalist instincts are powerful motivators. And I suppose you go to war with the flimsy legal arguments you have...

...and not the ones you wish for.

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Incidentally, judging just from the first video, you might conclude that Rice "wins" the confrontation. And in theatrical, TV terms she does: at the end she fishes out a gotcha question about Guantanamo which the student cannot answer. This was a foregone conclusion. It's not really a fair fight: Rice has had a long time to practice her legalistic justifications for her actions. These students are newbies. Her ability to fend off some callow undergrads demonstrates that an expert in any given subject can extemporaneously ejaculate a convincing wad of noise to defend anything.

But let's examine the two ways she deflects the student's question.

First, she goes on at length about Guantanamo not being a site for interrogations. This is correct; the torture was conducted by the CIA in locations around the world that have not been disclosed, although they're outside the United States. According to ABC News, one likely candidate is abandoned Communist military bases in Eastern Europe. Which is so much better than doing it in Guantanamo! But Rice doesn't mention any of that. The student's confusion regarding interrogation vs. indefinite detention is actually convenient for her, as it allows her to completely change the subject away from torture without being obvious about it.

Second, regarding Rice's gotcha question about putting the Guantanamo prisoners on trial: the answer to Rice's question is that federal courts halted the trials because they concluded that the trials were being conducted illegally. Or, more euphemistically, the tribunals convened by the Bush administration had failed to satisfy the requirements necessary to be called proper ("competent") military tribunals. Or, less euphemistically, Rice's pals setup some kangaroo courts; and she wants this fact to excuse her for holding thousands of mostly innocent people in concrete cells for years on end without providing them timely legal recourse.

Theatrically, Rice won the confrontation. But the cold light of later reflection exposes her rejoinders as total trash. The medium of video is not well-suited to reasoned argument.

"Enhanced Interrogation" approved in detail at the highest levels

If you're reading this, you're probably not someone who tends to give this Presidential administration the benefit of the doubt; but just in case you are, watch this Daily Show segment discussing the recent ABC news revelations on how our leaders were intimately involved in the details of planning torture sessions.

Look at the expression on Rice's face when she answers the reporter's question at the end, and ask yourself whether you can call this thing that speaks a human being, rather than some lower order of fleshy automaton.

Lectures on "aggressive policies" for detention and interrogation

I've linked previously to a bunch of lectures from the Cybersecurity and Homeland Security course I attended last quarter, but I haven't yet linked to a couple of the most important and disturbing. On November 30, the course organizers persuaded speakers from the U.S. Dept. of Defense to speak. The two principal lecturers were an historian in the employ of the Pentagon and a U.S. Army interrogator respectively.

Lecture links (as usual, you'll want WebViewer for an optimal experience, but you can also page through the slides manually):

Brian Del Monte, "Detention Operations Policy & the Global War on Terrorism":

PowerPoint slides, Windows Media video, streaming WebViewer, downloadable WebViewer archive

Christina Filarowski Sheaks, "Interrogation Policy & the Global War on Terrorism":

PowerPoint slides, Windows Media video, streaming WebViewer, downloadable WebViewer archive

By and large, the first lecture's infuriating, and the second lecture's chilling and surreal, a quality that is not mitigated by the fact that Ms. Sheaks, the United States Army field interrogator, is a soft-spoken woman wearing a low-cut dress.

I don't have a whole lot more to say --- the lectures almost speak for themselves --- except that it's worth noting how careful the speakers are to emphasize that they're speaking for the Department of Defense only, and (in Ms. Sheaks's case) addressing interrogation policy only. This leaves two elephants in the room. First, most of the recent "aggressive interrogation" incidents were allegedly performed by the CIA, which isn't part of the DoD. Second, the abuses at Abu Ghraib were not, in fact, performed as part of interrogation procedures --- they were performed, as far as we can tell, for no purpose at all.

More on Ignatieff

Recently I criticized Michael Ignatieff at length for his combination of supercilious prose and ignorance w.r.t national ID cards. Yesterday, Jon Mandle of Crooked Timber discussed Ignatieff's new book, coming to similar conclusions (although in a more politely worded form) about his more general program for civil liberties and security.

In fact, I think J. Mandle is much too easy on Ignatieff. Mandle claims that Ignatieff basically agrees in substance with both the principles and the conclusions of civil libertarians, but chooses in rhetoric to caricature civil libertarians as extremists and foes of security. I find this rhetorical move less excusable than Mandle does. By caricaturing civil libertarians as extremists, Ignatieff frames the debate in a way that discredits the very people who are most likely to argue for the right outcomes. Ignatieff is a star writer at the New York Times, and so he's about as influential as anyone in the press when it comes to framing the debate. In fact, because of the way that discourse works, his framing of the debate will probably be much more influential than his conclusions --- particularly when powerful voices in government are echoing his framing but contradicting his conclusions.

Ignatieff is therefore incredibly irresponsible, and incredibly stupid, to participate in the marginalization of civil libertarians. If the junta currently running our government succeeds in dismantling our freedoms, then people like Ignatieff will be partly responsible.

Michael Ignatieff is an ignorant, ignorant motherfucker

Today's New York Times Magazine carries an article by Michael Ignatieff which combines astounding arrogance with astounding ignorance. Ignatieff writes with a voice of supreme superciliousness, lecturing his readers that "we need to change the way we think, to step outside the confines of our cozy conservative and liberal boxes". Meanwhile he recapitulates basically every incorrect argument, every "cozy" bit of received wisdom, that I've ever read about security and civil liberties.

The biggest unspoken assumption is that reducing civil liberties is likely to increase security. It is true that security and liberty are sometimes in conflict, but in many cases the most effective security measures do not decrease liberty at all.

The most egregious example of Ignatieff's ignorance is his support for a national ID system:

But being absolutely right on this issue doesn't make a civil liberties position right on every other issue. Consider the question of a national ID system. Instead of crying ''1984,'' the civil liberties lobby should be taking an honest look at the leaky sieve of the existing driving license ID system and admit how easy it was for the hijackers to talk their way into the ID's that got them onto the planes. Instead of defending a failed ID system, civil libertarians should be trying to think of a better one. One possibility is for Congress to establish minimum national standards for identification, using the latest biometric identifiers. Any legislation should build in a Freedom of Information requirement demanding that the government divulge the data it holds on citizens and purge data that is unsound.

Aarrrrrggghhh!!! When I read this, I literally leapt from my couch and punched the nearest chair. Civil libertarians do not merely "cry '1984'" in objection; that is a ridiculous straw man. And civil libertarians are not "defending a failed ID system" when they criticize proposals for national IDs; they are claiming that ID systems in general are open to tremendous abuse, and that therefore a heavy burden of proof falls on those who propose to extend their reach and pervasive influence in our society.

Furthermore, and more importantly, civil libertarians are not the only ones who oppose a national ID system. Mr. Ignatieff, you're a reporter, so perhaps you should, you know, interview some actual security experts before you go shooting your mouth off about security? The notion that a national ID system would increase national security has been comprehensively debunked by world-renowned security expert Bruce Schneier, several times. He points out numerous powerful objections, and most of them stem from pure security analysis:

What good would it have been to know the names of Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, or the DC snipers before they were arrested? Palestinian suicide bombers generally have no history of terrorism. The goal is here is to know someone's intentions, and their identity has very little to do with that.

This objection, like many others, has never been credibly countered by advocates of a national ID system. Yet writers like Ignatieff and Nicholas Kristof (what is the deal with New York Times writers and this national ID system fetish?) persist in pretending that such a system would make us safer. Free Clue for the Clueless: A reliable ID system would not have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

The idea that national IDs would increase security sounds vaguely plausible at first, until you examine the specifics, at which point you realize it's a giant steaming mound of horse shit. (And, in retrospect, I think that the only reason it sounds plausible at first is that we've become conditioned, socially, to "present our papers" in all kinds of contexts --- many hotels, for example, now require you to present ID when you check in; if you think about it, there's actually no good reason for them to do this.) Notice that Ignatieff does not actually point out any specific scenario in which hijacking might have been prevented by a national ID system. Some of the hijackers had completely clean records. Among the ones who didn't, it's not clear that the blemishes would have been significant enough to prevent them from flying. Are we going to ban all convicted felons from commercial air flights? All Middle Eastern immigrants? All rural white people? Anybody who holds radical political views? In short, does Ignatieff propose even a single realistic scenario in which knowing someone's identity helps you defeat a terrorist attack? No, he does not. Ignatieff's writing is either extremely stupid or extremely irresponsible, and he should get the fuck off his high horse in caricaturing civil libertarians and security experts as a bunch of silly crybabies.

As for the notion that the government should "purge data that is unsound", well, duh, but that's far easier said than done. If Ignatieff had even the tiniest bit of experience with managing databases, or had spoken on the phone to someone who manages databases professionally for, say, thirty seconds, then he would recognize that maintaining security, integrity, and consistency of a database of this size over time is a stupendously difficult undertaking. Schneier thinks it is actually impossible, given the current the state of the art in computer security and database management. As a computer scientist, I'm inclined to agree.

In short, with respect to security, Michael Ignatieff is an ignorant, ignorant motherfucker who should stick to stuff that he's actually good at, like writing about foreign policy.