Irresistable

On another note, here's Ross Douthat's much-ballyhooed meditation on torture post-9/11. I think it not at all intellectually honest, which is what most of the people who disagreed with it would have said if they didn't like Douthat personally. It's mostly argument by non-sequitur; here's the bright insight that motivates the piece:

That while the Bush Administration's policies clearly failed a just-war test, they didn't fail it in quite so new a way as some of their critics suppose ... and moreover, had I been in their shoes I might have failed the test as well.

He proceeds to go on and on about just war theory, invoke an atomic bomb comparison, and obliquely argue against The Dark Side. What he does not do, however, is more telling.

He does not, once, in some 2100 words, mention efficacy. Or effectiveness. Torture's lack thereof is well-established (incidentally, this is an argument Mayer's made many times, upon which Douthat fails to comment). Assumed throughout Douthat's piece is that torture works. While Douthat doesn't come right out and say so, his phrasing gives him away:

But I certainly remember how I felt about interrogation in the aftermath of 9/11: I felt that we were all suddenly in a ticking-bomb scenario, that the gloves have to come off, and that all kinds of things needed to be on the table.

As Rugby Dan has pointed out before, the ticking time bomb scenario is tendentious as generally posed: You have a responsible party before you who holds some piece of information critical to saving thousands of lives, the lives of people who will otherwise perish in some short amount of time. Do you torture him to get the info? Rugby offers a categorical no, based on this phrasing of the question. I've heard it offered with the following modification: The only way to get it out of him is to torture. Do you? In this case, the answer is probably "toss me the razor and the blowtorch," although it's close. The problem is that the second scenario explicitly, and the first implicitly, assume that torture will achieve the desired effect: saving the people. Which it won't in the first case, and only will in the second case because it's specified as part of the hypothetical. Douthat does not address this issue in the follow-ups (1, 2) to his post. He did finally, kinda get around to it a couple of days ago.

Here's his verdict:

But I know at least some people in Washington for whom this isn't the case: People who argue, with a reasonable degree of knowledge and no self-justifying incentives, that whatever one thinks about the morality of waterboarding, the Bush Administration's interrogation policies up made a substantial difference in our ability to disrupt al Qaeda in the aftermath of 9/11.

Nothing that's been made public to date has left me convinced that they're right. (And even if they are right, it probably wouldn't change my judgment that the Bush Administration's broader record on detainee policy looks like a moral fiasco.) But I'm entirely convinced that they're sincere - and I think that any sincere proponent of what the United States did to its high-value detainees should be willing to see those policies defended more fully and publicly than they've been to date.

(emphasis mine)

Astonishing, no? He defends the decision to torture, decries the results, and then admits that the best evidence he can offer that torture works - that we were, post-9/11, actually in a ticking-time bomb scenario - is that some people he knows are sincere in their belief that torturing hundreds if not thousands of people helped us disrupt al Qaeda.