Protean Putz

by digby

I’ve been meaning to link to this masterful post by Batocchio for some time but seeing David Rivkin on TV today reminded me of it. This is just a taste:

I haven’t conducted an exhaustive review of all of Rivkin’s statements, but I’ve caught enough to see him argue that: torture is appalling, waterboarding may not be torture, waterboarding cannot be torture if American personnel undergo it, waterboarding is not torture, waterboarding is torture, and torture works. The protean logic and contradictions are rather dizzying, and that’s precisely their intent. They make much more sense if the person offering them isn’t trying to make a coherent argument – like a good defense attorney, he’s trying to muddy the waters and seed doubt in the minds of jurors.

He goes on to excerpt some of Rivkin’s appearances to illustrate that point and continues:

Foreman picks up on the flaw in Rivkin’s last argument, about waterboarding American personnel in SERE training:

FOREMAN: But we’re waterboarding our own people to give them an idea of what they would encounter if they were captured by somebody else.

RIVKIN: Well, forgive me, as a matter of law and ethics, if the given practice like slavery and prostitution is officially odious, you cannot use it no matter what our goals is, you cannot even use it to volunteers. So, if all forms of waterboarding are torture then we are torturing our own people, and the very same instructor who spoke before Congress the other day about how it’s torture, is guilty of practicing torture for decades. We as a society have to come up with the same baseline using (inaudible) in all spheres of public life instead of somehow singularizing this one thing, which is interrogation of combatants and we need to look at it in a broader way.

Rivkin and others have offered this argument several times. It may not be convincing, but it is inventive. (It seems to have first emerged as an attempted rebuttal of former SERE trainer Malcolm Nance’s authoritative 10/31/07 piece, “Waterboarding is Torture… Period.” Nance, a “former Master Instructor and Chief of Training” at the U.S. Navy SERE School, who testified before Congress, appears to be the “very same instructor” Rivkin’s claiming is hypothetically “guilty of practicing torture for decades.”) Rivkin’s also pulling a fast one here, trying to set up a paradox to befuddle the listener. Torture is odious and immoral. SERE training, while tough, is not. Rivkin tries to skip to his conclusion without proving it. He ignores Foreman’s common sense objection and makes a substitution. Looking at the explicit and implicit claims in this exchange, it goes something like this:

RIVKIN: Waterboarding cannot be torture if we subject American personnel to it.

FOREMAN: But SERE training is not torture.

RIVKIN: Aha! But torture is always wrong! Therefore, you must either prosecute our brave men and women in uniform, or not prosecute Bush officials for authorizing torture!

This is precisely the paradox and uncertainty Rivkin wants to sow in listeners’ minds. Rivkin hasn’t actually addressed Foreman’s point, but pushes past it to offer a statement most everyone will agree with – torture is odious – while pretending that he has proven that SERE training is torture. Comparing torture to slavery and prostitution is fine, but Rivkin’s conclusions depend on accepting the false premise that SERE training is torture. It’s certainly not under U.S. law, and Rivkin can’t honestly believe it is – but he’s trying to defend his “clients” in the Bush administration here. Slavery and prostitution are not at all analogous to SERE training (or military service in general – and Rivkin is implicitly comparing American troops to prostitutes here). Looked at another way, Rivkin’s essentially arguing that all sex is rape or vice versa. He does mention that volunteering doesn’t matter, but argues this in relation to torture, while treating as a given a separate point which Foreman has just directly contested – that SERE training is torture. Rivkin ignores the crucial elements of consent, control, purpose, trust and short duration that differentiates the brief waterboarding in SERE training from the illegal and immoral torture technique of waterboarding. Rivkin’s line of argument is particularly despicable given that SERE training is meant to prepare American military personnel against possible torture upon enemy capture, not to justify the torturing of prisoners under American control. SERE training is a defense against an evil practice, not an endorsement of that evil. Most of the American military do not view torture as either moral or legal, and much of the internal pushback against the Bush administration’s policies of torture, abuse and indefinite detention came from military lawyers, many of them conservatives.

I now have an involuntary reflexive response to people like him and I just start throwing food at the TV when he comes on the screen. If you are less far gone than I am, read batocchio’s whole post for a thorough dismantling of Rivkins disingenuous, insulting arguments.

And speaking of insulting, this article in The Week by Francis Wilkerson asks the question that nobody else has thought to ask: why is Dick Cheney all over television?

In the background, behind all the noise and fury about misspent billions and AIG bonuses, there is the story that won’t go away. President Obama and his aides express no interest in it. Major news reports about it are intermittent at best. Yet in twenty, even fifty years, long after the AIG bonuses are forgotten, today’s background story may be as vivid a historical marker as the Palmer raids or the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Slowly, not yet surely, America is moving toward a reckoning with torture.

Few people, in the press or elsewhere, seem to want it. The big news organizations have mustered an army of reporters to sort through the financial wreckage. But the torture beat has been largely relegated to lefty bloggers, The New Yorker and a few outraged conservatives. Americans feel bad enough about the general state of affairs. Who wants to wallow in what, in the end, may turn out to be the biggest national guilt trip since Zippo lighters in Vietnam?

[…]

The medium is not the message in politics, but it can provide clues about intent. Some have speculated that Cheney’s television appearances are an attempt to burnish his legacy. But cable television is not where legacies are cast or reconstructed. For that, there is the publishing industry (President Bush has just signed his book deal); the pages of Foreign Affairs; even the op-ed pages. By contrast, television is immediate—a conduit of today’s battles, not history’s.

Cheney seems determined to establish a real-time record of rancor with the new administration, to write his name in neon on a very public White House enemies list. Perhaps he’s genuinely angry. Or perhaps at some future, still hypothetical, date, his current belligerence might prove a useful shield, allowing the vice president to claim that he is being targeted for his political opposition, being made a scapegoat for denouncing his successors. Perhaps Dick Cheney, too, suspects his days of discussing torture may not be over.

If only.
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