If

Here’s what I hated more than anything after 9/11 — the fact that everybody seemed to lose their frigging minds and turned into complete, blithering idiots. There’s not a lot of grace under pressure in the old US of A, I’m afraid.

Do you remember the old Kipling poem, If?

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

[…]

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run –

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!

Remember that? Well, let’s just say that the American body politic has a lot to learn about maturity. I’m reminded of this whenever I read something depressing and stupid that people said right after the attacks that has now come back to bite us.

In following this ongoing blogosphere discussion of Jonathan Alter’s somewhat relative criticism of Bush, I came across a column of his from November 2001. Honestly, I’m wondering why people were so upset at Ann Coulter’s call to “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,” when “liberal” guys like Alter were blithely writing amoral crap like this:

In this autumn of anger, even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to … torture. OK, not cattle prods or rubber hoses, at least not here in the United States, but something to jump-start the stalled investigation of the greatest crime in American history. Right now, four key hijacking suspects aren’t talking at all.

COULDN’T WE AT LEAST subject them to psychological torture, like tapes of dying rabbits or high-decibel rap? (The military has done that in Panama and elsewhere.) How about truth serum, administered with a mandatory IV? Or deportation to Saudi Arabia, land of beheadings? (As the frustrated FBI has been threatening.) Some people still argue that we needn’t rethink any of our old assumptions about law enforcement, but they’re hopelessly “Sept. 10”—living in a country that no longer exists.

[…]

Actually, the world hasn’t changed as much as we have. The Israelis have been wrestling for years with the morality of torture. Until 1999 an interrogation technique called “shaking” was legal. It entailed holding a smelly bag over a suspect’s head in a dark room, then applying scary psychological torment. (To avoid lessening the potential impact on terrorists, I won’t specify exactly what kind.) Even now, Israeli law leaves a little room for “moderate physical pressure” in what are called “ticking time bomb” cases, where extracting information is essential to saving hundreds of lives. The decision of when to apply it is left in the hands of law-enforcement officials.

[…]

Short of physical torture, there’s always sodium pentothal (“truth serum”). The FBI is eager to try it, and deserves the chance. Unfortunately, truth serum, first used on spies in World War II, makes suspects gabby but not necessarily truthful. The same goes for even the harshest torture. When the subject breaks, he often lies. Prisoners “have only one objective—to end the pain,” says retired Col. Kenneth Allard, who was trained in interrogation. “It’s a huge limitation.”

Some torture clearly works. Jordan broke the most notorious terrorist of the 1980s, Abu Nidal, by threatening his family. Philippine police reportedly helped crack the 1993 World Trade Center bombings (plus a plot to crash 11 U.S. airliners and kill the pope) by convincing a suspect that they were about to turn him over to the Israelis. Then there’s painful Islamic justice, which has the added benefit of greater acceptance among Muslims.

We can’t legalize physical torture; it’s contrary to American values. But even as we continue to speak out against human-rights abuses around the world, we need to keep an open mind about certain measures to fight terrorism, like court-sanctioned psychological interrogation. And we’ll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that’s hypocritical. Nobody said this was going to be pretty.

It’s contrary to American values? How fucking touching after that precious little whine about “can’t we at least play loud music in their ears or threaten their families?” Is forced sodomy with a glow stick contrary to American values if it doesn’t actually, you know, take place here in the United States? Hey, nobody said this was going to be pretty.

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

A pundit be not, you’re much too wise

The four men who Alter contemplated sending to “the land of beheadings,” by the way, were all innocent.

Update: A commenter informs me of this piece by Mark Ames, which makes this point and more.