October 22, 2007
Moral Compasses, Then and Now III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:50 PM EST Alexander Burns writes that we may be talking past each other when addressing the possible loss of our government’s moral compass, particularly in wartime, when compared the values of the World War II generation. Possibly we are, but I am not sure. Mr. Burns was focusing on torture, I responded by broadening the discussion to other cases of moral restraint, or its lack, in American war-making. If torture is the only issue, and what is being discussed is what a government authorizes rather than what its servants actually do, I agree that the compass bearing has altered—but by how much? One relevant consideration may be the conduct of men who became postwar policemen and prosecutors and were veterans of World War II. In the South, a lot of them famously used electric cattle prods on black criminal suspects, and did so for several postwar decades. Elsewhere, American police often beat suspects or people who had otherwise irritated them, sometimes pretty savagely. When I was an adult in New York City, a police precinct in Queens made the papers because it had revived electric torture but used stun guns rather than cattle prods; I doubt that was the only such use in the 1980s. When I was an emergency medical technician in 1971 and 1972, I saw police prisoners who seemed to have been interrogated with some violence and in any case claimed that they had. The use of torture on criminal suspects in peacetime may not seem to address our moral compass in wartime, but my guess is that what men will do when they face a lesser threat is a useful hint about what they will do when they fear a greater one. There is also the possibility that people who will torture suspected criminals will not as freely torture soldiers in uniform, so the American moral compass may point in the same direction more often than one might have thought. The Bush administration does seem to have (mostly) restricted its use of torture to men who did not fight in uniform or observe most of the current laws of war (although I remember one case of an Iraqi general dying under interrogation). If the Bush administration generally restricts the use of torture to “unlawful combatants,” that certainly does not excuse its tortures, but it does make it harder to say with great confidence that it does things the World War II generation would never have considered. We do not know what the World War II generation would have considered if it had faced the threats we feared in the wake of 9/11, or in the face of insurgencies making effective use of terror tactics. At other times, Americans did use torture against such adversaries, and did so on a broad scale—certainly against insurgents in the Philippines, about a century ago. Much has been alleged about what the United States did or advised be done in Southeast Asia and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, and while we might want to discount some of those allegations, I think it would be a mistake to dismiss all of them. The United States did not use much torture in World War II, but it was, after all, fighting under circumstances where torture seemed a less crucial tactic than it may seem in counterinsurgency and anti-terrorist campaigns—and we in any case employed tactics and strategies at least as cruel. Again, this does not in any way excuse current American torture; my point is only that we should not too quickly assume our gross moral inferiority to our fathers and grandfathers. I wrote above, “if torture is the only issue,” but it seems to me it isn’t, and cannot be, if we are assessing moral compasses in wartime, and what Mr. Burns also calls “moral decay.” The extreme restriction of our willingness to attack enemy civilians as our primary targets, and the significant restriction of our willingness to kill great numbers of enemy civilians as collateral damage, seem to me to be evidence that our moral compass has also altered in a direction opposite to the one indicated by our government’s new tolerance of torture. An example: we often hear that the United States has no military option against the Iranian nuclear program, because Iran can reply by ramping up terrorism against Americans, in Iraq and elsewhere. It is pretty easy to work out what Franklin Roosevelt or Truman would have done to the vulnerable cities of an Iranian enemy who launched significant terror attacks against American civilians; to paraphrase Admiral Halsey, when it was over the Persian language would have been spoken only in Hell. As far as I know, no one at Halsey’s level talks that way today. Here is another example: In 1991, the United States pretty quickly refrained from attacking retreating Iraqi Republican Guard units at Mutla Ridge, because some decades after World War II it seemed under some circumstances unethical to attack armed and uniformed enemies even in wartime. In Serbia, in the wake of genocidal attacks on Bosnian Muslims and later Kossovars, there were significant criticisms of U.S. reprisal attacks on Belgrade’s electrical grid. Some Americans are, it is true, more willing to publicly or covertly countenance torture than was once the case, and that is certainly relevant when assessing moral compasses, but there are other kinds of evidence we should also consider, and when we do, I find it more difficult to draw a conclusion.
October 22, 2007
Moral Compasses, Then and Now II Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:30 AM EST Thanks to Fred Smoler for his thoughtful response to my post on torture. Mr. Smoler presents his point as though we have some serious disagreement, but I’m not sure that we actually disagree about much. We do, however, appear to be talking past each other a little bit. Mr. Smoler writes, in response to my suggestion that institutionalized torture shows “some kind of decay in the moral compass of the American government”: “The Bush administration’s insistence on loosening the definition of torture has shocked and disgusted many Americans, but I am no means certain that we nowadays wage war with much less tenderness and restraint than the World War II generation did.” That’s a fine and reasonable point, and one that I partially agree with, but I didn’t argue that our military apparatus has undergone a process of total moral degradation. My suggestion, as I quoted above, was that our greatly increased willingness to torture shows a loss of certain moral values. Mr. Smoler describes a few instances of World War II–era torture and torture-like behavior. I will note, though, that in all these examples, soldiers were acting on their own, in the field, under the stress of combat, without any evident institutional endorsement of their behavior. Are our soldiers today less ethical people than their grandparents were? I doubt it. But I think it’s obvious that the government they work for permits and encourages practices that would have been unacceptable six decades ago. A Dutch interrogator’s rough treatment of a 17-year-old German boy is distasteful, if arguably necessary. There’s a giant moral gap between his actions and those of a state that systematically tortures its prisoners. This week our President’s nominee for attorney general declined to say whether he believed waterboarding, one of the Khmer Rouge’s choice interrogation methods, constitutes torture. Last spring, a Republican candidate for President, Tom Tancredo, was asked what methods he would use to extract information about imminent terror attacks on American soil. His answer, delivered to thunderous applause, was, “I’m looking for Jack Bauer at that time, let me tell you.” Tancredo is a bit of a nut, to put it mildly, but he is not the only Jack Bauer groupie in government; Justice Scalia has also cited 24 as an inspiration for his thinking about counterterrorism law. For readers who are not 24 watchers, I’ll note that Mr. Bauer’s interrogation methods have included cutting off a diplomat’s fingers, shooting an innocent bystander in the leg, and suffocating his own brother with a plastic bag. My argument here is not that 24 is a pretty gross show. My point is that a significant and powerful portion of the American government believes the best way to question a prisoner is to assume that at any given second there may an atomic bomb counting down to detonation. This strikes me as a basically insane approach to the ethics of interrogation. In 1944 our government didn’t think every interrogation had the Battle of the Bulge riding on it. That would have been a recipe for random and pointless cruelty. Does our government’s altered reasoning constitute moral decay? I guess readers can decide for themselves. My answer is, unreservedly, yes.
October 20, 2007
Reprisals and the Lessons of History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:45 PM EST Today is the anniversary of the Kragujevac massacre in German-occupied Serbia. Over the three days of October 19 to 21, 1941, German troops murdered between 2,300 and 7,000 Serbian men and schoolchildren in reprisal for a partisan attack. This is also the anniverary of the day, three years later, when the Yugoslav partisans, in combination with the Red Army, liberated Belgrade. A few moments ago I posted a blog entry that included mention of the tendency of some World War II GIs to commit reprisal killings. One point of GI reprisal killings was to discourage breaches of the laws of war by making clear that there was a cost to killing prisoners. This may have worked, since there were relatively few German killings of U.S. or British POWs, but it probably didn’t, since significant Russian reprisals did not seem to discourage German massacres of Soviet POWs; relative German restraint against the U.S. may have had some other cause than fear of retaliation. There is some evidence that moderate reprisals sometimes work—for example they do seem to have discouraged official sanction of the Confederate practice of enslaving black American soldiers captured while fighting for the Union. On a sufficiently savage scale, things are no more clear. Reprisal killings may (or may not) work. In the case of Yugoslavia, horrific reprisal killings like the Kragujevac massacre discouraged some partisan groups (for example, the Chetniks led by General Draja Mihailovich) and massively energized others (the ones led by Tito). It would be simpler if savage measures always failed or always succeeded. The evidence points toward less predictable outcomes.
October 20, 2007
Moral Compasses, Then and Now Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:20 PM EST Alexander Burns posts that he was struck “by this Washington Post article on a group of World War II veterans who interrogated Nazi POWs at Fort Hunt. ‘Back then,’ Petula Dvorak writes, ‘they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners’ cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.’ Said one former interrogator: ‘We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture.’” This struck Mr. Burns “as an incredibly sad illustration of yet another way in which the World War II generation is passing away. Comparing the interrogations at Fort Hunt with those at Guantanamo Bay, it’s hard not to wonder if the 60 years since the Second World War haven’t brought about some kind of decay in the moral compass of the American government. It’s a good thing that there are lawyers and legal reporters wrestling with the subject of torture. But there’s something tragic about the fact that they even have to.” I also read the article in the Washington Post, and pondered it a bit. After thinking about it, I am not sure that there has been an unmistakable “decay in the moral compass of the American government,” if that means restraint in what we are prepared to do in wartime. The Bush administration’s insistence on loosening the definition of torture has shocked and disgusted many Americans, but I am by no means certain that we nowadays wage war with much less tenderness and restraint than the World War II generation did. That earlier generation attacked civilian populations on a pretty grand scale, sometimes accepting massive civilian casualties as collateral damage, but sometimes aiming more directly at enemy morale. Our current willingness to kill civilians is significantly less than that shown by our immediate ancestors. I am not saying that they were in this respect wrong, or that we are right, but I doubt that the difference means that we have lost our moral compass, at least in the sense I think Alexander Burns probably means to imply. We certainly seem to treat most Americans of Middle Eastern origin better than we once treated many Americans of Japanese origin (or than we treated some Americans of German origin in 1917 and 1918), and we accord more liberties to citizens who in the mid-1940s might well have been considered enemy Fifth Columnists. When we caught enemy combatants out of uniform in the 1940s, we sometimes simply executed them. How about killing prisoners who surrendered in uniform? We did it during the Second World War, more than we do it now. We did it against enemies who had shown themselves likely to perfidiously feign surrender—the Japanese—and we did it in reprisal against German troops. My father, fighting in the Bulge alongside American paratroopers, watched them shoot a number of SS POWs, then send one back across the lines with the message “tell your friends not to shoot paratroopers when they are caught in trees,” as the SS had done in Normandy. My father reported that he had no passionate objection to this procedure, because it happened right after news of the Malmedy Massacre had gotten out, and as it happens, the 70 American prisoners murdered by the SS at Malmedy had been on their way to reinforce Sankt Vith, where my father was fighting, and reprisals seemed well within the de facto rules of war. We also shot troops who surrendered after fighting to the last round. Our moral compass does not point in precisely those directions today; I have heard the case that it should, at least with respect to reprisals, but it doesn’t. What about torture? The editor of American Heritage recently told me about what he was pretty sure had been the torture of a German U-boat commander taken prisoner in the Battle of the Atlantic. I am not sure how often American troops tortured prisoners during World War II, and I suspect it was fairly rare—but I do know that American interrogators tried to beat confessions out of the men accused of committing the Malmedy Massacre after the war was over, and I have seen similar allegations about similar events. What about other treatment of prisoners that fell short of torture but was not by our modern standards exemplary? I once met a former GI who had helped stop the First SS Panzer Divison in the snows of Belgium, and recollected taking a prisoner, a 17-year-old boy. A Dutch interrogator slapped the boy, stuck a pistol in his eye, and barked out a question, and the boy spat in the Dutchman’s face. The American infantrymen all froze, and then the Dutchman slapped the boy again, knocking him to the ground, and, thankfully, that was the end of it, but it seemed clear that had the interrogator shot the German boy, no one would have been absolutely astonished. “That kid had guts,” the GI observed 60 years on, respectfully, but without agonies of self-reproach. This memory came upon the vet a few hundred yards from a field where the First SS Panzers committed one of 18 massacres with which it is credited in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge. The GI seemed to imply that slapping the boy around, even threatening his life, did not wholly annihilate the moral import of stopping the 1st SS Panzers in its tracks. My guess is that he was right, and I’d also guess that our moral compass, while somewhat different, is not wildly less accurate in 2007 than it was in 1944.
October 19, 2007
The Great Crash of 1987 Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:25 PM EST It was twenty years ago today Black Monday when the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 508 points, or 22.6 percent, on a record volume of 600 million shares, three times the previous volume record. The equivalent numbers today would be more than 3000 points on the Dow and a volume of around fifteen billion.
The market had been very strong for months. It began 1987 at 1985 and on August 25 reached its peak at 2722, up 44 percent for the year. But the next two months were volatile, to put it mildly, with the market trending downwards, a pattern reminiscent of 1929. On Wednesday, October 16th, it fell 95.46, a record in point terms. The next day it fell 58 points and on Friday 108.35.
At the opening bell on Monday, October 19, all hell broke loose. The crash had actually begun in Far Eastern markets, especially Hong Kong, and rolled around the globe, hitting Europe before New York. By the start of trading, sell orders were piled high in brokerage offices and many stocks could not open on time because of the imbalance. When the futures markets opened in Chicago, they added to the sell pressure. At midday rumors hit the Street (Wall Street has long had the world’s most efficient rumor mills) that the chairman of the SEC had suggested the Exchange shut down temporarily. This exacerbated the panic as traders rushed to avoid having exposed positions with no way to close them.
No one knew what to expect the next day, but while volume was again extraordinarily high, the market stabilized by noon, and October 20 would prove the low for the year. The market began to recover in December. Within two years it had recovered its 1987 high, and it is now more than ten thousand points higher. The causes of the great crash of 1987 are still much in dispute. Why it didn’t presage a depression, as previous stock market crashes had always done, is less so. For one thing, the extraordinary technological possibilities of the microprocessor were just beginning to be exploited, and they would open a floodgate of profits as they were. We have not begun to see the end of that tide. The Internet did not even exist in its modern sense twenty years ago. For another, for the first time since 1792, the federal monetary authorities, in this case the Federal Reserve, did what such authorities need to do in such situations: they flooded the Street with liquidity. Will such a crash happen again? Undoubtedly. It is a commonplace that Wall Street knows only two emotions, fear and greed, and can switch between them in the blink of an eye. Roughly every twenty years, apparently the length of time it takes to forget the lessons of the past in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907, and 1929 we had great crashes. Then it was almost sixty years until 1987. Human beings haven’t changed, but the financial world is very different than it was twenty years ago. Increasing globalization and decreasing national barriers are ever more tightly integrating world markets. The Internet makes it possible to trade stocks from anywhere in the world. Sharply reduced brokerage commissions have encouraged frequent trading. Fast-spreading wealth has greatly increased the number of traders. And new instruments and derivatives have still uncertain effects on the market. Most of all, the amount of information available in real time is now staggering. Michael Bloomberg became one of the richest men in the world by providing a means of accessing and manipulating that information in ways that were inconceivable twenty years ago. As Bette Davis said in All About Eve, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”
October 18, 2007
Stuart Taylor, Legal Reporting, and Torture Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:45 PM EST I want to thank John Steele Gordon, belatedly, for directing my attention to Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson’s Until Proven Innocent. I have not yet had the opportunity to take a glance at this book, but I look forward to doing so – even if it was reviewed well in (cue music) The New York Times. I am generally a fan of Mr. Taylor’s work, and though I know little about Professor Johnson’s, I am sure their collaboration was a fruitful one. One subject where I think Taylor’s writing has been particularly strong has been that of counterterrorism policy. While plenty of people have weighed in on topics like torture, detainment, and extraordinary rendition, Taylor is one of comparatively few who have done so in a legally-minded, evidence-based way. National Journal, where Taylor is a columnist, has perhaps the tallest, widest, most expensive subscription wall ever created for a publication, so forgive me for not linking. But in a January 2005 piece titled “Distorting the Law and Facts in the Torture Debate,” Taylor called for officials to cut through the “fog of confusion” over interrogation policy, and detailed the various ways in which the Bush administration and, to a lesser extent, their critics, simply weren’t addressing the real legal issues surrounding detainee treatment. More recently, in May 2007 Taylor urged Congress and the White House to stop improvising and enact meaningful guidelines for dealing with “a noncitizen suspected of being an Islamist terrorist.” Sometimes Taylor engages in a kind of on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand, let’s-split-the-difference reasoning that I find unpersuasive. All the same, though, he’s stayed on these tricky, important legal issues when many other opinion leaders have given them only fleeting attention. That’s admirable. I was reminded of Mr. Taylor’s work last weekend, even before Mr. Gordon’s post, by this Washington Post article on a group of World War II veterans who interrogated Nazi POWs at Fort Hunt. “Back then,” Petula Dvorak writes, “they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners’ cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.” Said one former interrogator: “We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture.” This struck me as an incredibly sad illustration of yet another way in which the World War II generation is passing away. Comparing the interrogations at Fort Hunt with those at Guantanamo Bay, it’s hard not to wonder if the 60 years since the Second World War haven’t brought about some kind of decay in the moral compass of the American government. It’s a good thing that there are lawyers and legal reporters wrestling with the subject of torture. But there’s something tragic about the fact that they even have to.
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