Andrew Sullivan looks more foolish with every passing day. In a recent post he quotes from lefty writer Ron Suskind's book a passage that purports to relate a discussion that George Bush had with CIA Director George Tenet concerning the harsh interrogation of a captured terrorist. Sullivan has no idea how accurate the passage is, he has no idea what the nuances were, or what the full context was, yet on the basis of it he proclaims that:
This shallow, monstrous, weak, and petty man is still the president. God help us.
Andrew's name-calling is as childish as it is distasteful. Why does Sullivan think Bush shallow? Because he hasn't read the books Sullivan has? Why is he monstrous? Because he's determined not to let his critics deter him from using harsh measures on terrorists who may have information that could save the lives of our sons and daughters?
Why Sullivan thinks Bush weak or petty is impossible to imagine except perhaps that these were the most unkind adjectives which came to his mind. One thing that Bush has not been throughout his presidency is weak, and even many of his enemies have been impressed with how gracious and unpetty he has been to them.
Andrew Sullivan, who has never had to bear anywhere near the weight that George Bush has had to shoulder, is certainly in no position to call Bush weak. Indeed, a man whose greatest accomplishment is constructing arguments in support of a state blessing of the desire of some men to have oral and anal sex with other men looks rather buffoonish calling a president who has in four years liberated 50 million people from tyranny "shallow," "weak" and "petty."
So what was it, exactly, that elicited this puerile outburst from Andrew? Sullivan quotes from a review of Suskind's book:
Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety - against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."
Mind you that this is from a review of a book whose claims are based on second and third hand information written by a man who is not eager to pen a positive portrayal of the administration. Throwing caution to the wind, however, and accepting it all at face value, Sullivan vents his outrage that a mentally disturbed man would be subject to the illusion he was drowning, loud noise, bright lights, and sleep deprivation.
Sullivan assumes that because the terrorist, like probably most terrorists, is mentally unstable that he therefore cannot be expected to know of any plots against American lives, but this is asinine. Simple-mindedness is not equivalent to ignorance.
Moreover, it's not clear to me why these measures, as unpleasant as they are, should be considered torture. Is it torture to frighten someone into thinking they will be harmed? Is it torture to make them uncomfortable? If so, if that is to be our standard of torture, then we have put ourselves in the position of having to say that it is absolutely wrong to fight against terrorists in the first place or to take them prisoner because neither of these is possible without causing them either fear or discomfort or both.
Sullivan may (if he has run out of vile epithets to hurl our way) reply by saying that we are free to do what we must until the terrorist is no longer a threat to us, but once in custody he is no longer a threat and should therefore be treated as gently as possible consistent with preventing him from becoming a threat again.
Generally speaking, I would agree with this, but a terrorist is not just a threat when he is able to harm us by what he does. He's also a threat if he's able to harm us by what he doesn't do. In other words, threats can be active or passive. Consider a scientist who has discovered a cure for some terrible disease, say avian flu or a childhood cancer, but refuses to divulge his knowledge so that much terrible suffering could be ended. Instead, he states that there are too many people in the world, and therefore he is going to keep quiet about his cure until millions die off. I would argue that that scientist is directly responsible for the suffering and deaths of everyone who perishes from the plague because he had knowledge that could have, and would have, saved their lives but refused to share it. He is in a position similar to the terrorist in custody who refuses to disclose information that would save lives. Both the scientist and the terrorist are passive threats to the lives of others, and the terrorist in custody is therefore not significantly different from the terrorist in the field.
At any rate, Andrew Sullivan's simplistic approach to these problems and his willingness to verbally stomp upon and smear those who disagree with him is growing increasingly wearisome and odious.