Rational Philosophy

The New York Times article today on Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations is both appalling and fascinating in its thorough exposure of the administration’s dogged efforts to encourage and enable the CIA to use a wide range and combination of brutal interrogation techniques without having to worry about their legality. But beyond the pertinent questions of what constitutes torture and in what ways the administration blurred the line between branches of government, and, once again, abused its executive power, I was struck by the universal themes of courage and cowardice that sprang out of the circumstances of the story.

The Times reports on a White House meeting involving James Comey, deputy attorney general: “Mr. Comey stated that “no lawyer” would endorse Mr. Yoo’s justification for the N.S.A. program, Mr. Addington demurred, saying he was a lawyer and found it convincing. Mr. Comey shot back: “No good lawyer,” according to someone present.”

Sitting at home reading the newspaper or watching events on TV it’s easy to regard the administration as laughable and not worthy of respect. But to be in its midst, as Comey was, surrounded by powerful supporters of the White House, with your job on the line, his boldness took real courage.

The Times also reports that within the circle of unswervingly loyal Bush insiders “there was a sense that Comey was a wimp” on national security matters.

I’m reminded of Plato’s Socratic dialogues. In criticizing Comey’s moral stance, the administration defines a specific instance of “courage” as the ability to follow through on severe methods of interrogation in order to get valuable information. Socrates would never let them get away with that kind of rhetorical sleight of hand.

It’s notable that at no point in the several years that this story has been unfolding has the administration appeared to betray any compunction about using severe interrogation methods. This may be an extreme thing to say, but one gets the impression that the administration does not view the detainees as human or deserving of human rights, and, therefore, feels that torturing the detainees couldn’t possibly be inhuman.

And perhaps this is their true perspective. It would explain a great deal.

Let’s suppose for a moment that some within the administration don’t feel that the detainees retain any human rights; that any form of torture is justified if it achieves results. Is this a form of cowardice? Is it courageous?

Courage and cowardice are concepts. They have meaning only as formulated through mental processes. A tree is not courageous because it holds fast against the wind (unless it appears in a poem, at which point it becomes a conceptual tree).

The concept of courage is directly opposed to the concept of cowardice. And the concept of courage has as its root two other concepts — fear or an awareness of risk, and strength — holding one’s course despite the fear. Fear is a direct emotional response to a situation of real or perceived danger. Strength or resistence to fear is a result of our conscious faculty, holding back our natural urge to give in to the fear, the power of the conscious mind to control our more immediate fight or flight responses.

Cowardice, in contrast, arises from the concepts of fear and capitulation. We feel fear, we are aware that we do not want to or should not give in to the fear, yet we give in to it anyway.

Going back to my working premise that maybe some in the administration don’t view the detainees as deserving of human rights. If this is correct, then to condone and enable torture of the detainees requires no courage on their part. But neither is it, in itself, cowardly. (Since they are not, in holding this stance, capiltulating to any fear; they feel no fear of the consequences of this approach.)

However, at the risk of extending my conjecture too far, the perspective I’m presuming exists in Cheney and others itself rests on cowardice. — Whenever we decide on a course of action and act, we risk error. If we don’t recognize the possibility for error, it is because we are afraid we will have to admit our failure. Refusing to admit failure, of course, is a hallmark of the current administration. This then, is cowardice at a deeper level.

To build this logic back up: The White House chooses to pursue a policy of severe interrogation that denies the detainees their human rights. The White House refuses to accept that this premise and the course of action being followed may be wrong. In refusing to accept that it may be wrong, the White House acts out of cowardice.

Others in the story betray a more simple and obvious form of cowardice: Gonzalez and Yoo, for instance, who defend the administration’s tactics for their own ends, to please their masters, or just so they don’t have to say ‘no.’

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