We admire someone like Jeannie de Clarens because she stood up to a ruthless force that used torture routinely; to suggest that her example should make us pay less attention to torturers working for our own government is rather perverse.
David Ignatius starts off his Washington Post column today (“A New Deal for the CIA,” 9/17/09) with a story about Jeannie de Clarens, a 90-year-old Frenchwoman who infiltrated the Nazi army, discovered information about German rockets that “saved London,” was captured by the Gestapo and survived a year in a concentration camp without betraying her secrets.
De Clarens sounds like a real hero with a great story. But the moral Ignatius draws from it is not so great:
When we read about waterboarding and other techniques that shock the conscience, it’s easy to lose sight of what intelligence agents like my friend Jeannie do most of the time—and their importance in protecting the country.
Somehow I suspect, contrary to Ignatius, that CIA employees in recent years have been more likely to be engaged in waterboarding and other forms of torture than to have performed death-defying, world-saving undercover work like de Clarens. In any case, we admire someone like her because she stood up to a ruthless force that used torture routinely; to suggest that her example should make us pay less attention to torturers working for our own government is rather perverse.
Ignatius goes on to endorse the proposal of David Omand, former coordinator of British intelligence, for a “paradigm shift”—replacing the old system “in which intelligence agencies could do pretty much as they liked” with a new system where “the public gives the intelligence agencies certain powers needed to keep the country safe.” Well, the latter certainly sounds preferable to the former—but as far as the public is concerned, we’ve always been living under the second system, passing laws through our elected representatives that limited the powers of intelligence agencies. If the agencies decided to act as though they lived under the other system, that’s called “breaking the law.”
But for Ignatius, expecting that intelligence agencies will follow the law is a new, rather radical idea, and it will require concessions on the part of the citizenry:
In this new “grand bargain,” Omand stressed, the public must understand that if it decides—for moral and political reasons—to limit certain activities (as in interrogation or surveillance techniques), it also accepts the risk that there will be “normal accidents.”
Ignatius really ought to understand that the U.S. public made that decision a long time ago—back in 1791, when it ratified the Bill of Rights.
There’s this presumption – giving Ignatius the benefit of the doubt that he actually believes his own bullshit – that immoral and illegal intel actions somehow protect the country better than moral and legal ones.
Not that that would be a argument for doing so if it were true, but where has that been proven? His own example of de Clarens shows that no matter how vicious a nation’s intelligence “community” is, determined adversaries can accomplish their missions, doesn’t it?
And that very viciousness is what motivates many to undertake those missions, isn’t it? A US that didn’t seek to dominate the world wouldn’t have some of the victims of that imperial impulse willing to do the bidding of bin Laden and others, would it?
I know I’m pissing in the wind here. This country has acted with immoral impunity since day one. No big surprise – it’s what most gummints do the world over – but the US has made an art form of the hyprocrisy of it, don’t you think?
Over a long span of time it has been shown that torture isn’t used in fact finding, it is use in obtaining expected confessions. Certainly the Catholic Inquisition found it useful in getting those they had to say whatever it is they wanted to stop the pain. Most weren’t allowed to escape alive, but the pain did stop. So if our gov’t is uninterested in actual facts then this is the way to go. Many an empire and despotic political organization swears by it. Our little slice of terror at home, as American as scalping (both sides did it) and hanging of witches and black men also kangaroo courts for the death penalty. The darker side of the country that seems to want full reign here and now. All that’s missing is the suspension of the Bill of Rights in toto. Which could still come at any time. Everything is still in place to do it.