John McQuaid

Someone asked me why, in my previous post, I wrote that we’d never see a South Africa-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission here in America to sort through the transgressions of the Bush years. Good question!

The country would benefit from such an approach on our response to 9/11. In the weeks and months after those terror attacks, the White House, Defense Department, CIA and other agencies pursued moral and legally questionable actions and policies that are geopolitically and historically significant. They go to the heart of our national identity and place in the 21st century world. I’d include the Iraq war, but for the purposes of this post will focus on U.S. treatment of prisoners. James Fallows says that the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility report on the “torture memos” used to justify those questionable policies is analogous to John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” and what it did for the atom bomb attacks on Japan. It exposes the terrible tradeoffs we made as a society in the name of security.

We certainly need some truth and reconciliation. The problem is, while everyone would nominally agree that reconciliation is a good idea (see, for example, the rote calls for “bipartisanship”), America remains fundamentally at odds over the “truth” part. Google “torture” and “poll” and you’ll find a bunch of ambiguous results. Americans narrowly approve of torture in some situations. Americans are split over torture investigations. Americans want a torture investigation. A majority of Americans think waterboarding is torture.

Obviously the problem isn’t just this set of issues but the deep political divisions that have nearly paralyzed the government during the Obama administration. There is a not-insignificant minority of Americans and a significant number of politicians and pundits that think “harsh interrogations” of terror suspects are necessary and effective. There’s also a credulous political press who will amplify their objections to any kind of investigation or process that suggests they are in the wrong. Every time Dick Cheney makes an assertion about the effectiveness of “harsh interrogations” – no matter how repetitive or unfounded – it’s news because of the extraordinariness of an ex-vice president criticizing another administration. (Though it grows less extraordinary each time he does it.)

Until there is some kind of political consensus that torture is wrong – some broad agreement on that something went wrong post-9/11 – it’s going to be very hard to get to the bottom of what happened, assign responsibility, and move on. Some leadership would be helpful here, but the Obama administration is determined to do as little as possible on this front – and, more generally, eschews decisive action that might generate significant political pushback from the other side.

On some level, though, this isn’t political at all – it’s just how we roll. America the land of “moving on,” of “closure.” Not real closure but “closure.” The notion that you shouldn’t dwell too long on unpleasant, ambiguous things but turn your face to the sun and keep moving forward. This forward inertia is often a good thing. Not here, though. Ideally, torture should be exposed to the full light of public inquiry and acknowledged, by consensus, as wrong. On a practical level, torture ought to be made politically and bureaucratically radioactive: take away any incentives from future politicians and their appointees to employ these techniques. Instead, though, we’re once again leaving ourselves to the mercy of events and expediency.

If you want to have a truly dispiriting, soul-shrinking experience, read Justice Department official David Margolis’s decision to let Jay Bybee and John Yoo off the hook for any professional misconduct in authoring “torture memos” for the Bush White House.

The sad thing is, Margolis’s disagreements with the recommendations of the Office of Professional Responsibility seem reasonable. He takes a critical view of the memos in question. Here’s what he has to say, for example, about Yoo:

I would be remiss in not observing, however, that these memoranda represent an unfortunate chapter in the Office of Legal Counsel. While I have declined OPR’s findings of misconduct, I fear that John Yoo’s loyalty to his own ideology and convictions clouded his view of his obligation to his client and led him to author opinions that reflected his own extreme, albeit sincerely held, views of executive power while speaking for an institutional client. These memoranda suggest that he failed to appreciate the enormous responsibility that comes with authority to issue institutional decisions that carried the authoritative weight of the Department of Justice.

Read further, and Margolis describes a process in which the OPR – going through drafts and responses from the principals – struggles to see how the Bush lawyers’ conduct might violate various ethical and professional codes of the Justice Department, the DC Bar, and other associations. In one of his responses, Yoo taunts the OPR for doing what it says he was doing: trying to make the code fit a predetermined conclusion. Ultimately, Margolis concludes that the standards they were compelled to follow were simply too low:

I conclude the DC rules created an unambiguous obligation on Yoo and Bybee to not provide advice their client that was knowingly or recklessly false or issued in bad faith. While the OLC best practices may require more, failure to meet those standards should result in poor evaluations or administrative disciplinary action, but not bar referrals.

So Yoo and Bybee were not lying or acting in bad faith. They were sincere in their perfidy! And even if they violated the higher standard, it doesn’t rise to the level of disciplinary action from the bar.

The problem here is not that Margolis has an overly bureaucratic sensibility, or even lawyers writing codes of conduct that protect lawyers and lawyerly institutions and not the public trust. It’s that a departmental disciplinary procedure is a terrible venue for adjudicating this issue. And it’s pathetic that we’re stuck looking to this arcane bureaucratic process for some measure of corrective justice here. Of course the result – whatever it was – was going to fall short.

There are many questions here that demand answers. The lack of resolution on torture is a kind of open wound in the body politic. It will fester if left alone. We ought to look backward. Can we determine exactly what went wrong, who was responsible, who violated domestic or international law, and what, if any punishment, they deserve? Is Yoo the villain here? Dick Cheney? Bush? Can we, as a society, agree that something went seriously wrong here? This gets us into the realm not of departmental hair-splitting but South Africa-style truth commissions.

Of course, that’s not going to happen. The more likely outcome is this fades into the background until the next big terror attack. Then all the unresolved issues will erupt in our faces. The intense pressure to “get tough” on prisoners will resume. Ticking time bombs will once again fill our op-ed pages. And because we lack clarity on exactly what the law allows, how institutions should behave, there may be nothing to stop them from going dangerously awry again.

Like many people on the East Coast, I spent a lot of time last week shoveling snow. When I came inside, I then had to endure a secondary storm of nonsense about how the winter weather disproved global warming, humiliated Al Gore, et al. This was, in turn, much-commented-upon, most incisively by Grist’s Dave Roberts, who concludes that the inability of many journalists to point out the ridiculousness of snowstorm-climate change denialism is a symptom of the profound ills afflicting traditional journalism.

Well, yeah.

But what’s really going on here? It’s not just that the press is stupid, or timid. With the fracturing of the political and media landscape, there are no sources of universally-accepted authority any more in American life (except – Oprah?). This has driven political reporters ever deeper into a cocoon of their own construction, one with no objective reference points, because all of those are disputed by somebody, somewhere. So we end up with traditional journalistic “objectivity” with the actual objective realities edited out. It’s genius, really. Reporters privilege the political process itself over policy, over science, over common sense. Political advantage, or victory, is what matters. Everybody likes a winner, after all.

When climate doubters win, though, the results are objectively disastrous. It’s pretty clear the world is lurching toward environmental disaster, and temporizing over snowstorms isn’t helping. And the doubters won quite a lot over the past few months, as this Washington Post story details, with denials and doubters seizing on the “climategate” emails and lately on mistakes in the supposedly-bulletproof IPCC report.

It ought to be possible for media outlets to separate the genuine scientific issues here from the political ones. It doesn’t take that much effort.

In the case of Snowmageddon, for example: it’s impossible to attribute a single weather event to global warming, or to the supposed lack thereof. But as Bill McKibben notes in this piece, the amount of moisture in the atmosphere has risen 4 percent since 1970, which would tend to produce wetter weather in some areas. That’s useful information, even without a cause-and-effect relationship established.

In the case of the IPCC, how did mistakes and citations from interest groups creep into the IPCC report? Does this signal a broader “bias” problem? Does that appear merely in the shaping of the report and its language, in the way the authors interpret data and studies, or in the data and studies themselves? Is something truly “rotten in the state of the IPCC”? I’d guess not, because if you drill down almost all the evidence holds up. On the other hand, I don’t want my climate consensus document to contain any spin – give it to us straight! – so it’s not enough to say “move along, nothing to see here.”

But many of these questions and distinctions get lost when this moves into the field of politics and media coverage of politics. The Post itself is a living example of what happens when politics, and the protection of political interests by journalists, interferes with climate coverage. George Will has embarrassed the newspaper with his repeated twisting of climate data and his assertion that climate change is a scientific fad, like bell bottoms. This weekend, the Post featured both the McKibben piece and a column by Dana Milbank saying that because Gore and some unnamed environmental groups went overboard in attributing weather events to global warming, they deserved whatever they got from the other side. Never mind that the other side is wrong on the fundamentals.

These mixed messages are confusing. To an average reader, who may not care much about the details, the impression one gets is of science politicized and contested, with no true bottom line. This is corrosive to the debate over what to do about global warming. The Post can certainly entertain different voices on these issues. But in some ways it appears too deeply invested in the short-term political process and the conventions of political reporting, to consistently separate the real questions from the BS.

Is Twitter “bad”? Does it destroy your ability to concentrate, immerse you in ideas you are only half-interested in, condemning you to an intellectually impoverished lifetime of skimming and linking? This is clearly a danger for some people. But obviously life is more complex than a stark, either-or choice.

So I don’t understand why George Packer insists that Twitter is a pernicious, totalizing force in the media landscape, something that by its very nature swallows minds whole – as opposed to simply another tool, if a potentially distracting one. Some of the issues he raises in his two posts are real ones we all grapple with – how does swimming in a stream of constantly updating information from social media affect your concentration, your ability to manipulate ideas, to create?

But the online debate that he kicked off quickly devolved into silliness. Because Packer merely raises that question in order to tell us what he already thinks he knows. He doesn’t engage it directly or explore its facets, its history, its social effects. He is apparently unwilling to use his awesome journalism talents, so expertly deployed in understanding complex, layered, unfolding situations in Iraq or elsewhere around the world, on what’s right in front of his face.

The problem here isn’t Twitter. Or Packer’s resistance to technological change, or to shifting patterns of media consumption and expression (which I believe is misplaced, but he can do whatever he likes on that front). It’s the odd, elegiac pose he takes. Packer’s principal worry is that a world devoted to the quiet contemplation of books is ending:

Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they’re being honest—including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books. It’s no less true of me, which is why I’m trying to place a few limits on the flood of information that I allow into my head. The other day I had to books that my son had wantonly pulled down, most of them volumes from college days. I thumbed idly through a few urgently underlined pages of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” a book that electrified me during my junior year, and began to experience something like the sensation middle-aged men have at the start of softball season, when they try sprinting to first base after a winter off. What a ridiculous effort it took!

But the problems Packer cites, from his own observations, have little to do with books, or reading, or the content of your Twitter stream. It’s random social media stuff that rubs him the wrong way. He expresses revulsion at the sight of people reading their during lunch conversations, or pressing their noses to their smartphones as they stroll into traffic. He bemoans the end of the print-media business model and blames Twitter.

In other words, this is not a serious argument about the future of media. (A sure sign of this is to denounce your critics as members of an “intolerant cult,” compare social media to Thalidomide, and, stripping the irony from Roland Hedley – mon dieu! – equate Twitter and thanatos.) Maybe we shouldn’t expect a thoughtful argument in what was, originally, just a rant on a blog, albeit the New Yorker’s. But of course if you use the New Yorker platform to attack Twitter and the media revolution, it’s going to attract attention and debate. So I wish he’d have devoted some thought to this.

Packer pines for the way things used to be. But were things really so great before social media fractured our attention? Trashy entertainments and distractions are as old as culture itself. There may be more avenues for trash and trivia today, and more ways to waste time, but the obsessions haven’t changed. The question is, is this a difference of degree or kind? If you say “kind,” what are the implications for reading, for writing, for neurology? For news, for politics? Can they really be all bad? If they aren’t all bad, where does the promise lie for the long forms and deep thoughts that Packer seeks?

Culture has existed for thousands of years and (one hopes) will exist for thousands or millions more. The avenues for cultural expression are always changing. New forms emerge with new technology and social and economic changes. Triviality contends with depth. Neither wins, ultimately. It’s fine to mourn the past, but if you simply dig in and cling to your grief, it helps no one.