Mark Bowden: more macho than you

(H/T to digby's stand-in, dday)

When it comes to Mark Bowden, I say what I say about a lot of musical groups:

The early stuff was better.

I remember reading Bowden's early columns about Mogadishu. I was so riveted, I saved copies of every one to a word document in case they got taken off the site.

I still have them.

I've read the resulting book and his equally visceral follow up "Killing Pablo."

At the time, I thought both of them had a moral center.

Blackhawk Down was an indictment of open ended foreign policy, and the fatal consequences of not minding the store. A humanitarian mission was allowed to turn into a counter-insurgency. Don't do that to your soldiers, it said. Give them honorable missions and support them fully.

Killing Pablo had many messages, but one of the enduring questions raised was about Los Pepes, a vigilante group devoted to killing anyone related to, or partnered with drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.

Bowden advanced the theory that US intelligence was being passed on to Los Pepes, so that they could better find and eliminate their targets. I'd have to search for the exact citation, but I thought there was an implied disapproval on the part of Mr. Bowden. Criticism of the US being in any way complicit in gangland-style murders of corrupt businessmen seemed inspirational.

After all - the counter argument would be easy to make - "hey, these guys had it coming. We're just giving them what they deserve."

Well, it appears that Mr. Bowden is now making that argument himself - about waterboarding.

According to him, the ends justify the means.

I shouldn't be surprised. A good portion of the Pablo book exults in the extremes that the Colombian police are pushed to. Escobar was unthinkably powerful in his country, and the normal measures were not enough. There is an action-movie narrative present that is easy to get wrapped up in.

But Bowden asks good questions in Killing Pablo - Was Delta Force involved in the shooting of Escobar? Was there any attempt at arresting him or were the police simply looking to kill him?

So, I guess I am really am surprised at this new column.

Here's Bowden's case. Let's see if we've heard any of this before:

Think back to those pictures of workers crouched in windows high up in the burning World Trade Center towers, choosing whether to jump to their death or be burned alive. This was in part Abu Zubaydah's handiwork.

Torture is okay because of 9/11. Check.

[Zubaydah] was supervising ongoing plots to kill hundreds if not thousands of people. He was, for obvious reasons, disinclined to share this knowledge.

Torturing bad people is okay. Check.

Subjected briefly to waterboarding - less than a minute, according to published reports - [Zubaydah] became cooperative and provided information …

Torturing people works, and this guy was only tortured a little bit. Check.

It is not torture in the traditional sense of inflicting pain; it inflicts fear, intense, visceral fear, without doing physical harm. It is a method calculated to straddle the definitions of coercion and torture, and as such merely proves that both methods inhabit the same slippery continuum. There is a difference between gouging out a man's eyes and keeping him awake, and waterboarding falls somewhere in between….

Besides, it's not really torture at all. It's "torture light." Check.

With prisoners like these, defiant and dangerous, the only right question to ask is, What works?

We can and should do bad things to prevent worse things. Check.

Bowden then follows this all up with this plaintive little gem:

The interrogators who waterboarded Zubaydah were breaking the law. They knew they were risking their careers and freedom. But if the result of the act itself was a healthy terrorist with a bad memory vs. a terror attack that might kill hundreds or even thousands of people, it is a good outcome. The decision to punish those responsible for producing it is an executive one.

And there it is, the most clichéd and obvious line - and therefore the most offensive shell in Bowden's broadside:

These torturers are noble, because they are willing to do things that are wrong. Spare them.

Mr. Bowden - from one who has enjoyed your work in the past - your column is full of it.

• "Because bad things have happened" is not a reason to torture.
• "Because I know this person is bad" is not a reason to torture.
• Only torturing a little - is still torture.
• Convincing a person that they are suffocating for any length of time - is still torture.

Bowden argues that factual information has been gained from torture - why else to cultures keep returning to this tactic? he asks. If it didn't work, we'd have stopped by now?

Yes, what other reasons can there be?

White settlers of America were horrified to discover that the Apaches would torture their prisoners slowly to death on the assumption that the captor would gain spiritual stature as the captive lost it. The student would prefer not to think that a primitive people was thus showing us what was once universally true, and came from instinct. It would help if mankind were the only animal that tortured its prey: We could persuade ourselves that only a social history could produce such an aberration. Unfortunately, cats torment mice until the mouse turns cold, and killer whales play half an hour of water polo with a baby seal before they finally put it out of its misery by eating it. We can do better than the cats and the killer whales, but it might be a help to admit that the same propensity is widespread and could even be there within ourselves.

Effectiveness, according to Mr. Bowden is the only possible reason.

Yet couldn't it spring from a sense of being the injured party? From an unquenched need to finally be dishing something out instead of merely taking it?

Any chance we just want to revel in inflicting pain on our enemy of the moment until they say exactly what we want to hear?

Nah, that couldn't be it, surely.

After all, we're better than that.