Sorting through the moral and ethical confusion surrounding the Osama mission

Posted By David Rothkopf Wednesday, May 4, 2011 - 3:03 PM

It is remarkable how much moral confusion and ethical contortionism can surround something as straightforward as the execution of a self-admitted mass murderer. But run anything through the political Play-doh Fun Factory of Washington and it comes out twisted as a pretzel.

This is not a partisan statement. Both sides have plenty of intellectual dishonesty, hypocrisy, and nonsense to account for.

On the right, you have the scramble to assert that the entire successful mission to dispatch Osama turned on information gained through aggressive interrogation methods. The argument is troubling on several levels. First, we know that "aggressive interrogation" is not only a codeword for torture, it is actually a synonym for it. The right is therefore once again staking out the pro-torture position, asserting that without them and their willingness to make the tough decision to compromise American values and U.S. and international law, this triumph wouldn't have been possible.

On one level, they fail yet again to see that torture is never justified and that it not only debases the U.S. but actually plays into the hands of men like bin Laden, making their anti-U.S. case for them. The stark fact remains that even in a situation requiring certain moral compromises, if the only way to get bin Laden was by torturing his associates, we shouldn't have done it.

But celebrating this shameful episode in our history like it was a badge of honor is not only morally bankrupt, it is stupid foreign policy. It will intimidate no one and alienate millions. Further, it negates or minimizes the role of the people who deserve the greatest celebration for this achievement and who, thus far, have received the least credit: the rank and file of the intelligence, military and law enforcement communities who pieced together the trail to bin Laden using countless sources, high-tech surveillance, old-fashioned shoe-leather and exceptional tenacity and skill. When there are so many successes to celebrate in this venture why embrace the one about which we should be most ashamed and which is likely to do us the most damage internationally?

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EXPLORE:JUSTICE, OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, PAKISTAN, TERRORISM

We need more than a day to reflect on 9/11

Posted By David Rothkopf Friday, September 10, 2010 - 4:12 PM

Update, 9/12/10: In the following post due to a mistake regarding which draft I submitted to be posted, a couple of key words were dropped that have been noted by several commenters. They refer to the paragraph regarding the mosque project in Lower Manhattan. What I intended to write (and had actually written in the draft that I mistakenly did not submit) was not "It is odious..." but instead "It may seem odious to some, but if our freedoms..." I appreciate those who noted the incongruity of the remark given that I was early and strongly on the record supporting the right of those supporting the Islamic Cultural Center to build it wherever they wanted to. As should be clear to anyone who reads this blog, I find the objections and efforts to block the cultural center to be what is really odious and that is the point that I would have made here were it not for my typo. Apologies.

A week ago, Fareed Zakaria wrote a piece for Newsweek entitled "What America Has Lost." It was subtitled "It's clear we overreacted to 9/11." As is typical for Zakaria, it is exceptionally thoughtful and well-argued. Its timely focus is on the enormous costs associated with building up the massive U.S. security apparatus that targeted a terrorist threat that was and is clearly overstated. Zakaria makes reference to the landmark Washington Post "Top Secret America" series that outlined how, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks, the United States has "created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent to $75 billion (and that's the public number, which is a gross underestimate.) That's more than the rest of the world spends put together."

Even today, nine years after 9/11, it took considerable courage for Zakaria to argue that we overreacted to the horrific events of that day. Given their scope and visceral impact on every American, it seemed in the days after the blows were struck that overreaction was impossible. But in the years that followed, the feelings seem hardly to have ebbed at all, and critiques of our national reaction are, with the exception of the near consensus that invading Iraq was wrong, considered almost unpatriotic -- nearly sacrilegious, in fact.

Yet I believe that Zakaria's column understates the problem. I attribute this to its appropriately limited focus rather than any narrowness of his perspective. It was, after all, just a single column in which he focused on making an important point about America's security priorities and the opportunity costs associated with our strategic overreaction. That said, the damage done by letting emotion and adrenaline get the best of us in the months and years after the attacks extends far beyond the distortion of foreign policy priorities or the impact on the U.S. federal budget.

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