vimothy
yurp
Graft Paper: The economics of assassination might surprise you as much as they did Harvard's Ben Olken - Michael Moynihan, The American
On a level other than the theoretical, is it useful? How would states interact with non-states or quasi-states?
Surely this ain't the right question to be posing Vim. Instead: how do states (or indeed the disaggregated parts of states i.e. its various departments, offices, agents etc) interact with non-states actors and bit-part quasi-state institutions? Analysing the DRC conflict (for example) through a state-centric lens would obscure much more than it could reveal about the actualities on the ground IMO.
Mr BoShambles borrowed my copy of his book many moons ago and never returned it
And IMO you're totally right about financial economists/economists having more of a policy role than IR scholars.
[P]ost the nation, what binds the citizen to the state?
BTW -- slightly off topic now, but Bill Easterly has started a blog: http://blogs.nyu.edu/fas/dri/aidwatch/
QUESTION: Can you think of any circumstances in a national emergency where torture might be justified? Let me just cite a quick hypothetical example.
Suppose the New York police department learns of three al-Qaeda people with a suitcase bomb coming into the United States, and they pick up one or two of them. They don't know where the third man is with the bomb. You have an imperative there.
DARIUS REJALI: Yes, and I understand the ethical—again, we can get into the ethical argument about this. But let me just put it this way. You wouldn't want to make that a torture policy. This is why we have jury nullification. Jury nullification is our policy, basically.
Can you imagine a situation where your wife is ill and is in tremendous pain, and you have to kill her? Can you? Yes, it's possible. You could. Then you go and stand in front of a jury and you say, "I did this," and no jury will convict you—unless, of course, you wanted the inheritance.
The same thing is true for torture. If you actually did this—and this is what I really dislike about this argument—first of all, you should be prepared to go to Leavenworth if you didn't do this properly. You should spend 30 years in Leavenworth if there was no reason, just as if you did this to get your wife's inheritance. You should go to jail for a very long time.
Instead, what I find is that all the CIA guys have liability insurance in case they are sued. They know that there isn't an emergency going on here.
The other point I would like to make about this—and I think it should be kind of straightforward—is that torture is not a regulatable process. One of the things that Torture and Democracy shows is that, even if this argument is true, it can't support the argument for regulating or legalizing torture. It just is an argument for the extreme end exception. To prove the rest of it, you would have to actually have proof—look at the data—that, in fact, torture can be regulated.
Can it be? That's a really empirical question. It's a very useful one. I'm happy to investigate it. I know all the data. This is what it turns out to be.
Torture has three slippery slopes; not one, but three slippery slopes. The first is that the number of victims that it's limited to—extreme cases, whatever—starts expanding.
Second, the number of techniques that are approved starts expanding, for a variety of reasons having to do with the pressures of time and worry and all these other things. People say, "Why should I stick to this? I'm not going to stick to the regs." They are the Jack Bauers of this world. They are not going to bother.
Lastly, organizations that torture and have regulated torture typically become less responsive to centralized authority. They simply become less accountable.
I was the last person in the world to be surprised that the CIA destroyed its videotapes without any legal permission. That is what happens when you allow an organization to torture. It becomes very worried about its own security. It becomes much less responsive to the people at the top.
All three of these slopes happen whether it's domestic torture or international torture. What happens in international torture, particularly in the context of war, is that these slopes become much slicker. They become much slicker for reasons that will become obvious. You need flexibility in counterinsurgency, so groups are separate from central command. You are dealing with fuzzy contexts, where you can't tell enemies from soldier combatants. Safety requires that you treat a person as an enemy unless they can prove they are your friend.
Basically, the ticking time bomb example, even if it is true, doesn't prove what its proponents want it to prove, which is that we should institute or regulate torture. All it can prove is something we all knew, which is that when anybody in America does anything bad, they stand before a jury and make their case. If they are wrong and if they lie, they go to jail.
What I dislike is when we get a culture of irresponsibility, where basically people say, "If I had good intentions, I should get off the hook."
I have students here. They all had good intentions when they were working for me, so they all deserve A's, right? No. It's what you do that really matters.
Torture still is a crime, but it's excusable under certain circumstances. For that, you don't need a policy. You just have jury nullification.