Morris D. Davis' Op-Ed in the New York Times yesterday was disturbing, to say the least. One should view it as an example of what Slavoj Zizek said in his own recent Op-Ed on torture--not because there is torture at Guantanamo, but because Zizek argues that there is a "normalization" or tolerance of policies that necessarily lead to activities like torture rampant in American discourse. We wouldn't consider fify years ago whether torture was acceptable or not in any US-operated prison, he says. Now, we do. And this consideration, this allowance of disgusting ideals into discourse is what prompts their tolerance: those who are beyond morality (those who no longer think about torture as an issue but merely as a deed to be dutifully carried out) coopt moral discourse into considering their position in order to respond to it. Thereby their (what we would call) amoral position is rendered legitimate, rendered as a reflection on morality. And this is enough to undermine morality in itself simply because their position just isn't moral--it doesn't concern itself with the same morality. It should be noted that Zizek does not conclude we should shut these "amoral" others up, but that we should mark their speech as of another morality--thus their position within discourse can be accurately discerned, and their ability to coopt ours becomes limited.
Regardless of whether Zizek's view is right or not, what becomes interesting about this is that we can make sense of an article like Davis'. Through what seems a cynical viewpoint at first, Zizek leads us eventually to the point where we can go beyond him and can assert that this "normalization" of amoral issues is merely the effect of people like Davis trying to crush dissent or honest debate on the issues of torture and (what is more important) rights generally. Witness Davis' attempt to quash debate on accusations that prisoners at Guantanamo are tried using hearsay evidence:
There is no ban on hearsay among the indespensible rights listed in the Geneva conventions. Nor is there a ban on hearsay for the United Nations-sanctioned war crimes tribunals, including the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Nuremberg trials also did not limit hearsay evidence. Simply stated, a ban on hearsay is not an internationally recognized judicial guarantee.
Besides the utter insanity of the comparison between a Guantanamo prisoner and Adolf Eichmann that the reference to Nuremberg (half a century ago!) invites, what is happening here is that Davis is normalizing a point of view that is hostile to basic human rights by subordinating them to the coherency of his portrait of Guantanamo. This is a throwaway paragraph. But it does the dirty work of insinuation, of degradation. The subject matter of the article itself--Davis' equally insane implication that because the conditions of the prison at Guantanamo are excellent, it makes detaining an enemy combatant there (who has not been given a chance to say whether she or he was wrongly accused until the belated event of her or his trial) is in compliance with any common-sense idea of legality--this subject matter is completely tangential to these remarks on hearsay: in the article, Davis has just made his point that hearsay is (supposedly) not admitted into trials of detainees. Why speculate on whether the admission of hearsay in a trial is an internationally condemned practice?
Simply because it buttresses his position. The insinuation is that you are wrong for questioning the United Stats on the issue of the legality of Guantanamo, and that, furthermore, you are wrong about your own knowledge of internationally recognized human rights. In short, your common sense is wrong--any revulsion you might have to hearsay itself is suspect. Regardless of the validity of this perspective it is obvious that the effect is to call into question whether hearsay should be a right of a detainee if she or he wouldn't get it at Nuremberg--and merely by considering this question, we are already on our way to accomodating things like torture. But what doesn't matter here are the effects of whatever side you are on: for Davis, and for many people in politics nowadays, it seems that the question of what side you are on is more valuable. This is the scary thing about the article: in an effort to defend the Bush administration's policies, it is willing to attack even our most common-sense values.
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