Following up on Adam's reply to Cliff May, I'll comment further on May's accusation that we and the New York Times had attempted either to "crush debate" and/or to incite violence against him, particularly because May quotes from an e-mail exchange with me. Obviously, neither we nor the Times sought to incite violence against May. And it's hard to see how engaging in debate (which is all we do here) can equal crushing debate. May complained to me that he had never said anything "remotely" like Adam's paraphrase, "torture is justified against Muslims because they're Muslim." I pointed out the key passage in in his much-discussed April 24 post, which he does not mention in his own column: "We now know that Islamists believe their religion forbids them to cooperate with infidels — until they have reached the limit of their ability to endure the hardships the infidel is inflicting on them." The plain meaning of this is that the nature of their religious belief justifies pushing them beyond the limits of endurance, which is one definition of torture. And it was written in defense of an op-ed earlier that week by Marc Thiessen which claimed that the usual objections to torture -- that people would say anything to get torture to stop -- didn't apply to Muslims because given the nature of the religion, "the job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely." And it was not just us and the Times who read it this way. In The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan headlined his immediate response "Cliff May: We Have To Torture Muslims." It seems that until it appeared in the Times "Opinionator" column, May (a former Times reporter who now runs a human rights think tank) was unaware of the widespread discussion of his obvious meaning. And no violence seems to have been incited in the three months since The Atlantic's headline appeared. May has two serious objections: The first is that I "failed to understand the difference between Muslims and Islamists, between -- for example -- a Kurdish businessman and al-Qaeda member with knowledge of plots targeting civilians, or between an Indonesian farmer and a leader of Hezbollah or Hamas." I do know that not all Muslims can be considered "Islamists," but also, rather more significantly, that not all "Islamists" are "al-Qaeda members with knowledge of plots" or Hamas leaders. Islamist, in its modern meaning, is a large, vague, controversial category, essentially referring to those who believe in some role for Islamic law in the state. It is not a synonym for terrorist or militant in any way. The dissidents on the streets of Tehran are mostly Islamists, as is the governing party of Turkey. His second objection is that we should acknowledge that he's always said that he opposes torture. This is absolutely true. Acknowledged: Cliff May's official position is that he's opposed to torture. What he wants, he says, is a debate about the definition of torture, about where the line falls between things that are definitely torture -- "includes gouging out eyes and prying off fingernails" -- and the comfy chairs and group therapy favored by "the anti-war left." And where does he think that line lies? In his view, waterboarding is merely "unpleasant," closer to the comfy-chair than to the eyeless-in-Gaza treatment. On The Daily Show recently, May told Jon Stewart with a straight face that the torture memos should actually be called "anti-torture memos" because all of the things they did not explicitly permit are defined as torture and therefore prohibited. But the debate he's been calling for has happened, and it's over. The techniques sanctioned by the torture memos are torture. If you support those techniques, you can choose to call yourself "anti-torture," but you can't reasonably expect anyone else to. -- Mark Schmitt
