Minerva, Fall 2011 - Citizens for Global Solutions

Extreme InjuryElaine ScarrySeptember 2011Elaine Scarry, Walter M. Cabot Professorof Aesthetics & the General Theoryof Value at Harvard University andauthor of The Body in Pain, among otherbooks, most recently has written Thinkingin an Emergency (the first volume inAmnesty International’s Global Ethicsseries) and Rule of Law, Misrule of Men.This essay first appeared in the September/October2011 edition of the BostonReview. It is reprinted by permissionof the author.In a 2008 television interview, former Vice President Dick Cheney addressed complaintsabout the overreaching of the executive branch. In order to defend the Bushadministration, he might have argued that reports of presidential overreaching wereexaggerated. Instead he argued the opposite: the public, he suggested, has an insufficientappreciation of how truly vast that presidential power is. Accompanied aroundthe clock by a military aid carrying the nuclear football,[The president] could launch the kind of devastating attack the world hasnever seen. He doesn’t have to check with anybody. He doesn’t have to callthe Congress; he doesn’t have to check with the courts. He has that authoritybecause of the nature of the world we live in. It’s unfortunate, but I thinkwe’re perfectly appropriate to take the steps we have. 1Cheney makes the transition from the first three sentences to the fourth as though hisconclusion followed effortlessly from his premises: the president’s license to launchnuclear weapons (accurately described by Cheney, and true of every president livingin the nuclear age from Eisenhower to Obama) makes his otherwise illegal executiveactions — however “unfortunate” — “perfectly appropriate”.What Vice President Cheney seems to be saying is this: if you keep in mind the vastlevel of injury the president is permitted to inflict on the world, it will help you keepin perspective the lesser injuries he has actually inflicted: the 350 people allegedlytortured, the 83 times Abu Zubaydah was water boarded, the 183 times Khalid SheikhMohammed was water boarded, 2 the 3x6x7-foot cell (rat-infested and latrine-free) inwhich the wholly innocent Canadian citizen Maher Arar was kept for a year duringwhich time he was periodically beaten with a two inch–thick cable and threatened withbeing suspended upside down from a tire and subjected to electric shock. 3 Each timeyou think that the perpetrators of such acts should be prosecuted, replace that pictureof prosecution with a picture of what is always in the president’s field of vision: thenuclear football.Of course, neither picture should displace the other. Prosecuting the architects of UStorture is critical to restoring the rule of law, as I and countless others have arguedand continue to argue. But we should also, as Dick Cheney counsels, think about the40-pound titanium briefcase that accompanies the president (as well as, in one formator another, the executive officers of other countries) and enables him to launch a nuclearstrike. Nuclear weapons need to be gotten rid of first and foremost for their ownsake and also for the “lesser” brutalities they license.Our nuclear weapons are, at every minute of the day and night, ready for use. Just asthe nuclear briefcase is within the president’s reach, so all other steps between theorder to launch and the launch itself are relentlessly in place. In his recent biographyWithout Hesitation, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton describesthe period of his career when, as Deputy Director of Operations at the NationalMilitary Command Center under Bill Clinton, he was “in charge of our nuclear watch”at the Pentagon “with secure 24/7 links to the President . . . and the key to initiate anuclear launch at my fingertips”. He recounts the frequent exercises—called “NightBlue” — for presidential launch: “Our guiding philosophy was—and still is—practice,then practice again.” 450 • Minerva #39 • November 2011[continued]