Bastinado

Who could have imagined, in September 2001, that one of the masterminds of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon would make his confession and the world would hear it with indifference?

So wails Anne Applebaum, the lone lady manning the oars of the Post's opinion page, where almost all the rowers sit on the same side of the boat with predictable results. Hell, Anne, I could've imagined it, and the Malign Mistress Sontag could have imagined it, and so could Ol' Marginal Noam, but my offices look down on the Allegheny, not the Potomac nor the Hudson, and no one who knew the US practiced torture before September 2001 and knew it'd practice ever harder thereafter counts anyway, moral judgment being an option open only to the wide-eyed and incredulous in this great republic of ours, which has lost its innocence more times than a a teenage hooker with an urge to the Evangel in the off hours of the day. (A prayer: Lord, do not save the innocent, but save us from them.)

That's deserved gloating. Here is the real answer: If you cared about a confession in the first place, you were already betting on the horse named Torture. Americans have a curiously Soviet affection for the confession. Maybe medieval is the better word. The spectacle of it appeals to us. We are not a proceduralist people by nature, the process of justice appeals to us less and less every day. A confession can have evidentiary value, of course, but that's not what Applebaum is talking about. Nor is she talking about a judicial process determining guilt and passing sentence. She's talking about the cathartic circus of some Arab in shackles saying, Yes, I brought the towers down, Inshallah. Then we can all feel better than the animals, and that purpose is served.

But we already knew whodunnit. It was no mystery. They claimed responsibility. They announced it to the world. Was Shaikh Mohammed the "mastermind"? Maybe, maybe not. That fact is irrelevant. We understood him to be a member of the organization that undertook to attack the United States on September 11. We understood his significance in that organization. So, to circle back, it was not confession-as-evidence, confession-as-information that Applebaum and her ilk wanted. It was Confession in the old medieval sense, in the Inquisition sense, in the thumbscrew sense: confession as a spiritual acknowledgement of guilt; confession as submission. I'll repeat myself: they wanted to see a broken Muslim in shackles, abased before American might, now at last harmless. They wanted what torture produces, but they're made squeamish by the fact of the torture, and they regret that something already sick and discredibatle was made more so by the grotesquely public facts of its execution.