If Sports Ruled The World
In an otherwise unremarkable column about the instant morality of sports, Henninger made the following preposterous claim:
Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to let a prosecutor investigate CIA interrogations that were ruled inbounds years ago is like a baseball commissioner reversing a hotly disputed World Series home run. Fans everywhere would burn down the stadium.
This is bizarre in a number of ways. Henninger isn’t even using the correct sports analogy. In this case, the analogy would have to be some kind of action that had once been illegal but was permitted under a looser interpretation of the rules. You would then have to have some regulating authority declare later on that the new interpretation of the rules was basically invalid and that the old rules had always applied, opening the door to some kind of retroactive penalties. The closest comparison I can think of is when the NCAA voids the wins of coaches involved in recruiting violations, which is an appropriate disciplinary action for cheating college programs and exactly the kind of strict enforcement of rules that Henninger is implicitly rejecting in his criticism of Holder.
In practice, there are rarely dangerous actions in any sport that were once banned but are now permitted. In American football, the trend has been towards tighter and tighter restrictions on what defensive players can do to receivers and quarterbacks. There really is nothing in the sports world that directly compares to investigating the torture regime, because there is no professional organization that started allowing routine violent abuses during games. You have never heard NFL officials claim that there need to be more crippling tackles on defenseless players to preserve the game of football. Of course, contests premised on fairness cannot reasonably be compared to practices that are by their nature gross injustices against human dignity, but that doesn’t bother Henninger. The very thing that Henninger finds attractive and worthwhile in the instant and mostly reliable morality of sports (which apparently does not apply to teams from Massachusetts) is what he plainly does not want to have applied when it comes to national security, and what is most striking is that he isn’t even aware of the contradiction.
For Henninger and those like him, the torture regime is the natural response to a world with blurred lines, gray areas and extraordinary measures that must be taken against unconventional enemies. If sports ruled the world, as Henninger’s title reads, people who openly defy and violate the Geneva Conventions would be hauled before international tribunals and sentenced to many years in prison, and their apologists in the press would be hounded from decent society as the enablers of criminality that they are. As we all know, this has not happened and will not be happening, in part because of people like Henninger, who pretend to decry chaos and rule-breaking while regularly endorsing it in practice when it is done in the name of anti-terrorism and security.
“Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to let a prosecutor investigate CIA interrogations that were ruled inbounds years ago is like a baseball commissioner reversing a hotly disputed World Series home run. Fans everywhere would burn down the stadium.”
I suppose there’s no point in even untangling this analogy, but… it’s Friday, so what the heck.
The problem is that the umpires in a sporting event, unless they’ve been bribed or otherwise influenced, have no interest in the outcome of the games they work or the calls they make. So it makes sense–in the absence of evidence that the umpires have been pressured or bought–to defer to the decisions they make on the field. But everyone in the United States government, no matter how fair-minded and humane, is on the side of the United States of America (again, discounting treachery, bribery, etc.). And, of course, the Bush Administration was unusually willing, even by the standards of US foreign policy, to engage in dubious and illegal activity, and to encourage dubious and illegal activity in its employees.
So, actually, the best analogy might be a baseball manager who takes over a team and finds that his predecessor has been encouraging all the hitters to cork their bats and take steroids, and encouraging the pitchers to use sandpaper and vaseline on the baseballs. “I would’ve gotten away with it under the other guy” is not a particularly compelling defense if the new manager decides to suspend or cut players who knowingly broke the rules in previous seasons.
Now, obviously, this is a silly analogy as well because the crux of the issue is whether CIA interrogators relied on legal advice that, as it turns out, was improperly manufactured by the Bush Administration and bears no relationship to the actual law. I suppose what happens to individual interrogators should depend on how clear the law is, and what they can and should have been expected to know about how the law limited their actions. If Henninger’s only point were that it’s wrong to penalize the utility infielders when the coaches have gotten away scot-free, then I’d agree with him. It’s certainly a little galling that the low men on the totem poll may end up punished when Bush, Cheney, etc. have entered comfortable retirements and are writing their memoirs secure in the knowledge that the Washington establishment will never come after its own.
“In this case, the analogy would have to be some kind of action that had once been illegal but was permitted under a looser interpretation of the rules.”
Here is a more accurate, if still problematic, analogy: If, in a previous game, a game Umpire – who does not have the authority to change baseball’s rules – declared that a foul-tip was a home run, and the rest of the league seized on that and played by that rule, though the rules were never changed by the proper authorities (the Commissioner). Then, years later, a new Comissioner realized that that teams had been playing game after game, violating the rules, called the legimacy of those games into question, and launched an investigation.
FYI – a low-level DOJ functionary does not have the authority to create laws. If a low-level DOJ functionary told George W Bush that it was legal for him to rob banks at gunpoint, that would not make it so.