Sidney Lumet and Tom Fontana, as a tandem, and individually, were simply sublime last night. They were smart, funny, witty and charming, with a great chemistry and raport. Their comments completely reinforced the spirit of and purpose for the Forum–artists in conversation about the way in which the legal system inspires the creation of art.
In this case, in screening their film collaboration, “Strip Search,” we focused on the competing moral and legal tensions between security and freedom in a post-9/11 world. In an age of the Patriot Act, with 9/11 anxieties everywhere, and with the reminder of Ground Zero just a few short miles from where the Forum was held last night, at the Time Warner Center, what moral compromises are necessary in order to defend ourselves against terrorism, and what are the moral implications in doing so?
We will have an MP3 of the event available for downloading soon, but I will post some of the highlights of the evening shortly.
Excellent program! Fontana was thoughtful and amusing. Lumet brought fascinating insights from personal experiences. Rosenbaum guided the discourse masterfully.
The issues were interesting, but the form of the questions framed the discussion. The film asked for how long individuals would be willing to give up all their civil rights. It might have asked which rights we would be willing to compromise and for how long. That would be more relevant to the current situation.
Rosenbaum asked whether the guests would be willing to torture an individual to save 3000 lives. He might have asked more provocatively, “Do you think the FBI should have tortured Moussaoui to uncover the 9/11 plot?” That would have made the discussion more concrete.
Personally, I remain interested in the effect on the torturer of being assigned to administer torture. Once having crossed that line of willingly harming another, does the torturer later become a wife-batterer or a child-beater?
I would submit that this is precisely the situation that confronts Sean Connery’s character, Detective Sergeant Johnson, in Lumet’s film The Offence, in which the burned-out veteran of the force, in the course of interrogating a suspected child molester he believes is guilty, snaps and ends up beating him to death, revealing that he and his suspect in fact have more in common than we might have realized at the outset. The “process” of getting to the truth ultimately destroys them both. It’s a high price for the system, and the rest of us, to pay for designating this fragile individual to be the truth-seeker in the story, and the implications of the result onscreen are all too real.
My thoughts on The Offence bring me back to the guests’ observations about their reluctance to support torture as a means of saving lives, as well as to their comments about the search for truth being about “the process.” If that process is violated by torture, doesn’t it ultimately make that process/search fatally flawed? How can the system remain uncompromised in its search for the truth if it is derailed by the use of torture as a means to that end? I think we have a moral obligation to those whose lives we are trying to save — I’m just troubled about the process (which Sidney Lumet said he believes is not generally “instantaneous” in these matters) that enables the high-ranking decision-making authority for obtaining the information, which is antiseptically removed from the actual information-gathering, to make a torturer of the lower-level front-line agent in their own ranks. If they either order the torture or if they create the conditions in which such conduct is perceived as necessary or acceptable, have they lost sight of the greater pursuit?
The choices posed by the teacher in the first segment struck me as artificial. We never will get choices like 1 hour, 1 day, 1 year, etc for the surrender of our rights. When emergency measures are enacted in wartime (as Lincoln did during the Civil War) there is an assumption that the war will last an unknown but finite amount of time, after which rights will be restored to prewar levels. But the war against terror is assumed by all to be unending. Nobody expects a VE-Day type of end to this war. So the choices boil down to (1)an unspecified but finite amount of time or (2) an infinite amount of time.
Secondly, rights aren’t surrendered in a vacuum. They are surrendered to someone, or to an entity controlled by someone — and just who that that someone is makes all the difference in the world. To surrender some liberties, forever, to the likes of Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al feels quite different than surrendering them to Abraham Lincoln for a finite amount of time.
The movie’s opening classroom scene sets up the surrender of rights as a choice: I agree to give up my rights for a predetermined period of time to achieve a certain end. We all make choices all the time—when we ride the subway or walk outside at night—in the interest of furthering our personal safety. That is quite different from someone else deciding for me which of my rights will be diminished or eclipsed entirely in the interest of fighting terrorism. What we’re experiencing now is a diminishment in rights that aren’t of our choosing. If we could choose, which of rights would we give up and to what extent? I’m comfortable giving up my right to not have my backpack searched on the subway or on the way to the airplane. But I say that with the belief that giving up those rights will not lead inexorably to random strip searches.
The question needs a bit more definition–what rights am i giving up. In the end it all comes down to how much of a martyr you’re willing to make of yourself. The moral implication is that if you’re talking about a loss of “every” right then you’re almost committing suicide, but I guess it’s clear to me that you need to be willing to forgo some liberties to ensure safety.
I feel that for certain reasons and causes I would be willing to give up some of my rights as an American. We all have to coexist in society and that may require us, at some point, to give up things to which we’ve become accustomed. Every time we fly, we have to take the time to go through security and be searched. Although this may not be as extreme as giving up a right, it is similar. It is something we all deal with in order for us to feel better about our safety . Yes, it may be a little annoying, but I feel that if it is to benefit the overall good, I can handle it.
I agree with JGilbert, that airport security is an analogous example. For example, if all Americans had to be subjected to what is otherwise an illegal search of their home for 5 years, once a year – I could live
with that to achieve an end to terrorism. BUT other rights, are not so easily discarded. For example, I could not stomach infringement on first amendment rights for more than a day.
Austin Pendleton might have opened the film by asking: How long would you be willing to compromise the rights of OTHERS in the interest of national security?