Abstractions

So, Matt Yglesias doesn't think very much of the way David Ignatius is approaching the question of how CIA operatives who break the law should be punished. It's a politically interesting, and important, debate to be having. But it's also extremely far-removed from the operational questions at hand: who orders CIA operatives to take illegal actions? Who sanctions compliance with those orders? What happens to people who refuse? What mechanisms exist to punish people who break laws against orders? All of those little checks and balances within individual agencies, and within individual intelligence officers, are critically important. I understand why people have the meta-level debates, truly I do. Questions of national character are not to be taken lightly. But if we're concerned about how these things happen, we have to know how they happen. There have been dramatic stories about struggles within the Justice Department to evaluate and get people to sign off on certain interrogation policies, but they're really only about that first question in the chain of events.