I must say, it gets kind of sickening sometimes when I spend some time concentrating on some of the torture stories. It's a grim subject.
But an important one. So here are several recent pieces on this.
Josh Marshall (06/13/04) references this Newsweek article: A Tortured Debate 06/21/04 issue; accessed 06/13/04). (How many times will we hear that rhetorical device, "tortured debate," "tortured argument," etc.?) Marshall emphasizes the angle showing that the Office of the Vice President was intimately involved in the discussions over torture in the gulag. Marshall has done a good bit of work on how Cheney, despite his reputation among a lot of people even now of being particularly competent, seems to be very involved in one Bush administration policy disaster after another.
This is a major story about how Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top American military officer in Iraq, may be directly implicated in the war crimes involving torture: General Granted Latitude at Prison Washington Post 06/11/04.
And since the defenders of torture of course try to wrap this kind of perversion in the American flag and in the name of "supporting the troops," it's worth remembering that some of the soldiers placed in the situation of being expected to torture prisoners or facilitate the crimes instead obeyed the law and did their duty as soldiers. Which in this case was to disobey criminal orders: Early complaints of Abu Ghraib abuse went nowhere, recrods show AP 06/12/04.
At least five soldiers objected last fall to abuses they saw at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. One demanded to be reassigned, saying the behavior he witnessed there "made me sick to my stomach."
Up the chain of command, the noncommissioned officers who heard such complaints did little to stop the mistreatment, according to Army records obtained by The Associated Press.
One of those same NCOs, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick, is accused of stomping on prisoners' toes and punching another prisoner so hard in the chest that he remarked, "I think I might have put him in cardiac arrest." Frederick is among six soldiers facing courts-martial. Another soldier pleaded guilty last month.
The military's full-blown investigation into beatings and humiliations at Abu Ghraib began in January, after one soldier wrote an anonymous letter to superior officers about troubling photographs. That soldier, Spc. Joe Darby, came forward later to talk to Army investigators and eventually became known as the whistle-blower who uncovered the scandal.
Now, the superpatriots and the Christian Right zealots and the Oxycontin blowhards and the stab-in-the-back crowd are already preparing to rewrite this history so that it will be "War critics accused random soldiers coming home from Iraq of being war criminals and yelling 'torturer' and 'baby killer' at them."
So, it's worth noting in real-time that it was an American soldier doing his duty as an American soldier and an American patriot, who made the complaint that eventually blew the lid of the Abu Ghuraib torture and forced the Pentagon, whose senior officials had connived at breaking the law, to begin to deal with war crimes involved.
In one important sense, too, soldiers like Joe Darby are antiwar protesters in an important sense, in that they objected to the way the war was being fought through the employment of means criminal under American and international law. That does not mean they were necessarily against the Iraq War as a policy. Whatever crimes may have been involved in planning the invasion of Iraq - and preventive war is a crime - the operations could have been conducted without torturing prisoners. And it's important to keep in mind: the law requires that the war be conducted without those methods.
The question whether this particular type of war, or the way in which the war was planned, have in some way increased the likelihood of these kinds of incidents, is a different matter. An extremely important one. But separate from the question of the war crimes at issue.
Helena Cobban has a long, informative post on the current state of the laws of war as they apply to the torture cases: Bush, Rumsfeld and 'Command Responsibility' 06/11/04. She also links to this paper by a Marine Corps attorney about the post-Second World War trial of the Japanese general Yamashita, a key predent in command responsbility cases: The Yamashita War Crimes Trial: Command Responsibility Then and Now by Maj. Bruce Landrum, 05/23/03 [the date is shown at the directory listing for Landrum_Yamashita].
Billmon has been looking at the role Christian zealotry at the Pentagon played in concocting the legal justifications for torture, based on the president's alleged power to set aside any law or Constitutional provision he chooses, as long as he claims it's being done in pursuit of national security needs: Praise the Lord and Pass the Thumbscrews 06/07/04 and There's Something About Mary 06/09/04.
Defending Torture, Sophomore Philosophy Version
Fred Hiatt comments on The Consequences of Torture Washington Post 06/14/04, making it clear he's pretty clueless on the whole topic. Mimicking Deep Thought, Hiatt makes the case for torture in his first three paragraphs:
"What if by using torture against an al Qaeda operative, U.S. forces were able to prevent a significant terrorist attack and save hundreds or thousands of American lives," a reader wrote to The Post in a letter published Friday. "Should torture be authorized?"
It's a seemingly simple question, one that many of us asked ourselves in the days and weeks after Sept. 11, 2001. Back then, the answer seemed relatively simple, too: If you could save, say, 3,000 lives by subjecting one terrorist to harsh or even painful interrogation methods, how could that not be the moral thing to do?
Now, after months of disturbing revelations about prisoner abuse and prisoner homicide by U.S. soldiers and interrogators, is the answer still simple? Many would say yes --would say, asthe letter writer was suggesting, that we cannot afford to be squeamish in the midst of a war on terrorism. Because the United States has been spared further attacks at home, they would say, we moralists may delude ourselves into thinking that we can once again afford the luxury of pure principle and uncompromised civil liberties. But let terrorists strike again -- perhaps more catastrophically than before -- and we will once again put the Geneva Conventions into proper perspective.
He proceeds to hem and haw his way to the realization that, gosh, maybe it's more complicated than that.
Which doesn't begin to describe the nature of that pitch for torture. It's a fine argument for sophomore philosophy class. Although calling it a "sophomoric" argument is giving it too much credit. That situation he describes occurs frequently in action movies and comic books. In real life, torture is not carried out under battlefield conditions where the lives of the whole platoon depend on getting some captured schmuck to talk immiediate.
Torture is carried out under the conditions at Abu Ghuraib, at Guantanamo, in the various other stations of the Bush-and-Rummy gulag. Leaving aside recreational S&M with consenting adults, torture torture is and always has been carried out almost exclusively by governments or quasi-governmental groups, in conditions wherer they have people captured and under control. The main exceptions would be free-lancing perverts, organized crime gangs and cult-type groups. But systematic torture is almost exclusively the practice of governments. And in all the kind of instances cited, the goal of torture is not primarily (and usually not even partially) to secure information about crimes committed - much less imminent killings - but to terrorize the target population.
Even Fred Hiatt seems to dimly recognize that allowing torture for the hypothetical case of the comic-book emergency would mean in practice that it would be used extensively. And Big Pundits get paid big money for writing stuff like that! Any country parson could reason out and explain more this issue more clearly.
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