"I wouldn't join the International Criminal Court. It's a body based in The Hague where unaccountable judges and prosecutors can pull our troops or diplomats up for trial.
"And I wouldn't join it. And I understand that in certain capitals around the world that that wasn't a popular move. But it's the right move not to join a foreign court that could -- where our people could be prosecuted." - George W. Bush 09/30/04
"Men without conscience are capable of any cruelty the human mind can imagine." - Dick Cheney 01/26/05
"This is just awful" are the words Laura Rozen uses to introduce excerpts from this article: In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths by Tim Golden New York Times 05/20/05 (not a permanent link).
Read the excerpt at Rozen's blog and then the article. It's sickening. I'll quote just this excerpt:
The story of Mr. Dilawar's brutal death at the Bagram Collection Point - and that of another detainee, Habibullah, who died there six days earlier in December 2002 - emerge from a nearly 2,000-page confidential file of the Army's criminal investigation into the case, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.
Like a narrative counterpart to the digital images from Abu Ghraib, the Bagram file depicts young, poorly trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse. The harsh treatment, which has resulted in criminal charges against seven soldiers, went well beyond the two deaths.
In some instances, testimony shows, it was directed or carried out by interrogators to extract information. In others, it was punishment meted out by military police guards. Sometimes, the torment seems to have been driven by little more than boredom or cruelty, or both.
This is what torture is about. Allow people to do these kinds of things to other people and the above is what inevitably happens. Torture is not about the TV-and-movies scenario where the nuclear bomb is going to go off in the middle of the city in twenty minutes and the hero has to cause the bad guy some serious pain to save millions of people from imminent destruction.
It's not about avenging 9/11. It's not about extracting information. It's about terror in the most old fashioned sense, of making people in the target population fear the authority responsible for the torture. It's about letting loose the worst impulses of human beings.
The United States is in the torture business. This scandal is not going away. Among other things, the Army is being badly damaged by the lawlessness and collapse of discipline that this represents.
Reading things like this make it difficult to be optimistic about the human race in the long run. It certainly gives a lot of credibility to the words of St. Paul, which Sigmund Freud would echo in scientific language centuries later, when he describes what happens when people are given up to "the lusts of their hearts." And what comes out of those hearts often ain't pretty:
They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are ... slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, ... foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. (Romans 2: 28; RSV)
Every single senior official responsible for this torture policy should receive a fair trial and be sent to prison for a long time. Rumsfeld, Gonzalez, the whole lot of them. Boastful, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless: is there a better description of the team responsible for the torture policy?
And, as Laura Rozen also asks, where is Congress in all of this? Where are those fine Republican "moderates" of the party that controls both houses of Congress, Richard Lugar, Chuck Hagel, "straight-talking" John McCain? When are they going to do a serious investigation of the torture gulag? What about that fine Christian, the good doctor Frist?
The following observation from Telford Taylor, US chief counsel at the Nuremberg war crimes trials of leading Nazi officials, which I have quoted before addresses just the problem described in the Times article (from Nuremberg and Vietnam, 1970):
Another and, to my mind, even more important basis of the laws of war is that they are necessary to diminish the corrosive effect of mortal combat on the participants. War does not confer a license to kill for personal reasons - to gratify perverse impulses, or to put out of the way anyone who appears obnoxious, or to whose welfare the soldier is indifferent. War is not a license at all, but an obligation to kill for reasons of state; it does not countenance the infliction of suffering for its own sake or for revenge. (my emphasis)
The supporters of torture can whine all they want about how the only problem is the press reporting these things. This scandal is not going away any time soon.
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