"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
Steve Gilliard has been on a "liberals need to keep some historical and practical perspective" binge lately. Specifically, In partciular, he's been griping about bloggers who dismiss the importance of economic issues in the midterm elections this year and think the Democrats should focus exclusively on the Iraq War, or the torture issue, and not emphasize the bread-and-butter economic issues.
Now, Gilliard has been anything but indifferent to the Iraq War. He's thought it was a terrible idea from the start. And his blog has been consistently one of the best sources for information (mainly through excellent news links) and analysis about the very real problems going on in the war. He's been especially good about noticing early on the tremendous damage the war has done to the Army, in terms of internal discipline and quality of recruits.
And he's also been all over the torture issue for a long time. Anyone who's followed his blog knows that he considers those important issues.
In About Torture 09/24/06, he objects to the American-exceptionalist argument against torture, such as the one Joe Galloway uses in his column, We've sunk to Osama's level McClatchy Newspapers 09/20/06. (Gilliard doesn't mention Galloway in particular, but it's clear this type of argument is what he had in mind.)
One of his points on the torture issue is that he reminds us that it doesn't exist in isolation. When the US undertook a colonial-type war ("neocolonial", if you prefer), it took on the kind of war that is extremely likely to produce these kinds of abuses. As Gilliard puts it:
People need to come to grips with something. All colonial powers use torture. How else can they control their enemies. The British used it against the Irish, the French against the Algerians, and the Americans against the Afghans and Iraqis.
Khalid Sheik Mohammad is one of hundreds, if not thousands of people who have faced some form of American torture. I would think the prisoners of Abu Ghraib would trade a little waterboarding for the rape of children.
Bush and Rumsfeld wanted to show how ruthless they were, so they went for torture as a way to show their enemies times have changed. Of course, torture is the idiots way of interrogation, and now Bush lives in fear of open courts and public testimony.
What I would add to this is that, in the past, tolerance for torture or war crimes was informal. That didn't make it okay, to say the least. But it was and is illegal. Harry Truman didn't go to Congress during the Korean War to ask them to legalize torture. Nor did Lyndon Johnson or even Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War. The Army may have preferred to keep quiet about massacres in Vietnam. But the My Lai incident came out, no least because it was observed by some many Army personnel who knew that what had occurred was blatantly illegal.
And 2001 was not the first time the CIA has tortured someone or arranged to have them tortured. What's different in the Cheney-Bush administration is that torture has been adopted as a systematic policy for the treatment of terrorist suspects. And now the Republicans want to legalize it.
Still, Gilliard's historical point about colonial wars is an important one. Such wars as the Iraq War or the French war in Algeria are especially like to create what Robert Jay Lifton calls, "atrocity-producing situations". See Heart of Darkness PBS Newshour 05/11/04.
In Conditions of Atrocity The Nation 05/31/06 issue, Lifton writes:
We can thus speak of a three-tier dynamic. Foot soldiers--in this case MPs and civilian contractors--do the dirty work, as either orchestrated or at least sanctioned by military intelligence officers in charge of interrogation procedures. The latter in turn act on pressure from higher-ups to extract information that will identify "insurgents" and possibly lead to hidden weapons.
What ultimately drives the dynamic is an ideological vision that equates Iraqi fighters with "terrorists" and seeks to further justify the invasion. All this is part of the amorphous, even apocalyptic, "war on terrorism," as is the practice of denying the human rights of detainees labeled as terrorists, a further stimulus for abuse. Grotesque improvisations can occur at different levels--whether in the form of interrogators' ideas about inflicting sexual humiliation or in foot soldiers' methods of carrying out those instructions or responding to more indirect messages from above. ...
In environments where sanctioned brutality becomes the norm, sadistic impulses, dormant in all of us, are likely to be expressed. The group's violent energy becomes such that an individual soldier who questions it could be turned upon. (A Vietnam veteran who had been at My Lai told me he had felt himself in some danger when he not only refused to fire but pointedly lowered the barrel of his gun to the ground.) To resist such intense group pressure, an unusual combination of conscience and courage is required.
The effects are very different when such behavior really is aberrant, something done by only a "few bad apples", compared to when the civilian and military chains of command order and/or encouraged the use of torture. The latter results in a more far-ranging breakdown of law and organizational discipline.
I should add atthis point that neither Lifton nor Gilliard nor I are making an argument to minimize the ethical and legal culpability of the individual soldiers or civilian who commits atrocities or torture or war crimes. Even if Congress passes the torture legalization bill and Bush signs it into law, the law is still clear that those committing such acts are responsible. The US is a party to the Geneva Conventions and, however much Republican nationalists may dislike it, those laws are still binding on the US. (The practical ways in which they could be enforced is another question.)
Gilliard's other point has to do with the war in Iraq. It's not the only issue in Congressional elections. But it is an important one. What he argues at the end of his post is that putting an end to the torture policy means first and foremost putting an end to the Iraq War. I'm not convinced of that. The Iraq War as it was concieved and executed has tended to maximize atrocity-producing situations. A more serious approach to atrocities and war crimes violations on the part of the officer corps would undoutedly make improvement even now, although the discipline problems and the quality of more recent recruits work against that.
But there's an ugly and destructive cycle in which the jingoism that the Iraq War allows the Cheney-Bush administration to keep cooking at a high level generates support for the torture advocates, and as explicitly sadistic cruelty becomes more and more legitimzed, it feeds the jingoism, and so on.
He also makes an important historical point: anyone who was paying close attention could see that even in the early weeks of the Afghanistan War in 2001, the laws against torture and other war crimes were being treated lightly by some of those directing the American war effort. There were reliable reports, since comfirmed several times over, of our Northern Alliance allies in the Afghanistan War summarily executing prisoners of war.
In December 2001, that bad apple Robert Novak asked Rummy this question:
Do you feel, Mr. Secretary, there is a problem, however, when apparently most of the prisoners, all of the prisoners, are in the hands of the Northern Alliance, which I don't believe signed the Geneva Convention and are not the nicest guys in the world? Does that bother you at all?
As I explained in the linked post, the Geneva Conventions most certainly were binding on the Northern Alliance. Rummy's reply:
The fact that they [the Northern Alliance] don't happen to subscribe to some convention that we do or that other countries do is a fact. It is also a fact that we have to stop those terrorists from killing more Americans. And I don't feel even the slightest problem in working with the Northern Alliance to achieve that end. (my emphasis)
That one answer of Rummy's, and the ugly incident of the Secretary of Defense sneering at the laws of war codified in the Geneva Conventions as just "some convention" should have sent both Republicans and Democrats in Congress rushing to investigate.
What happens when you have a Secretary of Defense who sneers at the laws of war? This:
And this:
And worse.
"The President is always right." - Steve Bradbury, Acting Deputy Attorney General, 07/11/06
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