The comments in the other post were getting out of hand, particularly after it was Instalinked. But there was an earlier comment there that I really shouldn’t let stand unchallenged, now that I have a break for the weekend.
The other point, separate from the moral issue raised by Bill, is that torture does not provide useful information. That according to experts.
So when you torture you are doing it not for the information content you wish to derive, but rather the sheer pleasure it gives the torturer. We don’t need that pleasure given that we claim we are better than Al-Qaeda.
I don’t accept the conclusion, because I don’t accept the premise.
First, “the experts” disagree on the value of information gained by torture. Certainly, it’s obvious that there is no guarantee that information gained under duress is valid. On the other hand, that doesn’t imply that no information gained under duress is valid. And we aren’t talking about inquisition, or confessions, here. We are talking about actionable (and often verifiable) information. For instance, if someone in custody knows the location of a kidnap victim, or a planted nuclear weapon, and they are unwilling to reveal it, what are we to do? If we get the information by duress, and we go to the location and find the victim or bomb, then apparently the information was both valid, and useful. Is the commenter really attempting to argue that because it was obtained by unsavory means that it is not?
Now whether or not it’s immoral to attain such information by such means is a separate and debatable issue (unfortunately, we live in a complex world in which “it depends”). But to say that one cannot obtain “useful information” by such means is nuts. Even if “the experts” say it (and I don’t think they all do, with due respect to Senator McCain, who is admittedly made of tough stuff). As commenter Cecil Trotter points out, George Tenet (is he an “expert”?) claims that Khalid Sheik Mohammed revealed a great deal of useful information under duress.
The notion that, even if we concede that we torture captured illegal combatants (I don’t, at least not as a matter of policy), it is only because we are sadists, and that Dick Cheney enjoys a good cigar, and quaffs an infant smoothie, while watching people being tortured, is nuts. We are in a war. If we attempt to get information out of people using duress, it is because we seek the information, not because we like people to suffer. This is Bush (and Cheney) derangement, pure and simple.
However, human nature is human nature. And in recognition of the latter we have the Third Geneva Convention.
There seems to be a single-minded focus on the Geneva Conventions as protectors of prisoners’ rights, even for prisoners who behave in utter violation of those Conventions. To do so is to display a profound ignorance of the primary intent of the Conventions, which were an attempt to reduce the impact of war on innocent civilians, a concept that our enemy holds in utter contempt.
This subject has been discussed multiple times in the blogosphere over the last few years, but apparently many of the commenters either haven’t read, or have read and forgotten, or lacked the reading comprehension to understand it.
The Conventions require that combatants fight in recognizable uniforms. Why? So that it makes it easier to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, and to reduce the incidents of collateral casualties.
The Conventions require that combatants not wage war from designated sanctuaries such as churches, mosques, hospitals, or ambulances. Why? I’d like to think that the answer is obvious.
The Conventions require that those waging war accept the Conventions. Why? Because if not, then there is no point in having them, since people who violate them would still be granted the benefit of them.
Since 911, in the face of the most ruthless enemy imaginable, who would wipe us off the face of the earth with the flick of a finger had they our power, we have fought the most humane war in the history of humankind. We have spent untold billions of dollars to develop precision weaponry that can destroy a building while leaving another one right next to it intact, that can destroy a tank while leaving a car sitting next to it unscratched. We (and the Israelis) will send in troops and risk their lives to take out specific terrorists, when we could instead simply wipe out a neighborhood, safely from the air. Why? Simply to avoid civilian casualties. We have rules of engagement that put our troops at further risk, so that we don’t accidentally hit a civilian.
But we have an enemy that not only hides in mosques and ambulances, and behind women’s skirts, but one that rejoices in deliberately murdering civilians, even of their own religion.
When people unthinkingly demand that we grant the rights of standard POWs stipulated by the Conventions to illegal combatants, they are in effect demanding that we violate the Conventions, and they are in fact undermining the purpose of the Conventions. This isn’t about having “moral authority” in the eyes of the world (a dubious premise, anyway, given how little moral authority most of the world has). That’s like worrying about what gangsters think about our occasional speeding tickets. No, it’s about trying to enforce the rules of war that were an (admittedly paradoxical) attempt to civilize it.
But when the focus in the news is on how awful we are, and how it’s all our fault that Muslims murder Muslims in Iraq, and the more they murder each other, the more news it makes in the western press, and the more we are blamed for it, it is giving the enemy exactly the kind of propaganda they want, and feed on. Only when the news media start to tell the whole story of what’s going on over there will we start to win the real war that we’re losing in the media, even as we win it on the ground.