..there’s really no other explanation.
Today’s editorial was about “Rewriting the Geneva Conventions“, and criticized Administration efforts to lawyer their way through the standards for prisoner care in such a way as to allow rougher treatment of prisoners.
I’m flatly against torture, although I’m not sure that I subscribe to a set of standards that would make the ACLU happy; but I’m against them for three core reasons: they damage the people who do the torturing irremediably; they don’t necessarily work very well; the damage to they do to the perception of American might and behavior is typically out of proportion to any benefit gained (see “they don’t necessarily work very well”); and they damage my society through the acceptance of that kind of behavior.I’ve said in the past that the man or woman on the spot who decides to use duress or brutality to interrogate someone who’s planted a ticking time bomb should do so fully aware of the legal consequences he or she will face when it is over.
But the Times says we shouldn’t torture captives because:
The Geneva Conventions protect Americans. If this country changes the rules, it’s changing the rules for Americans taken prisoner abroad. That is far too high a price to pay so this administration can hang on to its misbegotten policies.
Maybe if our troops ever get captured by the French. But to suggest that the standards of behavior of those we fight or have fought since World War II match our own – or that by degrading ours we somehow risk their lowering theirs is just ludicrous.
From 2003:
The ground offensive in the 1991 Persian Gulf War was in its second day when Joseph Small III piloted his OV-10 Bronco toward Kuwait City. The low- flying plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile. He ejected and was captured. Within days, the war ended and, after being beaten and tortured, Small was released.
“I’ll be honest, there’s not a day in the past 12 years when I haven’t given some thought to the experience,” he said Monday from his home in Racine, Wis.
Because of the grim experiences of Small and 22 other POWs from the last Gulf war — officials say all were beaten and one of the women was raped — the Pentagon is especially concerned about the fate of Americans now believed to be held in Iraq, including two pilots confirmed as POWs Monday. U.S. officials repeatedly warned Iraq on Monday to abide by the Geneva convention that prohibits mistreatment or humiliation of prisoners.
“It’s a concern,” said Lt. Col. Dave Lapan, spokesman for the Defense Department. “It’s a brutal regime, and their past experience would make us concerned.”
From Andy McNabb’s memoir of his captivity in Iraq. Go to Amazon, look up Bravo Two Zero, search within the book for ‘beating‘:
1. on Page 195:
“… the crowd. The soldiers started pushing the people away. It was a wonderful feeling. Just a minute ago they were beating me up; now these boys were my saviors. Better the devil you know … I was lying on my stomach …”
2. on Page 204:
“… and moaned. Some of it was put on. A lot of it wasn’t. Then, as if on a signal, the beating stopped. “Poor Andy, poor Andy,” I heard, and a mock clucking of concern. I got to my knees and put …”
3. on Page 223:
“… site. The slaps became punches that knocked me off the chair, but it wasn’t very exciting compared with the last beating. Probably they thought they’d now …”
4. on Page 277:
“… BRAVO TWO ZERO 277 split in several places during the beatings, and the wounds kept trying to congeal. But even the slightest movement made them reopen. My arse and lower back …”
5. on Page 296:
“… certain point; beyond that, it’s not a viable inducer of the goods. They can assess your physical state from the beatings they’ve given you. What they can’t gauge for sure is your mental state. For that, they need to know your …”
6. on Page 325:
“… and for what must have been quite a few days, it just carried on. Hour after hour, day after day, beating after beating, taking my turn with the other two, lying curled up, cold and in pain, waiting for the terrifying …”
7. on Page 359:
“… an American. We weren’t sure about Russell. We decided to initiate some form of contact with them. We risked a beating or worse if we were caught, but we decided it was worth it. If they were released or escaped , …”
8. on Page 366:
“… “Come on, then.” They backed off, shouting, “We’re going to split you up.” The threat was more horrifying than a beating would have been. Miraculously, nothing happened. We could only surmise that the boys didn’t report the incident in case their …”
9. on Page 380:
“… amazement. He was wearing a dish-dash. His body looked wasted, and he still bore the bruises and scars of severe beatings. “When we had that last contact and we both went down, I went left and got caught up in fire. …”
Here’s Admiral James Stockdale, a year after his return from North Vietnam:
For the sane man there is always an element of fear involved when he is captured in war. In Vietnam the enemy capitalized on this fear to an extreme degree. We were told we must live by sets of rules and regulations no normal American could possibly live by. When we violated these rules and regulations, we gave our captors what they considered sufficient moral justification for punishing us–binding us in ropes, locking us in stocks for days and weeks on end, locking us in torture cuffs for weeks at a time, and beating us to bloody pulps. As we reached our various breaking points, we were “allowed” to apologize for our transgressions and to atone for them by “confessing our crimes” and condemning our government.
Or this, from the Korean War:
Confinement of U.S. military personnel in the POW camps located in North Korea operated in three phases: July 1950 until the entry of the CCF into the war in November; the winter of 1950-1951 when several temporary camps were created that included the three “Valleys”; and the permanent camps. As mentioned, the NKPA had no POW system, just collection points. During the summer and fall of 1950, the NKPA moved POWs to the rear on foot, often by a death march. For example, during a 120-mile forced march during November 1950, approximately 130 of 700 POWs died. The First Offensive of the Chinese Communist Forces in late 1950 resulted in the capture of several thousand U.S. soldiers and Marines. Like the NKPA, the CCF at that time had no established POW system. As an expedient, the CCF set up a temporary camp called the “Valley” located 10 miles south of Pyoktong, North Korea, near the Yalu River. Primitive living conditions there resulted in the death of 500 to 700 of the 1,000 internees. American soldiers, most of them members of the 2d Infantry Division captured at Kunu-ri in November 1950, were kept at a place called “Death Valley,” 30 miles southeast of Pukchin. Forty percent of the camp’s 2,000 inmates died within three months. The other internment point known as “Peaceful Valley,” located near Kanggye, that held about 300 U.S. POWs, had better living conditions than the other two “Valleys” and only a 10 percent death rate.
Iraq, Vietnam, Korea. In which of these wars were captured American or allied troops treated in accord with the Geneva Conventions? What is the liklihood that a future American soldier, captured by Hizbollah will meet the standards in Guantanamo?
Again there are dozens of good reasons to insist that we treat captives firmly but decently (no matter how badly they may behave).
The reason proposed by the Times editors has nothing to do with reality or history, and isn’t one of them. But it speaks volumes about how they see the world, and what they know about it.
It’s all much simpler: one only needs to read the Convention itself. I’m too lazy to find and post here a link to it, but it’s easy to find online, and I had read it; a couple of years ago; out of curiosity: and everyone can and should do that same. Articles like the one you’ve linked to can possibly appear meaningful to people who have never read the thing itself (which is a safe bet about most people, I would guess; the Times editors must be betting on this as well).
There’s one simple line there that invalidates all this NYT nonsense (I’m paraphrasing, of course, from memory):
The rules stipulated in this Convention are to be applied to other signatories of the Convention or to the parties who, though not having signed it, behave as if they had.
All you need to know here.
PS. There’s more there — about wearing uniforms, and being part of some identifiable state military formation, etc., but it’s all really superfluous. The bottom line is: the Geneva Convention rules are applicable only to the parties that themselves act according to it.
OK, I’m lazy, but otoh, I guess I’m also anal enough to verify that what I’ve said above is true. First, the Convention text can be found at http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/91.htm
Second, relevant excerpts (emphasis mine):
From Article 2:
From Article 4:
“Rewriting the Geneva Conventions” my ass.
No, I believe you are wrong on all counts in your arguments.
1. The “Sky Bombing Plot” aka Bojinka 2 was in part thwarted by … torture by Pakistani officials.
Torture DOES WORK. IT in fact NEARLY ALWAYS WORKS. It’s why it’s used so often. It’s effective.
As a practical matter ask the American people which member of their family who flies they’ll sacrifice to feel good morally.
2. The Geneva Convention is a quaint relic of a time gone by like Barbershop Quartets or straw hats. Al Qaeda and all Muslim jihadis hold there exist no boundaries, no deeds that must not be done, no innocents or protected people or anything they cannot do. Flight attendants and commuters and office workers are as much a target as soldiers and sailors and marines.
This means … that anyone and everyone in the opposing camp is a target too. Is this a positive development or a good one or even a moral one?
No.
It is nevertheless an inevitable one … in December 1939 the Cabinet was appalled at the thought of bombing “private property” in the Black Forest. By 1944 Bomber Harris was enthusiastically incinerating as many Germans as he could.
Note that even some HOLLYWOOD people (Sandler, Kidman, Johnson, Danny DeVito) have had enough and at personal risk to their careers said so.
So torture works, and is in fact inevitable in some form (likely outsourced) as this conflict escalates. The day after say, NYC is incinerated by an Iranian/NK nuke your concerns about torture will seem quaint and trivial.
Which in fact they are. What is supremely unimportant (to the point of utter trivia) is if this enemy or that one is tortured. What is of importance to the exclusion of everything else is avoiding the nuking of an American city.
Because as sure as night follows day THAT event will followed by the making of a massive example to a nation or group of nations. Simple nuclear logic (if you don’t wipe out a country or people or two after being nuked you’ll get hit again) makes that not a prediction but a guarantee.
I recall MANY warnings that the end of the Cold War meant that the controls that kept nuclear confrontation manageable/predictable would in their loss inevitably lead to tin-pot nations/groups/terrorists getting the “great equalizer” and millions of Americans dead … in the mistaken belief that no return address that was obvious would lead to … restraint.
Trivial concerns about torture or whatever for a few individuals versus millions of Americans dead and hundreds of millions of Muslims dead?
Clearly, the Geneva Conventions are a “living document” that have evolved far beyond what a strict construction of the actual words say.
And isn’t it the goal of all correct-thinking people to extend the rights and benefits of Western society to every indiviual on the entire planet? (Obligations and responsibilities are culturally-bound issues to be negotiated later.)
The day after say, NYC is incinerated by an Iranian/NK nuke your concerns about torture will seem quaint and trivial.
Certainly we’d be hearing less from the NYT at that point. I wonder if Iran appreciates how important New York and Los Angeles are to them?
Torture doesn’t work? Maybe not according to the ACLU, but what do they know about the effects fo torture. I suggest we get some testimony from former members of various Communist and Fascist nations for their opinion on the usefulness of torture to wring cooperation and information from the unwilling suspect.
Torture is “bad form”, but useful sometimes in the interest of national security. The Geneva Convention accords were supposed to protect soldiers of the signatory countries from purposeless acts of cruelty. The Geneva accords don’t seem to have any bearing on non-signatory fanatics who wish to commit wholesale slaughter for any purpose other than terror and destruction.
(Does any reader here REALLY think an Al-Quaeda or Hezbollah operative will accept a plea bargain and cooperate with authorities to avoid life in prison? Just asking.)
Jim Rockford has the right of it. It’s useless to put the vigorous physical and psychological interrogation (i.e. torture) of Islamofascist terrorists into the moral relativism scales against a ruined city and a lethal response that will make the world shudder for years to come. Better to drag a a few suspects into a basement and work ’em over body, mind, and soul, until they crack and spill the beans on a terror plot so it can be stopped BEFORE a major American metropolis becomes a mass grave.
That BTW is the primary failing of American hand-wringing in the War on Terror, or in any other war so far. Hand-wringing over the distasteful but necessary business of defeating our enemies before the situation turns into something truly detrimental to this nation simply reduces the chances of solving the current crisis with a minimum of bloodshed. The longer the well-meaning but naive idiots complain about profiling, wiretaps, preemptive strikes, indefinite incarceration, and even torture, the fewer chances we have to stop the Islamofascist yahoos before they pull off an atrocity, dance and sing in front of the news cameras, and piss us all off into demanding a truly “disproportionate” response.
There is an idea abroad in the international jurisprudential community that there is some level of acceptance of a convention that constitutes the conventionn entering the body “international law” regardless of whether an individual country has ratified it or not.
That’s the opinion, for example, of the additional Protocols to the Conventions that the U. S. hasn’t ratified for the last 30 years or so. One of the several good reasons for the U. S. failure to recognize the ICC.
I have a question. Hopefully, someone can provide an example for me.
Since the writing of the Geneva Conventions after World War II and their ratification by the U. S. in the 1950’s, can anyone produce an instance of our prisoners of war (or civilians for that matter) being treated according to the provisions of the Conventions that could reasonably be attributed to conforming to the provisions of the Conventions?
Dave,
No, one can’t find our prisoners being treated according to the Convention. And that’s why I find the claims that the U.S.’s alleged refusal to extend “full” Geneva Convention rights to Guantanamo Bay detainees being a threat to our soldiers’ safety completely naive at best, and dishonest at worst.
AL, I’m curious: two of the reasons you listed for being against torture have to do with public knowledge of the event (“the damage to they do to the perception of American might and behavior” and “damage my society through the acceptance of that kind of behavior”). Arguably these are the big, national effects that will drive national policy, as opposed to the other two which deal with the immediate, individual effects (“damage the people who do the torturing irremediably” and “don’t necessarily work very well”) which can be mitigated on a case-by-case basis, or even entirely nullified (it is possible to find interrogators who won’t be scarred by this behavior, or it is possible that such methods will produce valuable results as suggested by Pakistan’s involvement with the foiled airline bombing plot).
So let me ask you a rhetorical question, which I readily acknowledge is based on an unlikely scenario: if we could ensure that all torture was done in absolute secrecy, in a strictly controlled environment, would that satisfy your objections? If the international community never learned of such actions (preventing any damage to America’s image) and the US populace was never asked to explicitly condone or endorse these actions (thus avoiding any psychic damage to our society), would you still advocate the ban of a tool which might be useful in the fight against nihilistic, homicidal death cults who use terrorism trying to bring down the country and society you wish to protect?
And yes, I know it’s nigh-impossible to keep a secret in the age of the Internet and the leaky CIA/NYT relationship. I have no doubt that instituting an explicit “secret torture” policy would end badly for the US. But it seems to me that the objections which make the strongest case against using coercive methods in the fight against terrorism are “merely” a function of the government’s inability to keep anything effectively classified, and as such may indicate the problem lies with government procedure rather than the actual act itself. It has been demonstrated above that refraining from such acts does not protect our troops to any significant degree, so your two “national” objections seem to be the major remaining case for such restraint.
(For the record, this should not be taken as an approval of torture methods, but I would at least like to see us develop a consistent framework for rationalizing the choice to either allow or ban such methods, given the need to balance real-world practical scenarios–the ticking time bomb, the assumed lack of total secrecy, the legal treaties, etc.)
The NY Times is rewriting history.
_The Bush administration objects to the clause in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions that prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.”_
The Bush administration has objected to the application of this clause to illegal combatants in international conflicts. Article 3 is limited by its terms to “armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties.” The official commentaries show that this was intended to mean “civil wars.”:http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/COM/375-590006?OpenDocument
The Bush administration does not object to the standard of Article 3 per se (although it clearly prefers an American standard to an international standard), it objects to its application to people violating the rules of war, i.e. illegal combatants. What kind of reciprocity can you expect from enemies that are already violating the rules of war?
Why should our enemies respect the Geneva conventions? We are for some reason obligated to respect them whether our enemies do in kind or not so what do they lose by breaking their end of the bargain?
We always capture more enemy than they capture of US so if we made it known that if our enemies don’t hold their end we will neither maybe some would hold their end. Of course some like the terrorist or WW2/Japanese would do it anyway.
I love how the myth that interrogation doesn’t produce any results “not very effective” in your words. If so why it is that man has interrogated their captured enemies? The truth be told is that it does work and works well. You can claim moral or mental damage to interrogators true but the results are plain and true. If interrogation didn’t work we would not even bother to ask captured prisoner questions just throw em in the brig or kill them.
Interrogation works even if an enemy out of fear or pain starts spitting all manor of BS or half trues it is effective. All interrogations whether outright torture or simple questions have to deal with sifting truth from lies and deceptions its part of the job torture or no torture.
Why we in the west think that by tying our hands and overtly restricting ourselves will some how give US “moral authority” which may give some bureaucrat a nice warm fuzzy feeling but it does nothing to assist our war effort.
War is hell it should be hell. The worse war is the less both US and them will wish to go the point of war. The more we civilize war the more we make it fair and clean the more it is “proportionate”, “moral”, or “civilized” the more War we will have. We are fast approaching a day were the west will be wrought with perpetual war.
This can’t be posted by a real visitor: #4 “from Kelly: Clearly, the Geneva Conventions are a “living document” that have evolved far beyond what a strict construction of the actual words say.”, etc.
Some of you WoC’ers posted this on behalf, so to say, of an imaginary stick-figure opponent; admit it.
😉
“Excerpted and linked”:http://www.oldwardogs.us/2006/08/ahistorical_ill.html at Old War Dogs.
You ain’t seen nothing yet:
“Start Talking to Hezbollah”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/18/opinion/18brahimi.html
Interesting theory, Broom. I’d guess that most readers here understand the difference between a treaty and a policy statement… but the occassional oddball stumbles in.
Then again, nobody else has bothered responding. You’re kind of new to this neighborhood.
Your bait, left on the hook? 🙂
Hm…. Wastelandlive, I wasn’t talking about the contents of this message, but about its appearance here. No, it’s not _my_ bait, but seems like you do agree that it looks like a bait.
It’s hard to tell, Broom.
You can almost catch a whiff of the student union and late night dorm-room bull sessions off Kelly… his/her comments are just self-righteous and naive enough to be genuine.
It’s just not really worth a response.
Now torture? I don’t know.
Those who prioritize self defense have ruled this thread. Nobody has stepped forward to make the argument for civil rights on principle. Nobody has asked the all-important and unanswerable question of who gets to decide when torture – forbidden by our constitution, the convention, and if nothing else, our principles – is permissable. Even AL doesn’t seem too interested in defending his position.
That’s probably because the argument is one that is cannot be answered, at least not out loud. While I hesitate to speak for AL, I think he clearly recognizes that when he suggests that “the man or woman on the spot who decides to use duress or brutality to interrogate someone… should do so fully aware of the legal consequences he or she will face when it is over.”
That is really the farthest our culture can travel down the road to torture and still remain our culture.