Torture: A Matter of Opinion or a Question of Legality?
Well, I am put off by the hyperventilated comparison of detainee treatment to Vietnam. “There is no other issue in my lifetime except Vietnam that has elicited such passion in both defenders and detractors”? Puh-leeze. Perhaps you didn’t live in America during the Reagan years. The left was routinely apoplectic about everything Reagan did, from putting Pershing II’s in Europe to Star Wars to support for the mujaheddin — all of it aimed at bringing down their incarnated hopes of the ideal society: the Soviet Union. In contrast, “detainee abuse” is a footnote, a propaganda club with which to undermine the struggle against our modern enemy. It may be a topic of heated conversation in the salons of Hyde Park, Manhattan, and Beverly Hills, but in the rest of flyover country it’s just not a priority.
In fact, despite an unhealthy appetite for politics, I really don’t care a lot about this issue one way or the other. I have no moral qualms about interrogation of illegal combatants, but as far as I’m concerned it’s an executive branch decision. Obama could opt to be lenient on terrorists, and though I think that would be an unwise shift in policy, there are more vital issues to debate.
BTW In my limited military training, it was made clear (in FM 27-10) that the Geneva Convention is specifically designed to encourage compliance by state actors. So there are a set of criteria by which the United States judges whether particular groups of combatants are given coverage by Geneva — for example, failing to wear a uniform will be deleterious to your POW status (as will, say, a policy of executing innocent civilians). But if legal authorities decide that POW protections should extend to every combatant rounded up on the battlefield, regardless of the criteria set forth in the GC, that’s okay with me, too — though it undermines the GC. You see, if you create incentives for combatants to follow the Geneva Convention (“outfit your soldiers with uniforms and they will be entitled to GC protections”) and then say, “never mind, we’ll give them POW status no matter how they dress or what they do”, you undercut the elaborately negotiated structure of Geneva. Is that really what you want to do?
I’m glad there was serious debate within the executive branch about interrogation. They seem to have come up with a reasonable compromise, with limited exercise of extreme methods, based on techniques validated through years of development of the SERE program. You and others seem to be upset that they made a decision at all. You never mention the threat that these interrogations mitigated — why is that?
I don’t suppose that the Senate report might just be a political document? Maybe you could look into that.
BBB
