Somehow, all I seem to be blogging about recently is the suicidal folly of conservative bloggers

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President Obama has behaved well in the matter of torture. He has published the memos that authorized them, including the names of their authors, but has refused to prosecute anyone himself. The option still exists for any organization or citizen to sue, especially, the lawyers who debased the rule of law by judging that specific forms of torture were allowable under US law; but as the President said, it would be wrong to prosecute people lower down the pole, who had received authorization - and as good as orders - from above to do as they did.

It is a common argument that prisoners in Guantanamo were and are treated well, probably better than the average jailed American (or British, or Italian) citizen. That is not so surprising when one realizes the bizarre compromises with conscience that American legislators and bureaucrats have inflicted on the nation; like that a small minority of probably quite unlucky murderers (most American murderers receive life or shorter sentences) can get killed, but only after an appeals process that can last twenty years; that the man who is to receive a lethal injection has the injection area carefully disinfected first - for fear, one supposes, that the corpse could suffer from an infection. The intersection of a never abandoned instinct for brutality with an obstinate set of rights set in stone produces the most bizarre results, and to have a system that at the same time guarantees its inmate three meals a day, Qur'an and any other book they may want to read (apparently Harry Potter is a great favourite), exercise and TV, while also allowing brutal "interrogation techniques" and the chance of being delivered to loving fellow-countrymen whose techniques are apt to be even harsher - it is nothing but a typical product of this strange mind. That, as such, is not surprising.

What I do find surprising is that, at this time of day, there still are responsible adults, capable of walking on two feet and of writing decent English, who would deny that what the bureaucratic scum allowed was torture. Forget that one prisoner seems to have been subjected to waterboarding for more than 250 times - and that after he had already talked without any stimulation. What really shocked me was to find that one of the "techniques" in question was sleep deprivation for up to a week. You try it, ladies and gentlemen. You try it for two days, and tell me whether it is not torture. And tell me, too, whether a man who has been subjected to seven days of this abomination will be in a state to answer elaborate questions in a sane and coherent manner. It is not just an abomination morally; it is also complete idiocy from the standpoint of results. Only a diseased intellect could think that it is not torture, or that it is justified.

And this is what conservative bloggers have been defending all over the internet. Well, gentlemen, I hope you like your Obama presidency, because if you carry on as you are, you will have him for a good long time.

Comments

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Priebke was lying, by the way. The SS simply went through Rome's jails, taking out anyone they could find. Most of the victims at the Ardeatine Pits were common criminals or people under remand who had not yet been convicted of anything. What is more, their blood lust was such that they even passed their own self-declared limit of ten Italians for every dead German: the dead Germans were 32, the murdered Italians 335. This, by the way, was not the worst massacre carried out by Nazis in Italy: in the ancient town of Marzabotto, they murdered 1802 men, women and children; at Sant'Anna di Stazzena, 553. And mention of women and children, including babies, will remind you that the excuse of the loathsome Priebke (and of his even more despicable chieftain, Albert Kesselring - a man whose escape from the noose is a scandal in the annals of justice) is so much shit. The Nazis just killed whoever they could find. In Marzabotto, they herded the tiny town's whole population into the local church, and then turned on the flamethrowers. The only survivor was a little baby whom his mother seems to have hidden behind the statue of a saint. Marzabotto, by the way, was one of the most ancient settlements in Europe. Archaeology shows that it goes back to the second millennium BC. It took the Nazis to destroy it to the last man.

And what they did in Italy is not even as bad as what they did in Poland, Russia, and Yugoslavia.

You may argue there is a slippery slope. But it would have to be a very long, long slope, to get from here to there. Why not punish these men and women for what they are objectively guilty of, instead of dreaming up correspondences to terrible crimes of long ago?

[dustthouart.livejournal.com]

I know for a fact that the vast majority of the people imprisoned by us in Iraq, at least in the early stages of the war, were not combatants, but common criminals or even innocents. I know not even just from the news, but because my own brother is an MP and was a prison guard in Iraq.

His battalion's family members back in the States (including us) would organize drives to send hard candy, soccer balls, and other items to the prisons.

Not for the soldiers (although we sent them care packages too). For the prisoners.

That's why it makes me so absolutely FURIOUS. Because you do NOT torture prisoners. You treat them humanely.

And since none of the people in Guantanamo have been tried, they are all innocent until proven guilty. They should be treated humanely in any case. Even in situations where the death penalty is needed because there is no alternative, it must be done without unnecessary suffering.

Anyway I think you missed my line about not comparing the acts but the defenses.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

One news report here in Britain said that Iraqi prisoners were very unhappy at being handed over from American to Iraqi custody, and if people like you organized charity events for them, I can well see why. However, as for the "they haven't been tried, hence they are innocent", that is a very... innocent... point of view to take. The presumption of innocence is a pleasant and useful legal fiction in peacetime. It is positively disastrous when dealing with an out-of-control, criminalized army, and the Allies quite rightly disregarded it in setting up their courts of de-nazification, where you had to prove that you were innocent, rather than guilty. The fact is that every member of the Nazi Party and of the German Army, let alone of the SS, had to be suspect of being an accomplice in the immense, systematic and long-lasting crimes that had involved the whole structure of the State. By the same token, the Taliban are a criminal movement, and anyone caught gun in hand in their company has to give reasons why he should not be regarded as their accomplice. Anything less leads to the ridiculous situation where people openly tell you that they will go back to killing Westerners as soon as they are able.

It is now midnight over here. I have to go to bed. If you have a response, I will look at it tomorrow morning. I also apologize for the "my child" remark; we do not live in the Victorian age, and from a man of 47 to an adult woman, it was bang out of order. Sorry.

[dustthouart.livejournal.com]

I didn't mind the "my child" actually, because we are friends and you are 25 years older than me, which is indeed old enough for me to be your child. If we didn't know each other well it would have been different. I think I've told you before that you remind me of my father only with a temper, haha. The Poseidon personality type from the book Gods in Everyman, which I should reread sometime and see if I think it's as deep and meaningful as I did when I was 15.

I think in wartime the burden of proof can certainly be lowered (say from "beyond a reasonble doubt" to "clear and convincing evidence" or even "preponderance of the evidence"), and we can do what we did in terms of holding people until investigations can be made when things are in chaos. But there still ought to be trials before the punishment begins, and that punishment ought to be humane.

The whole situation re: Iraqi prisons makes me very unhappy, because the majority of the soldiers there were upstanding men and women like my brother who tried their best to treat their captives like human beings. But because of Abu Ghraib, everyone thinks of Iraqi prison guards and military police as tormentors and sadists. I usually just tell people that my brother was "a soldier" in Iraq and try to sidestep him being a prison guard by saying where he was stationed in terms of the area and not the prison.