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

[fpb]

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

[ani-bester.livejournal.com]

Amen to that.
I'm sick of conservatives insisting it wasn't torture.
And I want to throttle (metaphorically speaking) people who use the phrase "enhanced torture techniques".

If they think the systematic and intentional breaking down of another human being through physical and psychological assault was necessary, at the very least that can have the dignity to not insult my intelligence by insisting none of these things are torture.

I don't know if you came across the quote from Bush's former speech writer, but he was arguing that torture actually helped because once a Muslim reached a breaking point, Allah allowed him to confess everything without it being a sin. So the torture helped them, in his mind.

I don't know what to say to that except, it horrifies me so much.

Also I agree, many conservatives have utterly lost their minds.

[super-pan.livejournal.com]

I don't think it would be ok to only try to prosecute those low on the totem pole who did a lot of the actual torture, and not try to prosecute those who gave the orders, but do you really think that those who did what they did should be exempt because they were following orders?

As you called it above, what we did was an abomination, and I worry that even the President is maybe too willing to let it just pass if it will. The US shouldn't hold it self to different standards than it does the rest of the world. I don't want to torture our enemies, any more than I want our enemies to torture us.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I think the urgent thing is to punish the ones who gave the orders, both because the ultimate responsibility is theirs (where does the buck stop, according to old Harry S?) and because they are guilty of debauching the law. I have no doubt whatever that people will be prosecuting the actual strong-arm men for years to come, but I would be furious if Condoleeza Rice and Cheyney (the highest-ranking figures thus far reached by the scandal) were not to feature in future trials.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

As for Obama himself, I have an intense dislike for a leader who takes upon himself to punish his own subordinates. Those people may be good or may be bad, but they have a right to expect loyalty from their superiors if they themselves are loyal to them. I would look on an Obama who started prosecuting low-level personnel, even for serious crimes, as suspect of hitting on those weaker than himself for political advantage. As it is, he has left the door open for anyone else to do it.

[dustthouart.livejournal.com]

I don't think President Obama has behaved well at all, except insomuch as he released the memos, which at one point it looked like he wasn't going to do that. (Although recently he seems to be backpedaling on the "not going to prosecute" thing too, so maybe he's just wishy-washy about this. Again, not the kind of thing I want to see in my head of state.)

Do you forget the Nuremberg trials, and the example of World War II, and all the people in the Holocaust who claimed they were "just following orders"? I thought we all decided that wasn't a defense. I thought international law said, that the Geneva convention said, that if you are ordered to commit war crimes, you must not do it.

Did I think wrong?

On your main point about people trying to defend torture, even in the face of this new evidence, I agree. Absolutely disgusting. Did you see Jonah Goldberg feel a twinge of conscience when he heard about the guy who had 183 waterboardings in a month? And then someone wrote in and said that if the guy withstood that, that just proves how tough these militants are and that it's needed? And Goldberg, relieved, agreed?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

My child, I have STUDIED the Nuremberg trials, including the transcripts. The so-called "Nuremberg defence" was never used by a single defendant, and, what is more, it was excluded from the start, since the defendants were ministers, commanders in chief and superior officers. Those who did not plead guilty simply claimed, either not to have committed the facts that they were charged with, or that what they were charged with was legal under German and international law. Some of the defences were accepted; three defendants out of twenty were found innocent, and only eleven were condemned to death.

I want the filth who ordered and justified this filth punished; the riff-raff may be punished or may not, but it would be monstrous to punish some prison guard at Gitmo and let the legal advisers who drafted the policy and the secretaries of state (or even higher placed persons) who authorized and ordered it go free.

Finally, I would like to draw your attention to the absurdity of your comparison. These acts of torture, though abominable, were designed to leave no permanent injury nor to cause death. And they were intended for illegal fighters - people whom international law defines as hostes humanae gentis, enemies of humankind at large. The defendants at Nuremberg were charged with, a, plotting in cold blood to unleash a war that would cost millions of lives, b, deliberately violating the laws of war with such things as the enslavement, torture and execution of prisoners from legitimate armies (that is, not hostes humani generis, c, plotting to massacre and enslave whole civilian populations. None of these things comes remotely close to what the Bush II government has done; even the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, whatever you may think of them, were perfectly justified in law, and anything but the result of years of plotting and determination - in fact, Bush II had come to power with the intention of reversing the Clintonian drift towards international adventures. However, nine-eleven happened.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Oh, and you may remember that I have had one or two issues with Jonah Goldberg before. I came to the point of heading one of my posts "The Protocos of Jonah Goldberg". I think he is a man to whom literally nothing exists beyond the party and party politics.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Of interest? FBI agent speaks out
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/opinion/23soufan.html

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Supports everything I think, including the fact that torture interrogation does not work. But then, I am Italian and I have read Cesare Beccaria's Dei Delitti e delle Pene ("A treatise on crimes and penalties"), which makes the case against torture so unanswerably that, within ten years of its publication, it had been removed from every European code of laws and kept out of those of the nascent American republic.

[dustthouart.livejournal.com]

Okay, but what about people such as Erich Priebke? He was an officer, but not a planner, who participated in the Fosse Ardeatine massacre. (As an Italian, I'm sure you know it, but I'll summarize for the peanut gallery.) Hitler gave him a quota of people to shoot in retaliation for German deaths (to kill 10 Italians for every 1 German in a certain incident). He tried the "only following orders" defense when he was extradited to Italy and it actually worked for him. This was later widely seen as a miscarriage of justice but he could not be retried, of course, because of double jeopardy.

Incidentally, Priebke insisted that he felt no remorse because the Italians that he killed were "terrorists". His word. It was Communist resistance fighters, using an IED, who killed a platoon of young German soldiers that sparked the retaliation. Sounds a lot like what we lock up the people in Guantanamo for. Only, of course, the resistance was good and the Nazis are evil. But obviously Priebke doesn't see it that way, and the Nazis didn't think of it that way at the time.

I'm just saying we've jumped off the slippery slope. I don't think the comparison is prima facie absurd, because while obviously waterboarding is not as bad as gassing (just as punching someone in the face is not as bad as shooting them), I wasn't actually making the comparison to talk about the acts, but to talk about the defense. I know I invoked Godwin's in my first comment. But come on, we're talking about the "just following orders" defense, how can one avoid mentioning the Nazis? It's impossible.

How about the many, many ordinary prison guards of concentration camps, such as Margot Dreschel, who, unlike Priebke, did not escape to South America, and were tried and executed in 1945 or shortly after? Or very minor SS members such as team leader Josef Blösche (who is only well known because of that photograph of him with his gun pointed at a Jewish child... and one of the other iconic photographs is of him standing next to Jürgen Stroop with a few other minor officers, in case it was in any doubt who was in charge)? Should they have all been excused, on the grounds they were just doing their jobs?

Edit: Er, to be more clear, I'm not trying to argue "The Nazis tried this defense, and the Nazis were bad, therefore it is bad." I'm saying "I thought we went through this already and established in international law that this is not a defense. Are we reopening it?"

[fpb.livejournal.com]

My father was a child in Rome when Priebke and co. carried out their crimes - you can hardly imagine I would not think of these filth. And there still is a difference. Bad though these acts of torture are, they are carefully designed to avoid murder or permanent impairment. Priebke inflicted mass death, and liked it. All the concentration camp guards and personnel were licensed to kill, and the acts for which they have been convicted have been acts of murder. You should see the difference.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

As for Obama himself, I have an intense dislike for a leader who takes upon himself to punish his own subordinates. Those people may be good or may be bad, but they have a right to expect loyalty from their superiors if they themselves are loyal to them.

Hm, I think I'm misunderstanding something here. Doesn't a leader have a duty to attend to the discipline of his subordinates?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

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?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That may be the case in warfare. In peacetime conditions, it smacks of vindictiveness and buck-passing (remember Harry S - The Buck Stops Here). The first instinct of a leader ought to be to protect his people; even if they have done wrong, to at least insure that a reasonable defence, within the limits of law and decency, is afforded them. If he discards them along the way, he leaves the impression of a man willing to feed his underlings to the wolves to cover himself. That, by the way, is one reason why we have a separation of powers. It is much more dignified, and much less full of traps and blind alleys, to have an independent judidiciary that can investigate and impartially punish the misdeeds of public servants.

[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.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

I agree regarding the importance of leaving the ultimate question of guilt and punishment to the judiciary in civilian/peacetime situations. However, isn't it still the job of the Attorney General or his delegates (i.e. the Executive branch) to bring charges in such cases?

On the other hand (with the exception of CIA personnel and civilian contractors), we are also talking in part about acts committed by military personnel in the context of an ongoing war.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

On the other hand (with the exception of CIA personnel and civilian contractors), we are also talking in part about acts committed by military personnel in the context of an ongoing war.

Though, my understanding is that the military actors are already being dealt with by military tribunals, at least in cases where their actions resulted in death.

[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.

[deansteinlage.livejournal.com]

You wouldn't happen to know if that book has been released in English?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

http://www.amazon.com/Crimes-Punishments-International-Pocket-Library/dp/082831800X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240632669&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Crimes-Punishments-Cesare-Beccaria/dp/1412810159/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240632669&sr=1-2
http://www.amazon.com/Beccaria-Punishments-Writings-Cambridge-Political/dp/0521479827/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240632669&sr=1-3

e-copy:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=FRDtZqosmnEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=cesare+beccaria
and others at:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?q=+inauthor:%22Cesare+Beccaria%22&as_brr=1&source=gbs_authrefine_t

[super-pan.livejournal.com]

Yes, that is definitely one way to look at it, and in that light, I can agree with you, and with him.