Torture And War
Posted on April 27th, 2009
by Daniel Larison |
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Or more precisely, why is the belief that the torture of captured combatants is wrong compatible with anything other than some form of pacifism? I mean this an actual question, not as a passive-aggressive assertion. ~Jim Manzi
One of the things that has kept me from saying much over the last week or so is my sheer amazement that there are people who seriously pose such questions and expect to be answered with something other than expressions of bafflement and moral horror. Something else that has kept me from writing much on this recently is the profoundly dispiriting realization (really, it is just a reminder) that it is torture and aggressive war that today’s mainstream right will go to the wall to defend, while any and every other view can be negotiated, debated, compromised or abandoned. I have started doubting whether people who are openly pro-torture or engaged in the sophistry of Manzi’s post are part of the same moral universe as I am, and I have wondered whether there is even a point in contesting such torture apologia as if they were reasonable arguments deserving of real consideration. Such fundamental assumptions at the core of our civilization should not have to be re-stated or justified anew, and the fact that they have to be is evidence of how deeply corrupted our political life has become, but if such basic norms are not reinforced it seems clear that they will be leeched away over time.
Manzi’s mention of pacifism is instructive insofar as it suggests that he cannot imagine a rationale for limited, just or defensive wars compatible with protections for captured combatants. It’s all or nothing, total war or pacifism. Once captured, combatants at that point become non-combatants, and one has to assume that Manzi can see why non-combatants are to be treated differently and are to be protected against reprisals, beatings, torture and execution. One certainly hopes that he would defend such protections for American non-combatants, which, incidentally, every apologist for the torture regime is daily undermining with their consistent, public defense of illegal and immoral treatment of detainees.
Implicit in Manzi’s entire post is the rejection of any distinction between combatant and non-combatant, which tells me that he either doesn’t understand or doesn’t accept the concept of limited war. For him, unless one is a pacifist, one must endorse total war. In such a view, there would be nothing immoral about the summary execution or cruel and inhumane treatment of POWs, since the latter would have been targeted for death while they were still combatants. After all, if torturing such prisoners is not immoral, as Manzi seems to say it is not, what could possibly be wrong with killing them? That is where one must ultimately end up once the distinctions between combatant and non-combatant are erased or blurred, and it is the barbaric conclusion one will eventually reach if one does not start from the assumption that war itself is a sometimes-necessary evil and that it is morally justifiable only under specific circumstances and within certain limits. One of those limits is that captured combatants are to be treated humanely, and when we go down the road towards easing those restrictions we taint not only the institutions responsible for national security with crimes but we also abandon any real claim to moral integrity.
I commented over there but if he refuses to engage with reality then what can you do. His response to the comments seems to be, “yeah, but what if you discount all of that, then what?”
Well done, Daniel. One thing that’s simply astounding about Jim’s post is the way that he runs together moral and legal issues with such abandon: hence its being legal to kill members of a retreating army is supposed to entail that in such a situation outright slaughter is perfectly okay (as opposed to, say, the sort of thing that it would be impossible to have enforceable laws against). I’m going to try to write something later on that engages more directly with his post, but for the time being “sophistry” and “part of a [different] moral universe” are reasonable places to start.
One of the bizarre things about his comments is that he’s deriding the idea that there’s any way to fight a war morally, without realizing that this is precisely why it’s been so important for nations to develop and adhere to ethical standards while starting and waging wars. Of course, from a purely practical standpoint, you can say things like, “If it’s okay for me to shoot a man on the battlefield, it’s just silly that I can’t blow up the field hospitals where the enemy army treats its wounded.” I think that’s morally dubious but, maybe more importantly, it ignores the fact that limits on what nations can do in wars are designed to keep an inherently immoral situation (masses of men aiming to maim and kill each other) from spinning out of control into something genuinely evil. I suppose Manzi might reply, “Well, ho, ho, who cares if CHARLIE thinks something’s immoral or evil?”, and presumably also doesn’t care that nations have worked hard to hash out these ethical questions and come up with workable laws of war. But a man who begins from the presumption that morality and ethics are just silly made-up ideas designed to keep one from using violence as efficiently as one might, and who discounts centuries of moral and ethical inquiry into the nature of war and how to limit its bad consequences, presumably does not consider himself to be a conservative. Maybe a nihilist or an anarchist?
I’m as digusted by as anyone by the torture apologia, but I’m not sure Manzi’s one of the bad guys here. I read his post as earnestly searching for a principled reasons to condemn torture, and being honestly disappointed by his failure to find one.
Daniel:
Here is the final paragraph of my post:
“Maybe I’m morally obtuse about this (again, I mean that non-rhetorically), but I don’t see how a non-pacifist makes the moral case against torturing captured combatants. Of course, there are at least two ways to interpret that. One is that torture of captured combatants is not morally wrong. The other is to see this as an example of why we should be skeptical about moral reasoning as a way to answer the question; that is, of why we must rely on moral intuition and the traditions of our society.”
The point of the post was the unreliability of abstract reasoning in drawing the lines for moral conduct in difficult situations. Because many (not all) reasonable people can imagine plausible situations in which they would torture enemy combatants, it is not persuasive to simply assert that it is “obviously” wrong. It’s not obvious to lots of people. We can only rely on the traditions of our society to guide us as to where these lines are, at least in cases like this.
In other words, as per your post, my argument is not that “it’s total war or pacificism”, but that developing a method of warfightinh (or an ethos of warfare) that balances the need of the society to defend itself from armed aggression without becoming a society not worth defending is not something that we reason our way to in the abstract, but something we develop through experience.
John:
Fair enough. It would have been more precise (by far) not to describe the alternative as pacifism, but something more like “a concept of operations for warfare that is far more restrictive than that which has traditionally guided the conduct of US military operations”.
Charlie:
I thought about including a paragra[h on this basic point (”we’ve got to draw lines somewhere”), but I think that this is an accurate belief (or at elast one I hold), but it is not a strong argument for why “don’t torture captured combatants” ought to be on this side of it.
[...] Torture Is Wrong I pretty much shared Daniel’s opinion of Jim Manzi’s demand for a non-pacifist case against torture, but I’ve got a brief post up at [...]
I read his post as earnestly searching for a principled reasons to condemn torture, and being honestly disappointed by his failure to find one.
I suppose one could charitably assume that Manzi writes, not from a position of insincerity and malice, but from a position of stunning ignorance vis a vis a very large body of historical, legal, moral, ethical and philosophical thought dealing with the nature and conduct of war. Either way, a series of obtuse questions worthy of a pot-smoking college freshman isn’t adding much to anyone’s understanding of anything. If he’s searching for reasons to condemn torture he might (in conservative fashion) educate himself with centuries’ worth of useful writing on the topic, instead of acting as if no one had ever considered the issue until people started arguing with each other on the internet.
Daniel,
Very good post. Aside from the moral horror, which I share, another frustrating thing with the type of argument advanced by Manzi – and you see this a lot, not just with regard to torture but with regard to other limits which civilized nations put upon the conduct of war – is the willful ignorance involved. Of course Manzi – and others who make this type of argument – are aware of the non-pacifist arguments against torture. But they lack the courage and intellectual honesty to actually engage those arguments, instead trotting out straw man arguments that they must know are nonsense.
In the greater scheme of things, supporting torture (and by implications opposing all limits on the conduct of warfare) is a far worse moral failing that mere cowardice and intellectual dishonesty. But it does make one despair of meaningfully engaging people like him.
But engage we must, as disagreeable as it is. Failure to engage ultimately cedes the field to the torture apologists.
JohnMcG,
Pernicious nonsense. That’s his pose, not the reality. It’s one thing for someone to conclude that the arguments that favor torture outweigh the arguments against torture. That’s horrifying to me but I can imagine comeone in good faith (mistakenly) reaching that conclusion.
But it isn’t possible for a sentient human being to honestly “search for a principled reasons to condemn torture” and conclude that there are no such reasons short of pacifism.
Frankly, the fact that he pretends to take that position makes his vile apologia that much worse.
[...] Larison: [...]
The moral case against torture, even in a time of war, is simple. On the battlefield, the enemy is actively trying to kill you. Hence, it is moral to try to kill him. When the enemy is captured and in your custody and control, he no longer has any capacity to do you harm, and hence your justification for trying to do him harm vanishes. By keeping him in custody, he is kept from doing harm to you, and thus there is no rationale for doing him harm. Torture by definition must take place when a prisoner is in full custody and under total control. Under such conditions, there is no moral basis for inflicting harm upon him, since he is incapable of doing his captors harm.
I’m not quite sure how I would like to express this, but here goes nothin’.
As a death penalty opponent, I have often been surprised by what appears to be a certain visceral relish on the part of some proponents for applying that penalty. I quite understand it emotionally, of course….it is the same feeling for justified sadism that allows me to enjoy a film like Walking Tall or a James Bond flick. But I hope that I do not live my life in service to the spirit of mere vengeance.
Something of the same feeling seems to me to inform some of the “debate” as to torture. I guess I’m trying to pussyfoot around the suggestion that some of these folks just appear to actually like the idea of torture, but that is in fact what I am saying. What’s the line in Hamlet?…”They did make love to that occupation”, wasn’t it? They would, of course, reject this characterization and all I can do is urge them to do is look a bit deeper into their hearts.
Manzi…so bright, so gifted….is an ongoing disappointment. Never more so than here.
Off topic (or perhaps not), I followed your link to The Napoleon Of Notting Hill. What a charming book! I have read Chesterton before, but not this. I love his notion of Christianity as a surprise and as a silly adventure. I wish you would link t the other posts in which you have discussed this novel or, better, amplify your reading of it.
“I thought about including a paragra[h on this basic point (â€we’ve got to draw lines somewhereâ€), but I think that this is an accurate belief (or at elast one I hold), but it is not a strong argument for why “don’t torture captured combatants†ought to be on this side of it.”
First of all, I apologize for the invective in my posts; I think these debates can and should stay civil and I wasn’t helping with the overheated rhetoric. That said, I think the points I was making are still sound.
First of all, there is quite a long record of people hashing out what is and is not permissible in wartime, and the moral and ethical understanding of the West, as codified in agreements like the Geneva Conventions, is that torture is on the wrong side of the “we’ve got to draw a line somewhere” line. The United States is not outside the mainstream when it comes to how its military and its government define torture (both in terms of its own behavior and the standards it applies to other nations, governments and organizations).
So it seems fair to say that there was a strong consensus in the United States that torture was wrong, until people began seriously considering the possibility that torture might have utility for the United States government, and also had to find reasons to redefine American behavior as something other than “torture”, at which point some Americans started taking a new interest in reexamining commonly-accepted legal, moral and semantic principles.
This debate is so clearly motivated by a desire to place current American interests (inaccurately defined, in my view, but that’s another debate) above agreed-upon moral and ethical standards that I find it a bit troubling when the argument is framed as a very abstract inquiry into the nature of war, torture and morality. Whether or not its disingenuous (and I was wrong to question your motives) that’s how it comes off to me.
As for where the line ought to be drawn, as a conservative I’m comfortable giving tremendous weight to the centuries of legal and philosophical thinking on that subject. But my own opinion about why torture is clearly on the wrong side of the line is that it is, by definition, the abuse of someone who has been reduced to a helpless state. The fact that he might one day not be so helpless, or that abusing him might be of some value to his captors, only underlines why it cannot be allowed. Children and civilian men might one day participate in a war effort; killing or (better yet!) maiming them would certainly hobble the war effort by demoralizing and distracting able-bodied men in combat. This is also why executing POWs is clearly on the wrong side of the line–the fact that a man might, one day, participate in the war effort does not justify executing him unless the massacre of military-age men is also justified. The fact that the justifications for torture also justify behavior commonly accepted as illegal, immoral and reprehensible is a strong argument for why it’s obviously wrong.
There are probably more sophisticated arguments that don’t rely on comparisons or the slippery slope, but these are certainly compelling enough for me.
I assume Manzi is next going to ask why there’s a problem with soldiers raping the enemy? After all, it’s not any worse than killing them!
This willingness to explore outside the boundaries of not just US practice but standard 20th century western consensus on human rights (it’s not torture if it doesn’t kill or maim you!) is the best example I’ve seen yet of the intellectual and moral rot of the GOP.
Prior to this I was content to think that the GOP simply deserved to lose elections. But after all the contortions I’ve seen in defense of torture I fail to see how any self respecting person on the right can wish anything other than the extinction of the GOP. It must cease to exist because it has no redeeming qualities.
A few days ago I received an email from the ACU. Probably everyone else here did as well. It started out like this:
And it continued on and on and on. I’ve disagreed with the ACU in the past, but I couldn’t get over how vile this email was. I unsubscribed from whatever list they had me on. I thought Battleline was sometimes good, but I promise to never visit it again. No more CPAC. No more anything ACU. Last and final straw. If this is conservatism then I want no part of it.
Even the libertarians as Reason are rising to the defense of torture. Has the right lost all sense? Apart from AmConMag I don’t see much left to preserve. Stick a fork in the right, it’s done.
Like Daniel, I was and still am an anti-war rightie, but I can’t really gin up any outrage over the memos. Don’t get me wrong. I oppose the torture policy of the Bush Administration, but moreso on the selfish grounds that what the government can do to scum like KSM, they could do to American citizens later.
My outrage was pretty well burnt up by the Iraq War, where you had generally forgotten incidents, like the fourteen civilians killed when we tasked a B-1B to flatten a restaurant we thought Saddam Hussein was patronizing. On a purely emotional level, dead innocents bother me a lot more than tortured villains like Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Part of the problem with the distinction between combatants and non-combatants is that the people in question weren’t really “combatants”. They traveled in civilian clothes and would eagerly resort to the protection of civil authorities give the chance. Worse, they specifically targeted non-combatants. The WTC, a Bali Disco, the Madrid and London subways are not battlefields full of soldiers.
None of this, of course, warrants the torture the Bush Administration used, but in context, waterboarding KSM is among the least of the past administration’s crimes. I suppose this is like Al Capone’s taxes. You go after what you can, but I’m just not jazzed.
I’d be far more happier if we dealt with terrorism by setting up a serious immigration policy and ceased meddling the affairs of other nations. Of course, that’ll probably happen around the Twelfth of Never.
Someone on an other board posted it, but I think it’s prescient enough to share here:
All future executive administrations will release memos penned by the previous administration in defense of or in approval of torture as evidence of the present administration’s moral superiority.
I am surprised and gratified by the consistent way in which Larison’s readers rise to the moment.
I don’t always agree with Charlie, and I certainly don’t get mailings from the ACU. So I am doubly pleased that Charlie and Taxman10m speak out for the course of honor.
If all Republicans spoke and thought as you guys do, then I would be one too.
Let me first thank all of the commenters for their remarks. There are a lot of points to cover, and I want to try to do them justice. First, Jim Manzi replied:
“The other is to see this as an example of why we should be skeptical about moral reasoning as a way to answer the question; that is, of why we must rely on moral intuition and the traditions of our society.”
Certainly, if I have jumped to the wrong conclusion and imputed a view to Jim that he doesn’t hold, I am glad to retract my charge against him. The other points stand as written, but I’m very pleased if the quoted passage is all that Jim meant to say, That said, I am not sure that moral reasoning is really the same as the abstract reasoning of which Jim and I are both seem to be very skeptical. One might go so far as to say that moral reasoning cannot be abstract reasoning and vice versa. I’m also not sure that there is a sharp break between moral intuitions–such as, say, instictive disgust at the thought of torturing another human being–and moral reasoning. On the one hand, it seems to me that most of the people most deeply invested in the power of *abstract* reasoning are those interested in defending interrogation policies of the last administration, while I find that moral intuition, and particularly the sentiment of disgust, is informing moral reasoning in arguments against these practices. Far from being an exercise in abstract reasoning, this moral reasoning is reasoning in close combination with sentiments that tell us that we should be appalled and horrifed by these practices.
John McG:
I hope you are right when you say, “I read his post as earnestly searching for a principled reasons to condemn torture, and being honestly disappointed by his failure to find one.”
As other commenters have already remarked, I think there are quite a few principled reasons to condemn the practice, so while I appreciate the point about Jim’s disappointment I am not persuaded that his disappointment could not have been rather easily avoided.
Conrad sums up the matter quite well when he writes, “Torture by definition must take place when a prisoner is in full custody and under total control. Under such conditions, there is no moral basis for inflicting harm upon him, since he is incapable of doing his captors harm.”
On a final note, I agree with Derek Copold when he wrote:
“On a purely emotional level, dead innocents bother me a lot more than tortured villains like Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”
Abhorrence of torture ought to be the bare minimum of what we demand and expect as. We are a very long way from getting enough people to feel the same horror at the wrongful deaths of foreign civilians in war and the basic injustice of aggressive war, and I’m afraid that until these inspire the same horror as torture we are going to keep seeing abuses of all kinds.
The ugly truth is that there’s virtually no point in engaging people like Jim Manzi on the subject of torture because they are not rational about it.
You tell them torture doesn’t work…they don’t care.
You tell them torture is counterproductive…they don’t care.
You tell them the BS scenarios they dream up to justify torture don’t practically exist in the real world…they don’t care.
You tell them torture violates every advance in Western moral thinking made over the last two millennia…they don’t care.
You tell them the argument for torture is the same argument made for every horrible thing done by Hitler, Stalin and Mao…THEY DON’T CARE.
People like Jim Manzi don’t support torture for any intellectual reasons. They support torture because doing so makes them feel good and they care more about that feeling than they do anything else in the world.
Mike
Mbunge, interesting post I saw at Red State:
http://www.redstate.com/moe_lane/2009/04/25/liz-cheney-breaks-nora-odonnell-on-torture-discussion/
This is how you do it, by the way. You don’t let them define the agenda; you certainly don’t let them define the terms; you concede nothing (you can always agree, but you do not concede); you keep going back to a disputed point over and over again until they get tired of trying to sneak one past you; you never lose your cool;
I think that is what this comes down to, a complete inability to ever admit one was wrong. Ever.
“the assumption that war itself is a sometimes-necessary evil and that it is morally justifiable only under specific circumstances and within certain limits” is, I suspect, precisely the assumption that advocates of the Bush Administration’s policies of “preventative war” did not make. I think even now Bush’s “former” supporters still view war itself as inherently morally neutral, with its morality decided solely by the use to which it is put.
Does that make their attitude towards torture more understandable?
Jetan, thanks for the kind words. But I should mention that I haven’t called myself a Republican since sometime in 2004. My sense of the reality in Iraq was so far removed from GOP rhetoric on the subject, and Iraq was so central to the party’s self-image, that it stopped seeming reasonable to characterize myself as a Republican with idiosyncratic views on the war. I’d supported the war and then decided that starting it was a moral and strategic disaster, so it was hard to continue identifying with people who were deluding themselves and misleading others about what was going on.
As someone who would not call himself conservative or Republican, I can’t tell you how happy I am to see conservatives rejecting torture. As has been pointed out ad nauseam by thinking people, the true conservative position is to respect the last half century or more of American political thought and reject torture.
We need a good conservative party!! Without the Republicans pressing the Democrats, the Democrats will go off on all kinds of strange tangents. We need solid, classic, small government conservatives – for the good of the country!!
Derek Copold wrote:
“None of this, of course, warrants the torture the Bush Administration used, but in context, waterboarding KSM is among the least of the past administration’s crimes.”
You’re correct, though perhaps not just for the reasons you state, as KSM was not the only person tortured. It’s one thing to inflict pain and suffering on someone that you *know* is guilty (but even here there are reports that KSM’s importance within AQ was overstated). However, the Bush administration has tortured hundreds if not thousands of *suspects*, killing quite a few in the process. The torture defenders keep trying to frame it as if we only targetted hardened terrorists overseas. But that’s not the case.
Torture cannot be entrusted to state, not just for moral reasons, but because the state is so very fallible. And when did conservatives forget that? The government is ineffective and inefficient… except when it’s killing and violating suspected enemies? Then it can do no wrong!
Scott,
AFAIK, the memos–the ’smoking guns’ in this situation–deal with a few specific individuals. They don’t cover the other reported incidents you refer to. I could be wrong, and if so, please correct me.
Yes, I agree with your point about government’s fallibility, and that is another practical reason to shun the practice.
Let us not forget that there is credible evidence that completely innocent people were snatched up an tortured by mistake.
Maher Arar was mistaken for a terrorist with the same name and shuttled off to a black site to be tortured for months. He kept telling them who he was and providing details to back up his claims but no one acted on them until he had been interrogated for months without result. Then they found that, indeed, he was who he said he was and had no connection to terrorism. Did they apologize and send him home? No. They kept him in a cell for another month while they covered their butts and ended up dropping him, blindfolfed and broke, in the back woods of Albania and left him to find his own way home.
I am totally against torture of any kind, and have a very broad definition of what it is. But, while I’m not currently a principled pacifist, I struggle to find any moral difference between torture and the killing of innocent civilians for any reason, even in a “just war.”
If it were simply a matter of military casualties, I would probably not be struggling, especially if both sides were volunteer forces. I realize, too, that “torture vs. war” is largely about The Law, and the implications for a nation that disregards it as a foundational principle; and that torture is forbidden under long-standing laws and treaties, whereas (some) warfare is not.
But laws, and “just war theory,” arise out of morality. And my moral sense is just as outraged over civilian deaths as it is over torture, which leads me, in order to be consistent, towards pacifism because no war, just or otherwise, is capable of avoiding the deaths of innocents.
I don’t like going there because I am generally not an absolutist.
And then, this thought occurs to me: What if, for every civilian death caused by a country’s military, that country was legally obligated to surrender an innocent civilian life of its own? Is that a meaningful rubric for “just war”?
The implications of that fascinate me.
I too am shocked that there are so many Americans who would defend torture, or pretend to have no argument against it.
I don’t want to rehash what has been written above, most of which I agree with, but I think it’s worth pointing out that Manzi assumes that torture is an extension of war simply because they are both violent and may involve the same perpetrators. The goals of war and torture, however, are very different, and are often used for completely different ends.
The strategic goal of war is to break the will or the ability of the enemy to fight. Once the enemy decides not to fight anymore, or cannot fight anymore (e.g., due to lack of weapons, fuel, or food), that goal has been accomplished. Once a soldier has been captured, he lacks the ability to fight for his cause, and is no longer treated as a combatant (because he is no longer very likely to injure or kill you).
The immediate goal of torture is to break the will of the subject, to cause him to say or do whatever the torturer wants — to enslave him.
In U.S. history, prior to the Bush Administration, no political leaders ever believed that torture was an advisable or desirable adjunct to the prosecution of war. Communist states, on the other hand, have often found torture advisable regardless of whether a war was being fought or not.
A further distinction can be drawn in that armed forces heavily depend on accurate information — the truth — in prosecuting a war. Obtaining the truth, on the other hand, never seems to be much of a goal for torturers (viz, various inquisitions). For instance, it seems likely the goal of torture by the CIA was to obtain evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Iraq, regardless of whether there were any actual links.
Rather, the main political goal of torture seems to be to inflict suffering and humiliation on the person tortured and, by extension, the group (nation, political affiliation, religion) they represent, and to emphasize the dominance of the torturer and the group they represent. The Chinese and Vietnamese tortured American soldiers not because they believed that anyone would believe that any confession of guilt was freely obtained, but to degrade those soldiers and, by extension, the U.S., and to show the world that they had the power to force those soldiers to say whatever they wanted. And I believe the goal of Cheney and the other supporters of torture in this country was to similarly degrade those in their control, many of whom seem to have been simply guilty of being Arab or Afghani in the wrong place and time.
Thanks to the advocates of torture, or those who would throw up their hands at the prospect of even arguing against torture, let alone seeking to see it punished, we are now the barbarians.
There is a lot of classic American conceit surrounding this ridiculous re-hashing of a long settled moral and practical issue. Shamefully admitting our government horribly betrayed our own ideals and fully embraced the “dark side”, requires eating a lot of humble pie and uncomfortable reassessment of America’s self-proclaimed righteousness (see Shepard Smith’s peripatetic unraveling on TV)
The path of least mental resistance is to assume, pridefully, that because we’re America, The beacon of goodness and freedom, whatever we do cannot be evil–according to the exceptionalists, our policies are good by default, requiring Orwellian reinventions of well established philosophical and moral norms to conform to the “America– always the Good Guy” proposition. If the USA can never be the Bad Guy, anything we do in war and peace is morally defensible, far above and beyond mere torture.
So…torture is not really torture, and even if it is, the ends justify the means anyway so who cares–We’re America! and we F**ckin Torture. If it helps protect our sacrosanct way of life, it must be defensible. When we do it it must be legitimate–despite all the historical and contemporary evidence and experience to the contrary.
You see, we’re exceptional, so Manzi and others must re-invent the wheel lest they come to terms with the moral horror of what has transpired in our name.
I tend to be a little cynical about this topic because I think that many people who denounce torture. would be less outraged about torture when those being tortured are those for whom they have an intense hatred. .
.
I recall that Joe McCarthy was denounced for investigating charges of torture of war crimes suspects from one of the SS divisions. He was “sticking up for the Nazis!” Do any of the McCarthy-haters ever give him credit for this?
I tend to think that his motivations derived from his representation of a state with a large ethnic German population. .
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it is well established that some of the major German war crimes suspects were subject to torture. One of the Commandants of Auschwitz comes to mind.
Even ordinary German POW’s were subject to torture-like conditions like being held in open fields with no shelter for months at a time. Also starvation or near-starvation conditions.
Everyone who writes about these subjects seems relegated to a category similar to that of the Holocaust deniers.
“I think that many people who denounce torture. would be less outraged about torture when those being tortured are those for whom they have an intense hatred.”
So we don’t hate murdering terrorists?
“I recall that Joe McCarthy was denounced for investigating charges of torture of war crimes suspects from one of the SS divisions. Do any of the McCarthy-haters ever give him credit for this?”
Everything I’ve been able to read on the Senate subcommitte hearings regarding the Malmedy case has said that McCarthy lied, distorted facts, and ultimately threw a tantrum while there.
“I tend to be a little cynical about this topic because I think that many people who denounce torture. would be less outraged about torture when those being tortured are those for whom they have an intense hatred.”
You’re just going to have to trust me on this: I really, really, REALLY, hate Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. None of my opposition to torture stems from any empathy I feel for the man. I support constraints like the Geneva Conventions precisely because, when respected, they protect prisoners from the vengeful instincts of people like me.
IIRC, McCarthy was against the prosecution of some SS suspects in the Malmedy Massacre.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmedy_massacre#Aftermath_and_trial
Now, unless McCarthy was generally on the side of truth, justice and the American way, I’d find him suddenly developing a bleding heart for SS men accused of murdering American prisoners to be highly suspicious.
I’m not convinced by simple appeals to long standing conventional wisdom. How many years did we constantly hear from the MSM that Alger Hiss was innocent? How many lies were we told about Soviet penetration of the USGOV before the release of the Venona transcripts?
If Charlie is a European leftist (many of whom have well-established ties to Islamic radicals) I wouldn’t necessarily believe him.
What appears to be an objective account of the Malmedy Massacre Trial:
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/DachauTrials/MalmedyMassacre03.html
“If Charlie is a European leftist (many of whom have well-established ties to Islamic radicals) I wouldn’t necessarily believe him.”
Are you kidding?
@Charlie
Heck, we’ve already turned your name over to Interpol. And the JBS. Didn’t you know?
@jetan:
Ha. I’ve already relocated to Caracas, where the long arm of international law can’t reach me.
In fairness, this is the internet and I could be anyone. But for the record I’m an American and a conservative. Not the most conservative guy around, but definitely not a liberal or a leftist (not that I’ve run into many liberals or leftists who sympathize with al Qaeda!).
Caracas. Hmph. That’s what Martin Boorman thought. We have our little ways.