A Comment On US Torture Policy
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Foreign Policy, General Politics, The War On TerrorismI talked about the double standard regarding torture a few days ago. Now the Financial Times weighs in, saying the Administration’s insistence that they be able to do whatever they want with suspected terrorists (including torturing them to death) should always be an option.
The US certainly needs to revamp its public diplomacy. The war on terror will ultimately be won not on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, but in the hearts and minds of the Muslim world. The existing communications effort is absurdly weak for the nation that invented public relations. Ms Hughes can contribute much by shaking up the bureaucracy and providing strong leadership. But it will all be for nothing if the US keeps handing the jihadists successive propaganda coups.This is what happened again this week. A series of amendments by Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham proposed mandating that the military follow its own interrogation rules in all cases, register all detainees at military facilities with the Red Cross and formalise procedures for determining enemy combatant status. By threatening to veto them, the White House signalled that it still will not accept any legal limit on its treatment of detainees. This undermines one of America’s strongest cards in the global propaganda war: the idea that it is, in Mr Graham’s words, a “rule-of-law nation”.
The FT correctly points out that McCain and Graham’s proposal is not without its flaws, but it’s a necessary step in winning a war against a tactic.
Not that the McCain/Graham amendments are perfect. They duck the question of what to do about “ghost detainees” held by the CIA at non-military facilities, who are at greatest risk of abuse. Moreover, they intrude on executive prerogative by seeking to micro-manage the war on terror. It would be much better if the executive branch led a highly visible campaign to stamp out mistreatment as fundamentally un-American. But it has not done so.
Read the rest here.
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July 28th, 2005 at 7:45 am
Help me out here, how has the Administration not led a campaign to stamp out abusive treatment of prisoners? When they learned about abuses they started an investigation into it and punished those involved…. what else were they supposed to do?
Maybe it is the Journalists that are handing the jihadists propaganda coups by reporting prisoner abuses before any investigation has been done. Maybe, they should wait for a complete story instead of just the sensationalism they use to sell newspapers. They ran with a story about abuses of the Koran and they used it to start a riot that killed several people, but then the investigation was held and it was unfounded. What do you tell these people’s families? Whoops, sorry, but we sold lots of papers? I understand the need for a free press, I’m all for it, but I sure wish that they were a little more responsible in their reporting while we are in a war. It is sad the way they constantly jump to conclusions just to ‘voice the juciest scandals’ only to have it turn out to be nothing…. kind of like ‘Batboy Lives’ only to read the story and see that it was a boy who had a pet bat. How many people actually read the entire article? How many people read the headlines and maybe the first 2 or 3 paragraphs? It is truly appalling how ridiculous todays reporting has become, it is on a par with the Enquirer, Star, etc.
July 28th, 2005 at 9:46 am
It should also be noted that jihadis are often trained by their masterminds to manufacture their own propaganda, by exaggerating events and even making them up if need be, to cast the enemy (i.e. us) in the worst possible light. Even though their claims may later be disproven, by that time the damage to our reputation is already done. What’s the old saying…? Oh yeah: “A lie can travel halfway around the world in the time it takes the truth to put its pants on.”
July 28th, 2005 at 10:13 am
The point is, they’re not doing enough. They say that the tactics at Abu Ghraib are horrible and sadistic, and yet they won’t agree on a standard code of conduct for interrogation. They want ALL options on the table, and those include the ones employeed at Abu Ghraib.
We’ve already killed several people in our custody, and the worst of Abu Ghraib is yet to be shown. And brutal tactics have been described coming out of Gitmo. If they’re exaggerating things, again, we certainly aren’t doing anything to say, “Never again will this happen.”
That’s the point the commentary is trying to make and what I’m trying to say in my previous post: Military Advised Administration Against Torture Policy.
July 28th, 2005 at 11:46 am
“the Administration’s insistence that they be able to do whatever they want with suspected terrorists (including torturing them to death) should always be an option.”
This is kinda like Trancredo’s insistance that “nuking Mecca” must be understood to remain as an option. It’s evil, flat out evil, shooting your wife and raping your daughter evil evil evil; let’s have no equivocation about it. Torturing prisoners is evil and nuking any city for any reason is evil. Pray God delivers us from the temptation to commit such sins.
How does an evil person view our declaration that we will NEVER, ever, swear to the God we pray delivers us from that evil, EVER retaliate with evil for evil?
How does a sadist react to a cry of pain?
Carl Sagan once compared the Cold War-era doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction to “two implacable enemies locked into a small sealed room awash in gasoline; each armed with a match.” What he failed to build into the scenario was the notion that one of the enemies was in fact evil, rapist-evil, theft-evil, murderous-evil; and the other was –while far from perfect — at least trying to accomplish other things than rape, loot and pillage (You remember, explore the moon, teach farmers in India, all that) AND was by non-flammable measures smaller, less armored, and had more to lose.
Evil is never not-evil. But dropping the match only guarantees that evil wins. HOLDING ON to the match risks much — to gain all. Let’s do what we can to avoid striking it.
July 29th, 2005 at 2:56 pm
“The point is, they’re not doing enough. They say that the tactics at Abu Ghraib are horrible and sadistic, and yet they won’t agree on a standard code of conduct for interrogation. They want ALL options on the table, and those include the ones employeed at Abu Ghraib.”
When you are in a fight for your life, you do what is necessary to continue living…. period! You are insisting that we put ‘rules and limits’ on ourselves while nothing is being done on the other side.
That is kind of like going to a boxing match, and one of the contestants has a knife that he is using… you are then insisting that the other contestant not use ‘any illegal moves’ to combat the knife weilding contestant. He has to continue to box according to the ‘rules’ - that is insane. He should be able to use anything that he needs to in order to survive since the other person isn’t applying any rules to their own conduct. That is all the administration is saying…. personally I agree with them.