Posted by zeugma on November 3, 2005, at 20:35:38
I am seeking to start a non-controversial thread on the Politics board.
So I'll bring up the Geneva Convention. U.N. established to avoid horrors like the whole world going the way of Nagasaki. Torture such as occurred in Nazi concentration camps not a good thing.
I expect no one will disagree with me there.
And it was recognized by the delegates to the Convention, that however utopian, a United Nations had to be practical. Wars, abhorrent as they were, would not be abolished by a nice plaza in midtown Manhattan. Indeed by 1950 there was some problem that resulted in deadly force being used in the vicinity of Seoul.
But torture of combatants is wrong. If wars must be fought, captured soldiers must be treated fairly. It's one thing to blow someone's head off in clean combat, quite another to take a feeding tube and stick it up someone's nose till person's vicinity is spattered with blood and vomit.
In America, till quite recently the leader of the First World, we don't even torture prisoners of ghastly crimes. An eye for an eye may have been good enough for Hammurabi, but we've come a long way since then. I regret the death penalty, but that aside, torture of serial killers is not engaged in systematically here as a public spectacle.
Now Donald Rumsfeld has a problem with the Convention. And so does Dick Cheney. The guy who replaced the disgraced Irvene Libby is an architect of the anti-Pentagon faction within the Administration- yes, that's right- that wants to flout the Geneva Convention.
I said anti-Pentagon. It is easy to see why the Pentagon would have a stake in upholding it as best they can- they are in the business of conducting wars, and soldiers, and even generals, have been known to get captured. It is not in those soldiers' or generals' interests to have captors who view the Geneva Convention as an unnecessary restriction on their right to do whatever they want.
I would like to know if my statements are as uncontroversial as they seem, and perhaps if Dick Cheney or Libby's replacement freqents this site, he can tell me why it is good American policy to torture prisoners, even if one were Osama bin Laden's janitor in some high-tech cave and couldn't explain just what it was he intended to do with that ammonia (he certainly didn't plan on making a dirty bomb with it). I describe a fictional character, but for all I know he could have been mistakenly put on some Bush Administration deck of cards because he looked like the Chemical Ali of Afghanistan, and a zealous CIA operative terrified that he was going to be the next one outed by an indiscreet Administration official decided on the basis of this resemblance and the fact that he was found with ammonia and a mop (both of which, if found on a street in Chicago, would put this country on Code Red for a week) to pad his resume with a capture of the 34th highest ranking member of al Qaeda.
The unfortunate janitor now can be tortured in defiance of the Geneva Convention.
To guess what a White House scriptwriter might say in rebuttal, I might offer this.
Torture someone for long enough and they will crack. They will offer up any fairytale they can think of to get the torture to stop.
And on the plus side, the witch trials weren't so bad. Drown enough people, and you're bound to drown a witch too.
The framers of the Geneva Convention did overlook the great success the witch trials achieved. After all, are there any witches left?
Maybe the Geneva Convention wasn't such a good idea anyway.
-z
poster:zeugma
thread:575183
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20050924/msgs/575183.html