Thomas Sowell again:
It used to be said that self-preservation is the first law of nature. But much of what has been happening in recent times in the United States, and in Western civilization in general, suggests that survival is taking a back seat to the shibboleths of political correctness.
We have already turned loose dozens of captured terrorists, who have resumed their terrorism. Why? Because they have been given “rights” that exist neither in our laws nor under international law.
These are not criminals in our society, entitled to the protection of the Constitution of the United States. They are not prisoners of war entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention.
There was a time when people who violated the rules of war were not entitled to turn around and claim the protection of those rules. German soldiers who put on U.S. military uniforms, in order to infiltrate American lines during the Battle of the Bulge, were simply lined up against a wall and shot.
Nobody even thought that this was a violation of the Geneva Convention. American authorities filmed the mass executions. Nobody dreamed up fictitious “rights” for these enemy combatants who had violated the rules of war. Nobody thought we had to prove that we were nicer than the Nazis by bending over backward.
Continue reading…
In a related op-ed Thomas Sowell examines the silliness of the “torture debate”. An excerpt:
One of the many signs of the degeneration of our times is how many serious, even life-and-death, issues are approached as talking points in a game of verbal fencing. Nothing illustrates this more than the fatuous, and even childish, controversy about “torturing” captured terrorists.People’s actions often make far more sense than their words. Most of the people who are talking lofty talk about how we mustn’t descend to the level of our enemies would themselves behave very differently if presented with a comparable situation, instead of being presented with an opportunity to be morally one up with rhetoric.
What if it was your mother or your child who was tied up somewhere beside a ticking time bomb and you had captured a terrorist who knew where that was? Face it: What you would do to that terrorist to make him talk would make water-boarding look like a picnic.
<snip>
But if the United States behaves that way it is called “arrogance”– even by American citizens. Indeed, even by the American president. There is a big difference between being ponderous and being serious. It is scary when the President of the United States is not being serious about matters of life and death, saying that there are “other ways” of getting information from terrorists.
Maybe this is a step up from the previous talking point that “torture” had not gotten any important information out of terrorists. Only after this had been shown to be a flat-out lie did Barack Obama shift his rhetoric to the lame assertion that unspecified “other ways” could have been used.
For a man whose whole life has been based on style rather than substance, on rhetoric rather than reality, perhaps nothing better could have been expected. But that the media and the public would have become so mesmerized by the Obama cult that they could not see through this to think of their own survival, or that of this nation, is truly a chilling thought.
When we look back at history, it is amazing what foolish and even childish things people said and did on the eve of a catastrophe about to consume them. In 1938, with Hitler preparing to unleash a war in which tens of millions of men, women and children would be slaughtered, the play that was the biggest hit on the Paris stage was a play about French and German reconciliation, and a French pacifist that year dedicated his book to Adolf Hitler.
<snip>
If we have reached the point where we cannot be bothered to think beyond rhetoric or to make moral distinctions, then we have reached the point where our own survival in an increasingly dangerous world of nuclear proliferation can no longer be taken for granted.
Goodness! I must have missed all that evidence which shows that the “talking point that “torture†had not gotten any important information out of terrorists” is “a flat-out lie.” Maybe Mr. Sowell has access to high-level documents which he’s bound by secrecy not to disclose to the rest of us. Or perhaps he’s referring to the “secret memos” that Dick Cheney swears exist which back up his case and prove once and for all that torture, in fact, worked.
Since those documents haven’t been released, though, you’ll forgive me if I reserve judgment on their veracity, their accuracy and even their existence. Dick Cheney does not exactly have a stellar record of either honesty or…you know…being right about things which we can prove.
Instead, what we have is the testimony of one of the men who was actually in the room with Abu Zubaydah during some of his “enhanced interrogation” (torture) and – critically – before it. And he informs us that Zubaydah gave up the identity of Kalid Sheikh Mohammed within the first hour of his interrogation using traditional methods, NOT torture:
Is it possible that Mr. Soufan is lying? Sure, I suppose so. But we KNOW Mr. Cheney has done so, on this very issue, more than once. I’m in favor of getting all the memos/documents/details out there into public view, but until such time as we (or some kind of independent prosecutor or truth commission) looks at them, I’m going to reserve my belief in something when it comes backed with nothing more than Dick Cheney’s say-so.
Almost a month ago, Sean Hannity – in a story which has now made its way around the interwebs – blurted out to Charles Grodin live on camera that he would be happy to be waterboarded for a soldiers’ families charity, to show that it was no big deal. He’s never followed through with it, despite nightly needling from Keith Olbermann, who was on Hannity’s offer like white on rice. It’s funny – the people who’ve been through it almost to a man will claim that it’s most certainly torture – as Jesse Ventura, of all people, recently did on The View (Ventura was a Navy SEAL and thus went through the SERE school’s training, including waterboarding). John McCain – who knows a thing or two about torture – said just yesterday that Cheney is not only not helping, but that he’s completely wrong about waterboarding. What is the masterful breadth of personal experience from which the august Mr. Thomas Sowell proffers his ivory-tower proclamation that not only is waterboarding not torture, but that to even entertain the question is “one of the many signs of the degeneration of our times?”
Mr. Sowell raises the shibboleth of the “ticking time bomb” scenario, which – not coincidentally – is the same scenario which pollsters like Scott Rasmussen use to survey the public’s “approval” of the use of torture. Rasmussen and other pollsters also usually toss in the caveat about “let’s say that we knew for CERTAIN that this specific terrorist knew the location and defuse-codes for that bomb.” But Sowell intentionally neglects to point out that such a “ticking time bomb” situation isn’t what, in fact, took place in any of the instances where US contractors were employed to waterboard terrorists. There’s no way to know for sure, of course, but I suspect that if the public were asked: do you support the use of private contractors waterboarding detainees for the purposes of extracting politically advantageous confessions of a link between two groups (Al Qaeda and Iraq) – which is what actually occurred in at least one case – the results would be far different. The “ticking time bomb” is a nice abstraction to bandy about like a badminton shuttlecock, but as Dan Froomkin ably notes:
If we knew with God-like certainty that someone we had in custody had information that could prevent an imminent attack on a large number of people — and we knew that in this particular case torture was absolutely the only way to pry it out of him — then, yes, I suspect many of us would use torture.
But we are not gods. We are humans. Such certainty doesn’t exist for us (except, of course, on TV).
And because we are humans, not gods, we have chosen to be ruled by laws — laws that draw clear lines between what actions are appropriate for humans, and what are not.
Indeed, ever since World War II, those laws have been codified to represent what civilized nations agree are — or at least should be — universal values. Chief among those is a respect for human dignity. The United States in particular has cast itself as the world’s champion of human dignity. And nothing is more antithetical to human dignity than torture.
Indeed.