The Lonely Goatherd Blog And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats - Matthew 25:32
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December 27, 2004
Sackcloth and ashes and prisoner abuse Matt Welch has a new article at the Reason website about the reaction of conservative pundits to the various allegations of American soldiers abusing prisoners.
At the risk of being called a libertarian torture apologist, I question the apparent basic premise of this article. Welch seems to be assuming that anyone who isn't worked up into high outrage over these scattered reports of prisoner abuse is somehow commiting an offense themselves.
For my part, however, I feel absolutely no urge to don sackcloth and ashes.
Perhaps he lacks perspective. We're fighting a WAR. In a war, bad things happen. We're sending soldiers over to kill people and blow things up. That's what they do. It's near impossible to just turn that off, and say that they should be nice to the enemy.
We struggle to keep our soldiers on a short leash, but they're only human. If, say, you've just captured someone who was trying to kill you, there's going to be a chance that even the good guys will get rough from time to time- even more so if you think they've got information that will stop their compatriots from killing you.
Best I can read from the tea leaves though, our troops have largely been well disciplined and appropriate with prisoners and detainees. Most of the world, specifically including many Americans, want US to fail or be brought down. If there really was much serious abuse, there'd be eyewitness testimony and specific dates and acts all over CBS and Al Jazeera, rather than mere broad hints and allegations.
I'm less concerned with great outrage over any American violation of the Marques of Queensberry rules than I am with stopping people from KILLING US.
I object to the broad sweeping lumping together of any and every whiff of anything stressful as "torture." A lot obviously depends on the exact individual circumstances, but I'm not real distraught over a little sleep deprivation for an Al Qaeda member. That's not even torture. It might not be particularly nice, but war is heck.
Nor do I automatically give credence to every passing whiff of an allegation.
When there is specific evidence of truly egregious abuse, then discipline the soldiers through the regular channels of the military justice system. The End. Other than that, we ought to be supporting our troops and giving them every reasonable benefit of the doubt.
I strongly suspect that most of the outrage comes from people who are much more opposed to our war effort entirely, rather than being concerned with human rights abuses. If human rights were your main concern, I would think you'd be mostly talking about the truly BAD people that we're fighting, and supporting our efforts to stop them from abusing not just prisoners but entire populations.
