This article from "Soldiers for the Truth," covers the Geneva Convention as it applies in the cases you are discussing, I think.
DefenseWatch "The Voice of the Grunt"
05-24-2004
The Case for Harshness
By Jim Simpson
Condemnation of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison has been prolonged, loud and shrill, ranging from President Bush to the former detainees themselves. I would like to make a different point: I believe there is a case for extremely harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists, even if the faint of heart among us call it torture.
First, the law. There are many legal proscriptions against torture, found in both international agreements and domestic military and civilian law. To discuss them all is beyond the breadth of this article, so I will focus on just the best known: the 1949 “Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, as Amended,” better known as simply “The Geneva Convention.” It prohibits a broad range of activities from execution and torture down to “humiliating and degrading” treatment. So it would seem that we, as signatories, have violated it, given the recent revelations of Abu Graib prison.
Or not.
Article II of the Geneva Convention states:
“Although one of the Powers in conflict may not be a party to the present Convention, the Powers who are parties thereto shall remain bound by it … in relation to the said Power, if the latter accepts and applies the provisions thereof.” (emphasis added). See The Geneva Convention for the complete treaty.
Under the definitions of the Geneva Convention, the various militia groups and insurgents are all parties to the conflict. So what this states, in typically tortured (no pun intended) legal language, is that any party to the conflict who does not agree to abide by the Convention cannot expect to be treated in the manner required for participating parties.
I don’t know what more proof you need than what comes across on your own TV screen to see that all of these groups are in gross violation of any and all acceptable behavior standards for human conduct in any circumstance. They have chosen their path, and even the Geneva Convention won’t protect them from their just desserts. In other words there is nothing in the Convention preventing us from treating Iraqi prisoners of war in whatever manner we see fit!
Now, I don’t claim to be an expert on international law, but there is something else. For any treaty to remain credible, those signatories to it must abide by its statutes. Virtually every country in the world has signed the Geneva Convention. Virtually every signatory has also violated its proscriptions.
Let’s see, there’s the Communist countries: China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. Their use of torture is government doctrine. Then there are all those pesky South American dictatorships and “emerging” democracies. Torture? Rampant. Africa? Gee, how about Sierra Leone? Well, okay I admit the convention didn’t specifically say you couldn’t hack off arms and legs, but …. Nigeria? I’ll pass on that interview. Zimbabwe? Not unless I can produce my lifetime membership card for the Mugabe Fan Club.
Or what about our “friends” like the Russians? I’d still suggest avoiding Lubyanka as a tourist stop. France? Mon Pere! (During the Algerian conflict at least, torture was doctrine). Or even closer to home: Egypt? Israel? Hmmm, don’t catch me on the wrong side of that fence. Turkey’s a fun place, at least according to that classic tourist movie Midnight Express. The Italians would probably electrocute themselves by mistake.
You get the drift.
Now granted, in the above cases I am often referring to how governments treat their own people, or the occasional hapless foreigner. I’m sure because they signed the Geneva Convention, they’ll buck up and fly right when a foreign army invades! Right!
All the conflicts in modern history show otherwise. Our POWs have suffered severe and extensive torture, sometimes to the death, at the hands of the North Koreans, North Vietnamese, Japanese, Germans, Saddam’s Iraq, and indeed in any conflict where the enemy captured American troops. I am hard-pressed to think of any conflict in which torture was not a prominent and regular feature among all the combatants except Americans and perhaps the British. Please, name one for me.
So it must be asked, if we are the only signatories to the Geneva Convention who actually respect its guidelines, what is its value? If virtually every country on the face of the globe routinely ignores the Geneva Convention, and they do, doesn’t its value rest solely in its ability to provide our enemies with a tactical advantage? It certainly has no value as an enforcement mechanism. It has been so completely ignored by participating countries around the globe that it cannot properly even be called “law.”
Which brings us to the second, and maybe even for us, more important point: morality.
What are we really about? What does our nation stand for? What do our people stand for? What is the image we would like to uphold in the world? Most of us would like to believe we stand for freedom, justice, equality and opportunity. Our people like to see themselves as generous, helpful, kind and courageous. The image we would like to uphold in the world is that of a strong but benevolent country, dedicated to helping where needed and spreading the message of political, social and economic freedom around the world. We want to share our wealth! Who else does that?
Because of our heritage, our Judeo-Christian values and our high-minded opinion of ourselves, we find the whole notion of torture beneath our dignity, repugnant and unacceptable. It is, after all, repugnant and unacceptable. However in this day and age we are confronted with a Hobson’s choice: either we learn to adapt some of the enemy’s odious tactics or accept inevitable defeat. Here’s an appropriate quote:
“The enemy will pass slowly form the offensive to the defensive. The blitzkrieg will transform itself into a war of long duration. Thus, the enemy will be caught in a dilemma: he has to drag out the war in order to win it and does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long, drawn-out war.”
Sound familiar? It was spoken by North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap at a 1950 strategy meeting for defeating the French (quoted in Street Without Joy, by Bernard Fall). Communist-trained armies and guerilla groups understand us better than we understand ourselves.
We are running essentially blind in enemy territory. His hit-and-run tactics are designed to bog us down until our political system demands an end. We don’t have the collective political will to engage in a long drawn-out fight with an enemy we can’t find. The Iraqis learned their tactics the same place Giap did: the Soviet Union.
When dealing with the highly decentralized, cellular structure of Soviet-trained cadre, good, fresh, actionable intelligence is the only means of identifying and rooting them out. And with a population cowed by thirty years of experience with these monsters – who are still swimming freely among them like Mao’s fish – they will remain largely uncooperative. Our best tactical intelligence will come in most cases, from captives, and the quickest way, often the only way, to get results is to get rough.
The average Iraqi citizen is used to much worse. He would like to cooperate with us, but has greater fear of the Saddam loyalists and other insurgents in his midst. While publicly voicing his displeasure at our “occupation”, to himself he is saying: “When oh when will those Americans ever get serious?” He is praying for the day we take off our gloves and start dealing with this insurgency. With our demonstrated commitment to a winning strategy, the average Iraqi will start cooperating enthusiastically and the less committed Ba’athists will come around too.
This brings up the third point: effectiveness. We often hear the claim that torture is not an effective interrogation technique. Prisoners wind up saying whatever they think the interrogators want them to say. That begs the question: then why is it so frequently resorted to? The former Soviet Union had (has?) entire bureaucracies dedicated to researching the most effective forms of torture. The communists use it to devastating effect.
In the 1980s, during the period when kidnapping of Westerners in Lebanon was an almost daily event, one of the Lebanese militias made the mistake of kidnapping a couple of Russians. A few days later the kidnapper was dumped in front of the militia’s headquarters, minus his male anatomy and very dead. The Russians were released unharmed and no militia group ever tried that again.
The notion that torture is ineffective is a bunch of happy horse**** and we all know it. If the interrogators can’t get information out of a prisoner that way, it has more to do with their ability as interrogators.
We must distinguish between what we as a people believe is the appropriate way of governing ourselves during times of peace and how we deal with barbaric enemies in a foreign country in times of war. What we do in a battle zone, when our lives are at stake, has nothing to do with how we behave at home, or what kind of government we would choose for our vanquished enemies.
I can go further. Do we deliberately target women and children? No! Would we ever do that? No! Critics tend to equate our humiliation of Iraqi prisoners with the wanton atrocities the Iraqi guerillas commit against men, women and children every day. We are talking here about adopting methods which prevent that.
I love when leftists cite the estimated 10,000 civilian casualties caused by our invasion (A gross overestimate in my opinion). Even if true that is 20,000 less than the annual average murdered by Saddam! Do you prefer 30,000 deliberate murders over 10,000 accidental casualties? We have saved that country from a holocaust and there were fewer killed during the entire war than would have likely died at Saddam’s hands.
We are a generous people. We are a decent people. We want the world to share in our success. But in order to get there, we must defeat the enemy. And to defeat the enemy we must recognize and fully understand his tactics and his reasons for applying them. We must then seek him out, find him and destroy him!
An article in The Washington Times last Tuesday reported that al Sadr’s militia was working with the Ba’athist underground in Kirkuk. No big surprise there.
The entire radical Islamist movement takes its inspirational guidance from Sayyid Qutb, an early member of the Islamic Brotherhood (the group who later became Islamic Jihad and went on to fame and misfortune by murdering Egyptian President Anwar Sadat). Qutb (pronounced Khatab) believed that the moderate Islamic nations of his time (1920s-1960s) were merely puppets of Western powers and, along with the decadent, immoral West, were in complete defiance of Allah.
He judged virtually the entire world “Kafir,” a very harsh judgement in Islamic tradition which means essentially being in complete defiance of God. Pronouncing such a verdict against fellow Muslims and even “People of the Book” (Christians and Jews) is extremely grave and normally a judgment reserved for Allah himself. For a Muslim to make that pronouncement places him essentially above God.
Believe it or not, Islam preaches a degree of tolerance. (Remember Malcolm X? He discovered this on his studies of Islam and it cost him his life at the hands of his fellow black Muslims when he later questioned their radicalism and corruption).
But according to Qutb, he and his small band of visionary pilgrims were following Allah’s path. His judgement of “Kafir” was tantamount to a declaration of war against the entire civilized world. We were all out of the bounds of acceptable behavior and thus were not to be accorded the niceties reserved for true believers. Anything was justifiable to rid the world of the “Infidels.”
Of course, this sounds a lot like Marx and Lenin, doesn’t it? “We’re right and you’re wrong, and anything we do to defeat you is justifiable.” It is no coincidence therefore that the various Soviet-inspired governments and movements, Syria, Iraq (under Saddam), the PLO and the IRA for example, have aided and abetted the many so-called “Islamic” revolutionary movements, including Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and yes, even al Qaeda. Great minds think alike, and as it turns out, so do the tiny minds of Islamists and communists.
So it is the Qutbists and their ilk who are truly the outcasts. For it is they who seek to destroy the forces for good in this world. It is they who are outside the bounds of acceptable human behavior.
It is they who are the Infidels!
These are not human beings we are dealing with. They are deranged monsters and do not deserve the treatment accorded those who count themselves among the family of man. They, by their very behavior, have abandoned the right to any civilized treatment. We need to do whatever necessary to ferret out their networks in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
To those who disagree, my response is: If it is beneath your dignity to use the tactics and methods necessary to defeat monsters, then you are by default ceding the world, including yourselves, your families and everything you hold dear about our society, to monsters.
The Vietnamese communists were confident that they would win the Vietnam War before it started. They were confident because they knew our culture and political system would never tolerate a long-term commitment to the type of grisly, down and dirty warfare necessary to beat them.
If we want to avoid another 9/11, or a disaster even greater than that, then we have to.
Now let’s be really honest. Who wouldn’t want to see 220-volt cables attached to every imaginable extremity of Osama Bin Laden’s ghoulish body? Who wouldn’t want to see that despicable little freak Abu Musab Zarqawi, fry like a hush puppy, flopping around like a landed flounder as the power was cranked up, until his teeth just popped out of his head?
Then the guy at the rheostat would say: “Ahh, Sir. I think he died before we could get any useful information out of him.” To which I would respond: “Ahhhhh…. Whoops!” Come on. Be honest! Can’t you truthfully say you would get a deep sense of satisfaction from such a spectacle?
Seriously though, (well, I am serious), so many of those who decry our treatment of the enemy at Abu Ghraib just stink of hypocrisy. They wail about the “cycle of violence” we are creating – except that we didn’t create it. The cycle of violence was initiated by demented minds doing demented things.
Others fear we will sacrifice our cherished morality and principles. But are we really willing to defend these principles or are we so afraid of losing them that we stubbornly refuse to adopt winning tactics? To me that suggests we may not be as attached to those principles as we think. For if we refuse to do what is necessary, we and our much vaunted principles will become as extinct as the Dodo bird. That isn’t principle, it’s suicide!
Finally, you cannot convince me that holding to these tactically suicidal standards against a barbaric enemy is worth a single American life. Now-retired Lt. Col. Alan West saved the lives of his men by threatening the life of a turncoat Iraqi policeman. The policeman talked, they prevented an ambush. Should his men have died instead?
College professors, educated beyond their intelligence, conceited journalists and despicable, gutless, politicians may be willing to sacrifice our young for phony, high-minded principles, but could any of them make that case to the bereaved parents? Would they dare? The parents of those soldiers are eternally grateful to Col. West for his brave action. The rest of us should admit we would be too.
We are at war. And we have the right to defend ourselves using any means necessary to save ourselves and the rest of the world from barbarity. We can fight them over there or we can fight them here. Take your pick. Either way, we will never penetrate their cellular organizations unless and until we face facts and start using tactics that produce results. Unfortunately, really rough interrogations, including those that rise to the definition of torture, are one of them.
Jim Simpson is a Contributing Editor of DefenseWatch.
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