You Can't Handle the Truth!

From The Edge of England's Sword, refreshing candor on the Abu Ghraib scandal:

"I have recently been thinking about the scene in A Few Good Men, where Tom Cruise says he wants the TRUTH and Jack Nicholson yells back "you can't handle the truth". I was hoping for a Nicholson style outbreak when Rumsfield et al were being questioned by the Senate. I want him to yell it at every pontificating journalist and opinionista. Hell, I want to yell it from the roof tops. The truth is war is a hard, messy, deadly affair. It is not a romantic game of bravery and daring. It is a hard slog, that is trying at the best of times and wrenching and torturous and terrifying most of the time."

There may be scandal in the photographs- there is certainly scandal in their publication. If taken for gratuitous personal use by our soldiers, there is no excusing the photographs. If taken for purposes of intimidation to gain cooperation and information from hardened Baathists, the strategy behind the photographs can be explained and excused. That the photographs circulated freely amongst the soldiers who took them points toward the former explanation. That Jeremy Spivits testified that freelance violence by soldiers guarding the prisoners was common in reinforces this explanation.

It would seem that Military Intelligence operated in Abu Ghraib with insufficient firewalls, and that soldiers guarding prisoners operated with insufficient guidance and supervision. In the combination of these oversights, abuse was almost predictable. The soldiers implicated must and no doubt will be punished. More importantly, the soldiers must not be sacrificed to save the careers of officers in the chain of command who are ultimately responsible for the scandal.

On the subject of torture, Mark Bowden wrote an excellent essay for The Atlantic Monthly examining the subject- its uses, its impact on torturer and torturee, and its effectiveness in gaining information. (I hasten to credit Gabrielle for suggesting that I read the article.) Bowden concluded that some level of torture can be a necessary evil to protect civilization, and he suggested a method (with which I disagree) for judicial regulation of mild torture under extreme circumstances.

Later in the article, Bowden described an interview with Alistair Hodgett and Alexandra Arriaga of Amnesty International, who oppose torture in any circumstances:

"I showed the two an article I had torn from that day's New York Times, which described the controversy over a tragic kidnapping case in Frankfurt, Germany. On September 27 of last year a Frankfurt law student kidnapped an eleven-year-old boy named Jakob von Metzler, whose smiling face appeared in a box alongside the story. The kidnapper had covered Jakob's mouth and nose with duct tape, wrapped the boy in plastic, and hidden him in a wooded area near a lake. The police captured the suspect when he tried to pick up ransom money, but the suspect wouldn't reveal where he had left the boy, who the police thought might still be alive. So the deputy police chief of Frankfurt, Wolfgang Daschner, told his subordinates to threaten the suspect with torture. According to the suspect, he was told that a "specialist" was being flown in who would "inflict pain on me of the sort I had never experienced." The suspect promptly told the police where he'd hidden Jakob, who, sadly, was found dead. The newspaper said that Daschner was under fire from Amnesty International, among other groups, for threatening torture."

""Under these circumstances," I asked, "do you honestly think it was wrong to even threaten torture?""

"Hodgett and Arriaga squirmed in their chairs. "We recognize that there are difficult situations," said Arriaga, who is the group's director of government relations. "But we are opposed to torture under any and all circumstances, and threatening torture is inflicting mental pain. So we would be against it.""

There you have it... by the standard of Amnesty International the life of every human being could be at stake, and the threat of torture would not be acceptable. It goes without saying that, in Amnesty International's opinion (an opinion shared by the Ted Kennedy wing of the Democrat party), saving the lives of a few good men serving America in Iraq would not be reason enough to man-handle Islamist thugs. Idealism is sometimes to be admired, but not when it is reduced to the level of silliness, and certainly not when the lives of decent people are at stake.

Posted by publius at May 28, 2004 11:46 PM