Spreading Democracy
Labels: politics
April 23, 2008
About Me
- Name: Hokai D. Sobol
- Location: Rijeka, Croatia
lecturer, translator, publisher, buddhist meditation teacher, shingon koshi, integral agent; born 1968 in rijeka, croatia; personal weblog here; for more content see personal directory
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7 Comments:
Do you think all interrogation methods are pre-democratic? Are there any scenarios in which placing stress on detainees to obtain information might be justifiable?
Of course not. There are predemocratic, democratic and postdemocratic methods. Scenario is secondary as such. There is the subtlety and effectiveness of the method itself, then there's the transparency and/or legality of the process, and finally the integrity of the military oversight. In most cases, however, "placing stress" is outright torture, and should be treated not just as a disciplinary breach, but as war crime, including command responsibility. Any thoughts?
Yes, some people say that the information received from stress or torture is not very good, and so if that is true it puts the whole thing into question. I don't know how true that is, though. As far as transparency and legality of the process goes, yes, up to a point anyway. Should a terrorist receive the same legal protection as an ordinary citizen? The laws weren't designed for people who might kill two or three thousand people, or more. Most of the Orange laws were designed to let several guilty people go rather than incarcerate a single innocent person, but the guilty who got away would not go on to kill three thousand people.
Of course we're talking about something slightly different here, torture, but the same basic principle applies--maybe we have to rethink things a little. Of course, if the information is not worth anything, then forget it. But having someone stand on a chair like that is awfully tame considering the truly barbaric torture that goes on around the world.
I don't think having dogs bark at someone or stripping them in front of women is exactly a war crime, do you? Of course, there may have been things worse than that happening in Iraq, and certainly were when they were shipped to other countries. Of course I'm not for that, but I think everything needs to be reconsidered considering the technology that's available or could soon become available to these people.
The video portrayed the man standing on the chair as being a great victim of the callous white man from the West. But some of the guys standing on the chair were out there blowing up a lot of people--for Red or Amber reasons. You know, like walking up to a line of police recruits and blowing them all up. I just think it's a difficult position people have been put into and the answers aren't particularly easy. I think it would be especially difficult if you were a military commander and you saw your men being continually blown up.
I agree that over-sensitivity in regards to this matter is just the other side of senseless cruelty. However, we have international laws and resolutions that are the basis of our collective moral authority, and eroding those standards without going through the painful process of transforming our understanding just because "we don't have time" is BS. The commander on the ground is not in position to decide the limits or the semantic subtleties of "torture" or "stress". The soldier must have very clear mission details, and the technical and ethical complexities are resolved somewhere else, agreed?
Yes, I agree with that. That sounds good. KW has recently said that when a country is attacked--and the same goes for a person, I think--everything tends to spiral down. A country, people, tend to descend and contront what it is they feel threatened by. In the case of the Bush administration, most of them were just barely Orange to begin with, so the attacks on 9/11 simply drove them, or many of them, to pre-Orange levels.
I actually went to school with the guy who was in charge of detainees at the Pentagon, working just under Rumsfeld. I never liked him too much, but he seemed to be solidly rational. I never knew him to be irrational or cruel at all. He minded his own business, made an arrogant comment once and awhile, and did his homework. But after 9/11, when the country felt threatened on a fundamental level, he was making comments and supporting policies (and probably creating policies) that were less than Orange.
I don't think the ones in charge really had the wherewithall to adapt to a new threat and do it in such a way that maintained at least Orange ethics. Green might have been too wimpy in their response and caused long-term harm and suffering. Teal might have been able to react with the appropriate toughness but still maintain at least an Orange level ethic, but of course it wasn't Teal in charge.
Thanks for the comments.:-)
Here's an article in today's New York Times about this that you might find interesting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/washington/27intel.html?hp
I hadn't known that the Geneva convention had ruled against techniques that were simply humiliating. I'm not sure exactly what they had in mind, though. They may have simply been referring to humiliation for the sake of humiliation rather than as an interrogation technique. It is of course highly questionable as an interrogation technique, but I think the counter arguments are at least worth considering.
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