Torture: Still Bad
Tuesday night’s Republican Presidential Debate was a debacle: the biggest applause from the audience was in favor of waterboarding, and the candidates variously called for doubling the size of Guantanamo (Mitt Romney), employing the talents of fictional torturer Jack Bauer (Tom Tancredo), or for interragators to “use use every method they could think of” (Rudy Giuliani). Only John McCain and [edit] Ron Paul were against it.
The Washington Post published, in response, a great op-ed by two former U.S. Generals (Charles C. Krulak, former Commandant of the Marine Corps, and Joseph P. Hoar, former head of CENTCOM).
It says, in part:
These assertions that “torture works” may reassure a fearful public, but it is a false security.
As has happened with every other nation that has tried to engage in a little bit of torture — only for the toughest cases, only when nothing else works — the abuse spread like wildfire, and every captured prisoner became the key to defusing a potential ticking time bomb. Our soldiers in Iraq confront real “ticking time bomb” situations every day, in the form of improvised explosive devices, and any degree of “flexibility” about torture at the top drops down the chain of command like a stone — the rare exception fast becoming the rule.
Complex situational ethics cannot be applied during the stress of combat. The rules must be firm and absolute; if torture is broached as a possibility, it will become a reality.
This has had disastrous consequences.
This war will be won or lost not on the battlefield but in the minds of potential supporters who have not yet thrown in their lot with the enemy. If we forfeit our values by signaling that they are negotiable in situations of grave or imminent danger, we drive those undecideds into the arms of the enemy. This way lies defeat, and we are well down the road to it.
Read the Full Story at The Wasthington Post
“It’s Our Cage, Too: Torture Betrays Us and Breeds New Enemies”
By Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar
April 17, 2007
Bill Standley wrote:
Ron Paul was also on record against it. But Ron went a step further to acknowledge the elephant in the living room: our interventionist foreign policy. This, naturally, was simply beyond rational discussion.
Don’t miss these excellent posts that appeared on Lew Rockwell:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/paul-said-it.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods68.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/hornberger/hornberger128.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods69.html
Posted 18 May 2007 at 3:49 pm ¶
Tom Chappell wrote:
D’Oh! I forgot Ron Paul. It was amazing to hear how FOX’s Brit Hume framed the debate, asking that since 77 percent of Republicans disapprove of the idea of setting a timetable for withdrawal, shouldn’t Paul, who is in favor of pulling out of Iraq, ought to be running as a Democrat?
Paul made a great reply: “But you have to realize that the base of the Republican Party shrunk last year because of the war issue. So that percentage represents less people. If you look at 65 to 70 percent of the American people, they want us out of there. They want the war over.”
And yeah, it was almost funny to see the reaction when Paul described how our foreign policy was stoking the flames of anti-U.S. sentiment. Heresy!
Posted 18 May 2007 at 9:59 pm ¶