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We have decided to stop torturing prisoners. If torture is too harsh a word, let me say thay we have decided to stop almost torturing or "aggressively interrogating" or some such thing. I'll let the fuddy-duddies of jargon flop around in that language morass. I use the terms "we" and "us" because I believe that this government of ours should belong to us.
While I have never believed that prisoners of war have the same Constitutional rights as citizens of this country, I have never doubted that abuse of prisoners is a violation of Human Rights -- not just legal rights. It may be that every German prisoner of war in World War II was not entitled to a lawyer and a public trial, but that doesn't mean he had no rights.
"The Laws of Nature and Nature's God" grant that.
A World War II veteran I once worked with told me that he was ordered in Belgium to take a couple of German prisoners under a bridge and shoot them. He did it. Now, belatedly, he knew that's wrong. This is because a human being has some rights, quite apart from what the law on the ground might seem to permit. And at some point, most of us who are not pyschopaths recognize our sins and errors, not simply because they may have been illegal, but because they may have been wrong.
Bush has come around to granting this in his policy, although he may not believe it in practice. I think he was a couple of generations tardy in this acknowledgment, and I hold no hope that he will ever be on time intellectually.
Those who are approaching brain death sometimes say that we should shoot-them-all-and-let-God-sort-them-out. They're wrong. Murder, indefinite imprisonment, or torture are not ideologic. Anyone can play those games. Anyone can pull out fingernails. Democracy requires us to behave by a better standard. So does Christianity and presumably Islam.
So, thank you government, thank you Bush, and maybe thank you Congress. I am sometimes appalled by what you have done in my name. (Well, Bush and many of his enablers are appalling people.) It's about time you saw reason.
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More about the new policy: TORTURE LINK
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1 comment:
I'm glad you posted on this topic. I couldn't agree more. I have to think the repudiation of our past tactics is also a pretty serious indictment of them, and someone in a high place must have recognized that this was not only unconscionable, but our treatment of prisoners was actually counter-productive.
It seems to me like I had some other great insights on this topic, but have forgotten them between then and now.
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