A correspondent of mine is retired from the U. S. Army. He was trained as an interrogator. I asked him what he could tell me about interrogation, torture, and the difference between the two. I also solicited his opinion on the events at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. Here is what he wrote:
(show)
US military interrogators are instructed and tested on the laws of land warfare and they know both what entitles a detained person to prisoner of war status and what means of interrogation are prohibited by law. Treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory have the force of law, and U.S. military personnel are required to abide by those laws which govern the treatment of persons detained on the battlefield. Those laws cover what is allowed in the process of obtaining information from POWs and other detainees. Physical coercion is strictly forbidden. Physical coercion includes the withholding of either food or medical treatment. The use of additional or special food or other special treatment as an inducement to cooperate is NOT prohibited. Psychological ploys that involve flattery or manipulating the detainee's possible resentment of the people responsible for his capture, i.e. his superiors and country, are NOT prohibited. Appealing to a detainee's likely desire to end the conflict is NOT prohibited. Pointing out that a detainee has been fighting on the wrong side since his professed religion actually preaches peace is NOT prohibited. Use of detainees who have already turned in order to persuade the reluctant is NOT prohibited.
Also, one of the traditional jobs of interrogators is the training of all other personnel in the standards of POW/detainee handling and the evaluation of performance of same during training operations. Interrogators must ensure that POWs are handled properly both from the legal/moral point of view and from the perspective of exploiting the POWs as sources of information about the enemy. It should be understood that this exploitation is maximized by keeping the POW in a state of apprehension, and to this end refraining from using either comforting words or providing non-necessary comfort items as cigarettes is neither inhumane or illegal; it should be the interrogator's prerogative to seek cooperation with comforting words or items. All of this being said, it is not reasonable to think that no people will break the rules. No one is more embarrassed by the shenanigans at Abu Garib than members of the intelligence community. By the time that Dan Rather got a hold of the story it was already being prosecuted by the US Army Criminal Investigation Command. That is a fact.
Now for an opinion: very little of that stuff that went on there involved what English speaking grown-ups would call torture. Even the notion that it is mental torture to have a Muslim man disrobe in front of a woman is laughable. Weirder stuff goes on in Masonic initiations. No, I am not condoning any of what was shown. But the reason why it was shown to the world was to embarrass the United States. We could have waited until after the conflict to find out about these things, just as we did in the case of WWII!!! By the way, some of those detainees were NOT POW's, and that complicates things a bit. What do you do with some lunatic non-POW killer who has information that we need to save lives? I honestly don't think that the law is clear on that. I do not think that scaring the hell out of someone like that or humiliating him to save lives is immoral. Moreover, I don't believe that many sane people think it IS immoral. I DO believe that some people will go to any lengths to embarrass and discredit the current U.S. administration because it is led by an evangelical Christian who is (generally) pro-life and opposes homosexual marriage. Am I being too long on assertion here and short on argument? Ask yourself where the outrage was when Clinton was bombing Iraq and Serbia. Ask them where the outrage was when Clinton proposed huge increases in government surveillance powers after the OK City bombing? All of this hysteria about Gitmo is just a ploy to get rid of people who believe in traditional Western values. It should be obvious that Dan Rather and Dick Durbin et alia are praying for a quagmire in Iraq.
Am I questioning their patriotism? Only in the way I question Hugh Hefner's commitment to chastity! Patriotism is not a virtue to the Left. Like Theism itself, patriotism is seen by the left in psychoanalytic and sociobiological terms as a primitive impulse, like tribalism and territoriality. Patriotism to the Left is something to be overcome. The secular academic and entertainment world is a sea of crypto Marxism and Freudianism, and the fish cannot see the sea. Unfortunately, so-called Catholic higher education is a part of this. Yes, that VISTAS thing [Loyola Marymount University alumni publication] is garbage. After 9/11 they ran an article by a Muslim Econ prof who cited a verse from the Koran that he purported was an example of Islamic tolerance; it was from the same Sura (#5) that adivises, "Do not have Christians or Jews for friends; they have each other." The whole rag reads like a satire on the PC world.
I hope I have answered some of your questions. Let me know if you need more info.
(hide)
Is this something that an English speaking grown-up would call torture?
Is there any evidence that lives have,in fact, been saved by such practices?
2. Disallowing comments from a particular person, or deleting an offensive, off-topic, or otherwise substandard comment, has nothing to do with censorship. People who think otherwise confuse censorship with lack of sponsorship. I am under an obligation not to interfere with anyone's exercise of legitimate free speech rights. But I am not under any obligation to aid and abet anyone's exercise of free speech rights, legitimate or illegitimate.
3. The Comments area is not an open forum for anyone to say anything about any topic. As the name implies, it is primarily for commenting on the author(s)' posts. But to comment on them, one must have read them. And if I have spent three hours on a post, a reader will not understand it in thirty seconds. Secondarily, the Comments area is to facilitate civil discussion between and among commenters as long as the discussion remains on-topic.
4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.