The Belgravia Dispatch: Torture Corrupts, Absolutely

June 05, 2007

Torture Corrupts, Absolutely

"All of Iraq was a ticking time bomb," Lagouranis said, downing his fourth of seven beers. He had joined the Army before 9/11 to learn Arabic. He didn't expect to go to war.
He was sitting on a night off at the California Clipper bar, where he works as a bouncer. The bartender joked that Lagouranis should be tougher on customers: "You should 'go Abu Ghraib.' "

At Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, the site of the 2003-04 abuse scandal, Lagouranis used to relax in the old execution chamber. He and a friend would sit near the trapdoor and read the Arabic scratched into the wall. They found a dirty brown rope. It was the hangman's noose. "If there is an evil spot in the world, that was one of them," Lagouranis said.

At Abu Ghraib and sometimes at the facilities in Mosul, north Babil province and other places where Lagouranis worked, the Americans were shot at and attacked with mortar fire. "Then I get a prisoner who may have done it," he said. "What are you going to do? You just want to get back at somebody, so you bring this dog in. 'Finally, I got you.' "

Lagouranis's tools included stress positions, a staged execution and hypothermia so extreme the detainees' lips turned purple. He has written an account of his experiences in a book, "Fear Up Harsh," which has been read by the Pentagon and will be published this week. Stephen Lewis, an interrogator who was deployed with Lagouranis, confirmed the account, and Staff Sgt. Shawn Campbell, who was Lagouranis's team leader and direct supervisor, said Lagouranis's assertions were "as true as true can get. It's all verifiable." John Sifton, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, said the group investigated many of Lagouranis's claims about abuses and independently corroborated them.

"At every point, there was part of me resisting, part of me enjoying," Lagouranis said. "Using dogs on someone, there was a tingling throughout my body. If you saw the reaction in the prisoner, it's thrilling."

In Mosul, he took detainees outside the prison gate to a metal shipping container they called "the disco," with blaring music and lights. Before and after questioning, military police officers stripped them and checked for injuries, noting cuts and bumps "like a car inspection at a parking garage." Once a week, an Iraqi councilman and an American colonel visited. "We had to hide the tortured guys," Lagouranis said.

Then a soldier's aunt sent over several copies of Viktor E. Frankel's Holocaust memoir, "Man's Search for Meaning." Lagouranis found himself trying to pick up tips from the Nazis. He realized he had gone too far.

At that point, Lagouranis said, he moderated his techniques and submitted sworn statements to supervisors concerning prisoner abuse.

"I couldn't make sense of the moral system" in Iraq, he said. "I couldn't figure out what was right and wrong. There were no rules. They literally said, 'Be creative.' "

Lagouranis blames the Bush administration: "They say this is a different kind of war. Different rules for terrorists. Total crap." [emphasis added]

Well yes, one would start casting about at the Nazis for inspiration, once you're onto sleep deprivation, stress positions, and induced hypothermia as accepted 'enhanced interrogation' techniques. It's the "Verschärfte Vernehmung" way, after all. And Donald Rumsfeld's. I'll say it again, but if I were a CIA interrogator tasked with conducting one of these interrogations, I'd think long and hard indeed about employing these tactics, even if ordered to do so by superiors. Because they constitute war crimes under various internationally recognized norms, even if John 'we can crush testicles' Yoo doesn't think so, and "I was just following orders" can ring rather hollow, especially with the passage of time (and despite hastily passed immunity carve-outs).

We've sunk to depths I could never have imagined. And the Republican field, in the main, promises more of the same. As Fareed Zakaria writes about Mitt Romney:

The competition to be the tough guy is producing new policy ideas, all right—ones that range from bad to insane. Romney, who bills himself as the smart, worldly manager, recently explained that while "some people have said we ought to close Guantánamo, my view is we ought to double [the size of] Guantánamo." In fact, Romney should recognize that Guantánamo does not face space constraints. The reason that President Bush wants to close it down—and it is he who has expressed that desire—is that it is an unworkable legal mess with enormous strategic, political and moral costs. In a real war you hold prisoners of war until the end of hostilities. When does that happen in the war on terror? Does Romney propose that the United States keep an ever-growing population of suspects in jail indefinitely without trials as part of a new American system of justice?

Its become a race to the gutter on supposed macho toughness in the Republican camp. Put simply, the party has lost its decency and honor. I wondered, during the first debate, how much more effective Chuck Hagel would have been in Ron Paul's shoes, calling B.S. at the cheap bamboozlements of the 'double Gitmo' crowd. Alas, it wasn't to be. But we could sure use a standard-bearer who'd stand for the more sober, rational Republican Party of yesteryear, a leader who would appeal to the courage and decency of Americans, not their prejudices and fears. What we've got instead is Rudy telling us Democrats in power would mean another 9/11 is likelier, or Mitt's "Double Gitmo", or John McCain's bogus 'leave Iraq, they'll follow us home.' This is no longer Ronald Reagan's party showcasing optimism and "Morning in America", this is a party that simply aims to stoke fear in the masses so as to be returned to political power. We've seen these types of tactics before. I hope this strategy fails, and miserably.

NB: Do note "1" in the Gestapo directive above. Interesting that "sharpened interrogation" was to be used, according to the instructions at least, only if the detainee was thought to have compelling information regarding hostile plans imperiling the state, and initial interrogation tactics hadn't worked. One can almost imagine Rumsfeld scrawling in the margin something of a protest akin to: "I stand for eight to 10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours", no? You know, who needs probable cause to use more onerous interrogation methods, and why waste time with 'non-enhanced' techniques? Time is of the essence, after all.

Posted by Gregory at June 5, 2007 04:18 AM

Comments

I hope that your readers appreciate the honesty of Lagouranis. If they do they might come a little nearer to understanding how it is 'ordinary' people can participate in a holocaust. You say that you "would think long and hard before employing these tactics". That's an interesting comment - I think you meant to say that you just wouldn't do it. At least I hope that's what you meant to say. However, as proved by those famous Stanford University experiments most of us can be persuaded to perform the most horrible acts on each other with even less reason than was exerted on Lagouranis. How we behave in such circumstances depends almost completely on those in charge and the regime they impose.

Posted by: John Rennie at June 5, 2007 01:29 PM | Permalink to this comment

You're damn right that's what I meant to say. I phrased it in contingent fashion given that I suspect there is a raging debate at Langley over these methods, and in case anyone is reading these posts, to make the case: even if you're being ordered to do it, think long and hard re: same because you simply shouldn't do so--firstly based on moral and legal grounds, and second, b/c it could expose practitioners employing tactics like waterboarding to potential legal liability, however unlikely given the immunity provisions in the Military Commissions Act but, going forward, this could potentially change...

Posted by: greg djerejian at June 5, 2007 01:41 PM | Permalink to this comment

Maybe an obvious point, but throughout all this torture stuff, I love how the civilian overlords kept reassuring military people that this is all A-OK, don't worry about war crimes tribunals or anything like that, etc. Is there a military person left that doesn't know what b.s. that is, that doesn't know Yoo or Bush or Rumsfeld would throw them under the bus in a heartbeat if it ever came down to prosecution? That's why all this parsing of words; it's what lawyers do to give themselves some wiggle room. Bush et al can say "We don't torture, we said that over and over" and courts will have no choice but to accept it. Nobody in charge will ever be prosecuted, just the low-ranking saps who actually believe that being in charge means taking responsibility for everything that happens under your command.

As for the Republican candidates: what a sorry lot. That anyone could consider voting for Rudy for president is amazing to me.

Posted by: LL at June 5, 2007 05:25 PM | Permalink to this comment

Some torture opponents made a few mistakes in their advocacy, mistakes which weakened their cause. First, instead of simply focusing on legitimate torture, like the stress positions, induced severe hypotherimia, water boardings, etc., people like Sullivan with some frequency wasted pixels on stuff like wrapping people in Israeli flags, being fondled by women in underwear, and other such nonsense.

People like Sullivan also misrepresented the historical record regarding the treatment of prisoners by American forces, in particular ignoring the deliberate attmept to dehumanize the enemy in the Pacific Theater in way the enemy in the European Theater was not, with the full understanding of what this would mean in regard to the treatment of such an enemy. Frankly, what was done in the Pacific Theater in WWII makes the actions in the current conflict look almost minor. When people like Sullivan lie about the past, it make their advocacy for the present look suspect.

Finally, people like Sullivan erred by dishonestly saying that torture never produces useful information, and, once again lying about such fundamental issues weakens one's advocacy. They would have been much better served by saying that torture can never be regulated in a fashion that fails to produce a large net negative effect, that it's uncontrollable nature always renders whatever gains it produces trivial by comparison, thus torture should always be prohibited, period, no matter what puerile ticking bomb scenarios are concocted.

These missteps, I think, have aided those who support torture.

Posted by: Will Allen at June 5, 2007 08:15 PM | Permalink to this comment

"Finally, people like Sullivan erred by dishonestly saying that torture never produces useful information, and, once again lying about such fundamental issues weakens one's advocacy"

Oh, it produces *lots* of 'useful' information.

If you want to 'prove' that Bill Clinton is a lifelong Satan-worshipping Communist who is trying to set the stage for an invasion by flying squidlike aliens from the orbit of Betelgeuse, torture will provide information that is 'useful' for that purpose.

Or any other.

The problem is, it's so 'useful' in getting people to tell you want you want them to say, that it is not terribly useful in getting facts.

Posted by: Jon H at June 5, 2007 08:23 PM | Permalink to this comment

Jon H., you are lying if you are asserting that torture, or the threat of it, never produces useful facts. It sometimes does. However, the practice is never controllable, and always ends up being on the whole wasteful and corruptive.

Why you believe lying serves your advocacy, and being truthful harms it, is puzzling.

Posted by: Will Allen at June 5, 2007 08:45 PM | Permalink to this comment

Don't miss this fascinating "Week in Review" article, which quotes a 1956 journal article on "Communist Interrogation" alongside examples of how we've learned from our Soviet mentors.

The authors saw "no reason to differentiate" our cribbed playbook "from any other form of torture."

Will Allen, the techniques you mock violate Geneva at the very least; whether they are torture or plain old abuse should *not*, I think, be a particularly relevant distinction outside the context of prosecution -- to decent people, at least.

And saying Sullivan "lied" about the Pacific theater is a bit much. What our troops did in the field is not the issue here; it's what our interrogators did with the few Japanese to (1) surrender and (2) have their surrender accepted.

Agreed, however, that "torture never works" is a red herring that deflects debate from the important issues.

Posted by: Anderson at June 5, 2007 08:49 PM | Permalink to this comment

Will, take a deep breath, okay? Jon said torture's not terribly useful in getting facts; that is not the same as saying it *never* gets useful facts.

That's twice you've called someone a liar -- chilll a little, willya?

Posted by: Anderson at June 5, 2007 08:57 PM | Permalink to this comment

Well, Anderson, the reason I prefaced my remarks with "if", is that I wanted to acknowledge that the mocking tone in Jon H's third paragraph may not be completely dismissing the reality that torture does produce useful facts. Many torture opponents have employed the red herring you acknowledge, and it has perversely aided torture supporters.

I do think Sullivan has lied regarding the historical record of the treatment of prisoners by American forces, and what role those at the top of large bureaucracies have played in that treatment . There was a deliberate effort by high officials in the United States to dehumanize the Japanese in a manner the Germans were not, with the full knowledge that this would result in unlawful actions taken against the Japanese, and no, not just in terms of accepting their surrender. For instance, using captured Japanese soldiers for target practice was reported by multiple sources. If Sullivan has lied about the historical record, in order to maximize his denunciation of the current administration, why should he avoid the label of being a liar?

Posted by: Will Allen at June 5, 2007 09:53 PM | Permalink to this comment

I do think Sullivan has lied regarding the historical record of the treatment of prisoners by American forces

Link, please?

Posted by: Anderson at June 5, 2007 10:03 PM | Permalink to this comment

Will Allen:

In a number of blogs, over a number of years, you have attempted to conflate the torture of prisoners in GWOT with atrocities committed against Japanese soldiers in WWII. It is, put put it kindly, disingenuous. Mistreatment of surrendering soldiers in the heat of battle and its immediate aftermath, is unfortunately, more common than is thought. The difference is that once the Japanese made it to the POW compounds, they were treated according to the Geneva Conventions. Interestingly, the--comparatively--kind treatment, combined with a lack of training on how prisoners should behave (since none are supposed to surrender..why train them...) led to easy and fruitful interrogation results.

By contrast, the ordeal for prisoners held at Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, etc., begins when they arrive at the detention facility. One would have to be pretty--or deliberately--obtuse to claim there was no difference.

I notice that the interrogator interviewed in the Post said that prisoners were subjected to stress positions, hypothermia, and sleep deprivation for weeks at a time. I guess the intelligence they were hoping to get was not terribly urgent (no ticking bomb there).

Posted by: Tom S at June 5, 2007 10:07 PM | Permalink to this comment

Tom, your use of the modifier "immediate" is disingenous in the extreme. One has to be extraordinarily obtuse to think there is a moral difference between encouraging, via deliberate propaganda, such mistreatment as using a Japanese soldier for target practice, several hours, or even days after battle, and what was done regarding the management of Abu Ghraib. Say, do you suppose that a Japanese prisoner, after having overcome his own government's propaganda regarding the morality of surrender and how he would be treated by Americans after having surrendered, upon being used for target practice, was thinking, "Boy, am I ever glad that this isn't taking place well to the rear of the action. That woulda' been horrible!"

Unlawful violence is unlawful violence, and encouraging it's employment close to clearly defined battle lines is no better than encouraging it's employment well behind clearly defined battle lines, or in a war without clearly defined battle lines. It is obtuse to believe otherwise.

Andereson, I don't have time right now to search Sullivan's archives. Perhaps later tonight.

Posted by: Will Allen at June 5, 2007 10:32 PM | Permalink to this comment

I suppose, Tom, using your reasoning, that Yoo's error was in not encouraging that the waterboarding and testicle crushing be done in the field?

Posted by: Will Allen at June 5, 2007 10:43 PM | Permalink to this comment

I begin to think whether or not torture corrupts absolutely, it surely corrupts blog threads absolutely.

Posted by: Appalled Moderate at June 6, 2007 12:39 AM | Permalink to this comment

Look, can we knock off this absurd game of patty-cake? The FDR Administration did "dehumanize" the Japanese for wartime propaganda purposes -- including veiled hints regarding the fact that they were nonwhite -- but given what the Japanese were doing to US, the Administration could have done far, far worse with total political impunity.

It was the Japanese, not the Germans, who sneak-attacked us; it was the Japanese, not the Germans, who cheerfully ignored the Geneva Conventions and tortured and murdered our POWs with outright glee throughout the war. In short, to an impressive degree the Japanese "dehumanized" themselves. But while the US government made use of those facts, they did not -- ever -- officially allow the torture of Japanese POWs; in fact, there were stern printed warnings against that. If the government HAD hinted that that was legitimate, there would of course have been a hell of a lot more impromptu killings and toturings of Japanese POW by our soldiers. Far, far more.

Now, this administration HAS legitimated torture of Moslem POWs (under whatever name you choose to call them). They have been deliberately and openly loose about the rules (Cheney's little pep-talk to would-be torturers in the West Point graduating class being only the latest example). And that official legitimization of frequent torture from our top officials played -- as we all know by now -- a very great role in lower-level US soldiers being uncertain what was allowed and what wasn't, and acting accordingly.

Posted by: Bruce Moomaw at June 6, 2007 12:53 AM | Permalink to this comment

Will, my point seems to have gone over your head.

"Jon H., you are lying if you are asserting that torture, or the threat of it, never produces useful facts. It sometimes does."

My point seems to have gone right over your head.

If my goal is to obtain evidence that Rudy Giuliani is a Maoist mole, torturing you would provide evidence that would be useful to that end.

If my goal is to obtain evidence that some cab driver turned in by a Kabul gangster is Al Qaeda's new #3, torturing you would provide evidence that would be useful to that end.

The fact this 'intelligence' came from *you* would be classified, so nobody need ever know you had no way of knowing either way.

The evidence you provide would be made up out of whole cloth just to make the torture stop. And there might even be some bits that turn out to be factual. But that's most likely accidental.

If torture produces so much information that you want to hear, that you want to believe is factual, how reliable can it be, really? Maybe one torture session in a thousand would produce something useful, but how many innocent and/or ignorant people have you tortured in the meantime to get information they didn't have?

Now, let's say someone fingers you as a terrorist involved in a plot to blow up a landmark tomorrow. So you are tortured to reveal the plot and where the bombs are. You don't know, but the torturers don't believe you. How do you establish your innocence before the torturers crush your legs into pulp?

If someone tells us a lie under torture, just to make it stop, do you think that person should be punished? Tortured again?

Anyway, I can't believe I'm having to explain a core American value to someone. Why shouldn't we torture? Because we're fucking Americans, that's why. We're better than that.

You're not up to American standards, I guess.

Incidentally, the whole "ticking time bomb" scenario is bullshit. You don't have time to distinguish between truth and lies told to make the torture stop. I can't imagine a polygraph would help, what with the stress levels being so out of the ordinary.

Even if you had the actual terrorist, and were torturing him, he'd just have to send you on wild goose chases for a while. By the time you discovered his ruse, it'd be too late.

Posted by: Jon H at June 6, 2007 01:24 AM | Permalink to this comment

Look, Bruce, can we knock off the absurd notion that references to race in U.S. WWII Pacific Theater propaganda was "veiled", or that propaganda was not designed to encourage the harshest possible treatment of the Japanese? The fact that it took place closer to the battlefield was merely an artifact of the logistics of prisoner movement in that war.

No, Stimson did not send out a memo explicitly demanding such mistreatment. Yes, Stimson did knowingly approve propaganda which greatly encouraged unlawful treatment. Yes mistreatment which occurred in rear areas was much more likely to be punished, and yes the Japanese military was a horribly cruel enemy. So is the enemy today, and some of our military personnel who have engaged in unlawful violence today have been punished as well.

A good place to start for people who don't want to whitewash the past is WAR WITHOUT MERCY: RACE AND POWER IN THE PACIFIC WAR, by John W. Dower. Paul Fussell's interviews with Pacific Theater vets will dispell the absurd notion that unlawful violence directed at Japanese soldiers was restricted to not accepting surrender, or that such unlawful violence was commonly punished.

Posted by: Will Allen at June 6, 2007 02:20 AM | Permalink to this comment

Jon H., your point didn't go over my head. You just can't read.

Posted by: Will Allen at June 6, 2007 02:24 AM | Permalink to this comment

Will:

"Similarly, the Marines loved to use the few Japs who came forward to surrender as amusing rifle targets..." (Paul Fussell, Wartime, p. 119). My reading of this is that the Japanese were shot down as they were trying to surrender; not that their surrender had been accepted, and then for some perverse reason, they were used for target practice. (The latter was more of a Japanese thing.)

Leaving aside the difference between an actual, conventional war, and what we are currently fighting (no, it is not the same thing, no matter how many Churchillian references are bandied about by the Bush Administration, and their bloggish supporters), my point stands. This administration, through a series of policies from the highest levels, has made torture of those who have been captured part of US policy, something that has never happened in this country's history.

If you can wholeheartedly and sincerely condemn this administration's policy of torturing captives in the same manner that you condemn atrocities committed in WWII, then more power to you. From having read your postings in the past in other venues, it is not clear that you feel that way.

Posted by: Tom S. at June 6, 2007 03:02 AM | Permalink to this comment

Mr. Allen: Did anyone in the FDR Administration say explicitly that some Japanese POWs were not entitled to Geneva Convention protections -- or to ANY protections against torture -- because they were "unlawful combatants"? Let alone leave the precise definition of such unlawful combatants highly uncertain?

Posted by: Bruce Moomaw at June 6, 2007 03:21 AM | Permalink to this comment

The same question may be applied to the Vietnam War. That one involved a hell of a lot of real-life abuse of POWs (and, for that matter, inconvenient civilians); but we still officially prohibited torture (despite the lack of reciprocation from North Vietnam), and the amount of it that actually occrred would have been a hell of a lot higher if we had not. So forget negative comparisons of Bush to FDR; it's perfectly possible to compare Bush negatively to Nixon on this one.

Posted by: Bruce Moomaw at June 6, 2007 03:24 AM | Permalink to this comment

Tom, please don't slander me. If you can produce a quote from me where I've stated that the physical abuse of prisoners is tolerable, do so. I have said in several forums, however, that the routinized torture of prisoners in the American penal system goes on pretty much unchallenged, to the point that elected law enforcement officials find the practice to be a source of humor, or find threatening citizens yet to be convicted with torture to be acceptable. This makes me rather cynical about a good deal of outrage expressed towards the Bush Administration.

Regarding the Pacific Theater, this is what one observer, Charles Lindbergh, reported seeing:

"It was freely admitted that some of our soldiers tortured Jap prisoners and were as cruel and barbaric at times as the Japs themselves. Our men think nothing of shooting a Japanese prisoner or a soldier attempting to surrender. They treat the Jap with less respect than they would give to an animal, and these acts are condoned by almost everyone. We claim to be fighting for civilization, but the more I see of this war in the Pacific the less right I think we have to claim to be civilized."

This behavior was explicitly encouraged by propaganda which portrayed the Japanese as subhumans. It had it's intended effect.
Yes, WWII was a just conflict, but that doesn't render the attempt to conceal what actually happened any less sickening.

Posted by: Will Allen at June 6, 2007 04:29 AM | Permalink to this comment

Mr. Moomaw, here is a taste of what you inquire about, from encyclopedia.com

"In January 1942 Admiral William Leahy, chairman of the new Joint Chiefs of Staff, observed that ". . . in fighting with Japanese savages, all previously accepted rules of warfare must be abandoned," to which he added some months later the opinion that the United States should destroy Japan "utterly."(32) General John DeWitt of the U.S. Western Defense Command opined that the Japanese threat could only be eliminated by destroying the Japanese as a race. Paul McNutt, chairman of the War Manpower Commission, stated that he favored the complete extermination of the Japanese people.(33) In May 1943 Captain H. L. Pence of the U.S. Navy, a member of a State Department committee shaping policy for postwar Japan, recommended "the almost total elimination of the Japanese as a race."(34) "

If people want to criticize the Bush Administration in the harshest possible terms, fine. It would be preferable, however, if they refrained from engaging in utter bullshit about halcyon days of yore.

Posted by: Will Allen at June 6, 2007 04:39 AM | Permalink to this comment

Will, you're right about the racism -- I knew that up front -- but what does this have to do w/ our interrogation methods in WW2?

Posted by: Anderson at June 6, 2007 05:10 AM | Permalink to this comment

Well, Anderson, I don't consider the unlawful application of violence to be mitigated in any way because it wasn't done in the process of performing an interrogation. When the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and a personal friend of the President, openly states that all rules off warfare are to be abandoned in waging war against a particular enemy, and all manner of unlawful killing and atrocities take place, well it's pretty hard to say that the Bush Administration has broken new ground with regard to the American government abandoning the rule of law in the application of illegal violence.

Posted by: Will Allen at June 6, 2007 05:50 AM | Permalink to this comment

I'm well aware of those comments, Mr. Allen. (They compare nicely with the more recent ones, by, for instance, Curtis LeMay -- there's always at least a light sprinkling of frothers in the military.) But the government never acted on those idiots' advice, did it? We didn't make any attempt whatsoever to "destroy Japan utterly", or to "exterminate the Japanese as a race", did we? Nor did the government ever officially allow the torture of any captured Japanese, did it? And that, of course, is the difference between that situation and the current one. (For that matter, it's also the difference between the current situation and the Vietnam War, or even our brutal repression of the Aguinaldo rebellion -- torture, at least, remained officially illegal in both those wars, for use on anyone.) Our situation now is genuinely new. For the very first time in our history -- ever -- we've officially LEGALIZED torture. If you think that doesn't make a serious difference, you're suffering from severe mental astigmatism.

Incidentally, is it really wise to quote Charles Lindbergh in support of your thesis? Especially since, in that passage, he's clearly still implying that the US shouldn't have opposed the Axis at all? (And as for Leahy's comment: note that he made it exactly 1 month after Pearl Harbor, at a time when the country's feelings were -- shall we delicately say -- still rather raw, or more precisely hysterical.)

Posted by: Bruce Moomaw at June 6, 2007 06:57 AM | Permalink to this comment

If you have evidence that Lindbergh was lying about what he saw, supply it, Mr. Moomaw. When the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs openly calls for all rules of warfare to be abandoned, one can be sure that atrocities will follow, all your silly rationalizations aside. Good golly, I'm sure Mr. Rumsfeld was terribly exercised when he issued his memos. That surely mitigates things, right? Maybe, to stay within your well-calibrated moral boundaries, Rumsfeld should merely have issued a statement calling for all rules of warfare to be abandoned!

Pathetic.

Posted by: Will Allen at June 6, 2007 02:56 PM | Permalink to this comment

it's pretty hard to say that the Bush Administration has broken new ground with regard to the American government abandoning the rule of law in the application of illegal violence

I don't see why we can't condemn the remarks you've cited (which should have led to courts-martial for the perpetrators) without ignoring the distinction, which Bruce and others have noted, between atrocity and policy.

I have a hard time believing that anyone other than Will Allen thinks that insufficient attention to racism in WW2 somehow impairs the case of those arguing against torture as American policy and practice.

Posted by: Anderson at June 6, 2007 03:23 PM | Permalink to this comment

Apparently, Anderson, you were unable to comprehend the meaning of the words, "If people want to criticize the Bush Administration in the harshest possible terms, fine." You were also apparently unable to decipher the meaning of this...

"They would have been much better served by saying that torture can never be regulated in a fashion that fails to produce a large net negative effect, that it's uncontrollable nature always renders whatever gains it produces trivial by comparison, thus torture should always be prohibited, period, no matter what puerile ticking bomb scenarios are concocted."

Finally, I wasn't commenting about racism in WW2, per se. I was commenting about how racism was translated into chosen policy by high officials in which it was encouraged that the Japanese, including Japanese prisoners, were regularly subjected to unlawful violence, and how many of today's tortrure opponents have dishonestly portrayed the historical record, in their desire to condemn the Bush Administration. I think easily discoverable falsehoods weakens one's advocacy, so I think the opponents of torture would have been better served by not lying about the past.

Let me know when you wish to differ with something I've actually written.

Posted by: Will Allen at June 6, 2007 04:48 PM | Permalink to this comment

How much money does Lagouranis stand to make from his book? How much if it will go toward reparations to the people he tortured? Like the two brothers he subjected to hypothermia, one of whom he told "I'm sorry. I'll always consider you a friend": will that "friend" share in the the profits?

I appreciate the honesty too, but no one should be pretending this man is brave. He willingly threw away his soul, and now the poor baby wants it back.

Posted by: brendancalling at June 6, 2007 04:52 PM | Permalink to this comment

Maybe, jocko, your own words aren't so clear, or relevant, as you imagine? Not that you appear to be the sort to consider such a possibility.

Posted by: Anderson at June 6, 2007 05:58 PM | Permalink to this comment

Goodness gracious, Anderson, must I diagram the sentences so you can begin to grasp their meaning? Let me know if I can be of service.

Posted by: Will Allen at June 6, 2007 06:19 PM | Permalink to this comment

Mr. Allen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs called for the rules of warfare to be abandoned -- once, during the hysteria right after Pearl Harbor. Then he dropped it. The FDR Administration did NOT make a point of stubbornly clinging to, and officially codifying, his suggestion. This Administration has. That's something new in American history -- it didn't even happen during our savage de facto misbehavior in the war against Aguinaldo. You can deny that it's something new -- and dangerous -- in American history until your head falls off, but that remains a fact. (And I suspect that this new move is almost entirely due to the influence of Cheney, who is -- let's face it -- a very unusually nasty man to have in one of the highest American positions of power.)

Posted by: Bruce Moomaw at June 6, 2007 11:57 PM | Permalink to this comment

As for Lindbergh: how the hell do I know whether he was lying about what he reported? He certainly lied about enough other things where the Axis was concerned -- including questioning, in the very passage that you quote, whether "we" were really on "the side of civilization" (as compared to Germany and Japan).

We were, of course, just as we are in the current conflict -- which doesn't excuse torture in either case (as you do agree, which at least puts you a considerable jump ahead of the majority of Republicans right now). But can you knock off trying to pretend that this administration is engaged in US Military Business As Usual? It isn't. That's exactly why they're straining to rewrite all our longtime laws on the subject.

Posted by: Bruce Moomaw at June 7, 2007 12:03 AM | Permalink to this comment

There used to be a time when, defending torture was tantamount to defending pedophilia, times have changed.

Posted by: someotherdude at June 7, 2007 12:48 AM | Permalink to this comment

Oh, right, Mr. Moomaw, it's the official codification which carries with it the important moral element. Really when a phenomena such as this......

"Government publications for U.S. servicemen frequently depicted the Japanese in a similar manner. Yank, the weekly magazine of the U.S. Army, referred to Japanese working on the airfield on Guadalcanal as "termites," while a piece of War Department training literature entitled The Jap Soldier, derived from an instructional filmstrip of the same title, informed GIs that Marines fighting in the Solomons believed that the presence of the enemy could be detected by their odor, described as "the gamey smell of animals."(20) Another War Department treatise likened the Japanese soldier to a poisonous snake, and urged readers to use their "better brains" in combating him. Referring to the cumulative impact of such imagery, a U.S. Army veteran remembers that "[w]e had been fed tales of these yellow thugs, subhumans, with teeth that resembled fangs. If a hundred thousand Japs were killed, so much the better. Two hundred thousand, even better. I wasn't innocent, either. You couldn't escape it."(21) "

....occurs, helping forment widescale unlawful application of violence and atrocity, by means of propaganda campaigns deliberately constructed with such a purpose in mind, well, gee, it really becomes a matter of secondary importance, doesn't it?

That Rumsfeld was an idiot. If only he had ordered a propaganda campaign which had marketed to the troops the notion that the wogs could be treated as if they had the same moral status as cockroaches when they were encountered in the field, then he would be held in higher esteem than is now the case by Bruce Moomaw.

Thank you for your penetrating insights.

Posted by: Will Allen at June 7, 2007 03:25 AM | Permalink to this comment

Mr. Allen, let's cut the crap. When the government legalizes torture, it has an impact. It could NOT have an impact. No government in US history has ever done that before. Now can we agree that, yes, it is also a No-No for the military to publish large amounts of rhetoric frequently declaring that your enemy is a subhuman (even if at the same time they publish very forcible official commands -- which they did -- NOT to torture the same POWs)? I mean, judging from the Presidential debates so far, we can confidently rely on the next Republican president to do that at the same time that they keep torture officially legal.

And -- as I said before -- if you want to look at a war in which the actual behavior of the US military was REALLY atrocious, just take a look at the Aguinaldo Rebellion (that is, the war run under that Other Roosevelt). But even in that one, torture was at least still ruled illegal, and at least one US soldier was court-martialed for waterboarding. Ditto for Vietnam, regardless of My Lai and its ilk.

Posted by: Bruce Moomaw at June 7, 2007 10:16 PM | Permalink to this comment

Typo: Change my third sentence to "It could not NOT have an impact."

Posted by: Bruce Moomaw at June 7, 2007 10:17 PM | Permalink to this comment

By all means, Mr. Moomaw, let's cut the crap. First, let's cut the crap entailed in pretending I wrote something I never did, namely that codifying torture has no impact. If it had no impact, I wouldn't have written that torture should always be prohibited. Period. Why do many torture opponents believe their cause is served by dishonestly portraying what others have asserted? Does it make you feel good to pretend that others have written something that they haven't? It truly is puzzling.

Next, and, more importantly, let's cut the crap that a more carefully orchestrated attempt to encourage American troops to commit atrocities renders the action less contemptible or immoral . Your legalisms about formal codification while a full blown effort was undertaken to encourage atrocities would be laughably pathetic, if it wasn't so grotesque. Your biggest complaint about Rumsfeld is thus reduced to being that he didn't cover his tracks well enough.

Posted by: Will Allen at June 7, 2007 10:53 PM | Permalink to this comment

"Legalisms"? Are we supposed to believe that officially legalizing torture -- which has never been done before in US history; not in WW II, not in the Phillippines or Vietnam (which you don't seem eager to talk about, being obviously obsessed with FDR-bashing) -- is unimportant? Especially, I may add, when it is indeed acompanied by such things as the Veep rhetorically cheering on the idea of torture at his West Point graduating class speech, in exactly the way you attack military officials under FDR for doing?

As for FDR's administration "carefully orchestrating an attempt to encourage American troops to commit atrocities": really. If they had been "carefully orchestrating" that, they would not have explicitly forbidden torture in their printed regulations to the soldiers. And they could, of course, have gotten away with doing exactly that, had they chosen to do so -- public opinion at that point was rabidly against the Japs, especially given their own cheerful refusal to reciprocate by not torturing OUR POWs. The reason the FDR administration avoided okaying torture in such a non-reciprocative situation was strategic, and obvious: torture gains you little useful information, and it mass-produces lasting hatred -- in a situation in which the US knew damned well that it could not occupy Japan forever, and wanted that country to be a nonhostile independent nation rather than a sullen slave.

A pity that our current governing nitwits haven't figured out that exactly the same strategic argument (as you yourself point out) applies right now. But then, when US officials believe that they have the power to "remake reality" simply with the force of their will (kind of like little Anthony in "It's A Good Life"), such elementary insights are likely to ecape them.

Posted by: Bruce Moomaw at June 9, 2007 01:18 AM | Permalink to this comment

You know, every once in a while Greg's sad little blog serves a purpose. That is, as long as he keeps a comment page.

As a professional soldier, I don't really care to wade in on this one way or the other. That's your job. Enemy of the month? Have gun, will travel - and sleep well afterwards. I just want to add two things to the truly outstanding running gun-fight that is playing out above.

First: Brilliantly argued by all. The anticipation builds and never lets up, entry after entry. It gets just ugly and just personal enough, without anyone quitting. And no one ruins it by making up afterwards. Very satisfying.

Secondly: Greg's header, premise and the resulting argument are completely false and idiotic then, aren't they? I mean, QED - right DJ?

I love that, the QED part. Such a perfect cut to such a pompous obsessive. Has the horror sunk in yet? Tell me you get it.

Posted by: tommyG at June 9, 2007 02:10 AM | Permalink to this comment

Actually, Bruce, if you want to carefully orchestrate wrongdoing, one of the first orders of business is to bureaucratically make it appear as if the wrongdoing will not be tolerated, and then have a few token punishments meted out. Thus, if one really wished to subject Japanese soldiers to atrocity, while appearing to do otherwise, one would state in one's regulations that atrocities were not to be committed, and then use a propaganda campaign to encourage atrocities, while prosecuting a few people when they happened to the rear of the action. You are not really as naive as this thread makes it appear, are you?

No, Bruce, I really don't think it matters much to the victim of an atrocity whether the atrocity was formally permitted, or was encouraged informally thorugh mass media. Do you? Say, do you suppose that when masses of people were slaughtered in Rwanda, they felt a whole lot better about the process, because they knew they were being murdered at the behest of a mass media campaign, and that murder was still a violation of their society's formal legal code? Maybe such knowledge gave them a warm and fuzzy feeling as their skulls were being caved in!

Golly gee, if only you had been an advisor to Rumsfeld, you could have set him straight....."Don, my boy, the thing to do is to keep the regulations in place against mistreatment of prisoners, but send constant messages to the front line troops that the locals they encounter aren't even human beings. That way, we get our sadistic treatment in, but we keep our hands clean!"

As to the idiocy of alleged "FDR-bashing" and Vietnam, yes, many atrocities occurred in that conflict, but I'll give LBJ credit for this much; he didn't approve a propaganda campaign designed to convince American troops that the people they encountered in their service were subhumans. That was FDR, and your childish idolatry aside, that is the historical record. Now, I happen to think that FDR was a well above average President, but then, my evaluation of historical figures is not dependent on sticking my fingers in my ears, squeezing my eyes tightly shut, and humming loudly to myself.

Posted by: Will Allen at June 9, 2007 02:33 AM | Permalink to this comment