A Conversation about Torture II

As I mentioned in the post below, J.R. Dunn took immediate care to respond to my "Letter to the Editor" regarding his article. I won't post his response verbatim because I don't have his permission and, at this point is not public--even to all three of my readers (ok, all two). But, in essence, he asked me how the likes of Khalid Sheik Muhammed are covered by the Geneva Conventions. Fair question. My response, in full and overlong though it might be, is below:

"Wow! I wasn't expecting a response at all, much less this prompt of
one. In all honesty, thank you for your attention to this.


The short answer is that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, technically, is not
(or at least should not be) covered by the Geneva Conventions--you are right. Ideally, he should be tried by U.S. Federal law and New York State law for mass murder and a number of other charges. I still don't think torture should be condoned under those circumstances either and, as an investigator who has performed a number of interrogations, realize that if you simply scare the hell out of guy long enough he will tell you that it was him and Liberace that really stabbed Julius Caesar on the steps of the Roman Senate if that's what you want him to say. It doesn't make it necessarily so.


That aside, I wasn't talking about just him. I was talking about enemy combatants met on the the field of battle by our Armed Forces. If this is a war on terror, and I believe it is, then we should abide by the laws of war and we should abide by the Army field manual. Further, as a moral, rational, and traditional imperative, we should abide by the standard set down by George Washington during our Revolutionary War and treat enemy combatants humanely.


Which brings us back to the Sheik. If he was being held in custody by our military, (1) how was he not, at that time, considered an enemy combatant, and (2) if he was, why would our military not be subject to the same rules it has observed since George Washington, much less the Geneva Conventions?


Then General Washington wrote, after we had captured 1000 Hessians in the Battle of Trenton in 1776, "Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren..."


And, yes, piling on, John Adams wrote to his wife in a letter in 1777 about the subject "I know of no policy, God is my witness, but this — Piety, Humanity and Honesty are the best Policy. Blasphemy, Cruelty and Villainy have prevailed and may again. But they won't prevail against America, in this Contest, because I find the more of them are employed, the less they succeed."


President Lincoln Lincoln instituted the first formal code of conduct for the humane treatment of prisoners of war in 1863. Lincoln's order forbade any form of torture or cruelty, and it became the model for the 1929 Geneva Convention. Dwight Eisenhower made a point to guarantee exemplary treatment to German POWs in World War II, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur ordered application of the 1949 Geneva Convention during the Korean War, even though the U.S. was not yet a signatory. In the Vietnam War, the United States extended the convention's protection to Viet Cong prisoners even though the law did not technically require it.


To stray from this tradition and this law is, in my view, not only harmful to the war effort and unintelligent, but a betrayal of our traditions and the beginning of becoming like our enemy.


Thanks again for your attention to this.

Regards,

Travis"