Torture
Geneva Convention, Article III:
In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria. To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; (b) taking of hostages; (c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment; (d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
(2) The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.
An impartial humanitarian body, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, may offer its services to the Parties to the conflict.
The Parties to the conflict should further endeavour to bring into force, by means of special agreements, all or part of the other provisions of the present Convention.
The application of the preceding provisions shall not affect the legal status of the Parties to the conflict.
If you do a quick Google News search — here, I’ll even do it for you: Geneva Convention Article III — you’ll see that one of the big topics of the day is torture. Specifically, are we doing it, why are we doing it, why we shouldn’t be doing it, and how the President is trying to weasel his way into making it legal. The President wants to have some legislation drawn up that “further defines” what Article III of the Geneva Convention means by “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment”. Because, you know, this Harvard grad can’t figure out what “outrages upon personal dignity” and/or “humiliating and degrading treatment” might actually be.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, may I present an example of “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment”? Here:
That might be one example. That would be the sort of thing we ought not be doing.
Look, kids, we don’t get to have this both ways. We can’t be the “good guys”, we can’t be “winning the hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people, of the entire Muslim people, and still be arguing over this shit. We don’t get to have “alternative interrogation methods”, okay? We don’t get to do water boarding, Chinese water torture, pulling finger nails, beating up POWs — whatever we call them — stack POWs up naked in Saddam-like prisons, use their own religious beliefs to horrify and offend them, and so on, and so forth. We don’t get to do that.
Pragmatically? If it were me, running a real war, and not a total bullshit Preznit Bush style war, and actual important things had been on the line? Then torture, yeah, maybe. Sometimes you do what you have to do. It’s ugly, but we employ people to take care of the ugly shit, so regular folks don’t have to deal with it. Fine. But this war, and this president, and this load of bullshit that has been dubbed the “War on Terror” — um, no. This is not the administration I want defining “torture” for all future generations, because I suspect that even I will disagree with their definition.
Torture is the tool that we don’t talk about having in the tool box. It’s the last resort, the thing we don’t want to contemplate, the last warped, deformed demon in the Pandora’s Box of war. And that’s where and what it should be. Sometimes, in order to win, you have to play dirty. This is not the first time the US has played dirty, let me assure you. (If you actually think so — then get on the bus with the rest of the shiny, happy people, and let the rest of us deal with the real world, okay?) In fact, I’m sure that this isn’t even the first time that the US has played dirty for no good damn reason.
But goddammit, at some fucking point, you draw a line in the sand, kids. At some point, with this dirty, crooked, lying, criminal, greedy, war-crime-committing, war-profiteering, rotten bunch of fucktard sonovabitches of an Administration, you draw a goddamn line in the sand.
In a real war, when you have gone to war as a last resort, after all other options are fully exhausted, when you have been left no other choice, and when you are doing so for right and proper reasons, and not when you are doing so to make a profit, and take over other countries’ resources — In that kind of war, you do what you gotta do. Shit happens, war is ugly. But this war, this invasion of Iraq, has been about nothing more than the bottom line, lining the wallets of criminals, oil for blood, and a lot of other utterly unnecessary bullshit to distract us from the fact that we have completely failed to accomplish any goal we set out on since 9/11/01. And the guys who perpetrated this moral fallacy are the guys who want to define “torture” and how we’ll handle it for our future generations.
And I say, No.
Who guards the guardians, kids? This is our job. We invest in our government the power, along with our trust. We expect them to take care of things, intelligently, with morals, as best they can. We expect them to do right, and we give them the power they need to do so, and we hope. But in the end, it becomes our job to watch them, and call them to task, and, when necessary, recall, somehow, the army of marching brooms we have unleashed.
It’s that time.
