Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Why that last story matters

Okay, well that last story was apparently more unique than I thought.
According to Marty Lederman, the torture was significant this time because:
1) The people who killed Mowhoush felt that they were doing what they were authorized to do. In other words, this goes against the "few bad apples" theory. Although, honestly, does anyone really think that torture wasn't authorized by this point.
2) Something I didn't think of- Mowhoush was captured in Iraq and was not an al-Qaida fighter or a Taliban member. So, according to the administration itself, the Geneva Conventions should have applied to him. But, they ordered for the man to be tied up, beaten and so forth.

So, perhaps they considered him to be an insurgent. Or, Lederman suggests, maybe the memos and directions have been so confusing (and they have been confusing) that the interrogators considered such behavior to be in keeping with the Geneva Conventions.

At any rate, what the Attorney General and quite a few others seem to have forgotten is that we traditionally haven't done these things (and here it's worth remembering that we didn't even torture captured Nazis) not because we thought we couldn't get away with it, but because we didn't think our democracy could survive it.

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