"Once an Army is involved in war, there is a beast in every fighting man which begins tugging at its chains... A good officer must learn early on how to keep the beast under control both in his men and in himself."
-- General George C. Marshall
As a former active duty military officer, it is troubling to me that other military officers followed unlawful orders to torture or abuse prisoners. Military officers have a sacred responsibility that is embedded in their oath of office: "I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same..."
The Constitution specifically prohibits cruelty to any person in the Eighth Amendment ("Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted"). Those officers who ordered, authorized, or were complicit in the torture and abuse of prisoners violated their oath of office. The United States has a rich history of military ethics dating back to General George Washington during the Revolutionary War. According to General Washington, "Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any prisoner...by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country." He said this in 1775, during a time when the birth of our nation hung in the balance.
It is the role of military officers, as first line supervisors, to ensure that we live up to our American principles in the conduct of every tactic we use in war. If an infantry platoon is ordered to take a hill and fails to do so because of enemy resistance, an order is not given to break out flame throwers and mustard gas in violation of the Law of Armed Conflict. Instead, we leverage our American ingenuity within the rules, we use our intellect, and we preserve through our courage to fight in accordance with our principles.
As I led an interrogations team in Iraq chasing the notorious former leader of Al Qaida, Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, we encountered detainees who did not provide us valuable intelligence information. We used those men as opportunities to refine our approaches and to improve our interrogation skills within the rules. It was those improved skills that we later used to break the terrorists within Zarqawi's network who, ultimately, sold him out.
We are Americans and we are smart enough to win the battle of wits in the interrogation room. We cannot afford to doubt our abilities. We should focus on improving our methods within the legal framework of Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution. And military officers have a heightened responsibility to effect change and to lead our interrogator corps to its full potential. We are smart enough.
Matthew Alexander spent fourteen years in the U.S. Air Force and Air Force Reserves. An "investigator turned interrogator", he deployed to Iraq in 2006, where he led the interrogations team that located Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the former leader of Al Qaida in Iraq, who was killed by Coalition Forces. Alexander was awarded the Bronze Star for his achievements. He is the author of How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.
Follow Matthew Alexander on Twitter: www.twitter.com/alexanderbooks
The most culpable parties are the President and Vice President. They swore to all Americans, before god, to defend the Constitution. Instead, they behaved as if the US government's responsibility to abide by the Constitution ended at US borders. They are reported to have planned to suspend various parts of the Bill of Rights. To not have impeached them is the most egregious miscarriage of justice in US history. They broke the law, they broke their oath to the American people and, apparently, they will never pay for their crimes.
Search on HuffPost. That's where I saw it. It's just been buried by the debate on torture. Which is why, in my opinion, torture has become the topic de jur; to distract people from arguing over suspension of the Bill of Rights or parts thereof. MUCH harder to find people who would be in support of losing the BoR.
There should not even be a debate of whether or not it IS torture. We tried others for the same crime. It should just be who gets to prosecute this War Crime.
OK! The bottom line is this:
TORTURE IS ILLEGAL!
TORTURE IS MORALLY REPREHENSIBLE!
TORTURE IS A BREACH OF OUR INTERNATIONAL TREATIES!
TORTURE IS PROHIBITED BY THE US CONSTITUTION!
End of discussion! Have a great day, y'all!
2)define torture
We don't have to define torture. It is already defined by the Geneva Conventions, UN agreements, and the US Constitution. Just go take a look at who the US has tried for war crimes and what they were accused of.
Once we open the door to torture, where does it stop? Do we torture child molestors to get a confession? Wife beaters? Drunk drivers? Illegal immigrants? Jay walkers? Who gets to decide where torture is applied?
There is a reason torture is outlawed in the Constitution, but that seems beyond NeoCon's comprehension.
Semper fi
Did that part of the oath and that additional training get lost somewhere along the way?
An "OK to Torture-memo" from a finger sandwich eating D.C. lawyer is unworthy of it's recipients. It's like taking a used toilet paper to the latrine... and the sandwich eater says,
"Here soldier use this instead."
But ... now, after the fact, do we really want to dig it up to see who all used it. Any torture is bad, but rolling out a legal CSI team in rubber gloves to look for guilt? No?
We need a high ranking guy to step up and take it, to aggregate the blame, take the bullet for the good men and women they ordered to wipe.
I like Washington's quote here, but the next step is for someone to take all blame, something he knew well. They would of course, lose their pension, career and do the time and end up as a think-tank consultant. Step up and like any soldier does to make the sacrifice of service to end the war on this little war on torture. A little redemption goes a long way and a pardon would come only eight years away.
Who is man or woman enough to take the heat?
I hope, for George Washington sake, there is one. Becuase if this is not the case, George Washington will have failed as a leader of men, or rather, this generation of his devotees has failed him.
DenverJJ
There is no justification for cruelty.
Semper fi
If the Bush administration thought that torture was legal, why did they have to have these "opinions" to justify it? Why didn't they just simply implement their plans? But wait a minute...I think that's just what they did, and when faced with dissent from others, instructed their minions in high legal places to justify what they were already doing!
Jon Stewart made a great point last night on his show....that once your have captured the enemy, disarmed him and put him into a detainment area, you are obligated to treat him well. If he is wounded, he should receive medical care on a par with what would be given to one of our own. This is the only decent thing to do, as human beings.
We are finding out more and more details of the atrocities committed in our names. I would refer all to the following link that tells of DEATHS of detainees as a result of torture.
http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/021109.html
Unfortunately, the MSM is dropping the ball....again! The American people, unless they do their own research on the Internet, have only seen the tip of the iceberg!
We did not accept the German, Japanese or Iraqi troops that said "we were just following orders" and have video of W. saying exactly that.
The behavior was clearly out of bounds, and if they were unsure, they could request either "To be transfered" or a Courts Martial.
Do I have sympathy for Lindy England, who may have had a below average IQ, and may have been ordered to do what she did. Yes. However, I still believe her punishment is just.
But to let those up the chain of command off the hook is a travesty. We must continue to keep pressure on the Attorney General to prosecute war crimes, no matter how far up the chain the culpability goes!
Semper fi
In addition to that I would like to point out something that you don't seem to understand. In order for torture to "work" as an interrogation technique it would have to produce a LARGE percentage of reliable, actionable intelligence. It fails in this, more often than not producing either purposefully false intelligence, or complete BUNK that a person will state just to make the torture end. On the other hand, torture DOES succeed amazingly well at its actual purpose, which is to generate false confessions!
Interrogation is an art and a science. Good interrogation is done for tactical and for strategic reasons. Tactical interrogation is done to gain immediate information that impinges directly on a unit's immediate mission. Strategic interrogation takes weeks, months, even years, given the depth of knowledge of a prisoner. The interrogator takes nothing for granted, assuming automatically that the prisoner is lying. Questioning is done over and over to expose the information and to reveal the truth. Various methods may be tried to ensure that the information is true.
Real interrogators learn, in training, that Direct Questioning works in 95% of all cases. The remaining 5% require various techniques because they have better training at resistance, or because they are committed to their cause. The terrorists we are fighting are committed to their cause and to their brutal religion. Many will still respond to the milder techniques, but others will not. No interrogators are trained in any torture techniques.
Semper fi
Semper fi