Tortured Logic

The day before Good Friday, the headlines told us that Iran had freed their fifteen captive British sailors, making it a better Friday. I personally hope for the sake of those fifteen that they never have to experience that kind of captivity again.

In the days that followed, the rabid right wing loosed a sea of ink screaming about the brutal treatment the British sailors received at the hands of their barbaric Iranian captors, but the sound of those screams didn't echo anywhere outside of their own shrinking sound chamber. Around the world, in the court of public opinion, these screams actually made a small pin-drop sound.

After seizing them in territory that may or may not have been Iranian, the captors had put the British sailors into very small cells, kept them in solitary confinement and in some manner coaxed video-taped confessions from each of them. Such "confessions" mean little to anyone beyond the target audience in the Iranian right wing -- I doubt anyone in Bulgaria or Japan seriously believes the British sailors voluntarily confessed to entering Iranian territorial waters. But these confessions clearly violate both the spirit and the letter of the Geneva conventions, and any U.S. President before W could have spoken out loudly in protest. A U.S. President with moral authority could have organized the international community in some way to condemn the Iranian government's treatment of the British sailors. But after Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, what could W say? Maybe he could mock the Iranians for being such lightweights. Or perhaps George could seriously teach the Iranians a thing or two about physical abuse that's not really torture as long as it doesn't cause organ failure.

The 109th Congress handed George W. Bush the privilege of deciding how he would personally interpret the Geneva conventions. A neat trick, I suppose, though it probably won't earn him any points in popularity contests around the globe. But even the rubber-stamp 109th couldn't give Bush what he really wants, which is the ability to interpret Geneva in two different ways -- one for the U.S. and favored allies, and a very different other way for countries we, or at least he, doesn't like. Such hypocrisy plays very badly along such avenues as "the Arab street."

You may recall that in colonial Salem women confessed to having carnal relations with The Devil and turning themselves into cats and/or birds. If you think they actually did these things, perhaps you can believe that torture (AKA "harsh interrogations," "whatever means necessary," "a little dunk in the water") actually works. But if you understand that "cruel and unusual punishment" will make people say almost anything to stop the pain, then you also understand that such punishment will rarely if ever give you any useful information, except perhaps on an episode of "24."

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, recently confessed to a laundry list of crimes. Since I didn't read the entire list, I don't know if he admitted to stabbing Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson or robbing the Glendale train. I do know his confession nailed down his reputation at the hardest working man in terrorism, rocketing past pikers like al-Zarqawi. His tortured confession also makes it impossible to know what role he actually played in planning and executing 9/11.

George Washington instructed his men after the American victory at Trenton in 1776 to treat the British prisoners humanely. At that moment he defined a core American value -- we do not torture. A few years later the framers of the U.S. Constitution wrote the phrase "cruel and unusual punishment" into the law of the new country. And while many lawyers have made careers out of arguing the finer points of the meaning of that phrase, and the U.S. Government did not always abide by the letter of its own law, no U.S. President before George W., and no Attorney General before Alberto Gonzales, ever suggested that its meaning was "quaint" or that it should be disregarded as much as possible.

Torture does have a purpose however, other than to extract meaningless confessions from witches, religious heretics and other outsiders -- it works very well as a weapon to silence criticism. A long line of tyrants, with names like Hussein, Pinochet, Stalin, and Vlad the Impaler, have demonstrated this fact, and it's a history lesson W actually learned. The one he didn't care to learn is that history does not speak well of past torturers. While Bush can tell himself that history will someday vindicate him, I would guess his place as the first U.S. President -- and hopefully the only one -- to openly advocate torture will cast a long dark shadow over his legacy. And George's legacy has little in the way of good deeds for that shadow to cover.

To close, I offer a salute to the freed British sailors: may the live long enough to enjoy the profits from the book deals they can get as a result of their captivity. And I think I've already said more about the British sailors than Bush did, but having removed the moral high ground from beneath his own feet, what more could he say? He probably didn't want to say much anyway, since he started his Holy Week vacation on Tuesday night.

5/18/07