They just want to know the rules
Wednesday, September 20th, 2006The Bush administration line on torture is now “We want clarity.” They claim to fear that well-intentioned U.S. interrogators would run afoul of the “nebulous language” in the Geneva Conventions. The President called on Congress to pass a law giving “clear guidelines”.
This debate is occurring because of the Supreme Court’s ruling that said that we must conduct ourselves under the Common Article III of the Geneva Convention. And that Common Article III says that there will be no outrages upon human dignity. It’s very vague. What does that mean, “outrages upon human dignity”? That’s a statement that is wide open to interpretation. And what I’m proposing is that there be clarity in the law so that our professionals will have no doubt that that which they are doing is legal.
Well, if you can’t figure out what an outrage upon human dignity is, perhaps you would recognize one when you saw it? Perhaps you would agree that throwing a prisoner’s Koran in the shit bucket would be an example. Maybe we could all agree that summarily executing bound prisoners would be covered. Maybe, just maybe, decent civilized people could agree that keeping a prisoner suspended by the arms until he died, or suffocating him with a plastic bag, would be an outrage against human dignity. How much debate could there be?
Yeah, right.
The problem is not that they don’t understand the rules. The problem is that everybody in the world understands the rules. The problem is that they want to ignore the rules and torture prisoners, but they know they might go to prison if they do. Their solution is to get rid of the Geneva Conventions by “clarifying” them.
When they’re done, the word “torture” will be like the word “terrorism”—it won’t mean what it did before, rather, it will refer only to what our enemies do, never to what we do. And the word “clarify” will be entirely meaningless.
