A slow day at work has me browsing around in forums I don't normally see. Then I stumbled on to this one. Prepare the soap box.
I've been in the Army (U.S.) for over 12 years now. I started out enlisted for about my first 8 years, and I've been an officer for over 4 years now. I've done a few tours "over there" and been fairly highly decorated for it. I've lived in a few foreign counties, and even brought my family to some. I'm also a military brat (my father is retired US Air Force) and I have a good % of other family members in the various services. My Grandfathers (like just about everyone else) were called up for WWII, only 1 was deployed to Europe. Going back to WWI my distant relatives were on the other side (Germany). Yes I feel the need to give you my background before I reply. I think I have a valid point of view on this topic. Having said that - this is all personal opinion, not anything more official than that.
Torture - never.
Questioning - sure.
This seems like a simple enough to draw, but its actually kinda blurry. This isn't necessary a bad thing. Water boarding, beating, etc - these are definatly torture and should never be condoned. Besides we (well, mostly others) have proven time and again that torture doesn't get results in the form of good intelligence. Past a certain point people will say anything to make the pain stop. Yes, sometimes they will give you what you want to know, but more often than not they just make something up.
Now aggressive questioning, that's a different story. I see nothing wrong with things like rapid fire questioning, solitary confinement, and giving them false information, sleep deprivation - maybe in limited amounts. Most of this is covered by the Geneva Convention. They should be treated humanly and with respect, but there is no requirement or moral imperative that we have to make them comfortable.
If you wake someone up after only 3 hours of sleep to question them - fine. If you allowed them to sleep the night before and you let them sleep the night after, going for 24 hours without sleep isn't really sleep deprivation in my views. If you're shouting at them and firing question after question for hours at a time - fine. By all means isolate them from others prisoners. But isolating them for extended periods (over 30 days) does start to become torture itself.
The Geneva Convention also mandates that POW's must be returned to their original country after the conflict is over. As far as the US goes and our continued holding of prisoners, I think they should all be given the normal POW status and treated as such. I don't think the armed conflict is over (was there ever a declared war?) so I don't see any problem with holding them longer. We should probably define what will define the end of the armed conflict, just so there is a clear line. Yes this is a different kind of war, different than what we were prepared for and different than the kind most international laws (and the Geneva Convention covers), but we should try to apply is as clearly as possible. Even if we are not at war against a uniformed army (like the Geneva Convention requires) we should still try to apply the laws of war. We were never at war with the country of Afghanistan, just the Taliban. We are still at war with the Taliban, just ask them. The same thing goes for Iraq, sort of. Yes we were at war with the country of Iraq, but that war ended. All captured Iraqi troops were turned back over to the country of Iraq after the war was declared over. We are now fighting an internal war against various terrorist groups. Until they want to declare an end to the war, any captured members can be held until the war ends.
Now to further complicate this whole thing is that at the same time as there is a war going on against various declared and undeclared terrorist groups there is also plain old common ethnic violence. It's often impossible to tell which is which. But the rules for common criminals are different. There are local, national and international laws for criminals. They should be turned over to the criminal system as applicable. Yes, this is probably the hardest part because as I've said, you often can't tell which is which. What are you going to do, ask them? It’s even possible for someone to do both at the same time. Very muddy water I'm afraid.
Why draw the line? Why not push it farther? Why not torture whoever we want as much as we want, after all they'd do it to us.
There are mainly two reasons, aside from my earlier point that torture doesn't really get you anything. They both tie together.
Is this how you would like to be treated? Yes, the whole "do unto others" thing comes into play. More then just yourself, from a military perspective, is this how you'd like your own troops to be treated? We cannot expect anyone else to treat our prisoners better than we treat theirs.
We need to take the moral high ground here even if our enemies do not. If we lead the calls for change people will listen, it may not be immediate, but they do listen. If we aren't following our own rules, how can we expect others to?
There's also a lesser side to this. We saw in the first gulf war, and somewhat again in the start of the Iraq invasion. If we treat prisoners fairly it will discourage them from fighting us in the first place. In the first gulf war, we treated them so much better than Saddam did that his Army deserted in mass. Our biggest problem wasn't the war; it was dealing with the endless supply of POW's. These are also the kind of prisoners you want. They couldn't wait to tell us all the intelligence we'd ever want to know - and you didn't have to question the validity of it.
We often demand that our soldiers take some extreme risks. Knowing that we treat our enemies fairly and we will demand that they treat us fairly is a must. Otherwise its one more thing that drags in the back of your mind and impairs performance. As an American soldier, we have a code of conduct to follow if captured; all we ask is that our enemies follow the rules agreed to in the Geneva Convention.
The more we can hold to the moral high ground and show that we are trying to help, the more cooperation and assistance we get, not just from detainees, but from the host nation and international community at large. This goes beyond just torture, it needs to be an entire political philosophy.
For the record I'm a strong conservative republican and proud member of the military. I don't think we're all the big evil, unthinking mob that some make us out to be.
