I’m Austrian, myself, by the way. I will use a German name for things whenever I like, thank you very much. Especially when it’s exactly the same thing.
“We” remember the Nazis for a lot of things. You remember the Nazis for their greatest crimes only? That means, ending democracy, persecuting minorities, reintroducing torture (under the name “verschärfte Vernehmung”), starting a war of aggression was all just peachy?
And in fact, it does help to know who else used exactly the same patterns of reasoning, the same euphemism in a different language, and where it led after that.
Actually, the document quoted is from 1942.
I don’t care who else Andrew Sullivan lauded; that is a pure straw man argument. Linking to one article written by Sullivan does not mean that I agree with anything else he has written, or that I have even read anything else he has written.
So, you say, rules become less strict in war time. So? Does that mean that the 1948 convictions of three nazis by a Norwegian court were wrong, because those are legitimate things to do in wartime?
Also, who is this “enemy” you keep talking about? Does the US have any enemies that are currently threatening its very existence, so that “being more civilized than the Gestapo” has become a luxury?
How about in addition to all of this, sucking fluid out of their chest every 3-4 hours, day and night for months or even years, averaging almost a litre every day? How about literally making them clean up their excrement and throwing up all over them? Treating them like a slave and making an unreasonable amount of mess everywhere they go? How about gaslighting them so that everyone around them believes that they should actually be happy with this arrangement, and dotes on their tormentor? How about if this gets so bad that if the sociopath hurts themselves out of their own stupidity, everyone blames their victim?
And that’s if you’re lucky enough only to have one tormentor at a time.
It is as if you think that our troops are automatons who needed to be ordered to think of our enemies as savages. Perhaps you like to imagine they were brainwashed into believing that 9/11 videos could apply to Iraq, and then spoonfed an endless loop. It somehow takes a one-line handwritten comment by Rumsfeld (that almost no one sees until it’s either leaked or FOIA’d to the press) to set them off.
At the same time, you seem to think that the pure savagery of our enemies shouldn’t affect our troops. Not simply the actual, real torture, including eye-gouging and amputations, but also the war crimes, from common, everyday acts of perfidy to car bombs filled with families in order to fool the soldiers at checkpoints.
And then there’s the fact that this stuff happened in previous wars, and America’s critics are always fine with them. All this happens while we debate whether to remove useless Red Cross insignia from rescue helicopters so that they may then be armed.
So the truth is precisely the opposite than you think. Our troops wouldn’t need to have their military culture finessed by memos of how many hours someone may have to stand. It was military culture that restrained them from becoming the true savagery they see being tolerated in too many other places in the world.
I will say that it is correct to ask whether the higher-ranking people were punished whenever appropriate. But for that, you need to understand what actually happened at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. The ACLU doesn’t want you to know.
The NAACP’s leaders didn’t have close associations to Klan-supporters, either now or then. The ACLU leaders do have connections to various allies of our enemies. You shouldn’t be putting them in the same category as the NAACP.
You’re not thinking of it as the German name. You’re characterizing methods as specific to the Gestapo that were common in many civilized countries. This normalizes and devalues the Nazis’ actual atrocities.
What do you think happens if the situation ever becomes desperate to you (it’s already desperate to a great many people) and you finally agree to bring more of those methods back? Perhaps you will never agree to that, but 99.9% of the other critics will do so. They already turn their backs on real torture whenever it’s too inconvenient to speak out. The “doesn’t work anyway” facade won’t hold for very long under pressure. People will then get the mistaken idea that the real Nazi atrocities were understandable.
The Gestapo rules we’re talking about were from before the war began.
This isn’t about rules being less strict in wartime. It’s about rules being rules. The Nazis ignored their own rules once outside Germany (and surely inside as well). Would those victims even have been killed if the rules remained in place? Probably not. Or, if you so, then the the regulations are different. The Norwegian case was very different.
There is, of course, the matter of detainees who died when in CIA custody because their interrogators had violated the rules. But here your comparison still falls on its face. The CIA personnel at the black sites had to explain this to someone in Virginia who then had to explain it to their own bosses, who then had to explain it to the CIA’s Inspector General. All that goes to Congressional oversight committees, and eventually to the press, and then to history when more of the books are ultimately declassified.
We know that the CIA handled those deaths as failures in their procedures, and in the personnel they had there. The personnel were removed, disciplined when possible, and the procedures revised. Most of the Senate’s complaints were from the earliest days before the CIA made those corrections. That’s all in the record.
Did the Gestapo handle it that way in Norway? I very seriously doubt it. That’s the difference. Then how about the Soviets? How about the Russians now? How about the Iraqis (either gov’t), or the Iranians and their own allies in Chavez’s Venezeula?
And once we get to Chavez, how many of his supporters (recently weeping over Castro’s death) had complained about Bush’s military and CIA, accusing them of torture? Probably all of them. As I’d just said, 99.9% of the critics will already turn their backs on real torture. And I do mean real torture, as in eye-gouging and amputations. If you oppose torture, you need to talk to them.
The Bush administration never tried to make a case that exceptional circumstances warranted actual torture. Their position was that their methods were several steps far enough below actual torture that they could then be legal.
Laugh all you like, but peoples’ definitions of torture tend to vary from day to day – assuming you can pin them down on any definition at all. There will always be someone calling our methods torture, no matter what we do. Critics still complain about several methods that remain in the Army’s current interrogation manual in the Obama administration.
BTW: Bush did consider getting the Congress to allow humiliating and degrading treatment once that was no longer permitted, but that didn’t get far.
Torture is severe pain or suffering. I think people are thinking too much in terms of their own experiences. Real torture is truly horrific. (See Pacino’s Scarface.)
People can complain all they like but I believe 20 hour interrogations are still technically legal under the Obama administration. That doesn’t mean they do it. Even Guantanamo only authorized it twice in the early years. After the first time, it was removed from the regular list. It was authorized once more in 2003, but never again. The CIA did more, and for much longer durations, but that’s them.
You can argue that it becomes torture at some point. But to say it’s at four hours you’d be arguing with what has been accepted by the U.S. government.
Also keep in mind that something doesn’t need to be torture for it to be illegal. Some may just be using “torture” as a synonym for “cruel.”
I am very happy that the US government does not set the rules in my legislation. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that sleep deprivation is not compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.
so it’s not torture because a normal person can understand it? you are creeping me out.
Well, Germany descended from a democracy to a totalitarian terror regime and took Austria along for the ride before the war started. And the war was well under way before the Nazis actually started committing atrocities that no one else had committed before.
The methods described in the 1942 document weren’t legal in Austria in 1900, and they were unthinkable in 1920.
So I consider it very much necessary to oppose those lesser crimes, and yes, those were Nazi crimes as well, and in my country, the Nazis were the only ones who committed them in the past 100+ years. So yes, I will use the German name for it, because that’s how it started here.
Did you read the article I linked?
I am sure plenty of other Nazis committed plenty of other crimes in Norway, but in that particular case, the torture victims weren’t killed.
[…] the acts of torture in no case resulted in death. Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in permanent disablement.
In this case, the tortures had stuck to the rules on “verschärfte Vernehmung” in the version from 1942, as quoted in the article. The court did not doubt that, but concluded that these practices of “verschärfte Vernehmung”, when practiced according to the letter of the (Nazi) law, were war crimes punishable by death.
So apparently, Norway was (edit: not) one of the “many civilized countries” that considered these methods common. And apparently, according to your definition, Nazi Germany was a “civilized country” until at least 1940.
I assume that the 1942 rules we’re talking about were not entirely new and that the rules they operated under from 1934-1942 already included provisions for allowing some forms of torture.
Shouldn’t they? I hear Stalin didn’t approve of Hitler’s crimes, either. That doesn’t make Hitler a good guy.
Yes, the situation is desperate, the enemies of the Greatest Nation of All are closing in on all sides, and we have to pull out all stops to Defend Our Great Nation. That’s what Hitler said, too.
Again, who is this enemy you are talking about? Is it the Poles again? You know, that incredibly strongly armed nation that forced Hitler to have shots “fired back” at them in 1939?
Also, you’re still claiming that torture works, and that its use even outweighs the evils of minor forms of torture (“verschärfte Vernehmung”), so that these forms of everybody-but-you-calls-it-torture are therefore morally OK.
The first has no basis in fact, and the second is MORALLY REPULSIVE.
What has a basis in historical fact is that the Nazis first justified the small things for a few exceptional cases. Then began using it more and more, and using worse torture on “a few exceptional cases”. And so on.
As the US government has turned against the civilized world on this, I consider that my duty. Also, I’ll trust the opinion of the ECHR over that of the US government any day.
And as minor crimes have a tendency to slide towards bigger crimes, and the US is still the most powerful nation on the planet, the US legalizing and justifying more torture is a much bigger problem than radicals somewhere else being a lot more brutal or China not being as efficient as we’d hope them to be in their efforts to abolish torture.
That’s an extremely odd definition of torture. If I fall down on a ski hill and break my leg, is that torture? If a parent dies of natural causes, is that torture? The former would inflict severe pain, and the later severe suffering, and each would be quite horrific.
If I had to define torture, it would be, “Intentionally causing a state of psychological and/or physical distress, especially in order to coerce cooperation or inflict punishment.”
Whether anyone else would agree with that definition of “torture” or not is beside the point. The important thing in my mind is that everything that falls under my definition of torture is morally abhorrentregardless of the circumstance.
Sleep deprivation would easily fall under that umbrella. So would waterboarding. The “poke in the chest” you referenced earlier probably wouldn’t.
If they torture us, and we torture them, that doesn’t make it right. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind (except for the last guy, because everyone who wants to put out his remaining eye is now blind and can’t see well enough to do it).
If a terrorist attacks us, and we change our way of life, or compromise our morals, or restrict our freedoms because they’ve terrified us, than the terrorists have won. They’ve succeeded in using terror to change who we are, to control out behaviour, and from that point, it’s just a matter of figuring out which way they want us to jump, and directing their acts accordingly.
You can never control every stimulus you’re going to be exposed to; you can only control your own reaction. Terror is one such reaction. I, for instance, am acrophobic: I’m terrified of heights. Is the proper response to that terror to level every mountain and valley, so that I never have to experience my terror? Of course not. If I want to defeat my terror of heights, I need to learn to control not the heights but my reaction to them.
It is true that we are in a War on Terror. But to win that war, we must not reflexively strike back when we are struck. We must not let our terror drive us to do morally repugnant things, and curtail the freedoms that make us great. Inflicting terror ourselves, at home or abroad, will only cause the war to continue eternally. Instead, we must learn to control our own terror, and our reaction to it. When those who think of us as their enemies are no longer able to inflict terror by violence, then we will have won the war, the only way that a War on Terror can ever be won.
