The object, in war, is to kill your enemies, so you win. Boot camp is where we teach boys who've been taught not to fight, to fight and kill. "Kill, kill, kill!" boots shout as they ram bayonets mounted on rifles into target dummies. This is good. It's what got us to this point.
In olden days, there were rules of war. Before international treaties governing war and the conduct of battle, there was a gentleman's code because, after all, the leaders of the armies in the dynastic wars were the king and his noble earls, all gentlemen. When captured, they didn't mistreat each other, under the code of chivalry.
Fast forward to World War I in the trenches of France at places called the Somme and Ypres where poison gas and dum-dum bullets were used. Dum-dums were incised at the tip with an X to make them spread out on impact and tear out your guts on exit, insuring that your downfall would require four of your battle buddies to drag you off the field before you bled to death on the spot, which you usually did, while enduring maximum agony.
These two lethal techniques were, after the war, outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, along with torture of prisoners to extract information or to punish for being the hated enemy.
The United States signed the Geneva Accords during the 1920s when they were negotiated, about 1924, if recollection of what I've read serves.
Come 9-11 and the U.S. has put a premium on finding out what our attackers have in mind. So we've moved isolation and torture front and center. Previously, say in the Korean War, we'd simply turn prisoners over to our South Korean allies and let them go to town, and thank them for the information, which may even have been useful sometimes. Of course there's the saying that you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar, so maybe you'd get more and better information by warming up to your prisoner, but, while candy is dandy but liquor is quicker, torture cuts to the chase without a lot of folderol.
It appears, thus, that we have laws regulating our killers as well as our torturers. Killing in war has to be done on the battlefield, in battle, to be legal. If an enemy soldier surrenders, you can no longer kill him, legally. He's entitled to POW status until the end of the war. Nor may you legally torture him to find out what his army plans to do next. Naturally there is a great temptation to ignore these rules when you think you may lose the battle or the war, and your country. Yet we drill our soldiers in the law of war and the rules of engagement. We teach them that if they violate these laws, they can be prosecuted before a military tribunal and sentenced to a term of years in the military stockade or federal penitentiary.
We even teach our soldiers that they not only have the right, but the duty to disobey, obviously unlawful orders from superior officers, such as to shoot prisoners or civilians or torture prisoners.
An officer who issues such an illegal order could be prosecuted and found guilty of committing a war crime.
Our officers take their direction from lawful directives issued by their civilian superiors. The president issues an order to the Secretary of Defense who passes it along to the Joint Chiefs of Staff which passes it along to the officers down the chain of command to the officers, non-commissioned officers, and the men and women now in the field.
If the president okays torturing prisoners and the soldiers obey, who is more to blame? The private soldier who carries out the president's order, or the president?
See the New York Times article on this today, below:
Who should know better? The Yale-educated president with the support of his legal advisers or the private soldier, a graduate of boot camp, on the front line of a war where people are shooting at him?
You can see that our president may have a concern about being prosecuted as a war criminal if he tolerated torture as a means of war.
Our president has nominated a retired, Republican, federal judge, Michael Mukasey, to replace the former Attorney-General, Alberto Gonzales, who resigned in disgrace for incompetence and worse. He authorized torture, in effect, by refusing to see it for what it was, a war crime, because perpetrated by us and his boss, the president.
In his Senate confirmation hearings, Judge Mukasey has refused to state that he thinks waterboarding is torture, although personally, he finds it 'repugnant,' but not necessarily illegal.
Whoops! What's going on here?
What's going on is that the president has appointed a guy to a position having the power to prosecute Pres. Bush and the nominee doesn't want to prosecute Bush, the CIA which does the torture, or the troops serving their country.
But if we have a rule of llaw, and treaties and statutes outlawing torture, don't we need to be able to call evildoers, as our president likes to call them, to justice, including the president? Or is the president above the laws written by Congress? Until now he has not been. Presidents can be impeached for committing high crimes and misdemeanors. Clinton was impeached for lying about an act of friendship, a blow-job voluntarily administered by an adult, loving intern.. How much worse, then for a president to authorize his men to commit torture on a now helpless prisoner? Oh, but this was to save the country, so that makes it different, right?
That's the argument, but it is very unlikely that this country needs to be saved by resort to torturing a prisoner, any prisoner. When we reach the prisoner who has the keys to our salvation, let me know and we'll deal with it. Meanwhile, we do have these laws passed by Congress, endorsed by the country, and taught to our soldiers.
The problem is that they don't seem to be taught to our civilian leaders and the president, or if they are, they are taught with the caveat that the president may be free to ignore them based on the inherent powers of his office, whatever they are. I seriously doubt that the president's powers exceed the limitations place on them by the Congress by statute and treaty, signed by him.
So Mukasey cannot go on record as saying that waterboarding, something we've done, is a crime, because then he'd wind up prosecuting the man who has nominated him to this high position of chief law enforcement officer, as the position of A-G is often called. He might be willing to testify that roasting a prisoner over an open flame is a war crime, assuming we don't do that, but not waterboarding, which we do.
This is sad, to see a federal judge revealed to be a lawless protector of someone or some people who may have committed war crimes.
Since he doesn't appear really to believe in the rule of law, why place him at the top of the law enforcement heap?
Doesn't this make a mockery of the idea of justice? That the head of the justice department can prosecute others for committing all sorts of crimes, but not those who commit war crimes in the name of you, me, and the country? Isn't this like joining a lawless gang, a conspiracy of cut-throats, engaged in terrible crimes, while prosecuting others for doing far less?
Can't the president find a nominee for A-G who believes in the rule of law?
Of course not, for then he might have to turn his powerful guns on the president, and no president, especially Pres. Bush, would be so stupid as to do that, would he?