History professor, ‘Colossus’ and ‘Empire’ author and LA Times
columnist Niall Ferguson warns against the latest attempts to abort the Geneva
Conventions. He was hired as the “right rail” columnist to balance “left rail”
opinion at the LA Times after Michael Kinsley was fired as editor/columnist.
Why Churchill Opposed Torture
The British leader
understood what President Bush does not: When it comes to prisoners of war,
what goes around comes around.
LA Times, October 2, 2006
LAST WEEK, both houses of Congress approved a bill — the Military Commissions
Act — that would permit the indefinite, extrajudicial incarceration of
terrorist suspects and their interrogation using torture in all but name. Does
that sound shocking? What's really shocking is that this was a compromise measure. When President Bush
signs this bill into law, a category of detainees will come into existence:
"unlawful enemy combatants" who, regardless of their nationality,
will be liable to summary arrest.
Those detained will not have the right to challenge their imprisonment by
filing an application for a writ of habeas corpus. When — or rather if — they
are tried, it will be by military tribunals. Classified evidence may be
withheld from the accused if the tribunal judges see fit.
My old friend Andrew Sullivan — who used to think he was a conservative until
President Bush came along — calls it a bill to "legalize tyranny." At the very least, it has the potential
to extend the scope of American martial law far beyond the cellblocks of
Guantanamo Bay.
Leave aside for now the question of habeas corpus; after all, prisoners of war
have traditionally been denied this ancient protection. Much more sinister is Section 8 ("Implementation of Treaty Obligations"), under which "the president
has the authority … to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva
Conventions and to promulgate … administrative regulations for violations of
treaty obligations which are not grave breaches of the Geneva
Conventions."
To see what this means, you need to know what the "grave breaches"
are. According to Geneva
Convention III, Article 130, they include "willful killing, torture or inhuman
treatment, including biological experiments" and "willfully causing
great suffering or serious injury to body or health."
Insidiously,
therefore, the Military Commissions Act empowers the president to authorize all
lesser forms of physical and mental intimidation of prisoners. Suffering and
injury are fine, in other words, as long as they aren't "great" or
"serious."
It is easy enough to understand why most members of Congress assented to this.
Five years after 9/11, Americans remain intensely hostile toward anyone who
might even be suspected of involvement in terrorism. Not for the first
time, war fever is encouraging Americans to set aside the fundamental
principles of individual liberty on which the United States was founded. Predictably, Democrats who opposed the
bill were accused by Republicans of "coddling" terrorists — a line of
attack that Karl Rove hopes will win November's midterm elections.
History, however, provides a powerful counter-argument. It is that any dilution
of the Geneva Convention could end up having the very reverse effect of what
the administration intends. Far from protecting Americans from terror, it could
end up exposing them to it.
THE FIRST Geneva Convention governing the humane treatment of prisoners of war
was adopted in 1929. It is not too much to say that it saved the lives of
millions. In World
War II, about 96 million people served in the armed forces of all the
belligerent states, of whom more than a third spent at least some time in enemy
hands. The majority
of these were Axis soldiers who became prisoners when Germany and Japan
surrendered. Luckily for them, the Allies upheld the Geneva Convention, despite
the fact that the Axis powers had systematically failed to do so.
Official Japanese policy encouraged brutality toward prisoners of war by
applying the Geneva Convention only mutatis
mutandis (literally, "with those things having been changed which
need to be changed"), which the Japanese translated as "with any
necessary amendments."
The amendments in question amounted to this: Enemy prisoners had so disgraced
themselves by laying down their arms that their lives were forfeit. Indeed,
some Allied prisoners were made to wear armbands bearing the inscription
"One who has been captured in battle and is to be beheaded or castrated at
the will of the emperor." Physical assaults were a daily occurrence in
some Japanese POW camps. Executions without due process were frequent.
Thousands of American prisoners died during the infamous Bataan Death March in
1942.
Elsewhere, British POWs were used as slave labor, most famously on the
Burma-Thailand railway line. Attempting to escape was treated by the Japanese
as a capital offense, though the majority of prisoners who died were in fact
victims of malnutrition and disease exacerbated by physical overwork and abuse.
In all, 42% of Americans taken prisoner by the Japanese did not survive. Such
were the consequences of "amending" the Geneva Convention.
Red-state Republicans may still shrug their shoulders. After all, George W.
Bush is no Tojo. Well, maybe not. But even if you don't see any resemblance
between Bush's "administrative regulations" and Imperial Japan's
"necessary amendments" of the Geneva Convention, consider this purely
practical argument: As Winston Churchill insisted throughout the war, treating
POWs well is wise, if only to increase the chances that your own men will be
well treated if they too are captured. Even in World War II, there was in fact
a high degree of reciprocity. The British treated Germans POWs well and were
well treated by the Germans in return; the Germans treated Russian POWs
abysmally and got their bloody deserts when the tables were turned.
Few, if any, American soldiers currently find themselves in enemy hands. But in
the long war on which Bush has embarked, that may not always be the case. The
bottom line about mistreating captive foes is simple: It is that what goes
around comes around. And you don't have to be a closet liberal to understand
that.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ferguson2oct02,0,4615277.column?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
