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But It Wasn't Inhumane

I posted on my blog about recent testimony by Lt Gen Randall Schmidt (USAF) before the Senate Armed Services Committee on his investigation of military interrogations at Gitmo. Coverage of this testimony appeared in the American Forces Press Services, New York Times, and Washington Post. The basic summary of his investigation appears to focus on three things:

1 - DoD policy, approved by Rumsfeld, allowed techniques that were degrading and abusive to individuals, but "not inhumane" or considered torture. Yes, they were creative and aggressive, but overall within DoD guidelines. Which really shakes my faith in DoD policy.

2 - There probably were individual cases of investigators exceeding those guidelines, and a number of cases could not be substantiated, either because the people refused to be questioned or they couldn't find evidence.

3 - The Republicans think this testimony reveals that we on the left are making too big of a deal about these cases. Unfortunately, these Repubs include people we thought were rational, like Sen Jack Warner of Virginia.

I wanted to take the opportunity to revise and extend my comments. When all the Abu Ghraib stuff came out, I did think that the excesses seen there by US military personnel were individual actions and not the result of deliberate DOD policy. I still think that to an extent, but I can see now that the boundaries for what interrogation techniques were considered allowable changed - and probably, individuals took the new guidance as the starting point from where they started ad libbing. I think those individuals that abused Iraqis in Abu Ghraib deserve jail time, but to say they had official guidance or concurrence to do those actions may be tenuous at best.

I don't think that the military leadership in particular, and OSD leadership in general, have considered the consequences of justifying their interrogation procedures in this manner. It flies in the face of two "what if" questions - what if this behavior appears as the headlines in national newspapers (would you feel okay about it), and would you be outraged if US soldiers were treated this way? And don't give me the cop-out excuses about "enemy combatants aren't covered by Geneva" or "yeah but terrorists caused 9/11". Rumsfeld said (I believe) that even if these prisoners weren't covered by Geneva, they were going to get treated right. And I have to seriously question the "valuable intel" that US interrogators are getting with these questionable tactics. Unless these guys are high-ranking al Qaeda members, come on, is there a real value here? And what price are we paying in moral and world leadership terms?

This "ends justify the means" approach is going to hurt us in the end. Maybe not today, not next year, but it's going to come back and smack us in the face in some future battlefield. No wonder the Bush administration is so hot about keeping the US military out of the International Criminal Court jurisdiction...