What “Torture” Is

Brit Hume and Mitt Romney do not get to invent the meaning of a word. Here’s the federal law itself from 18 U.S. Code § 2340 (Definitions):

"As used in this chapter— (1) ‘torture’ means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;

(2) ‘severe mental pain or suffering’ means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from— (A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering; (B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality; (C) the threat of imminent death; or (D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; and

(3) ‘United States’ means the several States of the United States, the District of Columbia, and the commonwealths, territories, and possessions of the United States."

It is not an opinion that "enhanced interrogation techniques" are torture. It is a legal fact. And it is also a legal fact that the president is a war criminal.

Re-Thinking The War III

Baghdaddavidfurstgetty

Ross thinks I’m way too excited by Ron Paul. Hey, excitability is my brand, isn’t it? And I do get a frisson from the candor and fearlessness of the guy. I’m not alone. But I don’t think Paul is a credible president, I don’t think he has a chance, and there is a doctrinaire libertarianism about him that is not congenial to me. His comments about black criminals are unfortunate – but I see no evidence of anti-Semitism at all, unless anyone critical of the Israel lobby is automatically an anti-Semite. I do think Paul has done us all a service by bringing a conservative critique of the Bush foreign policy to the fore. It’s healthy to have an actual debate about foreign policy and conservatism. And I don’t buy Ross’s idea that the fundamental divide is between realists and idealists. I think the last six years have opened up a deeper and more interesting debate between neoconservatism and paleoconservatism in foreign affairs, between internationalism and isolationism.

In thinking about this, I think the best way to sum up my own evolving view is as follows: 9/11 was the best argument that the U.S. needs to remain engaged in the wider world. At the same time, the Iraq war has become the best argument that the U.S. shouldn’t actually become an empire, least of all in the Middle East…

It seems to me that occupying a Muslim failed state indefinitely and policing an internecine Muslim war at the same time is both anathema to the national interest and deeply counter-productive to the war against Islamist terror. Maybe if we’d done it right, gone in with real force, expeditiously handed over power to an exile government, kept but reformed the army, and poured reconstruction money effectively into the place, it might have worked. That was what I envisaged. But I fear now that even that would have failed. When you’re dealing with a culture like the Arab world, the levels of paranoia and misinformation and ressentiment are so high that any form of occupation is almost certainly going to be more trouble than it’s worth. When you’re dealing with a country with the deep sectarian divisions that Iraq has, and suffering from post-totalitarian stress, it might be impossible.

Reagan’s internationalism – very leery of troop engagement, supportive of democracy through proxies, maintaining a clear moral highground between the West and the enemy – seems to me a better balance. 9/11 definitely showed that we cannot withdraw; but Iraq has shown that the methods of our interventionism are just as important – and arguably more important – than the goal. I say this as a chastened neocon. I say it as a proud supporter of intervention in the Balkans under Clinton and in Kuwait under the first Bush. I say it as a passionate opponent of Islamist fundamentalist tyranny. I say it as someone who loathes al Qaeda and remembers 9/11 vividly in my bones. I have not forgotten that day. I want to defeat those bastards. But it is precisely because we need to defeat them that we need to think more clearly and frame the debate as carefully as we can. Let’s be honest: we are currently losing both the military and political battle in Iraq and the broader battle for the Muslim world. Under those circumstances, not re-thinking the dangers of imprudent intervention is folly. A foreign policy that does not incorporate the lessons of Iraq is reckless. I have the feeling that Bin Laden has trapped us. And Bush is making the trap get tighter and tighter. It is not defeatist to want to fight this war on our terms, not theirs. It is not defeatist to want to escape from the trap as swiftly and as cleanly as possible.

(Photo: David Furst/Getty.)

Smearing Paul

This dialogue between John Gbson and Michelle Malkin actually takes it as a premise that Ron Paul stated that Bush knew about 9/11 in advance. Here’s Gibson:

According to a recent Rasmussen Report poll, 35 percent of Democrats think President Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks beforehand. The so-called 9/11 Truth Movement has already infected people like Rosie O’Donnell and one in three Democrats, and many other people, Americans evidently, including Congressman Ron Paul.

How on earth did Gibson get that from the debate on his own cable channel? Here is Malkin:

I’m glad that this moment provided great TV for FOX News — it was a very instructive exchange — but Ron Paul really has no business being on stage as a legitimate representative of Republicans, because the 9/11 truth virus is something that infects only a very small proportion of people that would identify themselves as conservative or Republican. And as you say, John, this is far more prevalent, this strain of 9/11 truth virus, on the left, and in much of the mainstream of the Democratic Party as that Rasmussen poll showed.

Gibson and Malkin owe Paul an apology. They are knowingly smearing under the guise of journalism.

Betrayal

A reader has a literary insight into the current president and the creeping brutalism of the GOP:

On a long plane ride the other day I came upon a passage in James Bradley’s "Flyboys" that you may not have seen, and that touches on the history of torture, how abberant this is for us. It’s an account of the air war over Japan in World War Two, and about, among other things, the inhumanity of the Japanese captors towards American pilots. A downed pilot named Nielson remembers:

"I was given what they call the water cure. I was put on the floor with my arms and legs stretched out, one guard holding each limb. A towel was wrapped around my face and water was poured on. They poured water on this towel until I was was almost unconscious from strangulation, then they would let up until I’d get my breath, then they’d start all over again. I felt more or less like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death."

As Bradley points out, this torture had been used by Americans in the Phillipines, to general scandal and American outrage; there’s an account in Morris’s " Theodore Rex". When news of these tortures, along with the execution-murders of American prisoners, reached the U.S., the headline in the TIMES ran:

"TOKYO STANDS ALONE AS A CRUEL CAPTOR IN DEFIANCE OF GENEVA CONVENTION."

The hero of the book is, of course, one of the flyboys who ran these risks of torture and killing at the hands of a government that defied the Geneva Convention: George H. W. Bush.