Rumsfeld
I guess the best reason to think Rumsfeld should be fired is that he has deliberately established and maintained the policy of denying captured "combatants" any formal rights at all.
(See Matthew Yglesias, with lots of links).
At Guantanamo, that includes some U.S. citizens, and people who are finally being released once their innocence is clear. At Abu Ghraib, General Taguba has indicated in his official report that prisoners are much less likely to be guilty of any crime than is the case at Gitmo. Yet the absolute denial of rights has been the same.
(See the scientist who has been held in solitary for a year. (Via Atrios). He was the first senior Iraqi to turn himself in to the Americans. He simply told them he was pretty sure Saddam's WMDs had been destroyed years earlier. Bye, pal. No hearing, no nothing.)
If only because of this policy, it is understandable that prison guards might believe they have official support for torturing prisoners. Of course, we are waiting to find out more about whether officers in military intelligence gave orders, literally or virtually, that this would happen.
In Thucydides, the Athenians offer several defences of their empire. At one point they admit openly that they conquer other cities, without any real pretext, whenever they wish to do so and find it to their advantage. In this they claim they are no different from anyone else. (The Spartans, who appear not to be imperialistic at all, are simply more fearful of risk--and they have a kind of empire over slaves at home). The Athenians go on to say, however, that they are uniquely noble, and even just, among empires in that they grant their disappointed "allies," or subjects, some kind of legal proceeding to air their grievances. In other words, given that they have an empire, which they admit is no more just in itself than any other, the Athenians practice a kind of remarkable and scrupulous justice on secondary or smaller matters.
The U.S. seems to be something like the reverse right now. So confident are they of the justice of their cause as a whole (that it is so different from, even opposed to, imperialism), that they feel justified in running roughshod over the legal niceties.
There is a kind of Spartan thinking in the Americans. They see themselves as slow to use force internationally, and doing so only when provoked. As the other side of the same coin, when they are aroused they feel justified in being very tough, spurning negotiations, rejecting strategic thinking as a sign of weakness, etc. After all they are in the right--so they don't want to give any ground to the evildoers. Not only that, but they've taken a lot of crap over the years (now that they think of it), and it's pay-back time. In the jargon of our age, I guess this might be passive-aggressive behaviour.
Rumsfeld and Ashcroft don't seem to believe in the rule of law for all. They think good people like themselves should enjoy the greatest freedom anyone has ever enjoyed; but bad people can be treated practically like garbage. The procedure for identifying bad people, of course, may itself not be very scrupulous.
UPDATE: An actual example of the Spartan approach to "detainees" who are not (officially) "prisoners of war."
Alcidas, a Spartan admiral, has decided that he wished to "find himself back in Peloponnese [i.e. home] as soon as possible."
"Accordingly he put out from Embatum and proceeded along shore; and touching at the Teian town, Myonnesus, there butchered most of the prisoners that he had taken on his passage. Upon his coming to anchor at Ephesus, envoys came to him from the Samians at Anaia, and told him that he was not going the right way to free Hellas in massacring men who had never raised a hand against him, and who were not enemies of his, but allies of Athens against their will, and that if he did not stop he would turn many more friends into enemies than enemies into friends. Alcidas agreed to this, and let go all the Chians still in his hands and some of the others that he had taken; the inhabitants, instead of flying at the sight of his vessels, rather coming up to them, taking them for Athenian, having no sort of expectation that while the Athenians commanded the sea Peloponnesian ships would venture over to Ionia."
Thucydides Book III, ss. 31-32 (the smaller section numbers are not included here).
|
