Friday, September 22, 2006
Our Miss Brooks on Torture
Rosa Brooks, law professor at, I'm sorry to say, the University of Virginia, columnist at the incredible shrinking LA Times, and apparent total wash-out as a regular guest lefty on the Hugh Hewitt radio show, writes emotionally, irrationally and unconvincingly about what I believe is the Democrat position on torture.
Consider this fair and dispassionate argument (interspersed with my comments in color):
If in doubt, take any of the "alternative" methods that Bush wants to use on U.S. detainees and imagine someone using those methods on your son or daughter. Yeah, the imagine it applied to your children argument--well renowned for inducing clear, unemotional and logical thinking. If the bad guys captured your son and tossed him, naked, into a cell kept at a temperature just slightly higher than an average refrigerator, then repeatedly doused him with ice water to induce hypothermia, would that be OK? It would be much better he suffer that and live than receive the usual treatment from our savage Jihadist enemies--that is, cutting off important body parts including the head. What if they shackled him to a wall for days so he couldn't sit or lie down without hanging his whole body weight on his arms? Better than cutting off his arms. What if they threatened to rape and kill his wife, Better than actually raping and killing his wife or pretended they were burying him alive? Pretend, like in a play or Kill Bill v. 2? What if they did all these things by turns? Would you have any problem deciding that these methods are cruel? No problem deciding they are cruel and if applied merely for the enjoyment of the captors, criminal and wrong, but if applied to obtain information, I have no problem declaring them not torture.
She also ventures into outright falsehood:
That's what the president is so worried about. He knows, too well, that the practices he authorized or ordered violate Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. The recent Supreme Court decision in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld made that explicit, but the court's holding shouldn't have come as a surprise. It only confirmed what most legal scholars (and military lawyers) have been telling the White House for years.
Most legal scholars? Well, maybe the dumb ones. The protections of the Geneva Convention clearly do not apply to illegal combatants who do not wear uniforms and who routinely violate all rules of warfare especially the prohibition against targeting civilians. I think even Professor Brooks could see that. The Supreme Court applied Common Article 3 to the Jihadists by ignoring the context of that section (applying only to Civil Wars) and declaring, totally without any reasoned support, (indeed falsely) that the war declared on and waged against America by the the Saudi leader of an international NGO, al Qaeda, headquartered in Afghanistan is not international in nature. If anyone had said, before the surprising and poorly reasoned section of Hamdan was published, that CA 3 applied to international terrorists, I would have called him or her a fool and few, if any, legal scholars and military lawyers were so arguing. If you know of one, list the name, Rosa. I personally think you're just making that part up.
(h/t Laer)
UPDATE: Professor Brooks is at Georgetown now not UVA but she's on leave I think to write a book. My mistake.
Consider this fair and dispassionate argument (interspersed with my comments in color):
If in doubt, take any of the "alternative" methods that Bush wants to use on U.S. detainees and imagine someone using those methods on your son or daughter. Yeah, the imagine it applied to your children argument--well renowned for inducing clear, unemotional and logical thinking. If the bad guys captured your son and tossed him, naked, into a cell kept at a temperature just slightly higher than an average refrigerator, then repeatedly doused him with ice water to induce hypothermia, would that be OK? It would be much better he suffer that and live than receive the usual treatment from our savage Jihadist enemies--that is, cutting off important body parts including the head. What if they shackled him to a wall for days so he couldn't sit or lie down without hanging his whole body weight on his arms? Better than cutting off his arms. What if they threatened to rape and kill his wife, Better than actually raping and killing his wife or pretended they were burying him alive? Pretend, like in a play or Kill Bill v. 2? What if they did all these things by turns? Would you have any problem deciding that these methods are cruel? No problem deciding they are cruel and if applied merely for the enjoyment of the captors, criminal and wrong, but if applied to obtain information, I have no problem declaring them not torture.
She also ventures into outright falsehood:
That's what the president is so worried about. He knows, too well, that the practices he authorized or ordered violate Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. The recent Supreme Court decision in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld made that explicit, but the court's holding shouldn't have come as a surprise. It only confirmed what most legal scholars (and military lawyers) have been telling the White House for years.
Most legal scholars? Well, maybe the dumb ones. The protections of the Geneva Convention clearly do not apply to illegal combatants who do not wear uniforms and who routinely violate all rules of warfare especially the prohibition against targeting civilians. I think even Professor Brooks could see that. The Supreme Court applied Common Article 3 to the Jihadists by ignoring the context of that section (applying only to Civil Wars) and declaring, totally without any reasoned support, (indeed falsely) that the war declared on and waged against America by the the Saudi leader of an international NGO, al Qaeda, headquartered in Afghanistan is not international in nature. If anyone had said, before the surprising and poorly reasoned section of Hamdan was published, that CA 3 applied to international terrorists, I would have called him or her a fool and few, if any, legal scholars and military lawyers were so arguing. If you know of one, list the name, Rosa. I personally think you're just making that part up.
(h/t Laer)
UPDATE: Professor Brooks is at Georgetown now not UVA but she's on leave I think to write a book. My mistake.
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 10:32 PM 
