The Detainee Issue
I know what bugs me about the whole debate. It's the same thing that bugs me about the entire political landscape today.
Of course the Republicans want a bill that gives too much power to the executive to prosecute the war on terror by denying good treatment to detainees. Of course they want it because it will make the war on terror easier to prosecute and easier to win.
And so of course they introduce legislation granting such power. The democrats and concerned Republicans, react. First, they wait to see what others think, and see how it will impact their reelection campaigns, and then they decide to take the moral high road, proclaiming terrorist detainees deserve habeas corpus and fair treatment.
Okay. So the debate is completely stuck. The bill tries to enumerate how the Geneva Convetions will be intrepreted and states that the executive intreprets Geneva. The democrats oppose this because they don't trust Bush and believe he is willing to torture detainees and not call it torture.
So me, as a citizen is stuck between two parties:
1. The Republicans who've become the party of big government, willing to grant all sorts of absurd power to themselves in order to help then run a clunky war on terror.
2. The Democrats who don't seem to have an original idea in their head about how to fight the war on terror, nor, sadly, do they seem particularly concerned with winning, but are willling to make bold statements about the abuse of executive power.
4 comments:
Are you actually following the torture debate? This post is so misrepresentative of the actual stakes at hand I don't know where to start. It's like you are taking your initial conviction, which you've harbored for a long time now without any revision, that Republicans may not fight in the right way but at least they fight, and Democrats may be moral but they are afraid to fight, and then you fix your views of the torture issue around these pre-established views.
Do you read Andrew Sullivan's blog? How can you ignore the nuanced perspectives he and his readers bring up, instead taking this very profound moral and strategic issue and boiling down to some cheap political analysis.
I know I'm being a bit of a jerk, but I'm so fucking pissed off tonight that this torture bill went through.
i haven't been following the torture debate that closely. but i've listened to some of the issues. and yeah, i have some convictions i still harbor because i don't have evidence to revise them.
i've said it a hundred times, i don't believe we should torture people.
but at the same time, there is an interesting moral question to be asked that if there are a select few of high value targets with specific training to avoid giving up information that is needed to prevent future attacks, should we be able to torture, or use more extreme interrogation methods, etc?
it's murky. in the case of al queda, i suspect we probably don't need to do this. however, with a greater and more powerful foe (which al queda could grow into in the future), i could see it being necessary and the morally correct thing to do.
further, i don't see what's so nuanced about sullivan's position, which is basically showing shock value pictures and screaming at the top of his lungs. sorry if it makes me yawn after awhile.
If you think Sulliivan's comments on torture amount to him screaming at the top of his lungs, you simply have not been reading his actual posts. I'm not going to take the trouble to link to all the diverse angles he has explored on the subject, but if you read his blog, he has dismantled even his most worthy foes, like Charles Krauthammer.
And frankly, the fact that someone as interested in this war on terror as yourself is willing to get fogged over by the subject, to the point that you don't read his thoughtful posts but just look at the pictures and "yawn"...I don't know what I can say to that.
How can you trot out the conviction that torture does get good infomation? Apparently, torture didn't get good information from George Washington through to 2001, but now George Bush knows how to get good information?
Go to comment 27 of this post if you want my full exploration of all the angles of the torture issue, as well as to see me hash it out with some rabid conservatives:
http://www.texasrainmaker.com/2006/09/18/do-noogies-violate-the-geneva-convention/
Post a Comment