SubscribeCruelty harms our nation's legal, foreign policy, and national security interests. I can't put it any plainer than that. Domestically, cruelty is contrary to and damages our values and legal system, including our constitutional order. Internationally, the effects and consequences of cruelty are contrary to our long-term strategic foreign policy interests, including many of the principal institutions, alliances, and rules that we have nurtured and fought for over years, and even decades.In addition, arguments that torturing al-Qaeda prisoners provided valuable information without a great deal of cruelty have been shown to be largely bogus. For example, see this Newsweek article on the initial interrogation of Abu Zubaydah by FBI agents: with traditional rapport building, rather than torture, he identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in "a couple of days". Subsequently he was waterboarded by the CIA 83 times.
From the national security standpoint, the use of cruelty has been demonstrably counterproductive to the effort to wage the war on terror successfully. Cruelty has made us weaker, not stronger. It has blunted our moral authority, sabotaged our ability to build and maintain the broad alliances needed to prosecute the war effectively, and imposed a political penalty on those leaders, such as Tony Blair and José María Aznar, who would stand with us in this war. By compromising those ideals we fight for, cruelty has handicapped our ability to compete successfully in the struggle for those hearts and minds of foreign individuals whose support we need, and need to have, in order to shorten this war, limit its costs, and prevail. ...
Our use of the term "war" should not confuse us into thinking that this conflict will be won primarily by military means. The geographic dispersion of our enemies, the difficulty in locating them, and the underlying ideological nature of our adversaries' actions—all point to a conflict in which our military actions must necessarily be subordinated to our political strategy.
This political strategy should be geared to building and maintaining large, unified alliances capable of cooperating across this spectrum of conflict. We will not be able to build this alliance unless we are able to articulate a set of consistent political objectives, and prosecute the war using methods consistent with these objectives. ...
Almost every European politician who sought to ally himself and his country with the United States in the war on terror incurred a political penalty—or experienced political difficulties, as Blair and Aznar demonstrated—as a result of that allegiance. And, because cruel treatment of prisoners constituted a criminal act in every European jurisdiction, there must be few European government officials, including military intelligence or police officials, who do not ask themselves at some point whether cooperating with the United States in the war on terror might not make them accomplices or abettors in criminal activity or expose them to civil liability.
All of these factors contributed to the difficulties our nation has experienced in forging the strongest possible alliance in this war. Because this is so, we consequently weakened our defenses. Whatever intelligence we obtain through the use of harsh interrogation tactics, on the whole these policies and practices greatly damaged our overall effectiveness and impaired our military intelligence capabilities in the war on terror.
The official program of the war party was a fight to the last ditch by the entire Japanese nation, and then a fight in the last ditch with bamboo spears if need be. There are indications, to be sure, that War Minister Anami understood the need for peace. The principal indication was, quite simply, that he refrained from resigning and thereby bringing down the whole Suzuki Cabinet. But his minimum program was to satisfy the national honor with a gigantic final bloodbath, which would also force the US to accept retention of something resembling Japan's prewar political system when the time came to talk peace. The dimensions of the proposed slaughter can be judged from the forces that were being mustered to resist an American landing: 2,350,000 soldiers of the regular army backed up by 250,000 garrison troops; the entire remnants of the navy and all the airplanes in Japan, including training planes and numbering about seven thousand; 4 million civilian employees of the two services; and the whole civilian militia of 28 million men, women, and boys.Alsop also notes that even after the emperor's decision to surrender, a number of militaristic army officers attempted a coup. Fortunately it failed.
,,, the opponents of surrender were still determined to circumvent and reverse the emperor's commands. What followed immediately in Tokyo was therefore an immense amount of argument, and much peril. The argument went on for several days, at several levels and in several places, the chief places being the still-divided Cabinet and the war ministry, which was all-important because it might again become all-powerful. It was fortunate that President Truman's reply to the Japanese government message came in promptly, for both Prime Minister Suzuki and Navy Minister Yonai were committed to join the war party if the proviso preserving the imperial throne should not be agreed to. Thus the whole machine would have gone into reverse if this agreement had not been forthcoming.This was all happening after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The same reversal would have happened, too, if War Minister Anami and the two chiefs of staff had got their way in the Cabinet arguments. At the war ministry, moreover, as well as at the main air force base at Atsugi, and in certain factions of the navy, plans were already in the making among hot-headed officers for a coup d'état that would drive the "traitorous" advisers from the sacred presence of the emperor.
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I think it's debatable if Nuking Japan was really necessary. I think Japan had actually been willing to come to a negotiated surrender, but not the unconditional surrender the U.S. demanded.
On the other hand, we were still at war with japan, and bombing/nuking in a way that creates a lot of collateral damage isn't the same as torturing someone who has no way to fight back.
Finally, I love the fact that the guy from the "Foundation for defense of democracy" thinks the government should be able to indefinitely detain without charges and torture it's own citizens. It's not technically undemocratic, since democracy at it's most base is simply the dictatorship of the mob, but generally we associate modern democracy with other enlightenment values that were contemporary with it's emergence.
posted by delmoi at 1:23 AM on May 1 [3 favorites has favorites]