Andrew Sullivan on Torture

Andrew Sullivan offers some scary thoughts about Gonzalez.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not paticularly worried about the rights of actual terrorists. If someone is involved in trying to collapse a building in America, I don't particularly mind if they get tortured - in fact, I wouldn't have objections to torturing some of the serial killers I've seen on Law & Order.

The problem is the risk that we will wind up torturing innocent people.

Moreover, I am seriously concerned about how laxity in our commitment to avoid torturing will affect our treatment of Iraqis:
For one thing, I don't see Iraqi insurgents as necessarily being equivalent to terrorists. Some of them are, but some are simply fighting to get control of their country (whatever that means in a particular case, perhaps it just means from their city) back from the US. The normal neocon response is that that's what we want; to give control back to the Iraqis. However, this ignores the fact that we want to give them a government under our terms; if we leave with a puppet government installed, that doesn't make them truly independent.

Obviously, some of the insurgnets use inexcusable tactics. Blowing up a bus full of children (presumably to force the coalition troops to do more active patrolling -as opposed to staying at base - so that they will be easier targets) is undoubtedly a terrorist act. But attacking US soldiers in Fallujah is, in my opinion, a legitimate act of war (which is not to say that we don't have the right to fire back - Col. West scaring the Iraqi by firing the gun near his ear and the guy that shot the wounded Iraqi in Fallujah do not appear to me to have done anything untoward).
In any case, insurgents as a whole should not be considered a class of people it is okay to torture.

Also, there is the concenr that we don't screen our captives enough to see who is an insurgent (another point brought up by Mr. Sullivan). As I understand it, a lot of the people in Abu Ghraib are simply curfew-breakers and the like. Whether the people who were mistreated by Graner & Co. were representative of the inmates at Abu Ghraib or were only (or disporportionately) the really bad dudes, I don't know.

But the possibility that we could be torturing mere curfew-breakers is extremely disturbing. If this is the case, and if it turns out to be more than a few isolated inidents, then it either indicates a breakdown in discipline, a total inability to distinguish the most dangerous criminals from the benign ones, or, as Justin Raimondo has averred, the intent to terrorize Iraq into submission.

In any case, given current failings, I think that we should be suspicious of winking at torture for any reason, not because I am worried about the rights of terrorists, but because I am afraid of where it might lead.

That is all.