First off, I’ve been using Typepad’s online posting tool a bit more of late to get the automatic post to facebook. But that tool has eaten a post of mine twice in two days. Anyone know a good way to do auto-updates otherwise?
Now to business. First off, Saletan has a nice item explaining why using torture techniques as part of voluntary resistance training isn’t the same as torturing the enemy.
The difference between SERE and the Bush interrogation program is the difference between S&M and rape. There is no consent. There are no mutually understood boundaries. There are no magic words. People who can't tell the difference between rape and S&M go to jail. What happens to people who can't tell the difference between torture and training?
More here.
[Update: To avoid just attacking a strawman, here is Liz Cheney making the refuted argument.] Salatan also gives details on the protections of the SERE program, which was perverted to provide the basis of the our torture program.
But today he made a rather odd post:
If we expose the people who tortured terrorism detainees, whom will we go after next? The people who execute death-row prisoners?
The scenario makes sense. Executioners, like water-boarders, act under government orders. Executioners, unlike water-boarders, aim to kill. They do kill, by the dozens. And public support for the death penalty has been declining. It's not hard to envision a world in which we look back on capital punishment the way we now look back on torture.
Well, actually there’s two reasons that it is hard to envision such a world. First off, there’s a difference between acting under the legal guidance of executive branch lawyers and acting under legal guidance of the Supreme Court. Second, international law based prosecutions, which can go after behavior that was legal according to domestic courts, cover a relatively small range of issues and are codified in nigh-universally recognized treaties. This isn’t to say that victor’s justice doesn’t happen. The Japanese imperial forces committed many a war crime, but charging them for “crimes of aggression” rather than the specifics was a miscarriage.
Here’s the kicker, both executions and abortion, the two examples Saletan sites, have at times been banned and then reauthorized in parts of the U.S. If there’d be after the fact prosecutions, there’d be examples to point to.
[Update: The domestic law and international law points were meant to be separate. Either is sufficient to provide the basis for trial, but neither is present in this case. That said, Nic does raise the valid point that theoretically a U.S. executioner could be arrested in Mexico for killing one of the Mexican nationals that was denied embassy access. I think that situation is politically untenable, but it does represent an exception to what I was talking about. That said, the striking executioners were in Washington State, not Texas, so one would hope the trials were more in keeping with due process.]
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