After going through the Human Rights Watch Report for South America, I turned to the section about Abu Ghraib. The article is called The Twisted Logic of Torture. How enticing. I begin to read…

A warped and dangerous logic lies behind the Bush administration????????s refusal to reject coercive interrogation. Many American security officials seem to believe that coercive interrogation is necessary to protect Americans and their allies from a catastrophic terrorist attack. Torture and inhumane treatment may be wrong, they contend, but mass murder is worse, so the lesser evil must be tolerated to prevent the greater one. Yet, aware of how fundamental the prohibition of torture is to modern civilization, even proponents of a hard-line approach to counter-terrorism are reluctant to prescribe systematic torture. Instead, they purport to create a rare exception to the rule against torture by invoking the ???????ticking bomb??????? scenario, a situation in which interrogators are said to learn that a terrorist suspect in custody knows where a ticking bomb has been planted and must force that information from him to save lives.

This sounds more like an editorial in the New York Times than it does a factual report. But here is a great assumption made by the author:

Why not also use torture to prevent a terrorist attack tomorrow or next week or next year? And once the taboo against torture is broken, why stop with the alleged terrorists themselves? Why not also torture their families or associates????????anyone who might provide life-saving information? The slope is very slippery.

The slope isn’t slippery at all. In fact, I doubt it’s really even a slope. The Human Rights Watch definition of torture makes me think of a nerd getting stuffed into a locker. If that’s the case, then I commited many acts of torture when I was younger.

The funny thing about this article is that it mentions Israel more than it does Abu Ghraib. So then I run across this article called The Policies Behind Abu Ghraib. The Human Rights Watch cites that to prisoners are protected under the Convention’s policy against “Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.” It seems to me that the HRW is attempting to create a broad link between the degrading treatment and torture, as if they are the same thing. They claim that the Pentagon interprets the definition too narrowly, however.

The decision to interpret the prohibition of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment narrowly, to permit certain forms of coercive interrogation????????that is, certain efforts to ratchet up a suspect????????s pain, suffering, and humiliation to make him talk. Not surprisingly, those methods became more coercive as they ???????migrated,??????? in the words of two Pentagon inquiries, from the controlled setting of Guant????namo to the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Better to interpret what degrading treatment actually means than to think it means torture. And that’s what happened in Abu Ghraib: degrading treatment. That was, in no way, worse than the most rediculous hazing that occurs at frat party initiations. Should it have been done? No, and the ones responsible are being punished. Was it as bad as these people are making it out to be? Not one bit.

UPDATE: I just wanted to add one more thing. They use a lot of “reported” information and an “unidentified senior official.” Seems fishy. They also make a mention of the refusal to join the International Criminal Court, and cite it as “in part out of fear that it might compel the United States to prosecute U.S. personnel implicated in war crimes or other comparable offenses that the administration would prefer to ignore.”

Or maybe because it gives up U.S. sovereignty to persecute criminals of American citizenship. Same reason why we’re handing over British prisoners from Guantanamo to British authorities. But after those article, I don’t expect them to look at it from a reasonable point of view anyhow.

UPDATE 2: Lance in Iraq has some comments. I find myself agreeing.

UPDATE 3: The Diplomad has a very good post about the upfront anti-Americanism prevelant in the HRW report.