Torture and War Crimes

Contributors to Andrew Sullivan's blog The Daily Dish have been debating the torture issue for a few days. One reader wrote in to differentiate the bombing of Dresden in WWII and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from torture and torture camps used by the U.S. as it prosecutes the "War on Terror." He saw the former as acts necessary to inflict the kinds of damage that would end the wars quickly and permanently deter future wars. They seem to have worked, don't you think?

However, torture is used to humiliate and dehumanize the enemy as much as it is to obtain information (dubious, that).

It's funny how the dehumanization works both ways, though. The reader related a time when he was sharing his feelings about the war in Afghanistan in his Quaker religious service. Money quote:

I called the men we were fighting "animals, who deserved to be treated like animals." This is the mentality that not only justifies torture but makes it appealing: to reduce your enemies to pathetic creatures; to at once demonstrate your superiority and to make someone--anyone will do--the vessel for your own pain and your own humiliation. It's a psychological form of warfare all the way down, and it dehumanizes all parties.

To me this is the essential ingredient needed to make torture OK. To view the enemy as human makes it impossible to torture them for whatever reason. Once it's become OK to call them "animals," "thugs," "savages," "Muslim scum" or "pieces of Iraqi shit," it becomes much easier to inflict the kinds of pain and suffering on them that one would reserve only for one's most gruesome yet exclusively interior fantasies. Like the guy who nearly ran me off the 110 freeway this morning. I wanted to string him up by his lead foot from an overpass, about 15 feet off the ground, while cars zoomed under him at 70 mph. Now, knowing that he's a human being who might have been in a big hurry for a very important reason -- plus the fact that I just couldn't catch the guy -- would obviate any attempt on my part to act on my scenario. But, with might, will, and a mind-set that reduces the enemy to sub-human status, anything is possible. It's what made slavery possible, what let the Holocaust happen, and what caused senior high-ranking officials in the Bush Administration -- including the president and vice president themselves -- to blame a few "low level renegades" in the military for being "bad apples" and committing atrocities at Abu Ghraib.