Letters to the Editor
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@elephantman
You wrote: “By the way, John Yoo never recommended nor would have tolerated any torture of any soldiers from any nation.”
But the key point for me is that this was recommended against human beings (whether or not they are soldiers seem irrelevant to me). Over at the blog Humanity Against Crimes,
Ondolette wrote:
“Much of the material coming out now centers around 2002: In January, opinions were solicited from the OLC about whether or not the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment (CATCIDT) applied first to al Qaeda, and then to the Taliban. These opinions were available to President Bush in January, as the government sought to figure out what to do about prisoners captured in Afghanistan, and President Bush issued a pair of memos denying first al Qaeda, then the Taliban, both the protection of prisoners of war, and the protections of common Article 3.”
The key phrase to me is : “whether or not the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment (CATCIDT) applied first to al Qaeda, and then to the Taliban”
How disgusting that it would be even asked: the conventions should apply to anyone who is a human being, that should be the default position.
You call the actions in wwII that would have mimicked what nazis did “regrettable”. If we did indeed do things that mimicked them, they were not regrettable, they were horrors. The fire-bombing of Dresden comes to my mind immediately as a horror against humanity that should be spoken against.
It is because we are fighting, as you put it, “groups who maintain the explicit goal of the extermination of Jews and who utilize the most massive means of terrorism known in our age” that we should be even more careful to “find such fault with the governmnent of the United States as it fights those terrorists.” We must not let them make us become like them. That would be a true defeat. I would rather die than be like them. The worst thing of all would be to lose my humanity, to lose my soul.