"It doesn’t matter that our terrorist enemies are evil. It doesn’t matter what they do to their prisoners, in terms of beheading, or what have you. We don’t judge our behavior by the standards of barbarians. We judge it by our own standards, and, so far, it looks like we haven’t been doing as good a job as we should of living up to those standards. Pointing that out somehow makes me Andrew Sullivan. Well, that’s fine. I’d rather be Andrew Sullivan than a moral cripple. Some of you appear content to be the latter.
Now, you can bitch and moan that some lefty cartoonist makes the military look bad. But, if you’re honest, you have to acknowledge that if the military wasn’t, in fact, torturing and murdering any prisoners, the snide little cartoonist wouldn’t be able to draw his little cartoon. And, when our guys are torturing prisoners to death, then the cartoon, no matter how distasteful you find it, has some relevance, and, indeed, some truth. [...]
It is to our credit that CID is looking into this stuff, and pressing criminal charges. But something is causing entire units to mistreat prisoners, torture them, and kill them. And let’s not hide behind any of this “Well, if it’s needed to stop another 9/11...” crap. Clearly, in the cases cited so far, it wasn’t necessary. It was being done at places like Bagram because the interrogators made it regular practice. Why? How did it become regular practice? I guarantee it wasn’t because some Staff Sergeant exceeded his authority. And, while we’re on the subject, why was the CID’s initial work at Bagram so shoddy that CID headquarters had the investigation reassigned from local CID agents and given to a team in Virginia? Apparently, some of our guys feel perfectly comfortable engaging in barbarism. Since there are no bad troops, only bad leadership, I have to wonder how complicit the chain of command is, at least at the local level, at turning a blind eye to this stuff.
Murdering prisoners is wrong. Period. Torturing prisoners is wrong. Period. Those are, in fact, supposed to be the types of principles that separate us from the terrorists. But as far as I can tell, there seems to be some problem getting this message down through the whole chain of command. It doesn’t matter whether that’s by negligence, or by design, it has to stop. Even if you don’t care about the prisoners themselves, you have to at least acknowledge that torturing and killing prisoners creates a propaganda and moral defeat for our side. It’s unwise on purely utilitarian grounds, let alone moral ones.
Finally, it’s too bad if it offends you to read criticism of our soldiers here. But, after putting in 10 years on active duty as a trigger-puller myself, I’ve pretty much earned the right to make any criticisms I think are appropriate."
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