Holte's corner

Living solutions and dead ones

Well at least I'm not alone. I was looking at the Washington Post, and there is a quite public dustup going on between Charles Krauthammer and Dan Froomkin in which Krauthammer with characteristic obtuseness refers to Froomkin as "occasionally stupid". To his credit Froomkin just keeps doing his old fashioned job of reporting facts. Krauthammer is trying to make the "ticking bomb" case for torture as if the fact that torture is illegal, immoral and not guaranteed to get good information doesn't matter. He uses an Israeli horror story where the IDF violated their own laws in a hurry to free one of their own people, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman. Krauthammer uses this to argue the efficacy of the ticking bomb scenario. The trouble is that Nachson Waxman died.

Krauthammer is slamming Froomkin, but to do it he has to stretch the truth to the breaking point.

I hope the personal nature of these responses will lead Mr. Froomkin to hold on like a bull Terrier in a dogfight. It's not a matter of anger, but of principle. The trouble with Rabin and Krauthammer, is that while the prisoner may have given up the location, he probably knew full well that:

"The order was, 'If there's any movement around the house, your first step is to kill the soldier. ... Don't think about your life. Your first step is to kill the soldier,'" said Imad Falouji, who was one of the Hamas leaders negotiating in secret with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. "From then on, one man stood by the soldier 24 hours."

"When Israel located Waxman, its commandos stormed the safe house in the West Bank and began blasting the reinforced doors that stood between him and them. By the time they reached the second-floor room where the Israeli-American was tied to a chair, he had a bullet hole in his neck and one in his chest. He was dead."

Torturing the prisoner didn't yield up a live Nachshon, it only was part of a hard-power deal that guaranteed his death. The Arabs neither gave nor expected quarter. And the Israelis seem to have adopted the same attitude.

The solution might seem to be an exchange of prisoners, both sides would prefer live young men to dead ones, but the reality is that once one goes down the course of brutality one might be able to yield up bodies, but not living solutions. There are Arabs who'd be amenable to that, and most Israelis would prefer to get their boys home. At one time they'd exchange 50 arabs for one Israeli. But that just led to Arabs kidnapping Israelis just to get their boys out of jail. The nastiness is ugly, but torturing prisoners doesn't help Israel make its case.

Newsday article
Krauthammer's article:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/14/AR2009051403601.html

The ticking bomb scenario makes sense in 24, sort of. But the truth is that there is no justification for torture. If it were justifiable, Nachson could speak for himself. As it is we are finding out that the administration wasn't even after facts anyway. Wilkinson testified today:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/white-house-watch/cheneys-motives.html?wprss=white-house-watch

Froomkin writes and quotes Wilkerson:

""[W]hat I have learned," Wilkerson writes, "is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida."

"So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee 'was compliant' (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, 'revealed' such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop."

"There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just 'committed suicide' in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi....)"

So, what's with these people defending unamerican tactics that bear ugly and destructive fruit? Who do they think they are defending? Certainly torturing prisoners doesn't improve Israel's security or ours.

Chris