Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Via Josh Claybourn, I find a link to this column by two retired generals condemning the use of torture by the US military and intelligence services. As Josh notes, in the last Republican candidates "debate", when asked about the use of torture two of the three leading candidates essentially endorsed it. The third was John McCain, who knows a thing or two about torture and made an impassioned statement against it:
"When I was in Vietnam, one of the things that sustained us, as we went - underwent torture ourselves - is the knowledge that if we had our positions reversed and we were the captors, we would not impose that kind of treatment on them."
This is one area where McCain still has his credibility, particularly moral credibility, having undergone almost 6 years of brutal torture himself (his left arm that so famously doesn't work properly is the result of having his shoulder broken multiple times by the Vietcong). But as Josh notes, Giuliani and Romney went in the other direction:
When moderator Chris Wallace asked Rudy Giuliani if he would support the use of waterboarding, an interrogation tactic that makes detainees believe they are drowning, Giuliani glibly replied, "Whatever they can think of." The other leading Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, said he supported the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" with the approval of the president. "Enhanced interrogation techniques" is a term of art that refers to doing as much as possible while still falling outside the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners of war. And in typical Romney fashion he upped the ante with Giuliani, saying "We ought to double Guantanamo." Go get 'em Romney.
That makes the timing of the generals' column perfect. it was written by Charles Krulak, former commandant of the Marine Corps, and Joseph Hoar, former head of the US Central Command in the Middle East. It is a powerful and eloquent statement not only against the morality of torture, but against its utility as well. The two generals argue that torture actually helps the enemy and undermines our ability to fight the war. An even larger group of retired generals said the same thing in a letter to the Senate in 2005.
Comments
Goodness knows I spend enough time harshing on Republicans in general, and this Administration in particular, over their gross violations of fundamental human decency and the principles that made our country great. But I have to give General Petraeus credit for responding to a recent military poll that showed grave slippage in the morality of our armed forces in the midst of conflict. He wrote a letter at the beginning of May condemning such practices as torture, and even though it looks Rove & Company stepped in to tone down the rhetoric in one line, overall it's a great statement for which I salute him.
Between Petraeus and Gates, there's hope yet that the adults are going to salvage some shred of American decency out of this Iraq debacle, or at least halt the spread of the contagion within our military. Torture's corrosive, it appalls me that we now engage in the very behaviors that we condemned our enemies for over the last two centuries.
Posted by: Jeff Hebert | May 22, 2007 11:17 AM
The other point to make is that this is barely a military conflict at all, in many ways. Look at how quickly the US and the UK won the military battle and yet they still look very much like 'losing the war', if that phrase even has any meaning.
This isn't really about military victory, as this has already been shown to be a pretty empty phrase, it is about hearts and minds. Does anyone really think that torture is going to win anyone over to anything? No, even the torture advocates don't say such crazy things.
But they do think that this is still a military war to be approached on military terms which, in the face of the fiasco that has been created, seems like a completely erroneous position.
Posted by: Matthew Young | May 22, 2007 11:23 AM
Yes, well, all the Bush administration has is a hammer, and all they see are nails...
Posted by: gwangung | May 22, 2007 11:39 AM
That position on torture is simply shameful. It's hard to believe that any American would support it (and yet, they do).
Posted by: Phobos | May 22, 2007 1:27 PM
hmmm... let me guess about how much actual military experience Romney and Giuliani have...
Posted by: SharonB | May 22, 2007 5:10 PM
I'm encouraged to hear Charles Krulak speaking out. He is one of the few generals to emerge with credit from Vietnam (see Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shinnig Lie"). Krulak went as far as to wangle a personal interview with LBJ to convince him the US was pursuing the wrong strategy. He failed. Will they listen now?
Posted by: toby | May 22, 2007 5:51 PM
Let's not overstate McCain's credibility on this issue.
I mean, great, he didn't say "yay torture!" when Giuliani and Romney did. But I don't remember when in his Senate career he's ever made a real effort to get the Bush administration to quit torturing people, let alone to hold the torturers accountable.
Besides, when the president has been fudging the definition of torture for years, saying that some tactics are not torture when we would certainly consider them torture if the KGB did them (long time standing, isolation), then the problem becomes that we don't even know what it means when a Republican claims to be against torture. Is he genuinely against torture, or is he just against the forms of torture that Americans (apparently) don't perpetrate?
Posted by: Tom | May 23, 2007 1:10 AM