Yes, and the state Germany was left in after WWI is a big reason the Nazi party had the ’success’ it did.

And David, I agree - when does a soldier become a gurrellia? When does a gurrellia become a terrorist? It often feels like our goal, as a country, is “how can we be as nasty as possible to those who aren’t 100% red-blooded Americans?” rather than “how can we work our way around to living in a reasonable amount of peace with as much of the world as possible?”

(I’ve been a fan of Wait, Wait since it aired, and finally got around to checking out this blog. Velly interesting!)

Perhaps this is one of the problems with espionage, this notion that CIA agents aren’t also soldiers for their country. Most troubling about the history of CIA operations is that they have been conducted without any regard for basic human morality or decency, the end totally justifying the means, and the end being too often overarching US business interests.

If spies really were just spies, not also agents of cold-blooded clandestine warfare, they could actually be treated quite humanely when captured, if not simply be killed in a confrontation, just like any other soldiers in warfare.

I would also add that I think terrorists are just soldiers, too, only at times gruesomely misguided agents of death and destruction. But all war is gruesome infliction of death and destruction. I am becoming less and less enamored of the fine points we try to apply to this whole cluster of inhumane human enterprises, although I do understand that a violent aggressor must be stopped. But if the ultimate goal isn’t ending all this insane carnage, as clearly it isn’t for this administration, then we are just staggering in ever more dangerous circles.

I still don’t think we should be redefining the Geneva convention for our own private use, for all the reasons stated above. The protection for our soldiers, and the maintenance of our own moral position, is still worth doing. But it’s a little clearer why the CIA is taking the position it is.

You suggest that if capital punishment is ok, then maybe torture is also ok. I agree that it may be hard to justify one and not the other, but I actually don’t think that capital punishment is ethically jutified, and so I think it should also be banned. Isn’t America still the only fully industrialized nation that allows capital punishment? It has always struck me as deeply hypocritical when people decry such things as torture yet still maintain that the death penalty is ok.

It would appear that you may have answered your own question. Perhaps our moral standards for dealing with these “historically new cases” should be the same as it is for the worst of the worst of our own U.S. society.

Very few would refute that Timothy McVeigh or unibomber Ted Kazinsky were/are wacked-out extemists, or that Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahlmer were/are monstrous blights in our society, but we did follow the letter of the U.S. law in apprehending, trying, and prosecuting these criminals. And we did so without resorting to either physical or psychological torture (and yes I am aware that Dahlmer died a grisly painful death - at the hands of another criminal).

If we show that level of morallity when dealing with our own societal monsters, why would we want to use a different standard for non U.S. criminals?

We debase ourselves by using tactics that we claim to abhore when those same tactics or worse are used by others.

Our moral standards, say it is permissible to kill by any nasty means necessary in some cases. In many states, it doesn’t even have to be self-defense, witness capital punishment of criminals already safely under lock and key.

Now if that is permissible, I’m not sure it is a great leap to non-lethal waterboarding or hog-tying or psychological pressurization where there is a reasonable expectation that someone picked up on the battlefield is witholding life-saving information, and he’s out of uniform with a rifle in his hand. I’m pretty sure that given the choice of being smacked around or terminated, I would choose the former, especially if I could end it by cooperating.

Whether or not to change or “clarify” the law is another question. Current law has served fairly well. In a true emergency, I’m inclined to force the self-appointed judges of necessity to violate the law if they feel so strongly about it. Then if they appear to have gone over the line and done something unnecessarily cruel, they can always be prosecuted and tried, or in the case of the President, he can at least be impeached.

The numer one purpose of the government, and therefor of the Constitution, is to defend us Americans, not everyone who comes along. If it fails to do that where it can, that’s not right.

And if that isn’t at all convincing, then the fact that torture is widely agreed to yield (at best) unreliable information undermines any other possible justification that Cheney or anyone else may have. For example, there is good reason to believe that bad info gained via torture was used to push us into Iraq under false pretenses.