Wipe the Spittle From Your Face, Frances

In an editorial in today's Washington Post, Eugene Robinson has a charateristic hissyfit in the typical liberal style, i.e., long on hysteria, accusation and emotional appeal, and woefully lacking in intelligence, coherence, or logic.

He shrieks:

I wish I could turn to cheerier matters, but I just can't get past this torture issue -- the fact that George W. Bush, the president of the United States of America, persists in demanding that Congress give him the right to torture anyone he considers a "high-value" terrorist suspect. The president of the United States. Interrogation by torture. This just can't be happening.

Mr Robinson begins with quite the stemwinder, but like many liberal arguments, it is based upon hysteria and half-truths, not fact.

What the President asked for is a legal clarification of Article Three of the Geneva Convention, which states:

In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:

1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.

   To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:

   1. Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

   2. Taking of hostages;

   3. Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;

   4. The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
   
   
2. The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.
   

An impartial humanitarian body, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, may offer its services to the Parties to the conflict.

The Parties to the conflict should further endeavour to bring into force, by means of special agreements, all or part of the other provisions of the present Convention.

The application of the preceding provisions shall not affect the legal status of the Parties to the conflict.

Much of Article Three is readily defined, but certain parts of Article Three are legally murky, with no clear legal definition of what constitutes "Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment" nor of what constitutes "cruel treatment and torture."

President Bush as asked Congress to pass a federal law legally defining the requirements of the United States as they relate to the Geneva Convention, a goal deemed "helpful" by the Judge Advocate Generals of the U.S. Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, and Navy in a signed letter to Sen. John Warner And Rep. Duncan Hunter six days ago.

Major General Scott Black, U.S. Army, Judge Advocate General, when questioned about the subject by Sen. Diane Feinstein, stated of Article Three's prohibition on "Outrages upon personal dignity," stated:

"In its current formulation, it's entirely too vague, and it puts - as you mentioned before - our service members at risk, our own service members at risk."

For Robinson and other dishonest ideologues, providing a legal operating framework for our military and intelligence communities to operate under—instead of the legally dubious gray area that has existed since 1929—would strip away the ability of critics to shrilly proclaim "torture" whenever the notion suits them.

Clearly defining what kind of interrogation procedures are legal, and deciding what behaviors are clearly illegal, will protect our men in women in uniform. Robinson's main complaint seems to be that legal definitions will strip him of his assumed right to excessive hyperbole.

He drones on:

It's past time to stop mincing words. The Decider, or maybe we should now call him the Inquisitor, sticks to anodyne euphemisms. He speaks of "alternative" questioning techniques, and his umbrella term for the whole shop of horrors is "the program." Of course, he won't fully detail the methods that were used in the secret CIA prisons -- and who knows where else? -- but various sources have said they have included not just the infamous "waterboarding," which the administration apparently will reluctantly forswear, but also sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, bombardment with ear-splitting noise and other assaults that cause not just mental duress but physical agony. That is torture, and to call it anything else is a lie.

Mincing words have never been a problem for Robinson, and his proclivity for shredded logic and reason are second to none.

Robinson seems infuriated that the military and intelligence services of the United States will not provide him with a detailed list of interrogation techniques for him to quickly spill into ink, thus rendering the methods less effective. What evils he suspects from a military he clearly detests he cannot say, and it angers him, as does the a list of uncomfortable and annoying but hardly horrific inducements that he calls torture, but many of us experienced to some degree in college, often of our own free will.

Sleep deprivation is a fact of life during final exams. You can't turn on a college or professional football game without an obligatory crowd shot of nimrods in the stands, shirtless, in freezing weather for three hours at a clip. Bombardments of ear-splitting noise describe every dance club or rock concert to which I've ever gone. People willingly pay good money to have variations of these same experiences. To equate these discomforting but minor annoyances to anything resembling legitimate "torture" is the lie, a lie that Mr. Robinson is spreading with very little thought or reason.

Blathering forward, and making progressively less sense, Robinson continues:

It is not possible for our elected representatives to hold any sort of honorable "debate" over torture. Bush says he is waging a "struggle for civilization," but civilized nations do not debate slavery or genocide, and they don't debate torture, either. This spectacle insults and dishonors every American.

I never thought I'd have remind an African-American of this fact, but Mr. Robinson, you are "free at last" because of those very kinds of debates. Civilized nations do debate slavery and genocide, and past sessions of Congress have had to argue against both in this nation.

Creating federal laws--defining the legal and the illegal--are the very essence and purpose of the House and Senate. It is a shame that Mr. Robinson can't seem to grasp that this debate over creating standards to comply with Article Three is a bit of legislation that Congress should have debated and passed 77 years ago.

Robinson's editorial goes on, but to continue to fisk such poor thinking is pointless. His logic is—after all—tortured.