“I don’t think it will be offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him,” Obama told NBC’s Chuck Todd.

Show trial much?

Look at your average Federal Prosecutor’s conviction rate and you really only have three possible conclusions. Either somehow in this single instance the government draws the best damned talent in the nation, somehow in this one case the Federal government shows remarkable restraint and only tries cases they are almost sure of winning, or most Federal trials are show trials. But hey, can we really blame them? Someone’s gotta put the brown people in prison to show we’re tough on drugs/porn/guns/terrorism/immigration/whatever-moral-panic-has-the-rubes-and-petty-fascists-in-a-lather-this-week, right?

“I don’t think it will be offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him,” Obama told NBC’s Chuck Todd.

Show trial much?

Why are some people so attached to the idea that torturing people is such a fantastic idea?

Its simple, really, some people are more interested in revenge than in efficacy. Theres something viscerally satisfying about the idea of torture to some dark little corner of the human brain, something which years for the days of marks on the body and physical punishments serving as means for the expression of dominance. It isn’t about what works, what is justifiable, what is desirable, or even really who is being targeted, its about finding a way to rationalize sadism. If it was about what works it wouldn’t be torture that would find itself defended but rather a range of methods.

I’ve never found a discussion on here literally nauseating until this one.

I suppose the moderators here are not going to allow me to defend myself by approving my comments?

Because the mantle of victimhood suits the tough-guy image so well.

If you want to win hearts and minds you have to pay attention to what those hearts and minds are telling you.

I think that you need to be able to both pay attention to the people you are trying to persuade and publicly display empathy while quietly doing the dirty work of national defense. That, to me, is one of the biggest practical problems of Bush’s strategy: he made what ought to be rare, covert, quiet operations common, overt, boisterous ones. Thats the big point that I think people like Jason miss, playing the tough guy actually makes you weaker and requires more resources for similar gains.

Realistically some people need to die and sometimes people on the ground need to do things that we don’t want to think about in order to get information from that, thats the nature of covert operations (its what the CIA has been doing for years). What is important about a covert operation is that very few people know that it happened and even fewer know the details. The target ends up dead, information is gathered, and those linked to the target become fearful both because they know something happened but they have little proof and because they don’t know exactly what happened and their fantasies fill in the details. The secondary gain of covert operations is that the kinds of people who are likely to know they happened look like conspiracy nuts when they try to talk to others about them, further marginalizing the targeted group.

At the same time, the vast majority of people are open to persuasion and good operations focus on not on spreading fear amongst the masses but hope. There is a reason the United States has been an extremely popular destination for immigration and there is a reason Western culture has continued to spread at the rate it has. If we make ourselves look more desirable than our enemies, our enemies become further marginalized. It isn’t about being a bleeding heart but about good strategy.

the ones that melt an Islamofascist jihadist’s heart

This article in The Independent seems to back up the idea that silly things like acting in accordance with one’s professed principles does more to dissuade potential jihadists than tough-guy posturing:

Hadiya Masieh, a tiny female former HT organiser, tells me: “You’d see Bush on the television building torture camps and bombing Muslims and you think – anything is justified to stop this. What are we meant to do, just stand still and let him cut our throats?”

But the converse was – they stressed – also true. When they saw ordinary Westerners trying to uphold human rights, their jihadism began to stutter. Almost all of them said that they doubted their Islamism when they saw a million non-Muslims march in London to oppose the Iraq War: “How could we demonise people who obviously opposed aggression against Muslims?” asks Hadiya.

And:

Just as their journeys into the jihad were strikingly similar, so were their journeys out. All of them said doubt began to seep in because they couldn’t shake certain basic realities from their minds. The first and plainest was that ordinary Westerners were not the evil, Muslim-hating cardboard kaffir presented by the Wahabis. Usman, for one, finally stopped wanting to be a suicide bomber because of the kindness of an old white man.

Usman’s mother had moved in next door to an elderly man called Tony, who was known in the neighbourhood as a spiteful, nasty grump. One day, Usman was teaching his little brother to box in the garden when he noticed the old man watching him from across the fence. “I used to box when I was in the Navy,” he said. He started to give them tips and before long, he was building a boxing ring in their shed.

Tony died not long before 9/11, and Usman was sent to help clear out his belongings. In Tony’s closet, he found a present wrapped and ready for his little brother’s birthday: a pair of boxing gloves. “And I thought – that is humanity right there. That’s an aspect of the divine that’s in every human being. How can I want to kill people like him? How can I call him kaffir?”

If simple kindnesses and respect work preventively, why shouldn’t they work in interrogation? I know that’s not the kind of evidence wingnut would-be Tough Guys like to hear, because it doesn’t give them the same kill-brown-people boners that the lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key rhetoric does. But, well, tough shit. If you want to win hearts and minds you have to pay attention to what those hearts and minds are telling you.

I’m not out to defend Bush, just to note that the rights of unlawful combatants are considerably more limited than those of covered combatants (those that are regular armies of signatories or those that, as CTD explains, wear uniforms et&).

The Geneva conventions re: POWs apply to those who a) wear uniforms b) have a responsible chain of command and c) carry arms openly. They are a framework of both rights and responsibilities.