November 2, 2007
Waterboarding, Then and Now Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:00 AM EST About 10 days ago, Fred Smoler and I had an exchange about torture and the moral rectitude of the American government. I argued that the executive branch’s current endorsement of what is effectively torture indicates “some kind of decay in the moral compass of the American government.” Mr. Smoler took issue with this characterization, suggesting that torture “isn’t, and cannot be [the only issue] if we are assessing moral compasses in wartime.” Mr. Smoler also observed that Americans used torture as a counterinsurgency tactic in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century. Readers who followed this exchange with any degree of interest might direct their attention to this article from Politico.com. The self-described “amateur historian” Daniel A. Rezneck details an event from the U.S. effort in the Philippines, in which Theodore Roosevelt overrode the decision of a court-martial and dismissed a general accused of permitting torture. President Roosevelt declared at the time: “Great as the provocation has been in dealing with foes who habitually resort to treachery, murder and torture against our men, nothing can justify or will be held to justify the use of torture or inhuman conduct of any kind on the part of the American Army.” Rezneck cites Edmund Morris’s description of the episode as one that garnered Roosevelt “‘universal praise’ from Democrats . . . and from Republicans, who said that he had ‘upheld the national honor.’” In order to avoid reopening a blog debate that’s gone cold, I won’t claim that TR’s example highlights a certain, shall we say, ethical degeneracy on the part of the present-day American state. Rezneck’s article does make me wonder, though, if we’ll ever again be a society where the President can win bipartisan plaudits for forcefully opposing torture.
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