Re: [Marxism] Scarborough interviews Dershowitz

[DLVinvest@xxxxxx]

The laws of war, including the agreements against torture of prisoners of
war, are contradictory, but the defining element in torture as distinct from
other forms of cruelty is that the victim is defenseless, at the mercy of the
torturer, whose only limit is what conscience he or she has been imbued with, in
which one human being recognizes him or herself in another, or lacking that
ethical inhibition, the deterrent effect of fear of punishment.

If the person desiring to inflcit pain has to weigh the risk of retaliation,
he/she might yet inflict terrible pain and injury, even death in order to
annihilate the opponent and avoid any chance of retribution. But the laws of war
and the convention against torture exist in recognition that individuals acting
in the name of states, and especially when they do so under military
discipline, require some greater ethical compulsion.

The US invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression under international law --
even though such law is at any moment is a vector of all the accumulated forces
of imperiliast rivalry and popular resistance that make up concepts of law and
claims to rights. It's notable that Dershowitz quibbles over what level of
cruelty constitutes illegal torture but does not raise the point that the
victors in World War II hung the Nazi politicians and generals for the crime of
aggressive war. All that follows from such aggression is criminal conduct. What 
is
illegal about the acts of humiliation and cruelty against the prisoners
begins precisely with their statuss as defenseless, completely at the whim of 
their
captors, without any legal limitations on their will to harm, without
restraint on their power of life and death. Any form of interrogation under such
circumstances is torture because it is based on the understanding of both 
torturer
and victim that their are no legal limits to what the former may do to the
latter.


Douglas L. Vaughan, Jr.
Investigations
for Print, Film & Electronic Media
3140 W. 32nd Ave.
Denver CO 80211
303-455-9429
_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism