“had their testicles permanently destroyed by kicks received from the American War Crimes Investigation team.”

good is no less than they deserved

Having said this, one finds it disconcerting, repeated constantly in this blog, that Americans have always had a unique innocence complex. As if other nations do not consider themselves the Best Of All Humanity! As if the American Left and Intelligentsia have not had, from very early in America’s history, a peculiar hatred for their people, unique among the world’s peoples (think of H.L.Mencken).

Further, one is not very credible denouncing torture unless one extends it as a universal principle. Alfred McCoy does not do this very well; neither does John Pilger.

Finally, were not a number of these people SS and Gestapo people? Could it not be that Allied soldiers, seeing the concentration camps just recently, lost their heads? It does not justify torture, but it does offer an explanation.

I’m not against treating torturers as war criminals.

Its just that if someone said to me, “now let me get this straight, I can blow people up and they can shoot at me, but I can’t pull their fingernails off just because they ALMOST blew me up but I caught them first. That’s absurd.”

I’d say they are probably right.

It seems odd to you that ‘a lack of suffering or a lack of evil [might be valued] above life itself’. But one has to ask if there could be anything valuable enough to die for. If there could be, then life should not be held as an ultimate value.

In any case, though it may be perverse that one can visit horrible death on ones enemies, but not pull out their fingernails, the conduct of war is a highly codified practice – there are rules of engagement and laws or war. Torture is proscribed, and those who do so in war are, precisely, war criminals.

Yes, intellectually—but emphasis on HUMANE. I don’t think most slaughterhouses are even close to humane, and think that chicken-concentration-camp chicken slaughterhouses are evil and brutalizing places.

But a bullet to the back of the head, to an animal that’s unafraid and content? I’m intellectually OK with it, although it’s uncomfortable. (I grew up on a farm, and have a small farm; I’ve killed and butchered for as long as I can remember.)

>He tells us a revealing anecdote about standing in Aden’s Crater District in 1967 with the notoriously bloody British ” specialist Col. Colin (“Mad Mitch”) Mitchell, watching as some of the soldiers under Mitchell’s command were…

stacking, as in a butcher’s shop, the bodies of four Arab militants they had just shot and Mad Mitch said: “It was like shooting grouse, a brace here and a brace there.”

Thanks for the explanation. What you say makes some sense to me, in that the “puppy drowning” characters I’ve run into were pretty scary people.
But are you really ENTIRELY OK with the humane killing of animals? The same feelings that make me think animal abuse is wrong give me guilt about all the meat and poultry I eat, but somebody’s got to be at the top of the food chain, right?

Its an old saw that the daintier hand has the more sensitive morals, but you seem to be saying the opposite that people who work in a meat or chicken packing plant and hence have a lot of experience with killing would be more likely to be horrified by brutalizing animals. You may be correct but I doubt it.

How exactly would me having more experience with killing make me better understand the moral difference between killing and torturing?

Even conceding your point that there is a difference, in what war has “humane” killing ever been the norm? In fact, some forms of “humane” killing such as vaporization with nuclear weapons seems more repugnant than more painful methods.

I probably don’t have a principled objection, I just think that since I think asceticism is a moral good, it troubles me to see torture as something worse than war.

I would say you have too little experience with killing. A lot of people (including me) are horrified by people who brutalize animals, but entirely OK with killing them humanely.

Pacifism makes sense to me as a coherent moral position.

“All’s fair in love and war” makes sense to me as a coherent moral position.

“Its OK to kill you in a just war but its not OK to torture you in a just war” strikes me as valuing a lack of suffering or a lack of evil above life itself which seems odd to me.

What am I missing that some of the anti-torture arguments seems like “Its OK to burn down your house but not to steal its contents”?

I can see why killing and torture are morally dangerous and corrupting to those who carry them out. Its just drawing a line between the two that I don’t understand.

Not really.

“Photographs of victims of a secret torture programme operated by British authorities during the early days of the cold war are published for the first time today after being concealed for almost 60 years.”

AMAZing isn’t it?

Who needs history when you have rationalism and good intentions?