Apr 23 2009
Manifesto #1
The one comment I’ve gotten so far was from an individual who was rather upset about my position on torture. The commenter noted that torture is a war crime, and subsequently we have a responsibility to prosecute them. Needless to say, I disagree.
I don’t take the idea of “War Crimes” seriously. To steal a line from the West Wing, “All wars are crimes”. When you look back at Hobbes’s work on State of Nature, he defines the state of nature as being one where everyone is entitled to their natural rights, being anything they can take. This means I have a right to kill you, enslave you, take everything you own, and you have the right to do the same to me and everyone else. No one has any protections other than their own force, which means the State of Nature is a State of War, everyone is at war with everyone.
That’s what war is. It’s the breakdown of any system of law. In the Civil War brothers killed brothers over control over pieces of backwater Kentucky, and no one was at fault. That’s war. Now a number of nations have repeatedly fought each other in war, and so they decided they’d agree on certain things they wouldn’t do. It was “law” by concurrence, everyone voluntarily participated because they don’t want anyone to do certain things to their citizens and soldiers and are willing not to do those things to anyone else’s citizens and soldiers so long as the favor is reciprocated.
It is not “law” in the sense of a governing body having jurisdiction over “citizens”. In order for it to be law in this sense, there must be some means of enforcement upon which the jurisdiction is premised. In short, for there to be international law that applies to the United States requiring anything more than voluntary participation someone else has to have means to come here and enforce it. If someone wants to come here and capture George W. Bush to prosecute him, by all means do your best, but we’re not going to let you.
International law, in the form of treaties, NGO’s, voluntary associations due to perceived mutual benefit, is very important stuff. Nations have to interact, and having a framework in which they interact is essential. International law, in the sense that we can possibly “break” it despite no one being able to do anything about it, is a joke. It’s a bad idea to torture because to a certain degree it matters what our allies think of us, but realistically we could slam someone in the iron maiden and we still wouldn’t face a problem in terms of “international law” .
And this “international law” certainly isn’t US law. If someone breaks our law, then they are prosecuted by us, if they break “international law” then Canada and France are free to try to come and get whoever they want to prosecute us. Evanston enforces Evanston law, Cook County enforces Cook County law, the state of Illinois enforces Illinois Law, the Government of the United States enforces federal law. None of them enforce “international law”.
And war crimes, I think, are ridiculous. To the victor goes the spoils. We created Nuremberg because we wanted to punish the Nazis but it was impalatable to just arbitrarily punish them because we won. So we created a fake court with a fake body of law, punished them in a generally arbitrary manner, but allowed everyone to feel like they didn’t arbitrarily punish them.
And whatever, they’re Nazis, I had no problem with arbitrarily punishing them, we won the damn war, we have the right to get some revenge for what happened. But it was us that were punishing them. It wasn’t some higher objective body on who’s behalf we were acting. And we shouldn’t decieve ourselves as to the nature of these “laws”. They aren’t real, they don’t count.
The question on prosecuting Bush administration officials over interrogation practices, the question is only whether they broke US law. And if you get enough lawyers, I’m sure you could manufacture a case against them, but that would be part of a disturbing trend of using the force of law to play your politics for you. I get very nervous when people are talking about imprisoning their political opposition for their political opposition. If this were some backwater secessionists who killed a state trooper based on some crazy politics, bring him in, but we’re talking about the Bush administration. He was elected President of the United States twice, this was an area of genuine political controversy.
