DUH DUH DUH DUH

Everyone knows that the taliban and the Iraqis treat their prisoners with understanding and care.

Kennedy and his Democrat chicken friends should become prisoners of the Taliban

Read article 133 of the UCMJ - Conduct Unbecoming of an Officer and a Gentleman. It's so loosely defined as to be a catch-all for anything the UCMJ doesn't cover.

I meant that the rules should forbid a wider range of conduct than the torture statutes do, and that the rules should forbid any conduct unbecoming of a U.S. soldier (but not in so many words--as you say, more detail's needed, but I do not have time or credibility to compose the rulebook).

While outright torture should be prosecuted, we shouldn’t let legal distinctions preempt the question “what should American soldiers do?”

The way you answer the question "What should American soldiers do?" is by writing rules. Basing those rules on "I know it when I see it" is bad for discipline.

You have to establish legal distinctions or you can't enforce the rules you write. And if you can't enforce the rules, then for all intents and purposes there are no rules.

If one of our guys is captured (in this conflict or some other conflict down the road) we would not want it to happen to him.

This reciprocity argument would hold more water if our troops had ever been treated as well as we treat enemy soldiers we've captured. It's never happened. "Hogan's Heroes" was a TV show, not a documentary.

The ends justify the means?

I don't recall Machiavelli's being incorporated into the U.S. Constitution by any activist judges lately.

The question is "does America really have any pride in itself, or is that only in country-music videos?"

Even though these guys are technically not POWs/EPWs, torture should never be allowed - making life difficult, uncomfortable and everything short of torture is fine but we have come to far to regress back to beating out confessions.

Military commanders have said the techniques prompted Qahtani to talk.

The military achieved "solid intelligence gains," by interrogating Qahtani, Craddock said yesterday, and other military officials have said he revealed details on how the terrorist network operates.

Joyner:

Moreover, these tactics are counterproductive, not only because of the propaganda value they provide to our enemies but because they violate the basic tenets of effective interrogation ...

It appears we define productivity differently. It's getting a bit tiresome to keep reading the generalization that "torture doesn't work" (Anne Applebaum trots it out often too).

Torture sometimes works, some people have forfeited the right to avoid it by their murderous acts, and preventing further loss of life may require employing it to get them to talk. Leave the rest up to the professionals.

While outright torture should be prosecuted, we shouldn't let legal distinctions preempt the question "what should American soldiers do?" Because that bars a lot more conduct than just torture.