Inspired by the game X-COM: Enemy Unknown, where you can take alien invaders captive for interrogation. After the interrogation (implied to be of the ungentle variety) the subject is terminated and you can perform a good old-fashioned alien autopsy for additional intel. If the subject were human this would be a war crime.
The trope is also explored in Independence Day, where the captured alien is gleefully gunned down after psychically telling us all to die. In Worldwar by Harry Turtledove where aliens invade in WWII, the Japanese treat captured aliens the way you’d expect - extremely poorly.
Assuming the attack is a bog-standard alien invasion with no benevolent or subtle overtones, if we took some of them prisoners do we beat the tar out of them and give them a .45 send-off or treat them as accorded enemy combatants captured in war?
There would be no quarter. Assuming these are beings we have never encountered before, dissection, scientific study, and unspeakable horrors are not just inevitable, but required. It’s a basic tenet of warfare that to defeat your enemy, you must know your enemy.
The best justifications for according prisoners dignity are, I think, reciprocity, and individual dignity.
We respect prisoners because our own people will be prisoners of the enemy, and we want the enemy to respect our people. Do the aliens show any indication that they’ll behave similarly?
We also respect prisoners because they might be enemy soldiers, but they’re also individuals capable of all the same emotions as ourselves. Are the aliens similar?
If the aliens are brutal to their prisoners, and if they show no indication of experiencing emotions analogous to our own, then there’d be no reason to protect them.
But if either of those statements is false, then it’d be a more difficult issue.
Are the aliens mindless warrior drones, or crazed fanatics? Are they just grunts doing a job, or conscripts, or unwilling Janissary slave-soldiers?
How are they prisoners? Did we snatch them up when they incapacitated, or did they come out, hands raised, when they realized they were in an impossible tactical bind?
How desperate is Earth’s situation? Are we Germany in mid-1941, or Germany in May, 1945? Do we have the resources to care for the prisoners, or their (possibly exotic) living requirements?
Are we trying to gain anything from the prisoners—even aside from possibly making the alien troops more willing to surrender if they know they’ll be treated well, or even dissent or rebellion in their ranks if they aren’t treated well by their own commanders? Are we trying to encourage defectors?
Do the prisoners know anything about alien technology, strategy, or biology that would be useful? Would they just tell us what we wanted to know, or would they be so tight-lipped that even brutal torture wouldn’t get them to talk, or any step in between?
Hel, how is human morale depending on how we treat the prisoners? Is there going to be outcry if we mistreat the sexy alien catgirl™ prisoners, or is the public hatred over the invasion so strong that there’d be riots and hysteria if we don’t publicly execute a quota of bugmen™ prisoners every week in the most gruesome method practical?
Excellent points, indeed. The ‘alien prisoner’ scenarios in the OP in X-COM, they’re genetically modified warrior slaves; in ID they’re closer to crazed fanatics, in Worldwar they’re pretty much just grunts.
In X-COM and ID they’re incapacitated, in Worldwar some surrender and some are captured while incapacitated.
Germany a few days after D-Day.
Sun Tzu did say that the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. Whether this will work on extraterrestrial invaders from beyond the moon…?
In X-COM and ID psychic powers are employed in the interrogations as they don’t speak. In Worldwar they use pidgin Big Ugly language when they realise that the Tosevites aren’t as weak as they thought.
Since we’ve been invaded and attacked without provocation - or any known provocation, Klaatu barada nikto - I would imagine most people will be pretty pissed off with the visitors, physical appearance notwithstanding.
I think it would also depend on the apparent goals of the aliens, is it a recognisable invasion along historic human lines (ie: they’re fighting for limited understandable objectives and are open to negotiation) or is it a war of extermination/subjugation?
If the former we should treat the prisoners correctly, even if only in our self-interest, in the latter? Well the gloves would come off if we were fighting for survival, I don’t think throwing morality and ethics out the window is a good thing but if its necessary to ensure we’re going to be around in the future to have morality and ethics then it may be necessary. Even then I don’t believe in pointless cruelty for its own sake but if its necessary to mistreat them to enhance our chances of survival then maybe.
Actually, thats an interesting question and I’m kind of conflicted on it.
I think it also depends on how ‘human’ the aliens are. If they are Star Trek-type aliens (they look just like us except for that weird ridge on their forehead), then we’ll be inclined to treat them humanely. If they are giant insects, or something totally ‘alien’, then we’ll have less of a problem with simply ‘putting them down’.
This came up in Battle for Los Angeles, IIRC. They couldn’t really interrogate it because they didn’t share a language. But – they didn’t even know how to kill it, where its vulnerable organs are, etc.