Apparently it is a war crime to drip water down a prisoner’s throat (in the case of a certain U.S. facility located on Castro’s island, before returning him to his soccer practice).
But it was NOT a war crime to vaporize two entire cities filled with nothing but civilians days apart in 1945!
Seems the opposite should be true, but then I’m wrong about everything.
While it’s an interesting question to discuss, I must point out that Hiroshima contained a large military base.
During WW2 both Germany and Japan bombed cities with largely civilian populations, but after 1945 were not prosecuted for that as war crimes – presumably because if the bombing of London, Coventry and Darwin were crimes, then so were the bombings of Dresden, Tokyo and Hiroshima.
But bombing enemy cities is one thing: how you treat prisoners under your control is an entirely different matter.
Waterboarding is not “dripping water down someone’s throat.” It’s a form of controlled drowning (and it is entirely possible to die.) Jesse Ventura, who endured the process during his military training, even admitted so in an interview with Larry King, and many others have agreed.
Also, we needed to bomb Japan to end the war. When do we ever need to waterboard anyone? It’s been proven that it doesn’t result in useful information.
What exactly is the purpose of war? To kill the enemy? No, it is to get the enemy to do what you want. It turns out that killing the enemy is one way to try to accomplish this. But the death and destruction of war are not ends, they are means to ends. You can kill a million enemy soldiers, but if you don’t accomplish your war aims those deaths don’t bring you victory.
And so, soldiers fight wars. And the Geneva conventions don’t try to prevent soldiers from killing and destroying during war, because if they did they’d just be ignored.
The Geneva Conventions were created by government officials who believed that war was inevitable, and winning a war was better than losing a war. And so, no condition of the Geneva Conventions, like restrictions on killing enemy soldiers, make it harder to fight and win a war. It’s simply false that countries that abide by the Geneva Conventions are obliged to fight with one hand behind their backs.
The Geneva Conventions were written under the assumption that war was inevitable, that countries would fight and kill each other as best they could, but that unneccesary suffering during the inevitable wars could be mitigated. And that eventually individual wars would stop because continuing the war would be intolerable to one or both parties, and then peace would temporarily break out until the next war.
And so you have rules regarding prisoners. Why is that? Shouldn’t you just shoot prisoners in the head? Some countries have that attitude. But the trouble is, if you invariably shoot surrendering enemy soldiers in the face, they’ll stop trying to surrender and instead keep fighting, since surrender=death. It turns out that you WANT enemy soldiers to surrender, because when they surrender they stop shooting at you. In fact, the best result would be for the whole enemy army to surrender en masse before the shooting even starts.
And so, if you treat captured enemy soldiers decently, and don’t torture them or shoot them, they’ll tend to surrender more often and this is good. Allowing enemy soldiers to surrender isn’t a namby-pamby hippy-dippy liberal pipe-dream, it’s a war-winning tactic. During WWII thousands of American soldiers survived to fight another day because German soldiers knew that if they just surrendered they’d be allowed to live.
Probably off-topic, but admitting that he endured it during his military training speaks volumes about where waterboarding truly sits on the torture scale.
OP specifically compares modern-day waterboarding vs. atomic vaporization of People Who Aren’t American by Americans. One obvious point of law: Maybe the modern war crime laws didn’t exist then?
There were three Geneva Convention treaties on the subject prior to WWII ( Wikipedia ) and a fourth one added in 1949. This was largely a result of the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-1946, where some of the ideas of “crimes against humanity” were pioneered.
There might be stricter rules about nuking cities today than there were in 1945. I don’t know that this would necessarily stop any country that seriously has a war to win, though.
Not necessarily. It was probably chosen for torture resistance training because it’s relatively easy to set up and is less likely to cause physical harm or death than other techniques. Rather than necessarily being psychologically easier on the victim.
Alternatively, it may simply have been because it was the torture of choice for the NLF (viet-cong). Which would speak volumes, no?
Waterboarding is only a war crime if it is considered torture.
The Obama admin thinks it is … does that mean that future admins will?
… or has some world government/entity that we bow to found it to be torture?
The Geneva conventions belong to the sphere of international politics. So they represent compromises that are preferable and possible. They are not your idea of perfect world that you force down other people’s throat. E.g. the gas weapons were banned becuse they were used by the losers of WWI. Atomic weapons were used by the winners of WWII they could not be banned. If they had been used by the losers, then they quite likely would be banned now. (Of course, how can you lose with the A-bomb?)
I believe the Americans called waterboarding when done by the Vietnamese they were fighting, torture. Perhaps you are bowing to your own history?
Yanno, OP? You might want to open your mind to the possibility that there are other things besides nuclear weapons that are horrible.
Death toll at Hiroshima is estimated between 90,000 and 166,000.
Death toll at Nagasaki is estimated between 60,000 and 80,000.
In both cases I tend to believe that the lower figures are more accurate, but for the sake of completeness I’ll give you the range.
The death toll for the Tokyo firebombing raids in February of 1945 is even harder to estimate than the victims of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The immediate death toll for the incendiary raids starts at around 100,000, and that figure may be low. There have been credible estimates for the number of injured going as high as one million. Also this single raid is estimated to have put 1.5 million people out of their homes. At a time when the transportation network was devastated and starvation was becoming an issue even for people with established residences, this is certain to have lead to secondary casualties because of the effects of the bombings.
If you’re going to decry war actions in WWII, you might want to amend your thinking to include what’s arguably the most destructive bombing raid in the whole of the war.
Or just admit that you think that there is a difference between being incinerated by a nuclear flash, and being incinerated in a firestorm.
On preview:
Yes. The Entente powers were innocent of using gas weapons during and after WWI.
IOW, The banning of gas weaponry is far more complex than you’re presenting it to be. Certainly the Central Powers and Germany specifically are given the blame for the use of gas weaponry in WWI, just as Germany is still saddled in many people’s eyes with full blame for the war. And with just as much accuracy, IMNSHO.
For that matter, as a private opinion, I think that the single greatest factor in favor of the general acceptance of the ban on chemical weapons is that delivery and control are both such a difficult matter.
War crimes are never classified as such during a war, only afterwards. It’s an unfortunate necessity at best, but usually they’re down right asking for it, right? It’s bad enough when faced with an enemy who has little regard for your life, but it gets very scary when faced with an enemy who has little regard for their own life.
I’ll call your Kamikaze and I’ll raise you a WMD. But stay put and stick together please. Too bad modern suicide terrorists don’t comply to that. Oh well waterboarding it is, if we can get our hands on 'em.
The fact that someone is simulating drowning means that it will give you the worst panic attack of your life. And if you’ve ever had a really bad one, you know you temporarily would rather be dead. Waterboarding is torture.
I don’t know if you are wrong about everything, but misstating what waterboarding consists of, implying that the prison area of Guantanamo is some sort of vacation resort for its residents, and claiming that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had no military significance does not get you off to a good start.
Former USAF Enlisted
Enlisted Aircrew, officers, and other high risk of capture personell in the USAF undergo a resistance portion of training in which they endure many of the various forms of torture techniques currently in use. Waterboarding was by far the worst of them. To be frank, I’d rather have my fingers broken or be beaten than waterboarded. You can train yourself to ignore pain after a while, even severe pain, but you cannot stop the panic of drowning. It is simply built into the basest part of your brain. It is brutal, torturous, and more than a little unsafe. It is used in training because done correctly, it does no lasting physical harm to a subject.
I suggest that anyone that has not been waterboarded should keep their mouths firmly shut on whether or not they feel it is torture.
The OP is off, but not by much.
Anyone who has seen the film Fog of War will know that even McNamara claimed we would have been tried for war crimes had we lost the war. The winners of the war are never prosecuted for war crimes, though. They are the prosecutors, not the prosecutees.
Without wanting to be too blasé about, “war crimes” are defined (and redefined) by people who win wars.
ETA: beaten to the punch.
I note the join date January 2011 matches my prediction from the title - so how much effort is worthwhile.
The predicted casualties of Operation Downfall were such that we are still using the purple hearts created for that invasion. That’s not even addressing the massive number of predicted Japanese dead.
Funny, I predicted 2012. 