Some interesting history regarding Japanese treatment of POWs along with some, ahem, interesting analogies with present-day events.
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Gitmo=Bataan?
This entry was written by Robert Koehler, posted on June 13, 2006 at 3:51 pm, filed under East and Central Asia, Japan. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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9 Comments
Having had relatives who were POWs of the Japanese (and their Korean trustys) in the Pacific, I’m outraged by the egregiously obtuse exercise in moral equivalencce that this moral knucklehead Colin P.A. Jones tries to conduct.
Aside from the incarceration without speedy trial (which while fairly significant is not enough to qualify Gitmo as human rights violations) what is the difference between Gitmo and Fort Leavenworth? If all these self-righteous liberals are more concerned with the way terrorists are treated at Gitmo than the way military inmates are treated at Fort Leavenworth than indeed “for us or against us” takes on added meaning. They choose to focus on one and not the other. If human rights is their true calling, however misguided, then shouldn’t they be consistent in their coverage of who qualifies? Why don’t we just ship the yahoos at Gitmo to leavenworth and see what becomes of them? ahhhhh that would be sweet justice.
Yes, the wonders of the supposed moral equivalent arguments. Intellectual dishonesty at its finest.
Democrats are, simply put, defeatists, and would love to see America lose this war.
American liberals = communists/socialists.
It’s no surprise to see democrats’ persistent objections as to how enemies are treated and their “rights” being violated — they are LUCKY TO BE ALIVE at all.
Beyond these factors, it’s difficult, if not absurd, to attempt to draw similarities of POWs treatment from two clearly different eras and wars.
–Remort
That’s the kind of attitude that gets us hated around the world. Considering the people you say are ‘lucky to be alive at all’ have had no trial, how can you be certain that they are guilty? Not everyone enclosed in these camps was caught red handed.
And even those that are, how is it different what the US is doing now from what Japan did then? Oh, I know, they call them terrorists now instead of POWs. There are laws against doing things to POWs, but not terrorists. I’m pretty sure any prisoner taken during a war is a POW no matter how you shake a stick at it. It would appear to me to be the same thing.
Perhaps America isn’t pulling the air raid horn and then dumping gas on all the soldiers who fled only to light them on fire as Japan was doing towards the end, but do we really want to set that as the standard to which we compare ourselves? That’s like saying freedom of speech is great in Russia, when compared to China.
Yes, the methods used against the POWs by the US right now are not the same as the methods used by Fascist WW2 Japan, but the fact that the US is doing something very wrong does not change. The authors point is “we know this is wrong, we’ve had it happen to us before, how can we possibly do it to others now and see no problem.”
Actually, you’re incorrect - not every prisoner taken during a war is a POW. See article 4 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, available at http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/91.htm (defining “prisoners of war”).
Essentially, you’re saying that the difference treatment in the two situations is one of degree, not kind. However, in comparing Japanese treatment of POWs with American treatment of detainees at Guantanamo or other facilities, the difference in degree is so great that it is indeed a difference in kind.
While I may have differences with the wisdom of the interrogation methods being used, my moral outrage meter isn’t exactly going off.
> Not everyone enclosed in these camps was caught red handed.
Actually, pretty much none of them were. They are mostly all “suspicious” guys hanging around who were picked up in Afghanistan after the fighting was finished, or guys who were sold to American forces by Afghan bounty-hunters — gawd knows where they plucked them from. Very few of the men that America has been detaining without charge and torturing have turned out to be any sort of al-Queda officers or soldiers — which is why America continues to not charge them with anything, nor treat them as POWs. The many that have already been released after kidnap, prolonged illegal detention and “rough interrogation” have turned out to be entirely innocent of any crime, other than the “crime” of being a Muslim man (sympathetic to the Taliban, perhaps) in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is the main reason for the ongoing scandal, for the outraged objection from most of the world. If these were actually any sort of “terrorists” that America was holding and abusing, there wouldn’t be nearly so much bad feeling about it…
…which is why authentic and traditional conservatives in America have joined the rest of the world in announcing what’s going on with this, distancing themselves from the neo-conservative radicals. Google, you can find plenty of their voices, including McCain to the extent he’s able to speak freely.
What the Bush administration has been doing in Gitmo and in the network of CIA-secret-torture-prisons around the world is simply un-American, unworthy of our traditions, ideals, laws and character. It makes me ashamed of my country when I would much rather feel proud…
There is no evidence of torture at Gitmo. And what do the mythical evil neo-cons have to do with all of this? Very little.