MoveOn.org owes General Petraeus an Apology

Remember this?

Unfortunately, since the ad is copyrighted material, I can't quote it in full here. But here are the key passages:

GENERAL PETRAEUS OR GENERAL BETRAY US?

Cooking the Books for the White House

. . . .

Every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed. Yet the General claims a reduction in violence.

The ad then goes on to explain why it believes the General's claim is false.


In evaluating this claim, one needs to be aware that the General has an information advantage over MoveOn.org. That's because the General is in Iraq most of the time, and he has access to up-to-the-minute reports from his troops. MoveOn.org is in the USA and has to make do with second-hand information.

However, if you are going to call someone a liar, you had better have your facts straight. So before making its claim, MoveOn.org had a responsibility to make sure it was correct in its belief that the Surge was not reducing violence.

Today, it is beyond dispute that the Surge did greatly reduce violence in Iraq. To prove this, here are data from two liberal organizations which track civillian casualties there:

Iraq Body Count
Iraq Coalition Casualty Count

Both datasets show that during and shortly after the Surge, civillian casualties dropped dramatically.

Now, you might object that as of September 10, 2007, when the ad appeared, the data were much more ambiguous. And this is true. But . . .

* As of September 10, 2007, the General would have had much better information than the general public.
* As of September 10, 2007, even publically available data (in particular Iraq Body Count data, as they work a bit faster than ICCC) suggested that violence was declining. Here is a September, 2007 Iraq Body Count report which admits as much.
* If you are going to call someone a liar based on incomplete information, you had better be sure that your information is true. If you aren't, you need to either investigate more, or wait for someone else to come up with more complege information, before you make your accusation.

MoveOn called Petraeus a liar based on its own belief of fragmentary and incomplete information about what was happening. And even at the time, a liberal organization with a careful and consistent methodology (namely IBC) had noticed what was really happening.

As of September 10, 2007, it was not crazy to believe that it had not been publically proven that the Surge was reducing violence. But it was crazy to believe that it had been publically proven that the Surge was not reducing violence. And that's what the ad claimed.

The upshot is that Petraeus was right and MoveOn was wrong, pure and simple.

Is waterboarding a violation of United States international obligations?

As a personal matter, I don't really care what the US does to the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mahommed or other high-level Al Qaeda detainees. However, it is an interesting intellectual exercise to look at the question of whether waterboarding is a violation of US international obligations or not.

The United States is a signatory to the Convention against Torture. Among other things, this treaty commits signatories not to torture people in their custody. It defines torture as follows:

1. For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.



According to that definition, it appears that waterboarding a detainee (who does not know that they are not being drowned) is torture, as it is severe mental suffering.



However, the when signing the treaty, several countries, including the United States, made certain reservations. And in its reservations, the United States says:



. . . in order to constitute torture, an act must be specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering and that mental pain or suffering refers to prolonged mental harm . . . . (emphasis added)



Allegedly, the US has never waterboarded anyone for a long time. It "broke" Khalid Sheikh Mahommed within a couple of minutes. If this is true (and I have no reason to doubt it), the US is in compliance with its commitments under the Convention against Torture.



Torture is also banned under the Geneva Conventions. However, they make no effort to define the term. So it is unclear whether waterboarding is banned under the Geneva Conventions or not.

Judges are typically very reluctant to find that someone has violated something (a law, treaty, or contract, for example) when it is not clear that they have done so. Since the Geneva Conventions do not define the word "torture", it is likely that a court, if one were to consider the question, would say that grey-area techniques such as waterboarding are not in violation of the Conventions. This is particularly true for a US court, since the US made clear in its signing statement to the Convention against Torture that for purposes of that document, it does not consider waterboarding to be torture.