Tortured? No problem!

Our government asserts that they can use evidence gained from torture in determining the fate of prisoners at Guantanamo.

In short, this whole process is a travesty. From almost day one, our response to the question of what to do with captured terrorists (and non-terrorists) has been flawed, contradictory, and put together seemingly without any thought for future repurcussions or any general concerns for human rights.

The violation of human rights of innocent prisoners that's going on in the name of our "war in terror" bothers me. But to be honest, what bothers me most is the sheer incompetence with which this adminstration has carried out this regime of detention and punishment. This administration is in a hole they dug for themselves, and they (and we) are in so deep that there's no good way out.

Evidence from torture is not admissable in U.S. courts, and hasn't been for about 70 years. And for good reason; torture is illegal, but it's also mostly ineffective. The few hypotheticals that pro-torture advocates have used to try to and justify torture are so limited and speculative that there are no known real world counterparts for them. It's so offensive to human dignity, and generally regarded as so useless, that it's banned by international law.

This of course means little to the Bush administration. They're not overly concerned with international law, or troubled by the use of torture and it's questionable effectiveness, and they certainly don't need anyone telling them that their power to deal with these terrorists is limited in any small extent whatsoever. So they've done whatever they've seen fit to do, from building what amounts to a concentration camp in Cuba, to allowing the use of torture in Iraq, Cuba and God only knows where else to get whatever information they thought they needed, or in some cases, just for fun(see Abu Ghraib.)

So here we are, a few years into the "war on terror", and the adminstration finds themselves forced by the Supreme Court, and general worldwide revulsion with their policies, into coming up with some means to deal with the prisoners in Guantanamo. A lot of the prisoners at Guantanamo need to be locked up. Unfortunately, in the process of determining this they've been illegally detained, and in some cases tortured or placed under duress not legal in the U.S. And now to show that these guys need to be kept locked up, the U.S. government is the perverse position of trying to argue that use of torture to extract information is perfectly legal.

So what to do now if the courts find otherwise? In that case we'll have evidence we can't use, against guys we can't legally detain, many of whom are innocent, but many of whom are undoubtedly terrorists. In the U.S. illegal procedures mean a walk even for the bad guys. So do we let them go because we can't use what evidence we have? Or keep them locked up forever, in clear violation of international law and the wishes of the Supreme Court that they have some sort of process for determining their status? Because at this point, it's getting to be that those are the only two choices, thanks to the absolute bone-headedness and lack of foresight by this administration.

The administration could have behaved like adults, and limited their own response to comport with international law and consideration of American and worldwide opinion, and been in a much better position to deal with these terrorists, legally, today. Instead they behaved without thought or concern for the future, and we're all going to pay a price for it.

If anyone knows a word for unrivaled arrogance combined with inexplicable incompetence, I'd like to know it. If there isn't, there will be after four more years of this.