Guantanamo is dishonorable

While I conceed that war is by necessity a dishonest undertaking, there are honest allies and I think the US should strive to be one.

While I conceed that wars are evil by nature I do not conceed that they are of necessity dishonorably fought, and I believe that to torture or murder detainees under any circumstances is dishonorable. It may be necessary in extremely limited situations (aka the credible ticking-bomb scenario), but it remains a dishonorable act even then and should not be engaged casually.

While I conceed that civilians always die in war zones I do not accept the death of innocents as Just, and not even in necessary or unavoidable situations. The fire-bombing of Dresden or the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima may have been necessary, but they were not Just acts.

Good does not harm.

But people are not very good by their natures and seldom improved much with the application of nurtures. The best that we can hope for seems to be to resist our inner temptations to perform evil acts using virtue ethics to guide us. That is, to act "as if" we loved our neighbors seems like our challenge.

I find myself wondering today why so many otherwise decent Americans don't seem to care that their government tortures other human beings.

I know that our allies do not dismiss the Geneva conventions as "quaint". Here is an editorial that appeared in the Toronto Star:

Free U.S. Captives or Charge Them

George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice and their ilk are torture-apologists and seem irredeemably corrupt.

Why don't we care enough to stop them?