Our friend Byron is critical of my use of the word "silly" in a post titled Overdoing the Outrage in which I refer to Andrew Sullivan's concerns about disregarding part 1c of Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions on torture as "silly hyperventilating". Byron, whose admonishments I value and whose opinions I deeply respect, urges me to consider that I'm demeaning people who have a noble moral objection to the use of torture when I call their concerns silly. By's criticism can be read on our Feedback page, and I would like to say a few things about it here.
What I labelled silly (a word I prefer because it is gentler than stupid) was this passage from Sullivan's blog:
The United States is a rogue nation that practices torture and detainee abuse and does not follow the most basic principles of the Geneva Conventions. It is in violation of human rights agreements and the U.N. Convention against torture. It is legitimizing torture by every disgusting regime on the planet. This is a policy mandated by the president and his closest advisers. This is the signal being sent from the commander-in-chief to his troops: your enemy can be treated beyond the boundaries of what the U.S. has always abided by. When you next read of an atrocity of war-crime or victim of torture by the U.S., just keep in mind who made this possible.
Sullivan makes these extremely derogatory claims about the U.S. because the administration has decided that any provision which may prevent our interrogators from yelling at, insulting, questioning the courage of, placing in solitary confinement, or even shackling or incarcerating terror suspects or other enemy combatants is an absurd restriction on our interrogators. I agree with that, and I think that it is literally silly, as in unserious or lacking in sense, for Andrew Sullivan to assert that we are a rogue nation because we think it appropriate to treat these detainees as something less than visiting dignitaries. To claim that our reluctance to accept the unreasonable constraints of 1c "legitimizes torture by every disgusting regime on the planet" is arrant nonsense as is almost everything else he says in the paragraph above.
Those who object to the use of genuine torture are certainly not silly people. Indeed, I am one of them, although for reasons I've discussed on this blog I think we must stop short of absolutizing our objection. But those who would call it torture if an interrogator says mean things to a terrorist, certainly are silly, and those who would say what Sullivan says because we reserve the right to offend the sensibilities of those who try to kill us truly are unserious. Go to Overdoing the Outrage to read the full discussion on Sullivan.