Submitted by GaryGagliardi on
Over the last few days, there has been a lot of rhetoric regarding Sen. Durbin's comparison of interrogation techniques at Gitmo with Nazis, Gulags, and Pot Pol, but little I have read has made as much sense to me as this article by a former resident of the Gulag in his posting about Amnesty International.
There is ample reason for Amnesty to be critical of certain U.S. actions. But by using hyperbole and muddling the difference between repressive regimes and the imperfections of democracy, Amnesty's spokesmen put its authority at risk. U.S. human rights violations seem almost trifling in comparison with those committed by Cuba, South Korea, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.The words that struck be here were "the imperfections of democracy." I would broaden them to "the imperfections of humanity." Sun Tzu stressed over and over again that life was about probabilities. You cannot predict what will happen with perfection. The best strategist in the world is wrong a lot, which is why so much of strategy is based on limiting your losses. Reality is statistically and when we cannot grasp the difference in scale between numbers, we cannot grasp reality. Because we cannot weigh men's souls as good or evil, we have to judge by their actions. Even the best man is less the perfect, but do we sum up his entire life by his few mistakes or do we take the whole of it into account and compare it to the lives of other men? The difference between a good man and a bad man is not that one is perfect and the other unfailingly evil. The difference is statistically. The good man does the right thing much more often than the evil man. Comparing them side by side, they aren't even close. The good man spends almost all of his life producing value for other people while the bad man spends almost all of his time trying to take what is valuable from others. We can say the same about societies. I don't know how many people the Nazis arrested and interrogated, but over eight million of them died in the process. This is evil and intentional. Amercans have conducted 24,000 interrogations at Gitmo. No one has died. Say a few dozen interrogations have gone further toward barbarity than many people would like. This is not evil. This is simply imperfection. This isn't tough math. If 100% of your arrests end in slavery and death, that is evil. If one-tenth of one-percent of your interrogations end in high level of stress, this is imperfection. Should we expect most people around the world to grasp the difference in these number? The media must stop treating imperfection as though it were the same as evil. If you have over a hundred thousand men in the field in Iraq fighting terrorists, some percentage of bad stuff is going to happen. None of these men are perfect. Given the numbers of people, a few of them are bound to be evil. Imperfection is unavoidable. Especially in war. The amazingly low number of problems demonstrates something wonderful about our men in the military. How do tyrants behave and how do the terrorist behave? Among the evil, the goal is to accomplish evil. The evil desire a high percentage of senseless death and suffering from their activities. These problems don't result from imperfection, but from intention. What percentage of terrorist captives end up dead? Virtually all. Torture and discomfort are only a small part of the price they extract. When a terrorist bomb innocent people, people don't die because mistake are made. People live when mistakes are made. When a bomb goes off and not innocent people die, the terrorist failed to accomplish their mission. The terrorists aren't perfect either, but does the media complain when bombings are poorly executed and no one dies?