Don't know much about history--Obama tortures Churchill

Arthur Herman:

PRESIDENT Obama's forays into history, especially European history, are interesting but not always accurate. Who can forget his description during the presidential campaign of African-American GIs liberating Auschwitz? (It was the Russians.) Or his admission during his recent European trip that he didn't know how to translate a certain word into Austrian? (There is no "Austrian"; Austrians speak German.)

His evocation of Winston Churchill in his press conference last Wednesday took confusion to a new height. The president cited the great British prime minister in support of his ban on enhanced interrogation techniques at Gitmo and elsewhere, noting that Churchill never allowed torture of German detainees in World War II "even when London was being bombed to smithereens."

Strange words of praise from the president -- who in February ordered that Churchill's bust be removed from the Oval Office. (We're told this was because British authorities roughly interrogated Obama's Kenyan grandfather in the Mau Mau rebellion, during Churchill's second tour as prime minister. Not exactly an advertisement for "Winston Churchill, foe of torture.")

Apparently, Obama got his new, sunny view of Churchill not from reading the Churchill biography that Prime Minster Gordon Brown gave him last month but from Andrew Sullivan's blog. Maybe we should be grateful to Sullivan and Obama for their confusion, however, because Churchill's actual position on what is morally permitted against a nation's enemies illuminates much more about the relationship between torture and civilization than their fictitious version.

Churchill recognized that torture -- the cruel, needless infliction of pain as a means of domination and control of others -- was emblematic of man's barbarism, as opposed to the values of what he called "Christian civilization." It was precisely this barbarism that he saw in the Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulag -- and that we see among the Muslim fanatics who will stone women to death for refusing to wear the veil or behead reporters.

But Churchill also understood that, if barbarism was one enemy of civilization, another was a moral cowardice disguised as moral qualms -- an instinctive flinching in the face of danger, dressed up as "upholding our values."

Churchill had seen this flinching in such 1930s appeasers as Neville Chamberlain, and he feared that he'd see it again among Britons and their leaders after the war.

...

But there's another, more powerful reason why the British didn't torture their captured German spies. They didn't have to. Thanks to the Ultra code-breaking program, British MI5 had access to nearly every major German High Command decision. Had Ultra not existed, the attitude toward captured German spies would've been a lot less casual. (Sixteen were in fact executed for espionage before war's end.)

Likewise, if America hadn't had the Clinton-era intelligence "wall of separation" that prevented the CIA and FBI from sharing information before 9/11, a place like Gitmo might never have been necessary.

...

There should be a distinction between POWs and enemy combatants. POWs are entitled to Geneva Conventions protections because they wear a uniform and openly carry arms. Unlawful enemy combatants should not be entitled to the same protections since they have committed the war crime of camouflaging themselves as noncombatants. Germans who were caught out of uniform or in friendly uniforms were subject to summary execution.

However, the British did engage in harsh interrogations of some POWs.

Andrew Sullivan seems to be a tortured soul. He finds some methods torture that have been defined as acceptable by the notorously wussy European Commission on Human Rights. Other things which are par tof routine military training or even football practices send him looking for the vapors. He is not a source I would credit on this issue.