There’s a bit of speculation going around about just which article Obama recently read about Winston Churchill’s anti-torture policy, with a recent Andrew Sullivan piece being among the top contenders. Apparently, there’s also a little push back, to the effect that the British may not have always stuck to their anti-torture policy.
Well, we don’t need to go off shore for anti-torture precedent. We need only look to the one great president whose name began with George, the sometimes under appreciated George Washington. Here’s Bobby Kennedy, Jr. citing David Hackett Fisher’s Washington’s Crossing, the book from which I also learned this little factoid:
Washington decided to behave differently. After capturing 1,000 Hessians in the Battle of Trenton, he ordered that enemy prisoners be treated with the same rights for which our young nation was fighting. In an order covering prisoners taken in the Battle of Princeton, Washington wrote: “Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren. ….. Provide everything necessary for them on the road.”
At the time, as the introductory sentence implies, the British were behaving quite differently. They were engaging in a terror campaign against American civilians. On the battlefield, the Hessians were ordered to take no prisoners, and they followed orders. In the face of that, Washington has this to say about the way we should treat Hessian prisoners (from a letter to Robert Morris, George Clymer and George Walton):
The future and proper disposition of the Hessian Prisoners, struck me in the same light in which you view it, for which Reason I advised the Council of Safety to separate them from their Officers, and canton them in the German Counties. If proper pains are taken to convince them, how preferable the Situation of their Countrymen, the Inhabitants of those Counties is to theirs, I think they may be sent back in the Spring, so fraught with a love of Liberty and property too, that they may create a disgust to the Service among the Remainder of the foreign Troops and widen that Breach which is already opened between them and the British.
Keep in mind that the danger we face pale in immediacy to those faced in those days. Enemy troops were on our soil, brutalizing our populace. Our troops taken prisoner were kept in unspeakable conditions. Washington himself faced execution if things didn’t go so well. The danger was not hypothetical, it was happening as Washington wrote.
I don’t know whether the Hessians were sent back to their lines, but I do know that many of those prisoners stayed behind when the war was over. They were little more than slaves in their native country, whose major export at the time was mercenaries. If we had followed the good George’s example this time around, might we not have returned humanely treated prisoners back to where they came, where that humane treatment might have dampened terrorist recruiting?
So in my book, Obama should be citing George Washington, and reminding our country that in a time of much greater hazard, we stuck to our principles, which at the time were an innovation. There was no Geneva convention back then, and humane treatment of prisoners was hardly the norm.
UPDATE: How odd that a commenter who adopts the sobriquet “Notostalin” writes in to support torture.
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