Some things are simple

I'm excerpting from today's
Editorial Observer in the NYT, but I really recommend reading the whole article (it's not long). It tells the story of Pfc. Joseph Dwyer who died last month at home after serving honorably in Iraq.

He was 31 and very sick. For years he had been in and out of treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction. He was seized by fearful delusions and fits of violence and rage. His wife left him to save herself and their young daughter. When the police were called to Mr. Dwyer’s apartment on June 28, he was alone. They broke down the door and found him dying among pill bottles and cans of cleaning solvent that friends said he sniffed to deaden his pain...

His friends tried an intervention, showing up at his door in October 2005 and demanding his guns and cans of solvent. He refused to give them up.

Hours later, gripped by delusions, he shot up his apartment. He was glad when the SWAT team arrived, Ms. Knapp said, because then he could tell them where the Iraqis were. He was arrested and discharged, and later moved to Pinehurst, N.C. His parents tried to get him help, but nothing worked. “He just couldn’t get over the war,” his mother, Maureen, told a reporter. “Joseph never came home.”

The way we treat our veterans is a travesty. This isn't an issue that should cause divisions on partisan, ideological, or philosophical lines. This isn't an issue that needs to wait for a new Administration. Summer is a slow season, and, while Obama and McCain are focus group testing their fall ads, they should take some time out to say, together that our vetrans deserve better, and they should endorse a biparisan plan now. Pfc. Dwyer, and others like him, won't make it to January.

Front Page: US cribs from China on torture

I feel pretty strongly about torture as a moral issue, but Scott Shane's article China Inspired Interrogations at Guantanamo makes it pretty clear this isn't a big moral dilemma, balancing the needs of the many against one person's human rights, if torture doesn't produce actionable intelligence. Or any intelligence at all, really. Leaving aside the fact that when China practised the techniques we've adopted on American soldiers we called it torture, here's the real money quote:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. [emphasis added]

So we've adopted as protocol for intelligence work techniques designed to produce false information. With the White House pushing to keep Gitmo in the shadows, what on earth do we need false, coerced confessions for?