by TChris

Law Professor Sanford Levinson asks a timely question: What is torture?

For over a decade, the United States has lived with a loose definition of "torture" that is significantly out of line with that of most of the rest of the world and invites the kind of manufactured distinctions that give lawyering a bad name. Moreover, officials in both Congress and the executive branch have winked and nodded at practices such as sending prisoners to countries that will do our dirty work for us.

Levenson explores the ambiguities that inhere in the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as well as the U.S. Senate's rather more limited understanding of torture, tacked on to the Convention as a condition of consenting to U.S. ratification.

It is easy to understand but difficult to accept one of Levenson's conclusions:

Why, then, should we feign shock that inexperienced, frightened, and foolish—it is almost pointless to view them as "evil"—young soldiers would have had little or no understanding of what the limits were on what they could do? They have received not the slightest trace of genuine leadership on this issue.

True, a failure of leadership is largely responsible for the abuses inflicted in Iraq. The soldiers who abused prisoners should not shoulder the blame alone, but neither should they be excused because appropriate limits had not been set. A soldier shouldn't need a JAG lawyer to explain that it's wrong to attack a prisoner with a dog or to engage in the humiliating acts revealed in the Abu Ghraib photographs.

Still, there's no doubt -- as Major General Antonio Taguba said today -- that a failure of leadership, going at least as high as Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, is to blame. In fact, the entire fiasco in Iraq stems from a failure of leadership: by Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush.