George W. and Human Rights
George Washington set a standard that our current president disregards.
By Robert Kuttner
Issue Date: 10.01.04
In his new book, Washington’s Crossing, historian David Hackett Fischer recounts how humane treatment of prisoners was literally invented by George Washington on the battlefield in late 1776. Official British policy was to let field commanders decide whether to put captured enemy soldiers “to the sword” or to “give quarter -- to keep captives alive in a barracks. Hence the expression “give no quarter,” which literally means to kill a captive on the spot.
Washington wept, watching through a spyglass, as his troops, taken prisoner at the disastrous Battle of New York that November, were then slaughtered. After the first battle of Trenton, on December 26 and 27, where Washington’s men captured several hundred Hessian mercenaries, Washington ordered his troops to treat the captives humanely. American soldiers risked their own lives, ferrying Hessian prisoners back across the Delaware. The Hessians “were amazed to be treated with decency and even kindness,” Fischer writes. “American leaders resolved that the War of Independence would be conducted with respect for human rights, even of the enemy. This idea grew stronger during the campaign of 1776–77, not weaker as is commonly the case.”
In George W. Bush’s 2000 acceptance speech in Philadelphia, the future president invoked the first one. “Ben Franklin was here,” Bush declared, “Thomas Jefferson, and, of course, George Washington -- or, as his friends called him, George W.” As if.
How instructive to contrast the way the two George Ws weighed military imperatives and human decency. It made perfect sense that the British gave the American irregulars no quarter. They were viewed by the British precisely as guerrilla terrorists, who did not respect the 18th-century conventions of warfare.
The very survival of the infant republic literally hinged on the battles that Washington led that dreadful winter, far more than it does on the results of interrogations at Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib. But the founding George W. gave quarter.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=8531
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