Jim Mattis Was the Man Who Stood Against Torture

[David Lockmiller]

I just submitted the following comment to an Op-Ed that was published in today's (December 21, 2018) New York Times:

During the American Civil War, Frederick Douglass had an interview with President Abraham Lincoln in the White House.

"Mr. Lincoln, I am recruiting colored troops. . . . If you wish to make this branch of the service successful you must do four things:

Fourth -- In case any colored soldiers are murdered in cold blood, you should retaliate in kind."

"To this little speech Mr. Lincoln listened with earnest attention and with very apparent sympathy, and replied to each point in his own peculiar, forcible way."

"Mr. Lincoln admitted the justice of my demand for the promotion of colored soldiers for good conduct in the field, but on the matter of retaliation he differed from me entirely. I shall never forget the benignant expression of his face, the tearful look of his eye and the quiver in his voice, when he deprecated a resort to retaliatory measures."

"Once begun," said he, "I do not know where such a measure would stop."

"He said he could not take men out and kill them in cold blood for what was done by others. If he could get hold of the persons who were guilty of killing the colored prisoners in cold blood, the case would be different, but he could not kill the innocent for the guilty."

(Source: "Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time" collected and edited by Allen Thorndike Rice (1888) pages 186-189.)


The following is one paragraph from that published Op-Ed.

“Jim Mattis Was the Man Who Stood Against Torture”
Op-Ed by J. Kael Weston

General Mattis commanded troops in some of the bloodiest fronts of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Yet he remained cleareyed in his opposition to torture, arguing that it was inhumane, illegal and ineffective. I first met him in Anbar Province, Iraq, in 2004, when I was with the State Department overseeing American political engagement with Sunni leaders — and, when necessary, trying to restrain young and overly aggressive Marines. General Mattis’s reputation had preceded him. The “Warrior Monk” was an erudite scholar of warfare who gave famously profane pep talks to Marines. But he was also a natural statesman.

J. Kael Weston, the author of “The Mirror Test,” teaches at Marine Corps University in Quantico, Va., and at Westminster College in Salt Lake City.