But George Washington and his compatriots took their founding principles quite seriously. On Aug. 11, 1775, Washington sent a blistering letter to a British counterpart, Thomas Gage. He complained about gravely wounded and untreated American soldiers being thrown into a jail with common criminals.
Eight days later, despite threatening to treat British soldiers with equal cruelty, Washington admitted that he could not and would not retaliate in kind, writing: "Not only your Officers, and Soldiers have been treated with a Tenderness due to Fellow Citizens, & Brethren; but even those execrable Parricides [traitors] whose Counsels & Aid have deluged their Country with Blood, have been protected from the Fury of a justly enraged People."
Imagine that; a government on the run fighting a desperate war against a hated enemy and treating captured prisoners with compassion and decency. No doubt many of the captured British troops had intelligence that might have been useful to the Revolutionary cause – still, decent treatment was the norm. In the current war on terror, that would be described as being "soft."
Alexander Hamilton, while commanding soldiers against the British, prevented what could have been a massacre. After the siege of Yorktown, one of Hamilton's captains, eager for revenge against the British, was about to run a prisoner through with his bayonet.
Hamilton stepped in personally to stop the man, and later reported proudly: "Incapable of imitating examples of barbarity and forgetting recent provocations, the soldiers spared every man who ceased to resist."
The Founding Fathers didn't treat prisoners decently solely because they were decent people. Although their writings and ideals reveal a constant and passionate interest in essential human rights, it's important to remember that they were also pragmatists. They understood that the Revolutionary cause had to take and hold the moral high ground in order to rally popular support and exhaust the British giant. And they knew that their necks were very literally on the line were they to be captured by the British. Mistreatment of British soldiers would come back on their heads a thousandfold.
Times have changed, of course, and now it's the US that holds the upper hand from a military perspective. There is no longer any fear among US leaders that they personally will suffer the effects of cruel treatment of prisoners, and so they feel far more comfortable ordering the sort of "extraordinary" measures of interrogation and detainment that led to the Gitmo suicides.
What they overlook, of course, is that the moral high ground is still there to be taken – or lost.
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