The ethics of captivity

[missroserose]

The NYT has a story today of a Frenchman's "harrowing escape" from Muslim extremists who'd captured him.  I've only been skimming bits and pieces in between working, but a couple of things stuck out:

1.)  He "escaped" because his captors failed to lock the door to his cell and then went to sleep.  No, seriously.  (Admittedly, tiptoeing past heavily armed folks liable to shoot first and ask questions later probably counts as "harrowing", but still.)

2.)  This bit:

Mr. Aubrière insisted emphatically, several times in an excited voice, that his half-dozen heavily armed captors treated him like a gentleman, never hitting him, always feeding him and making sure he had plenty of water.

“They were young guys, but good guys,” he said.

He talked about what he ate — “spaghetti, rice, meat from sheep, you know, the normal Somali stuff” — and how he trained for weeks in his cell, cranking out push-ups and walking for hours back and forth, always barefoot, “to toughen up my feet.” To kill time, he read the one book he could get his hands on, Dan Brown’s “Deception Point.”

“I read that book eight times,” he said. “I hate this book now.”

I'm sure his situation was far better than any number of other political prisoners around the world, but seriously, dudes - you hold the guy captive for more than a month and give him one UND EXACTLY VUN book to read, and it's a Dan Brown novel?  That probably counts as cruel and unusual treatment in and of itself.