Torture in Our Name
by KevinOctober 4th, 2007
Congratualtions, Mr. Bush, Mr Cheney: you have now establsihed a moral and legal code that would make Pinochet proud:
When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.
But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.
Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.
Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.
Torture is wrong. That used to go without saying, it used to be understood. But not now. No, now we have moral degenerates like Dick Cheney running the show, men who think that macho posturing makes up for their deep moral and intellectual failings, men who are too stupid to understand that torture is the leas effective method of interrogation, that it destroys the country’s moral credibility, and that it leads to bad information and wasted time chasing down false leads. Now we have men whose morality is so deficient that they think Pinochet is a model, not a monster.
There three kinds of people in the world, with respect to the United States. The first will hate us almost no matter what we do, because we represent something about the world and how to make your way in it that they despise. The second will love us no almost no matter what we do, for essentially the same in reason in reverse. The vast majority of the world falls into category three: people whose opinions of the US are shaped by what the US does. These people care about the US only to the extant that we touch their lives, impress their sense of the good, or offend their sense of morality. To these people we are what we do.
And what we do now, thanks to Bush and Cheney, is kidnap people, send suspects to be tortured by friendly tyrants, lock people away without much hope of a truly fair trial, and torture prisoners as a matter of policy.
The next time you wonder why they hate us, sit very still and listen for the screams, faint and distant, of the men entrusted to the morality of Dick Cheney and perhaps you will understand at least part of the answer.
Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations…
A 2005 Justice Department opinion provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a …
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[...] Lean Left reacts to the news that Alberto Gonzales secretly issued an opinion that would authorize the CIA to use harsh interrogation procedures that some would call torture: There three kinds of people in the world, with respect to the United States. The first will hate us almost no matter what we do, because we represent something about the world and how to make your way in it that they despise. The second will love us no almost no matter what we do, for essentially the same in reason in reverse. The vast majority of the world falls into category three: people whose opinions of the US are shaped by what the US does. These people care about the US only to the extant that we touch their lives, impress their sense of the good, or offend their sense of morality. To these people we are what we do. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
[...] “The next time you wonder why they hate us, sit very still and listen for the screams, faint and distant, of the men entrusted to the morality of Dick Cheney and perhaps you will understand at least part of the answer.” [...]
The Torture Race…
Only by frequently defining torture up — but not too far up because we never want to be as bad as they are — can we hope to stay on an almost even playing field with the enemy….
Nonsense. It’s nothing new for “conservatives” to love Pinochet. After all, he freed up the markets.
In 1979, Americans were outraged (and rightly so) by the scene of Iranian students leading blindfolded and handcuffed American hostages out of the occupied American Embassy on a perp walk for the international press. This insult to the dignity of detainees was seen (again rightly so) as a violation of all international standards of humane treatment of prisoners.
How far we have fallen since those days. Now, all too many Americans in and out of the administration justify waterboarding (the favorite torture of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge of Killing Fields infamy), physical abuse, “stress positions” (like hanging a detainee from the ceiling by his wrists, his feet off the floor, for hours, even days), mock electrocutions, sleep deprivation (said to be one of Stalin’s favorite techniques), exposure to extreme heat and cold, painfully loud music, darkness and isolation, and a dozen other techniques that make the Iranian students’ abuses against the U.S. Embassy personnel look like acts of kindness worthy of Mother Teresa.
How far we have fallen…
Another reason to be glad Gonzales resigned as AG!
Abuses need to be corrected lest we continue to lose the moral high ground. Dubya seems to think that no apologies are needed as of this blogging.