We Have Met the Enemy, and He is US
August 19th, 2008
Andrew Sullivan is making unprecedented amounts of sense lately. I wonder if he’s thinking of coming into the light? Anyway, he’s got an Atlantic.com column today which is not very original in its basic idea, but is a remarkably clear and well-expressed statement of some of the most horrid truths about BushCo. and, sickeningly, John McCain. Good writing.
The torture that was deployed against McCain [in Vietnam] . . . involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?
According to the Bush administration’s definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.
Cheney denies that McCain was tortured; as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet. . . . McCain talks of the agony of long-time standing. A quarter century later, Don Rumsfeld was putting his signature to memos lengthening the agony of “long-time standing” that victims of Bush’s torture regime would have to endure. These torture techniques are, according to the president of the United States, merely “enhanced interrogation.”
No war crimes were committed against McCain. And the techniques used are, according to the president, tools to extract accurate information. And so the false confessions that McCain was forced to make were, according to the logic of the Bush administration, as accurate as the “intelligence” we have procured from “interrogating” terror suspects. Feel safer? . . .
[T]he government of the United States now practices the very same techniques that the Communist government of North Vietnam once proudly used against American soldiers. When they are used against future John McCains, the victims will know, in a way McCain didn’t, that their own government has no moral standing to complain.
Now the kicker: in the Military Commissions Act, McCain acquiesced to the use of these techniques against terror suspects by the CIA. And so the tortured became the enabler of torture. Someone somewhere cried out in pain for the same reasons McCain once did. And McCain let it continue.
This is the utterly repulsive level at which our current government leaders operate. And this is what even Republicans of “integrity”, as we are always told McCain is, will do, for military expediency or just personal political gain. This is the shame they don’t mind bringing upon their country, the indifference they show at abandoning the legal prohibition on torture that formerly offered at least some deterent protection to our own citizens, the gleeful moral emptiness inside them that fouls their country and everything they touch.
Does McCain even know what he has done? Does he ever make the connection in his mind, as he runs around the country constantly telling his POW stories, to what he himself has authorized to be done to others? Does he still think anyone should care what was done to him, given that - as he tell us - we are not required to care that the same things are done openly, in our name, to others?
If the people who tortued McCain now stood openly in the highest offices of the Vietnamese government, would we be entitled to draw any moral conclusions from that about that government? If the official who authorized torturing McCain now said openly that it was a good thing and he would choose to do it again to others if he felt the need, and that person happened to be a candidate for the top political office in that country, would we feel that those facts in any way impinged upon his fitness for that office, or in any way impugned the political party that put him forward as their leader?
Categories: Culture, General, News & Current Events, Politics, Terrorism, Torture | 6 Comments
