Marble Composition

How Low Can We Go?

In an e-mail to a friend the other day, I wrote: "I never thought I would see, in my lifetime, an American president pushing Congress to enact a law that would explicitly allow the torture of detainees in U.S. custody." It's a testiment to just how far we've fallen as a nation.

One way I haven't seen this framed in the media would go something like this: "Bush Defies Military on Torture Policies." That's exactly what's going on here, but no one will come right out and say it. Opposing Bush in Congress there's a former Air Force JAG lawyer, a former Secretary of the Navy and WWII vet, and a former Vietnam POW and torture victim. Outside of the government, two former Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell and Vessey, have come out against Bush's proposal. The military's top uniformed lawyers have questioned the legality of the administration's bill. Even The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America oppose Bush and Cheney. In a very poigniant statement, one of their leaders wrote, "Mr. President, If You Had Fought, You Would Understand."

Bush and Cheney have used up America's military in Iraq, downgraded its readiness, and appear to view it only as a tool for their foreign imperial ambitions. Here, Eric Alterman breaks down a detailed study conducted by the New Republic:

There are a lot of reasons why pro-military types and their families vote Republican and while they exist for understandable historical reasons as a reaction to particular historical and cultural phenomena, fewer and fewer of them can be considered rational in light of contemporary developments. The long and the short of it, as Lawrence Korb, Max Bergmann & Peter Ogden demonstrate in this week’s TNR, is that Bush has declared a de facto war on the U.S. Army. Consider:

• Fully two-thirds of the active U.S. Army is officially classified as "not ready for combat."
  
  
• The National Guard is "in an even more dire situation than the active Army but both have the same symptoms; I just have a higher fever."
  
  
• The Army has almost no nondeployed combat-ready brigades at its disposal.
  
  
• The equipment in Iraq is wearing out at four to nine times the normal peacetime rate because of combat losses and harsh operating conditions.
  
  
• The total Army--active and reserve--now faces at least a $50 billion equipment shortfall.
  
  
• After failing to meet its recruitment target for 2005, the Army raised the maximum age for enlistment from 35 to 40 in January--only to find it necessary to raise it to 42 in June.
  
  
• The number of Army recruits who scored below average on its aptitude test doubled in 2005, and the Army has doubled the number of non-high school graduates it can enlist this year.
  
  
• Basic training, which has, for decades, been an important tool for testing the mettle of recruits, has increasingly become a rubber-stamping ritual. Through the first six months of 2006, only 7.6 percent of new recruits failed basic training, down from 18.1 percent in May 2005.
  
  
• Thousands of white supremacists may have been able to infiltrate the military due to pressure from recruitment shortfalls.

Only people that would choose to avoid combat would know what kind of gall it would take to lead our nation into the myriad of foreign policy and military failures that we have endured in the past five years. For them to admit that a few mistakes were made along the way is to excuse the fact that they were wrong from the outset about everything. Completely and utterly wrong. I'd challenge anyone who would assert they were right about anything. Anything.

We need to hear from some other voices. Duncan Black (a.k.a. Atrios):

Since 9/11 our rulers have elevated American Exceptionalism to absurd heights, arguing anything we (meaning, actually, George Bush) does is by definition Right and True and Correct. Torture is fine when we do it, bad when others do it. They see no advantage in trying to achieve the moral high ground because whatever we do is moral.

American might in the world always depended in large part on its moral authority. No one thought the country was perfect or that it ever came close to living up to its ideals, but the ideals were still there.

Aside from disgusting me, losing that perception of moral authority makes everything we do more costly and more dangerous.

From PA., the respected Billmon:

[As] Marty Lederman asks over at Balkinization, if Article 3 is so "vague," and our organs of state security never use torture (as President Cheney and his underlings tell us repeatedly) then why are the administration's mouthpieces fighting so hard to get Congress to bar the courts from reviewing methods such as hypothermia, near drowning, standing in place with hands shackled over head for 40 hours or more, etc.? And why are the Rovian clone clowns on Capitol Hill trying to amend the War Crimes Act? And why are CIA operatives suddenly taking out torture insurance (including the "accidental" death or dismemberment rider)?

The answers are pretty obvious: They're all exposed. Their great big flabby asses are hanging out in the legal breeze, and they know it. They actually are scared it could come to this.

[...]

We're not there yet, but that is the direction we're heading, and a unilateral decision to redefine the Geneva Conventions (without actually admitting that we're doing it) would take us another few hundred miles down the road.

What this amounts to (and what Powell was really complaining about) is the final decommissioning of the myth of American exceptionalism -- once one of the most powerful weapons in the U.S. arsenal. Without it, we're just another paranoid empire obsessed with our own security and willing to tell any lie or repudiate any self-proclaimed principle if we think it will make us even slightly safer.

To put it mildly, this is not the kind of flag the rest of the world is likely to rally around, no matter how frantically we wave it. Even Shrub seems to understand this somewhere in the dimly lit attic that is his mind -- thus his recent remark that an America that doesn't advance the cause of freedom is an America that has lost its soul. It's easy to paint this as delusional, or an updated version of the old Orwellian slogan that slavery = freedom, but Shrub at least seems to understands that America will have to convince the world it stands for more than just power, privilege and profit if it's going to attract the support of the 80% of the human race that lacks all three. How, exactly, would ditching the Geneva Conventions further this goal?

Then again, maybe it's best if the myth gets permanently busted. Maybe America should take public responsibility for torturing prisoners -- instead of just pawning the job off to the Jordanian or Egyptian or Saudi intelligence services, who could and would hook car batteries to testicles with gusto while we piously pronounced our hands (and hearts) clean. A U.S. torture statute would at least bring a certain degree of clarity to the "vague" and "open to interpretation" policies that have long allowed the United States to enjoy the fruits of torture (and other crimes) without actually committing them ourselves. I know that's not exactly the kind of clarity Shrub was asking for today, but it would still be a refreshing oubreak of honesty.

That said, though, nobody should have any illusions about what that kind of "clarity" would reveal and which side of the moral line the United States would be seen to be standing on.

We give the final word to DK, guest posting at Talking Points Memo:

The torture debate in Congress--I never expected to write such words--is as surreal to me as watching the collapse of the Twin Towers. If the Democrats are able to take control of at least one chamber in November, then surely the President's pro-torture bill will be viewed in hindsight as the nadir of the Bush presidency. If not, how much lower can things go?

I am beyond being able to assess the political implications, one way or the other, of this spectacle. Regardless of which version of the bill finally passes, this debate is a black mark on the soul of the nation. Of course passage of a pro-torture bill will diminish U.S. standing internationally and jeopardize the safety and well-being of U.S. servicemen in future engagements. But merely having this debate has already accomplished that. Does anyone honestly believe that if Congress rebuffs the President in every respect that the rule of law and the inviolability of human rights will have been vindicated? Of course not.

The Republicans have defined deviancy down for the whole world, including every two-bit dictator and wild-eyed terrorist.

[...]

Only the weak, scared, and evil torture. Those who order and sanction torture, but leave the dirty work to others, are an order of magnitude more culpable morally. (A special place is reserved for the lawyers who give legal cover for such orders.) In their fear and their weakness and their smallness, the President and those around him stepped over the line. To do so in the heated days after 9/11 is understandable to a point, though not justifiable. Yet they persisted, first in saying that they did not step over the line and now in seeking to redraw the line. So which is it?

They are descending from the morally reprehensible to the morally cowardly.

posted by FuzzFinger @ 9/16/2006 08:51:00 PM