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May 10, 2004
Bruce Schneier is becmoing the king of op-eds. Here’s another goodie that argues for requiring warrants before we allow government agencies to invade our privacy. Bruce doesn’t want us to increase our security against foreign attacks by making us less secure against the predations of our own government.
Over at Frank Paynter‘s there’s been an interesting and useful discussion of my attempt to find a way for the left and the right to agree on a policy condemning torture. (As I’ve noted several times now, I should have talked not about the right wing but about the Rush wing.) Frank’s first blog entry about it is here and his reply to my reply is here. Be sure to read the comments where I am taken to task rather severely by some exceptionally thoughtful people. (I reply there also.)
May 9, 2004
I’m trying to be fair. I’m trying to appreciate the right steps I believe President Bush has taken in reaction to the discovery that Americans tortured Iraqi prisoners. I’ve said that I was glad Bush expressed outrage right away and then a day later apologized. I made the public mistake of anticipating a tepid reaction from the right wing, but have found it only in the Rush wing, and I accept the correction gratefully. I have tried to keep some perspective on the harshness of the torture we’ve heard about so far, and have taken some lumps for that. I am trying not to be the knee-jerk liberal nee pacifist that I in fact am. And I find my views wobbling like a headlight on the road after a traffic accident.
But I read the news today, oh boy. Now we know how many holes it takes to fill a moral void.
Rumsfeld is wondering what to do with the additional information we have about torture. The fact that he’s wondering means he should be fired. There wasn’t much of a case for keeping him before this: He knew we were torturing prisoners, didn’t act to stop it, and didn’t tell Congress or the President. The effect of his hiring mercenaries and going soft on the Geneva Convention was predictable. Rumsfeld should be fired before he’s allowed to resign “because the continuing political controversy no longer allows me to be effective in my job.”
And, the US should close Abu Ghraib because symbolism isn’t just symbolic when it comes to morality. And we ought to open all our prisons up to the Red Cross. And we ought to unambiguously accept the Geneva Conventions as applicable across the board. And we ought to internationalize the occupation of Iraq, beyond the Coalition of the Willing and the Paid, along the lines that Kerry has suggested. We now need to do everything we can think of to indicate that we understand that because we are fallible humans, our power can corrupt us, and since we are the most powerful country on the planet, we know we need to take special pains to behave well and humbly.
If Bush does not fire Rumsfeld and take the strongest and most dramatic steps to investigate, reveal and remedy the abuses, then Bush supports Rumsfeld and takes the blame for the system that enabled torture, just as surely as he should take the blame if, say, the economy suddenly tanked and he didn’t take strong steps to fix it. If a president is responsible for a system of “torture rooms,” that, in my opinion, is a high crime that is grounds for impeachment.
Even if Bush doesn’t deserve impeachment — and of course reasonable people may disagree — if he fails to take these events seriously enough, impeaching him is perhaps the only way we can signal to the world and, more important, to ourselves that America knows it isn’t above the most basic laws of morality. Symbolism counts.
Tony Judt writes well in the Washington Post about the hollowness of our official apologies. For the military’s own report on the abuses at Abu Ghraib, see Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article. For Cheney’s assessment that Rumsfeld “is the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had” and that Rumsfeld ought to get back to business as usual, see this Reuters article.
May 8, 2004
I’m pleased that the Bush administration hasn’t tried to defend or minimize our actions at Abu Ghraib. Not a word that I’ve heard.
Of course, I wish Bush had apologized earlier; it took about 24 hours for the administration to decide that this was really really really bad and not just really bad. And, I’d prefer to see a more sweeping set of changes that address how this could ever have happened. But I’m surprisingly not outraged by how Bush reacted once the photos went public.
Will this bring a break between Bush and the DittoHead wing of the Republican Party? Rush is telling his cadre that this was all caused by some “idiot” who took “a picture of something out of context.” “The world is laughing” at us for the Senate’s questioning of Rumsfeld:
We are being laughed at today and we are being seen as weak and malleable. I ask again, “Who died here?”
Um, 25 Iraqis. And America’s claim to being the unambiguous moral leader of the world.
Has Rush criticized Bush for apologizing? I can’t say that I’m a regular listener…
May 7, 2004
You know how sometimes when you’re angry at someone, you write a letter that you don’t send just because writing it feels good? That’s what I do when I get frustrated at what I’m hearing from politicians, except it comes out not as a letter but as a speech in the bombastic rhetorical style typical of candidates.
This is what I wrote last night…
May 6, 2004
The left sees in the photos what we are afraid our country has become. The right sees in the photos some “fratboy hazing” (Rush Limbaugh’s basic message) and fairplay against people who want to kill our children. Is torture going to be the final breaking point between the two sides in this country? Is it the issue that will in fact solidify our national sensibilities into two and only two sides: You hate torture or you think it’s great that we’re finally getting tough on the bad guys?
I despair of finding middle ground. Here’s the best I can do:
I am willing to admit that there are circumstances in which torture is permissible, just as I think sometimes we have to kill people. And I’m willing to admit that what we apparently put the Abu Ghraib prisoners through wasn’t nearly as bad as the torture that’s routine in many other countries.
Is the right willing to admit that: Torture should only be used in the direst of circumstances? Torture should never be a cause for the exulting shown in the photos? The people responsible for allowing the wholesale torture at Abu Ghraib need to be punished severely, quickly and publicly not only for the sake of justice but to try to limit some of the damage the practice has done to our war on terror?
Can we get even to that common ground? Can we as a nation say that we abhor torture, except in the rarest of cases? That we do not believe in the institutionalizing of torture? That we will fight it around the world? That we believe in the rule of law and that no one is above the law? That we believe in treating even our enemies with dignity? That we support the established international conventions for treating prisoners? That we are sorry about what went on at Abu Ghraib?
If left and right can’t agree on those points, then I do fear that the division in our country is unbridgeable. If we can’t agree to condemn torture, if we can’t feel shame at what we did at Abu Ghraib, then what can we agree on?
I am predicting that some of you are going to be outraged at the idea that we should treat our enemies with dignity. So, let me preemptively explain what I mean.
In WWII, when we captured Nazi soldiers, we generally (AFAIK) followed the Geneva Conventions. We didn’t kill them. We didn’t beat them. We didn’t strip them and put them on leashes. We fed them and housed them ok. We treated them with basic dignity even though we had been trying to kill them in the field, and even though they were f_cking Nazis. Why?
For a few reasons.
First, people are people. But if you have a problem with the idea of treating enemies with dignity, this will probably strike you as mere liberal mush.
Second, we want reciprocity. Failure to abide by the international rules gives the other side license to do the same with your own soldiers.
Third, the aim of war is to establish peace. Mistreating prisoners makes it harder to come to peace because your enemy hates you more. And it makes it harder to preserve peace because the people you’re now mistreating are going to become civilians when the war is over; making a segment of the population hate your guts does not help the cause of long-term peace.
If you believe, as I do, that the war against terror can’t be won solely on the battlefield, then preventing the war from destroying the possibility of peace is especially trenchant.
The Washington Post has a gallery of photos.
They’ve cropped out the dicks and balls. This is one time our sensibilities need to not be protected.
May 5, 2004
Who would have thought that this would be something we’d have to state explicitly?
Mark Dionne, in an email, asks an excellent question:
We were eating a chicken tonite, and wondering where the ovaries were. I speculated that one ought to sometimes find an egg inside a chicken one was eating, if the chicken were slaughtered just before it was ready to lay one.
The Web being the Web, Mark found his answer here.
Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post writes about what the images of torture mean to the world and mean about us.
Look at these images closely and you realize that they can’t just be the random accidents of war, or the strange, inexplicable perversity of a few bad seeds. First of all, they exist. Soldiers who allow themselves to be photographed humiliating prisoners clearly don’t believe this behavior is unpalatable. Second, the soldiers didn’t just reach into a grab bag of things they thought would humiliate young Iraqi men. They chose sexual humiliation, which may recall to outsiders the rape scandal at the Air Force Academy, Tailhook and past killings of gay sailors and soldiers.
Is it an accident that these images feel so very much like the kind of home made porn that is traded every day on the Internet? That they capture exactly the quality and feel of the casual sexual decadence that so much of the world deplores in us?
As Kennicott says of the photo of the hooded figure on the electric crucifix: “This is now the image of the war.”
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