“I’m sick to frigging death of people – self-identifiedly conservative or otherwise – whose reaction to the ongoing revelation of what our government and its representatives did post-9/11 is to say, Oh, well, I’m really opposed to torture, and clearly there were some cases where a few bad apples crossed the line, but we were just trying to do our best, and national security is really important, and these people are pretty awful people after all, so despite the fact that I’m really opposed to torture I’m still okay with what our government did. NEWSFLASH: If you’re okay with all or most of what our government did, you’re not opposed to torture.” ~ John Schwenkler responding to Sonny Bunch et al

Exactly right.  It makes me wonder when the tide will turn.  How many years (decades?) does it take for the now-supporters and apologists of the Bush “interrogation tactics” to wipe the blindness from their eyes, take a hard look at the history books and say: no, that was torture; that was wrong….?  Because at some point in time, from one moral conflict to the next, a sort of two-pronged history unfolds.  For every wrong we admit to, a separate myth is woven, which casts our actions in a softer, even noble light. Hard denial gives way to denial-lite.

This is why the general sentiment surrounding Lincoln is so positive despite the fact that he was hugely unpopular in his day; and why the second World War is thought of as a “good war” without any irony at all.  We embelish.  We create of the world archetypes by which to measure our values.  In the second World War, the villains were larger than life; Hitler’s crimes were far more despicable than anything we could possibly imagine.  America was the hero par excellence.…

Which isn’t exactly true, of course – the reality is we dropped atomic bombs on Japan; we firebombed Germany; we killed lots and lots of civilians unnecessarily; we put our own citizens in internment camps.  We were certainly not even remotely as bad as the Nazis, but that doesn’t mean our hands were clean.  We have admitted to much of this, but we keep the heroics front and center.  We’re not as bad as the terrorists either.  We’re only just beginning to learn how bloody our hands are now.

How will we spin this myth together?  How will we hand this story down?

“Disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage, and is perfectly packaged for media consumption. It will also incur the utter contempt of our enemies. Somehow, it seems unlikely that the people who beheaded Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl, and have tortured and slain other American captives, are likely to be shamed into giving up violence by the news that the U.S. will no longer interrupt the sleep cycle of captured terrorists even to help elicit intelligence that could save the lives of its citizens.” ~Michael Hayden and Michael B. Mukasey in the Washington Post’s editorial response to the release of the Bush torture memos.

There is something about this excerpt – and the larger Post editorial – that is so strikingly backwards; at once morally, logically, and practically, that one can almost visualize the mental and moral gymnastics that went into penning it.  First of all, the “people who beheaded Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl” are not necessarily the same people who we have been torturing; nor are we torturing in order to deter terrorists.  At least theoretically, torture was intended to elicit information – not to exact vengeance.

Calling for an end to torture, and seeking to hold those responsible accountable (we can hope) for their crimes is in no way intended to “shame” the terrorists into giving up violence.  On the contrary, we are once again renewing our belief in a higher moral standard than our enemies.  What could possibly be more devastating to our freedom in this asymmetrical fight than losing our most deeply held values – our honor and dignity and sense of justice?  What could be a worse blow to our liberty? [Read more →]

(Updates below and continuing as more reactions come in…)

You can read the memos here.  Sullivan has some initial thoughts up here:

I do not believe that any American president has ever orchestrated, constructed or so closely monitored the torture of other human beings the way George W. Bush did. It is clear that it is pre-meditated; and it is clear that the parsing of torture techniques that you read in the report is a simply disgusting and repellent piece of dishonesty and bad faith. When you place it alongside the Red Cross’ debriefing of the torture victims, the fit is almost perfect.

Michael Scherer:

The legal memorandum for the CIA, prepared by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, reviewed 10 enhanced techniques for interrogating Zubaydah, and determined that none of them constituted torture under U.S. criminal law. The techniques were: attention grasp, walling (hitting a detainee against a flexible wall), facial hold, facial slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, insects placed in a confinement box, and waterboarding.

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So it looks as though Spain is opening formal criminal inquiries into alleged war crimes surrounding the use of torture by the Bush administration.  Judge Baltasar Garzón is involved in the investigation, the same guy who prosecuted Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator propped up for years by the CIA.  So perhaps there’s something “full-circle” about this.  It’s not as though the Bush Administration is alone amongst the past dozen or so Presidents who abused their authority in order to spread American power across the globe.  From Kennedy to Nixon to Bill Clinton these sorts of soft-crimes, coups, and shadowy military support of tyrants and rebels alike has been the modus operandi for the Executive Branch.  George W. Bush just took it one step further, and it’s hard to know how other Presidents would have reacted post-9/11, but there is no question in my mind that few would have taken it so far as Bush did, and the main reason I believe that is because of the insidious influence of Cheney on White House policy over the past eight years.

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