Letter to the president, redux
As mentioned in the last post, I want to address Andrew Sullivan’s “Dear President Bush” epistle, in which he writes of George W. Bush’s role in the use of torture at Gitmo and at other bases, mostly in the Middle East. Sullivan admonishes the former president to come clean on tortuous acts that he authorized in the name of preserving freedom and our safety, acts that, as Sullivan says, put a “stain of dishonor” on the service men and women’s uniforms he so deployed.
Sullivan makes a compelling case, and I agree with him on many points. At the onset of the United States’ presence in Iraq, like many people here, the war with Iraq over Kuwait in the 1990s was still fresh in my mind, and like 9/11, I remember where I was when I heard about the swift victory in Baghdad and the statue of Saddam Hussein coming down (I happened to be having lunch at a local pizzeria in downtown, Clemson, S.C.).
Hussein was a blight on his own people and had to go, I thought. Thus, I was quite uplifted, initially, while watching newscasts of the now infamous statue being felled, as it reached a 45-degree angle and then down to the sultan ground. Admittedly, I was pleased the U.S. was able to put a stop to a dictator such as Hussein. But when I learned that there were no WMDs in that country, and that we invaded without license or provocation, my view began to change, and it became more rigid when we learned that the jihadists and the 9/11 attackers weren’t even based out of Iraq but were in the hills of Afghanistan. One can make the case that Iraq was supporting them, but invading a country on that logic is a bit like going after the gunrunner rather than the terrorist who used the munitions. Hussein was a “sadistic megalomaniac,” as Christopher Hitchens writes, but so is Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who, in less obvious ways, has destroyed economic prospects for his own country.
What the heck were we doing in Iraq, I thought. I remain convinced that, unlike Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini or Ahmadinejad or bin Laden, Hussein was not, at the core, a fundamentalist nutcase, but a dictator at heart, not a theocrat. Conversely, Hitchens said in the same column,
People keep bleating that Saddam Hussein is not a fundamentalist. But he did rejoice in the attacks on New York and Washington and Pennsylvania, and he does believe that every little bit helps.
Perhaps this is true, but this still doesn’t make him a fundamentalist like Khomeini and others. He may, indeed, revel in the establishment of some new Islamic caliphate, but the caliphate would likely have been more about Saddam’s eminence, than about Allah’s. So, on at least one point, I disagree with Sullivan that tackling Iraq was a noble goal on the grounds of quelling religious extremism. Defeating bin Laden and the Taliban would have been the culmination of that goal, not defeating Hussein.
Nonetheless, Sullivan offers a thoughtful piece on the methods of torture used at Gitmo and elsewhere and about how Bush should address his role in authorizing them. But first, I want to proceed with the Constitution and John Adams.
I have, in the last month, watched the extraordinary “John Adams” HBO series and came away with at least two points (and many more) about the person of Adams, one of our greatest founders. First, he put the law above any person or nation in his legal defense of the British officers at the Boston Massacre, stating to his cousin, Sam Adams, that he, John, was going to make sure any man, British or American, could receive a fair trial in the colonies (And they did). Second, in witnessing the brutal tar and feathering of a Britishman delivering a shipment of taxed tea, that inhumane acts were to be railed against. Although that specific act was not inflicted to bring about any information, I believe, were he alive today, he would fit the similar horrendous acts at Gitmo and elsewhere into the “tar and feathering” category. Adams was, above all else, a man of the law.
Today, that means the Constitution. Soldiers who inflicted torture on Gitmo prisoners wade in testy waters.
A German soldier would have taken his oath to the Führer, Adolph Hitler, to unconditional obedience. Any American citizen, a soldier doubly, has taken an oath to swear to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment. It’s as simple as that. — The Hour, May 2, 2009
But Bush and the usual suspects, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney have called it a “military necessity” that the U.S. dabble in torture techniques to wrest information from prisoners. The latter, I might add, to most everyone’s utter amazement is still defending torture, while giving it the spicy nickname, “enhanced interrogation”:
In short, to call enhanced interrogation a program of torture is not only to disregard the program’s legal underpinnings and safeguards. Such accusations are a libel against dedicated professionals who acted honorably and well, in our country’s name and in our country’s cause. What’s more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation in the future, in favor of half-measures, is unwise in the extreme. In the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed.
Nonsense. Terrorism at all levels has existed for thousands of years. Cheney’s nebulous, quack theory puts us at odds with every quack regime on the planet. Sullivan said in The Atlantic article:
This gaping “military necessity” loophole—formally opposed in a memo by the member of your Cabinet with the most military experience, Secretary of State Colin Powell—was the beginning of America’s descent into the ranks of countries that systematically torture prisoners.
Yes, Powell’s opinion on the matter was all but pushed aside. He’s only one of, if not the, most experienced military man we have. What does he know?
To move on, Sullivan defines “torture” thusly:
Torture is defined by the imposition of “severe mental or physical pain or suffering” to the point when a human being can bear it no longer and tells his interrogators something—true or untrue—to stop what cannot be endured. That’s torture, in plain English.
It only takes a cursory reading of Sullivan’s article (there are many others which have the same effect), to show that the machinations carried out at Gitmo and elsewhere were ungodly. God, Allah, Yahweh or otherwise, usually had the mercy to simply kill enemies outright. But torture, in its self-defeating goals, leaves prisoners suffering on this Earth in extreme cold, in extreme heat, in solitude, in sensory deprivation, in near death experiences, in near drownings, in stress positions, in sleep deprivations, without trial and for no perceivable reward. What reward can there be? Information from a mental invalid? How can one obtain reliable information from a hollow-case? Sullivan makes the case that Bush, though he may have been ill-informed or utterly deceived at the time, should still be honest about what he knew and what he didn’t know. For such a self-proclaimed, religious person as the former president to stand silent as his legacy wanders into the history books with the charge of torture still fresh, smacks of indolence and hypocrisy (My words, not Sullivan’s). But here are Sullivan’s:
To violate that imago Dei by stripping and freezing him, by slamming him against a wall, or strapping him to a board to nearly drown him again and again and again, to bombard him with noise and light until he loses his mind, to reduce a human being to a mental and spiritual shell—nothing can justify this for a Christian. Nothing. To wield that power is to wield evil. And such evil is almost always committed by those who believe they are pursuing good.
And the final quote that I thought poignant on this issue, speaks Sullivan to Bush:
You may not have intended to torture people, but you did; you may have wanted to protect the country within the law, but that admirable desire too easily slid into your approval of actions that are indefensible, illegal, and deeply damaging to America’s reputation and honor. You were let down, as Reagan was. He took responsibility. You need to as well.
Will he? Time will tell, and whether he does will implicate the man’s legacy. I have always thought of Bush as a sincere man, albeit severly misinformed, in most regards (Hitchens has even suggested he was dyslexic in his speech-delivering abilities). I believe it was his cronies, Rumsfeld, Cheney and others, who were the bulwarks in ramming this skewed philosophy down our throats. And Cheney continues to ram it until we chillingly come to this fact about our country:
No society has remained free that has allowed its government to torture human beings. And no previous American president has imported the tools of torture into the very heart of the American system of government as you did. Every dissident in every foul tyranny on Earth, imprisoned and tortured by men and women far less scrupulous than you, now knows something he or she never knew before your presidency: America tortures too. — Sullivan
John Adams would wince.
