Friday, April 24, 2009

Bush’s Big Lie

“This government does not torture people.”
-- George W. Bush

George Bush’s credibility has sunk further and deeper than a Russian submarine. Invariably, the divergence of Bush’s rhetoric from reality has been excused as the result of sincere and honest error. Bush may have misled, the apologists insisted, but he did not lie to the American people. The latter offence of course, is considered far graver than the former, especially by Bush’s Christian base, which tends to take Commandments like “Thou Shalt Not Lie’ very seriously.

Personally, I agree with the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, author of the classic, The Art of War, that a statesman is better off lying if doing so will keep us out of war. Statecraft is an art, not a science. And the same can be said about morality.

Bush, however, stands revealed a complete charlatan, a hypocrite, and a war criminal. He and Dick Cheney ran on a platform that was heavy on things liberals supposedly lacked: namely, moral clarity and accountability. When it came to crafting torture memos, however, Bush & Cheney utterly failed to draw bright moral lines against techniques that have been recognized by U.S and International Law as torture for centuries. Put simply, Japanese officials who used water boarding during WWII were prosecuted and found guilty for committing war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials. What the Bush administration’s torture memos did, of course, was to torture the law until interrogators could use any abusive technique Bush, Cheney, & Rumsfeld wanted to authorize.

Defining torture out of existence, by insisting all practices that didn’t lead directly to organ failure or death were acceptable, is the epitome of moral vacuity and evasiveness. In essence, Bush & Cheney thought they could evade moral culpability through legal locutions and hairsplitting: Sure, water boarding is fine, just as long as the water temperature isn’t too hot or cold, and the victim has a pillow, and is tied down with nylon rope that he doesn’t burn his wrists.

Bush & Cheney are intent on evading responsibility in a no less cowardly way. For years they have feigned outrage at lower-level military personnel for committing abuses that they in fact authorized. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice not only lied when they insisted the U.S. did not utilize torture. They lied in the most self-serving way by allowing low-level military personnel to pay the price for the crimes they knowingly sanctioned. The way Bush and Cheney evaded military service in Vietnam was less than honorable; the way Bush & Cheney are evading responsibility for the abusive techniques they authorized is cowardly and despicable.

The release of the torture memos indisputably show that top administration officials – including the president himself – repeatedly lied to the American people. Their deceptions were not aimed at protecting national security, but avoiding responsibility for policies they knew crossed the line into war crimes.

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Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The Torture Memos

“Are thumbs fingers?” The question is posed by an obtuse but efficient Nazi interrogator in the film version of “The English Patient.” The scene jumped into my mind as I pondered the tortured legal locutions the Bush administration concocted to justify interrogation techniques that went out of style in most of the civilized world following the Inquisition.

Apologists for the Bush administration, of course, would prefer that these torture memos never saw the light of day. They claim self-servingly, that revealing the “legal rationales” behind the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” methods can only aid the enemy. In truth, the Bush administration’s harsh interrogation methods were never as effective as advertised. However, the administration’s defenders do have a point; the memos are such a complete legal, logical, and moral embarrassment that their publication amounts to a propaganda victory for al-Qaeda.

The Justice Department has long since repudiated the shoddy legal opinions devised by Bush’s Three Legal Stooges, John Yoo, David Addington, and Alberto Gonzales. They are viewed as cranks by their peers and pariahs by the international community. It is probably only a matter of time before they face prosecution for providing the legal rationale for war crimes.

Many conservatives are apoplectic because they believe legitimate policy differences are being criminalized. This view does not hold up to scrutiny. Simply put, the Bush administration’s lawyers were not looking to the law for guidance; they were looking for ways around the law. Incidentally, the same perversion of justice was at work in the legal rationalizations that culminated in the debacle of Bush vs. Gore, and the run-up to the Iraq War for that matter. In each case, the “legal principles” involved functioned as a blunt extension of political power, rather than as objective standards. This is a pretty cynical approach to the law.

The same ad hoc quality that infects the Bush administration’s quasi-legal reasoning is on display by those who insist torture techniques are what kept America safe since 9/11. Bush’s speechwriter, Marc A. Theissen, writing in the Washington Post for instance, insists that “without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.” What Thiessen fails to mention, however, is that torture also led to “intelligence” that apparently “confirmed” the Bush administration’s preconception that Saddam possessed WMD. In other words, torture also helped lead the United States into a strategic debacle. This illustrates what most counterterrorism experts believe is the fatal flaw from using torture: It is exceeding difficult to distinguish bad information from good. Too often, interrogators who use torture will hear what they want to hear.

Theissen goes on to cite the “success” of using harsh interrogation methods on Abu Zubaydah. However, it is now clear that President Bush overstated the importance of Zubaydah and the information he apparently divulged after being tortured. As the Post’s Eugene Robinson notes, Zubaydah was hardly the pivotal figure the administration claimed he was. And the “vital information” Zubaydah provided after being tortured was in fact information that was already known to the intelligence community from other sources.

The Bush administration has deservedly acquired a reputation for concocting self-serving ad hoc rationalizations: America has not been attacked since 9/11, so naturally it must be because we employed enhanced interrogation methods. To paraphrase Bush’s CIA director, Michael Haydn, enhanced interrogations were done according to the best legal advice available at the time, and those methods worked.

The first part of Haydn’s conclusion is patently ridiculous; even the Bush administration has repudiated the early legal memos that supposedly legitimated the president’s authority to order techniques like water boarding. That tells you how shoddy and scholarly deficient they were. However, it’s no surprise that torture can yield important intelligence. The real question, of course, is this: Could legal interrogation techniques have yielded the same or better results? Members of the Bush administration say no, but most counterterrorism experts insist torture is counterproductive in the long-term.

There are good reasons to side with the vast majority of counterterrorism experts on this one. To begin with, the appalling level of deliberation the Bush administration engaged in prior to authorizing enhanced interrogation methods provides no confidence alternatives were debated or even discussed. As with the decision to invade Iraq, dissension was virtually non-existent, and top administration figures simply chose a course of action and then charged underlings with finding a way to legitimate and rationalize a foregone conclusion.

George Bush believed in a leadership style in which displays of strength and success would breed legitimacy. He got it backwards; legitimacy is what leads to strength and success. Simply put, George Bush and his policies have weakened America precisely because they lacked legitimacy. There is a common thread linking the corrupt decision of Bush vs. Gore, the corruption of the intelligence gathering process that led to the Iraq War, the corruption on Wall Street, and the corruption of American ideals that bred the torture scandals of Abu Ghraib and elsewhere; in each case objective standards of decision-making, rationality and accountability were discarded to meet the self-serving interests of those who wielded power.

To be sure, many of the minions who served Bush believed they were protecting America when they justified the use of torture. Let there be no doubt, however; they were not safeguarding America’s ideals or values. America was founded on the principle that all individuals are endowed through Natural Law with certain inalienable rights. These are rights that no sovereign or government can grant or take away without due process of law. The Bush administration, however, made the preposterous and indefensible argument that a single individual -- the commander-in-chief -- could effectively strip any individual of their right to due process under the Constitution, the Geneva Convention, or virtually any meaningful legal framework whatsoever. Anyone who challenged this perverse perspective was accused of caring more about the rights of terrorists than the safety of America’s citizens. This is pure demagoguery that rests on fallacy of a false choice.

Statecraft is an art, not a science. Though torture is odious, there may be some limited instances where its use can be justified. If it is necessary to torture a suspect to save a city, then those circumstances should count heavily as mitigating circumstances when those officials are prosecuted. If I were a judge, prosecutor, or juror in such a case, then I’d recommend only a token sentence if the defendants are found guilty. The bright lines civilization has drawn against torture should not be erased by third-rate legal scriveners. After all, the institutionalization of torture is bound to corrupt the body politic as the practice brutalizes and desensitizes those who use and rationalize it. The practice has certainly demoralized Americans, inflamed our adversaries, and delegitimized America in the eyes of the world. When the debate descends to whether thumbs are fingers, well, that’s an indication that things have gone seriously wrong.

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