Yesterday, Jon Stewart aired a segment about the newly-released Bush “administration” torture memos. It contained jokes, and some incisive commentary, and more jokes; all in all, a typically strong segment from the typically-strong Daily Show. Nothing amiss there… except for the fact that I couldn’t bring myself to laugh. In any other circumstance I’d have been falling out of my chair, because Jon Stewart is good like that. But here, I found myself too distracted by the bile rising in the back of my throat at the “justifications” outlined in those memos. I was, to be blunt, too pissed off to enjoy the humor.
It’s not even about the torture itself any more. That revelation has come and gone. Today, it’s about how the clowns that we elected coldly justified such monstrous behavior in our name, carried it out without a shred of conscience, and now have the gall to act offended, put-upon, when we expect justice.
(The Huffington Post posted the memos in their entirety last Thursday. They are neither light nor easy reading.)
This morning I woke up to an electrifying editorial by Hunter at Daily Kos, which opens thusly:
I can only fathom that we are supposed to beg.
I think we are supposed to get down on our knees, even grovel for it, and beg that our nation act in accordance with its own laws, with international laws, and with basic decency. We among the more expendable classes are supposed to write passionate editorials; we are supposed to form grass roots movements; we are supposed to make the usual dozens of phone calls, and be ashamed, and debase ourselves — and then, perhaps, if we are very lucky, and if beg enough and with the right arguments and place enough pressure in the right, most uncomfortable spots, then our own government will relent, and our laws will be followed, and investigations conducted, and if warranted, those responsible will be prosecuted. And we will finally as a nation, at long last, reject torture in practice as well as in words.
The Obama administration’s hesitance to build a case against the war criminals that ran this country from 2000 to 2008 is mystifying. We’ve heard that it’s about looking forward, not backward. That we shouldn’t be “vindictive”. And that we certainly shouldn’t go after those who were just following orders, as Obama told the AP early this afternoon:
OBAMA: The OLC memos that were released reflected in my view us losing our moral bearings. … For those who carried out some of these operations within the four corners of legal opinions or guidance that had been provided from the White House, I do not think it’s appropriate for them to be prosecuted.
Obama appears to be saying that those who actually conducted torture shouldn’t be prosecuted because they had been provided specific legal opinions justifying and authorizing that torture. But a Senate Armed Services Committee report (PDF) declassified today indicates that torture was authorized and carried out before any legal opinion had been issued. There is no veil of justification to hide behind: both the order-givers and the order-takers knew torture was illegal, yet they carried it out anyway.
And in any case, this isn’t about vindication. It’s about justice.
Imagine if a man — a garden-variety civilian, perhaps your next-door suburban neighbor — deprived his wife and children of food, kept them awake for days at time, forced them to strip naked and humiliate themselves in front of others, repeatedly slammed their heads into a wall, locked them in a box with insects toward which they have a known phobia. Would it be “vindictive” to prosecute that man, or would it be “stupefyingly irresponsible” not to?
All of those things, and more, were conducted in American-run overseas prisons, by American agents (who were apparently “just following orders”), over the last seven years. All of those things were explicitly authorized by American lawyers and government officials, in writing, coldly justified as acceptable behavior because, after all, the prisoners were only slammed against the wall when wearing a “collar” to “prevent whiplash”, as if that somehow made the act any less inhuman.
And this is where things get truly surreal: even as frustration with the Bush crew’s mishandling of our nation boils over [again], the right-wing noise machine has geared up to tell us all, in no uncertain terms, that none of these things are actually torture at all.
Says Rush Limbaugh:
LIMBAUGH: We have allowed — we have allowed these guys, Obama and his buddies over at the CIA and in Congress, to water down the definition of torture to mean anything that makes a person uncomfortable. You know what this reminds me of? Remember when the NOW gang and all these other social interest groups started asking women if they’d ever been a victim of domestic violence? They didn’t like the numbers they got initially. The numbers weren’t high enough for the NOW gang. So they expanded the definition to include a man shouting at them. A man shouting at them equaled domestic violence. It didn’t matter if the women shouted first.
But Media Matters has the mother lode:
- Rush Limbaugh again: “If you look at what we are calling torture, you have to laugh.”
- G. Gordon Liddy doesn’t think much of locking a detainee in a box with insects to which that detainee has a known phobia, saying “I went through worse on Fear Factor.”
- Mike Huckabee, on the same technique: “Look, I’ve been in some hotels where there were more bugs than these guys faced.”
- Joe Scarborough: “Yeah, you know, millions of people are dead, but I feel good about myself — we didn’t put caterpillars in people’s boxes.”
- Rush Limbaugh yet again: “I just slapped myself. I’m torturing myself right now. That’s torture according to these people.”
- And once more for good measure, Rush Limbaugh with the grand finale (good God, this man is an endless fount of ignorance): “If somebody can be water-tortured six times a day, then it isn’t torture.”
On that last point: Hey Rush? I bet somebody would survive having a finger or a toe cut off six times a day, too, or having a tooth pulled six times a day, or having another bone broken six times a day. Are you going to tell me none of those are torture either? ‘Cause dude… the whole point of torture is that it doesn’t kill you. It just really, really, really sucks.
(And no, Rush, I’m not going to apologize for criticizing you. That’s for spineless GOP officials who don’t have a clue what they stand for or why they’re in office.)
But there’s a bigger point here that these conservatives are missing. Yeah, some people voluntarily restrict their food intake to 1000 calories per day to lose weight, and it’s not torture. And some people have stayed up for 96 hours straight, and that wasn’t torture either. But you know what the difference is?
In those cases, the people involved were still in control of the situation.
There are two parts to torture: physical, and psychological. Conservatives are responding solely to the physical, and ignoring the psychological. If you take away the fear, the humiliation, and the uncertainty that are key weapons in the torturer’s arsenal, then yeah, having to stand naked in a cold room for a few hours probably isn’t torture. But if you don’t know for how many hours you’ll have to do it, or if you’ll ever get to see your family again when it’s over, that changes things dramatically.
To Mike Huckabee’s comment about being in hotels “where there were more bugs than these guys faced”: Hey Mike? Did you have a clinical phobia toward any of those bugs? ‘Cause that psychological component makes kind of a big difference.
What scares me is that this radical right that denies that this stuff is torture is the same radical right that has in recent weeks raised the specters of secession and armed revolution. These people have no sense of humanity, basic morality, or common decency. They see anything and anyone different from themselves as a threat to be eliminated, and they’re apparently willing to torture and kill — or at least justify and authorize others to do it — in service to that goal. And all they need to make it a-ok is the application of the word “terrorist”.
What we need to do now is make sure that the word “terrorist” is no longer a license for anyone to act outside the law. We need to stop trading away our humanity for misguided ideals, and get this country back onto firm ethical ground. The Obama administration can do that; all that’s needed is for someone to say the word.
UPDATE: It. Just. Keeps. Getting. Worse.
“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.
“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.“
[...]
“Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”
So the Bush administration authorized torture, invented tenuous legal justification for doing so, and did it all to support a sham war that they really, really, really wanted to fight despite there being no evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq, and no evidence of Iraq’s possession or manufacture of purported WMDs.
I’m with Hunter on this one:
I cannot come up with any rationale for why this would not be, unambiguously, a war crime.
