Tuesday
Apr282009
Enduring America Special: Why Torture Matters
Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at 6:01
Featured Post: Andy Worthington - Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?
Featured Post: Mark Danner - If Everyone Knew, Who’s to Blame?
Featured Post: Frank Rich - Why Torture Matters: The Banality of Bush White House Evil
This morning, I was catching up with the newspapers when a friend/reader Skyped about our recent item, "Dick Cheney's Fox Interview and the Defence of Torture": "Surely there must be some date by which I can hope to never ever see Cheney's face on EA again."
While I could understand the sentiment, it also brought on depression about how this torture discussion will probably "go away". The barrage of news stories and commentary --- now that many in the American "mainstream" media, with the Bush Administration in the rear-view mirror, has decided torture should be noticed --- brings on fatigue. Now that Cheney, formerly the most secretive Vice President in history, has decided that he will incessantly shine his own distorted light on "enhanced interrogation", I have the sense from his smirk that he knows he is wearing us down.
Meanwhile, beyond the shrillness of knee-jerk comment on torture protecting us from another 9-11 and the silliness of "what's wrong with putting man in a box with a caterpillar?", those who claim a bit of knowledge are spinning the reasons why we should just walk away. It's not just the former Bush Administration officials --- now Porter Goss, the former (hapless) Director of the CIA, is writing, "We can't have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets", when the only secret in danger is who in the Bush Administration authorised torture and when.
David Ignatius in The Washington Post plays sage referee, "[The Obama Administration] needs to take care that the sunlight of exposure doesn't blind its shadow warriors", even though the exposure does not threaten our "shadow warriors" but those who have now left office. Walter Pincus, the long-time intelligence beat reporter of The Post loses both the plot, "The CIA Will Pay the Price", and his grip on facts, spreading the implication (discredited by his own newspaper) that torture provided valuable intelligence:
And David Broder, in a piece that should stand as a reminder of why eminent journalists are not toothless but complicit in the
activities of the Government they claim to watch, reduces the quest for answers and, yes, justice to "an unworthy desire for vengeance".
It's enough to make me throw up hands and settle for the complications of a policy on Iran or Afghanistan or even a light-hearted look at the latest escapade in the Culture Wars. Then, in the midst of this growing depression, I remembered that I wrote last October:
I still believe that. So today Enduring America features three opinion pieces and analyses --- by Frank Rich of The New York Times and by historians Mark Danner and Andy Worthington, that offer both answers and reasons why we should never forget.
Featured Post: Mark Danner - If Everyone Knew, Who’s to Blame?
Featured Post: Frank Rich - Why Torture Matters: The Banality of Bush White House Evil
This morning, I was catching up with the newspapers when a friend/reader Skyped about our recent item, "Dick Cheney's Fox Interview and the Defence of Torture": "Surely there must be some date by which I can hope to never ever see Cheney's face on EA again."While I could understand the sentiment, it also brought on depression about how this torture discussion will probably "go away". The barrage of news stories and commentary --- now that many in the American "mainstream" media, with the Bush Administration in the rear-view mirror, has decided torture should be noticed --- brings on fatigue. Now that Cheney, formerly the most secretive Vice President in history, has decided that he will incessantly shine his own distorted light on "enhanced interrogation", I have the sense from his smirk that he knows he is wearing us down.
Meanwhile, beyond the shrillness of knee-jerk comment on torture protecting us from another 9-11 and the silliness of "what's wrong with putting man in a box with a caterpillar?", those who claim a bit of knowledge are spinning the reasons why we should just walk away. It's not just the former Bush Administration officials --- now Porter Goss, the former (hapless) Director of the CIA, is writing, "We can't have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets", when the only secret in danger is who in the Bush Administration authorised torture and when.
David Ignatius in The Washington Post plays sage referee, "[The Obama Administration] needs to take care that the sunlight of exposure doesn't blind its shadow warriors", even though the exposure does not threaten our "shadow warriors" but those who have now left office. Walter Pincus, the long-time intelligence beat reporter of The Post loses both the plot, "The CIA Will Pay the Price", and his grip on facts, spreading the implication (discredited by his own newspaper) that torture provided valuable intelligence:
The pages of the Justice Department opinions contain many references to important information learned from Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
And David Broder, in a piece that should stand as a reminder of why eminent journalists are not toothless but complicit in the
activities of the Government they claim to watch, reduces the quest for answers and, yes, justice to "an unworthy desire for vengeance".
It's enough to make me throw up hands and settle for the complications of a policy on Iran or Afghanistan or even a light-hearted look at the latest escapade in the Culture Wars. Then, in the midst of this growing depression, I remembered that I wrote last October:
How did an American government, in the name of "freedom" and "democracy", sanction these activities?
The demand for that answer should never be given up. By coincidence, a book titled After Bush is being formally launched in London today. Amongst its many egregious errors, distortions, and distractions is this sentence: "'Prisoner abuses’ were aberrations --- recurrent in every war --- rather than the logical consequence of the authority under which Bush acted.”
These were abuses --- without the quote marks. They were not aberrations. They were not just the logical outcomes, they were the intended outcomes of a policy developed from September 2001 by the Bush Administration, led by a Vice President dedicated to the expansion of his personal power and that of the Executive, supported by second-level officials like John Yoo happy to promote their own perversions of legality, and abetted by colleagues from Condoleezza Rice to Colin Powell to George Tenet who were either too cowed to fight back or too intent on covering their own backsides.
Any attempt to pretend otherwise, that we can just whisk away torture as a silly little aberration, is a disgrace to those of us who believe that "America" should stand for something beyond the expedient and the power-hungry.
I still believe that. So today Enduring America features three opinion pieces and analyses --- by Frank Rich of The New York Times and by historians Mark Danner and Andy Worthington, that offer both answers and reasons why we should never forget.