Posted on 06/03/2006 5:50:22 PM PDT by quidnunc
"This is not America." Those words were President George W Bush’s attempt to explain the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison on the Arabic-language network Alhurra in 2004. He spoke the words as if they were an empirical matter, but a cognitive dissonance could be sensed through them.
If the men and women who tortured and abused and murdered at Abu Ghraib did not represent America, what did they represent? They wore the uniforms of the United States military. They were under the command of the American military. In the grotesque, grinning photographs they clearly seemed to believe that what they were doing was routine and approved.
And we now know from the official record that Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, had personally authorised the use of unmuzzled dogs to terrify detainees long before Abu Ghraib occurred, exactly as we saw in those photos. Does the secretary of defence not represent America?
Almost two years after the torture story broke Congress finally roused itself and passed an amendment to a defence appropriations bill by John McCain that forbade the use of any "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" of detainees by any American official anywhere in the world. It was passed by veto-proof margins and Bush signed it. But he appended a "signing statement" insisting that, as commander-in-chief, he retained the right to order torture if he saw fit.
And so on May 18 the nominee for CIA director, Michael Hayden, was asked directly by Senator Dianne Feinstein whether he regarded "waterboarding" as a legitimate interrogation technique. Hayden replied: "Let me defer that to closed session, and I would be happy to discuss it in some detail."
Huh? Why a closed session? Isn’t the law crystal clear? Isn’t strapping a person to a board, tilting him so that his head is below his feet, and pouring water through a cloth into his mouth to simulate drowning a form of "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment? And isn’t that illegal? In America? Or is that not America either?
-snip-
I do. War is hell and sometimes you do what you need to do. The USA has lost the will to fight. I have absolutely no problem with torture if needed. These guy could have been shot on sight and that would have been legal.
Those who spend their rhetorical capital comparing Abu Gharib with Auschwitz and calling what went on at Abu Gharib "torture" are guilty of demeaning the memory of true victims of war crimes and attrocities, and of letting real torturers and murderers off the hook. When you have expended all your bile attacking the defenders of America, and of democracy, what do you have left for the likes of Saddam Hussein and his sons, who are reportedly guilty of the deaths of millions of their own countrymen? This tendency is driven by the kind of self hatred we see in the spineless left, and it is a sad day to see Andrew Sullivan join those ranks.
Yes. And we're all pretty PO'd at you, you were supposed to bring the donuts.
I promise you..it wasn't my fault..an old friend came in from town..my suit didn't come in from the cleaners..I had a flat tire..my alarm clock didn't go off at the right time..I had to wait for the cable repair man..please it wasn't my fault..
Andrew's queer eye for the American political landscape is tiresome and non-productive.
What a nancy boy.
Geneva Conventions? Uh, actually, the relevant ones have to do with OUR treatment of THEM... Please point to a section where it says that detained civilians are considered "spies"...unless you are unaware that many of the detainees were not battlefield prisoners.
Thank you for the reply. War is hell, but we despise the Nazis for rounding up "suspects" in their occupied areas, and I don't recall our GIs doing the same.
Do FReepers not realize that many of these "detainees" were not caught on the battlefield, but were simply picked up because informants claimed they were against us?
LOL!!!
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